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Eclipse Oxygen with Atlassian Connector plugin for accessing Jira issues

I’ve been kicking the tires in my local dev setup running my own Jira and GitLab installations. I’ve been meaning to take a look at how to access Jira tickets from within Eclipse, and then the next logical step is to look at the Jira to GitLab integration.

First up, let’s look at accessing Jira tickets in Eclipse. Docs on the Atlassian Connector are here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/ideplugin/atlassian-connector-for-eclipse. The installation guide gives an Eclipse Update Sites for Eclipse version up to Luna but not more recent versions (Mars, Neon, Oxygen), but questions online (e.g. here) suggest the Luna version still installs and works with Oxygen (using update site: http://update.atlassian.com/atlassian-eclipse-plugin/rest/e3.7)

Integration within Eclipse is using Mylyn. After installing the plugin by adding the update site above, open the Mylyn/Task Repository view:

and select the Jira option:

Press Next and enter the URL for your Jira server:

When prompted to create a new Query, select Yes – this is what retrieves your assigned tasks from Jira:

Press Next for the next dialog. There’s a lot of options here (continues below the area in this screenshot), but in this case I’m interested just in the issues logged for my Blackjack Twitterbot project, so I selected this specific project:

In my Task List view I can now see a list of my assigned tasks, open and competed:

Double-clicking any of these opens the ticket in Eclipse:

This is pretty typical of any issue ticket tracking support in Eclipse. At this point I can edit and update the tickets.

Next up, I’ll look at Jira and GitHub integration.

 

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Building a Card Playing Twitter Bot: when AWS Lambdas timeout

node.js AWS Lambdas have a default timeout of 3 seconds when you create a new Lambda via the AWS Console. This can be increased with the slider in the Console, but if you keep the default and you get a timeout, you’ll see this error in CloudWatch:

2018-06-14T01:16:56.953Z 9f86... Task timed out after 3.00 seconds

From looking at the logs, my Blackjack card playing Twitter bot Lambda typically executes in around 2 secs, so the default of 3  secs probably doesn’t have enough wiggle room for unexpected slowdowns, and while testing I’ve seen this error a couple of times. When it does time out, it seems the execution just stops in the middle of whatever it was currently doing at that point, which leads to some unexpected results. In the case of this Twitter bot, the execution is being triggered via a 5 minute Cloudwatch event, so the only way I know it’s failed is to look at the logs (it’s not called via a webpage, so there’s no error being returned to the caller). Increasing the timeout to 10 secs seems to work fine for this particular Lambda.

Remember you are billed per GB-s of execution time, so keep an eye on how long your Lambdas execute for. If you’re aiming for low cost, then quicker execution times are obviously better.

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Increasing VMware ESXi guest desktop resolution for Ubuntu 14.04

By default, my Ubuntu 14.04 desktop guest running under VMware ESXi has a maximum resolution of 1360×768 when accessed with the Remote Client, which although usable is not great on my MacBook Pro:

In the guest settings for my Ubuntu guest, I have rather limited graphics settings:

I tried bumping up the memory and see if that opens up some additional settings but that didn’t change anything, although for higher resolutions it’s most likely I would need more gpu memory, but that’s not the issue with the limited settings here.

Searching for ‘ESXi linux guest maximum resolution’ I found this article:

https://communities.vmware.com/thread/527747

which suggests to install a ‘desktop’ version of the open-vm-tools:

sudo apt-get install open-vm-tools-desktop

Let’s try that. After a reboot, now we’ve got higher resolutions! Awesome!

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