Some More on TeamCity

After having used it for a few weeks, I have this to say following my last post:

1. Great Support! We've had a couple of issues with Teamcity, some because our owns unit tests "maliciously" killed all java processes as a form of cleanup, and this killed the TeamCity Build Agents, and some other problems related to which version of the JVM was to be used. The TeamCity support staff and developers were extremely helpful and responsive, and aided us to get a stable Continuous Integration system up and running.
2. Enjoyable UI - the AJAX UI is usually very responsive, and rather feature-complete. It gives easy access to builds, projects, a sane way to manage settings and source control bindings, and a quick way to access the full log for every individual build (can be quite a few megs!) What I am missing is the one specific feature - I want the UI to clearly spell out the name of the person who broke the build (and speak it very loudly using text-to-speech, but that could be considered too esoteric to be included in the main build but rather implemented as a plugin).
3. Impressive code duplication finder - buggy at first, it now semi-stabilized. While we haven't had the time yet to actually work with it and remove duplications from our code base, it's just a matter of internal priorities at Delver. The power this gives a developer that wishes to improve his code base is huge.
4. VC integration - a bit less smooth than the other features. It's mostly worked for me, but sometimes it didn't. The Personal Build feature is very attractive, but I found one major problem using it: I ran a personal build that succeeded, but then it failed to automatically merge the code. I don't know if anything can be done about this - I can GetLatest before running the build, but the content of the branch may still change, and unless the merge is automatic human will be needed to solve it. However, I think it's a powerful tool that should work most of the time.

 

That's it for now. All in all, great product - keep it up JetBrains.

Famous Last Words?

The Large Hadron Collider might/will create miniature black holes here on Earth. For anyone who's read Hyperion, this sounds like famous last words.

(Updated the Hyperion link to point to the novel, thanks Boaz)

I Don't Have Enough Faith to be a Christian

I've recently listened to two audio books on religion - Richard Dawkin's "The God Delusion" and "I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist", by Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek (still half way through).

Both books claim that the existence of God is a scientific question. The latter looks like a keen attempt to persuade the reader that:

1. We can conclude, on logic and philosophical reasons alone, that God exists.
2. Christianity the correct religion, again for logical reasons.

The book is dangerous. It contains a great deal of truth - which makes the falsehoods hard to detect sometimes.

Here is a neat dissection of the book, written in a form of a dialog with the book itself. Recommended reading.

Moved Back to Herzelia!

I’m too tired to write anything else about it, but Aya and I finally moved to Herzelia. Combine that with the fact that I finally submitted my master’s thesis this week, and you get that life should be so much better now (15 minutes to work instead of an hour and a half does a good deal to one’s health).

A downer is that my bike was just stolen 2 days before the move. It was my fault, I had bought a very good chain for it but almost never used it out of naivety. Live and learn I guess.

Our apartment is still a huge mess from the move, and we’ll be taking our sweet time unpacking. However, if anyone wants to drop by to a messy apartment and say hello, you’re welcome.