Download the jruby source zip, extract it and open the build.xml file, search for “rspec” (there’s two occurences) and you’ll find that it’s passed in as an argument to the gem installer, add in another line with “cucumber”:

<target name="install-gems">
  <property name="jruby.home" value="${basedir}"/>
  <java classname="org.jruby.Main" fork="true" maxmemory="${jruby.launch.memory}" failonerror="true">
    <classpath refid="build.classpath"/>
    <classpath path="${jruby.classes.dir}"/>
    <sysproperty key="jruby.home" value="${jruby.home}"/>
    <arg value="--command"/>
    <arg value="maybe_install_gems"/>
    <arg value="rspec"/>
    <arg value="rake"/>
    <arg value="cucumber"/> <!-- add cucumber -->
    <arg value="--env-shebang"/>
  </java>
</target>

Then run ant:

$ ant jar-complete

To verify that everything is fine:

$ java -jar lib/jruby-complete.jar -S gem list

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

builder (2.1.2)
cucumber (0.2.3)
diff-lcs (1.1.2)
polyglot (0.2.5)
rake (0.8.4)
rspec (1.2.2)
sources (0.0.1)
term-ansicolor (1.0.3)
treetop (1.2.5)

Great we’ve now managed to package jruby-in-a-jar with some additional gems. Now to run cucumber on jruby in eclipse.

Download and install nspluginwrapper from http://gwenole.beauchesne.info/projects/nspluginwrapper/.

For ubuntu, there are some instructions on how to do this here (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=341727). On gentoo I had to

 #emerge nspluginwrapper

Download the flash installer from the website here: http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz. Untar the installer:

$ tar -zxvf install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz

Step into the installer directory:

cd install_flash_player_9_linux

Edit the installer file:

vi flashplayer-installer #use nano or gedit if you like

Navigate to line 47 (this inside the function exit_cpu) and comment out the line that says exit 1.

# the architecture is not supported
exit_cpu () {
  echo ""
  echo "ERROR: Your architecture, \'$1\', is not supported by the"
  echo "       $PRODUCT installer."
  echo ""
  #exit 1   # this was line 47
}

Install the flash plugin, I used the default paths, you can choose the paths according to what you have on your computer (I used /home/ketan/.mozilla)

./flashplayer-installer

Now verify that the plugin actually got installed in the directory that you specified

$ ls /home/ketan/.mozilla/plugins

Use nspluginwrapper to create a 64-bit wrapper around this 32 bit plugin. (thanks to Lance for a typo update)

$ nspluginwrapper -i /home/ketan/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

Now restart firefox, that should get you to run firefox with flash player.

#!/bin/bash
find -iname "*.jar" | xargs -i unzip -l {} | less

In case you are new to less, here’s how you navigate:
1. To find a particular class say com.xyz.abc.MyClass, you type:

/com.xyz.abc.MyClass

2. To find what jar contains this class, you type:

?Archive:

A lot of folks use *nix and the existing CCTray is not much help.

If you wish to use this pre-alpha release, feel free to write back. It’s not all that configurable, so you have been warned

Oh, yes, BTW this release depends on issue #899 of CCNet dashboard, and issue #118 of CC.rb. You can vote for these issues to be resolved to see CCTray in Java released a bit earlier.

Finally a screenshot for those really interested.

That said, this is in addition to a HOWTO on installing the Lotus Notes 7.0 Client on Ubuntu.

I’d rather that a very popular lotus notes fan tell you more on why lotus notes is a great tool! What I focus here is on some inside stuff that I figured while installing the lotus notes client on my laptop. Stuff that could have possibly been done in a far better way.

I did this merely as an “educational exercise” to understand if it would be possible to fool the installer into thinking that all is fine, so that it can go ahead installing lotus notes. To give you a brief about how the installer works:

The installer is a statically linked binary that extracts a jvm and an installer jar with some parameters, and then deletes the jvm and the jar on finishing. When the installer was running, I copied the jar to another location, extracted it, decompiled the classes inside. A quick grep on the error message, and I got to the java class where the installer “detects” the mozilla version (and fails).

Here are some things that the installer was doing in more or less the same order:
1. Check the existence of /etc/gre.conf or /etc/gre.d/gre.conf
2. Read the file, and check that there’s a line of the form [majorVersion.minorVersion.patchNumber]
3. Verify that majorVersion.minorVersion > 1.4
4. Find out where GRE_PATH for this particular version points (this is the directory where mozilla resides, in my case /usr/lib/mozilla)
5. Generate the following script:

#!/bin/sh
ldd "/usr/lib/mozilla/libgtkembedmoz.so" | grep gtk>&/tmp/iwcttmp.out #ldd prints shared library dependencies

6. Execute the script.
7. Read the file /tmp/iwcttmp.out.
8. Verify that it contains the string “libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0″ (WTH, one may say)
9. In case any of the above steps fail show the famous error message

Now here’s the glitch.
1. I’d got the right version of mozilla (1.7.13 which is > 1.4).
2. I had libmotif3 (as specified by a support page at IBM lotus notes).
3. I had got libgtk1.2 installed (as required by the installer)
4. I verified that libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0, really does exist (it did)

Having verified all the above, why did the script fail ?

I’ll tell you why
/bin/sh is linked to a minimalist shell called dash on Ubuntu. And the line ldd "/usr/lib/mozilla/libgtkembedmoz.so" | grep gtk>&/tmp/iwcttmp.out does not work with dash. Anyone heard about posix compliance ?

Now that is the reason why you need to uninstall dash, and install bash in order to get lotus notes 7.0 installed !

End of class.

I ran into the notoriously infamous “Could not validate mozilla version” message, that I’d seen a lot of times before. In case you also run into this problem. Here’s a howto to get you out:

Note: These steps are to be run as root

1. Install libmotif3:
sudo apt-get install libmotif3

2. Install gtk1.2:
sudo apt-get install libgtk1.2

3. Remove dash:
sudo apt-get remove dash

4. Create a location where you want to install Lotus Notes:
sudo mkdir -p "/opt/IBM/Workplace Managed Client/"

5. Make this directory writable by you:
sudo chown ketan.ketan "/opt/IBM/Workplace Managed Client/"

Note: None of these steps are to be performed as root

1. Extract the Lotus Notes package:
unzip /opt/downloads/C93D1NA.zip -d notes

2. Change into the directory where you just extracted notes:
cd notes

3. Extract the Lotus Notes installer:
unzip Personality.zip

4. Change some file permissions:
chmod 755 setuplinux.bin setup_wct_platform.bin

5. Copy the setup file to the correct location:
cp setuplinux.bin updateSite/features/com.ibm.workplace.notesinstall.linux.feature_7.0.1.0000-0900/bin/linux

6. Now we are all set up to install:
./setup_wct_platform.bin

That should be able to get you through the installer. Add a comment on this entry in case you are unable to get things done.

Update on 23rd March, 2007: Does lotus notes not work even after these instructions ?

Further, it’s impossible to calculate the opportunity cost to IT ventures due to insufficient diversity of backgrounds, ideas, and modes of thought; but as the end consumer of our work becomes increasingly female, these costs must be rising.

However, no one can have failed to notice that despite all the efforts of a great many brilliant, motivated, and determined individuals and groups to support women in technology, Google, Yahoo, MS, IITs, Stanford and Berkeley – there are still not nearly as many working female engineers as there are males.

And when it comes to female tech entrepreneurs from an engineering background I believe the ratio is even more skewed, although I do not know a definitive number. Finally, when you count the women who head venture-backed businesses – which is an arbitrary distinction except as it highlights the availability of capital and other resources which can ease the crushing burden of starting a business – it is indeed a lonely little group.

The point of this article is not to wring my hands and whine about the status. Nor do I plan to propose computer science education as the long-term solution to the gender imbalance problem, because far better-qualified people than I are already working along those lines. Instead I focus on a well-known but little-studied phenomenon in the technology industry – particularly in the newer, more experimental, startup-driven subdomains – and in the Open-Source movement. That of lack of self-taught female software engineers.

Everyone in professional or Open-Source software development has worked with countless male colleagues who are essentially self-taught, somewhat lacking formal training in computer science. In the perhaps less glamorous areas of the software development lifecycle – QA, build and release, documentation, i18n (translation), metrics, DBA, etc. – a lot of people I’ve ever worked with, or known directly, or indirectly, have lacked formal qualifications (which in many cases don’t exist anyway). These self-motivated male engineers run the gamut of quality, from the best of the best to the truly sub-par; but it is incontestable that there are a relatively large number of them, and that they form an important part of the technology ecosystem. But everyone seems to agree – and certainly it has been my experience – that there is no correspondingly large pool of female professional and Open-Source engineers without formal training.

Why does this gender gap in software engineers exist? Could it be bridged through some sort of organized effort? Would such an effort be ethically troubling or bad for the profession in some other way? What opportunities might be lost if we continue to do nothing about the gender disparity in software engineering, or simply wait for long-term educational efforts to take root at some unspecified future date? For those who care about women in the technology industry, I would argue that these questions should be very pressing and our ignorance of their answers should be equally troubling.

I’m not much on speculating about social problems, but if I were forced into diagnostic mode about the lack of self-taught female software engineers, I’d probably put the following rationales at the top of my list (in no particular order):

• Almost all of the male engineers I know report childhood experience “playing” with computers. I also had this experience, as did most of the female engineers I know; but non-engineer women seem far less likely to have done so.
• If Programming classes started with social software rather than math problems and competitive games, more women might discover an unexpected interest.
• Women seem to be disproportionately attracted to careers where they feel they can help others – for instance medicine (which of course requires rigorous, highly competitive scientific training), teaching — rather than careers that promise high pay or entrepreneurial possibility.
• Male self-taught engineers often begin working with computers as a hobby – for instance, legions of Open-Source devotees (including myself) began this way. Women seem less inclined to learn programming just for fun, and more likely to see it as simply a job (to be fair, many self-taught male engineers also seem to primarily see their work as a job rather than a personal passion).
• Women often seem to gain self-confidence by pursuing institutional affiliations, credentials, and clear career goals – rather than simply pushing forward as “lone wolves” driven by individual curiosity.

I have really struggled with these objections, because as an individual I don’t necessarily disagree with them at a philosophical level. But, those are pretty abstract principles of fairness to hold up against the realities of business and life. I hear from managers who say that they would love to get more female engineers. I also hear from intelligent, motivated, practical women who want jobs – or better jobs – but need help. Sometimes all they really need is a critique of their resume, or an introduction inside a particular company. But sometimes they need someone to see them for the valuable engineer they could be, and say, “You’re so good at analyzing this type of problem and finding a solution… Have you ever considered a career as a [QA engineer | release engineer | sysadmin | metrics analyst | DBA | webdev | etc.]? I will train you.” I enjoy helping out as much as I can personally, but we would get economies of scale if all the interested parties of IT could combine our efforts and institutionalize the method by which women without CS degrees could be turned into contributing members of engineering teams.

There’s a survey that notes that 93% of Linux users are male.

“The XO machines are still being tweaked, and [OLPC UI] Sugar isn’t expected to be tested by any kids until February. By July or so, several million are expected to reach Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nigeria, Libya, Pakistan, Thailand and the Palestinian territory. Negroponte said three more African countries might sign on in the next two weeks. The Inter-American Development Bank is trying to get the laptops to multiple Central American countries.”

Interesting… reminds me of Steve Ballmer saying:

You know who I think out biggest competitor is? Linux. Linux, Linux, Linux! Burn it on your foreheads, people: Linux!

Amen…