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AllYourFlexAreBelongToUs Name Change

This has been a long time coming, but I have finally decided to change the name, and URL, of the Flex Blog Aggregator that I operate. The new site name will be 'FlexBloggers.org' and the new URL is http://www.flexbloggers.org.

You may be asking, 'Why now?' Well, I have been doing a lot of maintenance on the site recently (you did notice, didn't you?) and it has become a real pain for me to have to keep typing that stupid, long ass, name (especially with my pitiful typing skills). For now, the old URL will continue to work just as it used to, but in the future I may drop that entirely. To help prepare for when/if that happens, please do the following:

  • If you are subscribed to the old RSS feed, please subscribe to the new feed which is at FeedBurner.
  • If you are following the Twitter account I set up recently, you should stop following that account and follow the new one, located here.

If you happen to notice anything wonky with the new name/URL, please do not hesitate to contact me.

18-1 = New York Giants Super Bowl Champs.

I do not think there has even been a more satisfying win as a Giants fan (though, the Cowboys game a few weeks ago is close).  No one gave the Giants a shot, all the hype was about 19-0 and Tom Brady.  Today, during the pre-game, I heard several times that in order to win, the Giants had to play a perfect game, and they did just that. Holding the Pats to less than 50 yards rushing and 14 points (note, they did not even score the 17 Plaxico Buress said they would) was a phenomenal showing. The play where Eli got away from trouble and then connected with David Tyree was awesome, and should be one of the most memorable in Super Bowl history.

After the Minnesota game and the 4 interceptions, I jumped off the Eli bus.  I would like this post to stand as my official request for permission to get back on.

What a great win!!!

Ant Can Mail Stuff

 

On a project we are working on,one thing we needed to do was set up some Ant tasks for deployment to staging and production environments.  For the most part, its pretty straightforward, grab latest from SVN repo and then use Ant to replace some text in the main configuration file.

The entire process can take some time, so I looked for some sort of an alert or notification that I could use to signal the job was done.  That is when I discovered the <mail> task in Ant.

That's right, among all the cool things Ant can do, it can send e-mails, even with attachments if you'd like, and like most things in Ant, once you understand the syntax, its pretty easy.

First, you will need to download 2 .jar files from Sun and place them in the lid directory of your Ant install.  These files are mail.jar and activation.jar . (These links will send you to the pages to download entire packages, but all you need are the 2 .jar files in {ANT_HOME}\lib)

the syntax for the <mail> task is pretty straight forward.

<mail mailhost="your mail server" subject="Subject" user="username" password="password">
    <from address="who its from" />
    <to address="who its to" />
    <message>Your message goes here</message>
</mail>

If your mail server does not require SMTP authorization, you can leave out the user and password attributes of the mail tag,

For more information on the mail task and it attributes, check out the documentation here.

The more I play around with it, the more I like Ant.