The Play Framework is a Java web framework that disposes of much of the traditional Java dogma and strives to create a developer experience similar to that of more established frameworks in other languages such as Rails and Django. Gone are the routine getters and setters, replaced by public static fields. Similarly, controller methods are implemented as public static methods. Once a seasoned Java developer has gotten over these shocking design decisions and actually written an application or two with Play, the Play Framework Cookbook by Alexander Reelsen is a good next step to learning the full depth of the framework.

One thing that’s always been a pain on the BASS is getting the cluster clear when we have a maintenance window, which usually happens monthly. Our initial solution was to send out an email notifying users of the upcoming outage and then simply killing all of the jobs at the appointed time. This obviously has its downsides. The solution that is currently implemented uses a JSV to modify the hard runtime limit on the job and notify the user of the change.

Something I’ve been doing for the past couple weeks on the BASS is storing the Grid Engine configuration in Subversion. This allows me to do cool stuff like diff’ing and rolling back to previous configurations.

Birds are chirping, trees are blooming, and each day is a little longer. This can mean only one thing: Google Summer of Code is upon us. This year, I’m proposing to add a publishing workflow to WordPress.

WordPress has an amazing plugin system that has allowed thousands of plugins to be created. At the heart of the plugin system are actions and filters that allow developers to hook into the WordPress internals and tweak things. There are hundreds of actions and filters, many of which are described on the codex, and developers can create their own as well. I was curious which ones were most used by plugin developers so I parsed the WordPress plugin database and ended up with the graphs and analysis below.

With the semester winding down, I took a couple hours this morning to go outside and see the world for a change. My goal was Occoneechee Mountain State Natural Area, a state park about 10 miles away. The drive there along Old Highway 86 was pleasant enough. Until, that is, I got closer and passed under I-40 and I-85. You see, from the park itself, you can hear these interstates because it borders on one of them and the other is only a couple miles away. The interstates largely tainted the pleasantness of being out in the woods.

As my time in Würzburg teaching English was winding to an end, I was seeking a longer text that could challenge my advanced class of juniors. We had spent almost a year (two for some of them) reading political articles and random current events, but I wanted to find something literary, something that had some level of merit. I also wanted something that would be interesting and hopefully draw them in.

If you’re using Akismet to tackle spam on WordPress, there are a number of statistics available to you about your current spam situation. These are all available in the Comments page of your blog, but who wants to go there every day to check up on things. By taking control of WordPress Cron with WP-Crontrol and a couple lines of code, you can receive this information sent by mail every day.

Last week, I released Version 1.0 (and quickly thereafter, Version 1.1) of a WordPress plugin called Plugin Stats! The plugin is designed for WordPress plugin developers to keep track of downloads of their plugins. The plugin graphs the number of downloads in three different ways:

The new version of WP-Crontrol allows you to add new cron entries with code. This allows you to write code that will repeatedly be executed without actually touching any .PHP files. Below, I present a way to utilize this functionality to remind you to post something if you haven’t done so in the past two days.