Historically, our fearless leader Kohsuke has blogged on Java.net. The setup made a whole lot of sense when Kohsuke was employed by Sun, then Oracle, which sponsors and runs Java.net. In a post earlier this week discussing console markups, Kohsuke casually pointed out that he will be cross-posting to Java.net, and his personal blog located at kohsuke.org. The first post over on Kohsuke.org welcomes us:

For the longest time I haven’t really done anything about kohsuke.org, but as I left Sun/Oracle, I decided to put a bit more effort into it. So this is the new home.

For the time being, I plan to post my blogs both on java.net and here.

If you're a reader of feeds, I recommend adding the rss feed for the blog to your list of interesting continuous integration/hacker feeds.

Those of you on the users@ or dev@ mailing lists have likely already read that Kohsuke (left in the photo), the founder of the Hudson project, is leaving Sun. I say that he is leaving Sun, instead of leaving Oracle as Kohsuke worked at Sun for nine years and Oracle only a few months. In those nine years at Sun, Kohsuke has worked on some great products, the most notable of them being Hudson.

Per Kohsuke's post:

Where am I heading next? I'm actually starting my own company to take Hudson to the next stage.

What this means for Hudson still isn't certain yet, fortunately it means that Hudson will continue to have at least one full-time developer. It remains to be seen where KohsukeCorp (the name has not yet been disclosed) will focus within the Hudson code-base. For the greater user-base of Hudson, this means that the schedule for releases may slow down during this transitional period, there are some logistics to work out with Oracle regarding some of the hardware Hudson has traditionally used to host JIRA, this blog, and a number of other machines helping support the Hudson project in one fashion or another.

The next couple of months will be interesting for the Hudson community; as per usual you'll be able to get the latest updates from this blog or the @hudsonci twitter account. I'll let Kohsuke finish this post off:

And finally, big thank you to everyone in the Hudson community, and in a broader java.net community. I wouldn't be here without you guys, and I feel very proud that I'm a part of it.

Rarely do I ever get mail, let alone mail I like, so I was quite excited when a shipment of stickers from Hudson HQ arrived yesterday. I'm certain you're thinking to yourself "what does this guy need hundreds of Hudson stickers for?" Fact is, I don't! They're not for me, they're for you!

I am willing to mail stickers vast distances to you (with some conditions)

Conferences

If you're presenting at a conference or otherwise would like some Hudson stickers to go around, email me with a rough estimate of how many you need. The only condition being that you tell me all about the event and how Hudson was received after the fact (this may involve an interview).

User Groups

If you email me requesting some stickers for a user group, I'll need an estimate of how many folks attend meetings. Depending on supplies, I may send you a little more than requested to be shared.

Companies

If your company wants some Hudson stickers, I'd be happy to oblige, and of course I always appreciate stickers, pens, branded bouncy balls, etc (see: swag) in return!

People who like stickers

If you're just a fan of Hudson, stickers, or both, I'll still gladly mail you a few stickers with the condition that you take pictures of where the stickers end up (and maybe of your Hudson install) and either email me some cool pictures or post them to Flickr (tagged: "hudsonstickers")

I will be stuffing envelopes in my free time, so there may be a slight delay.

It's been a little over a month since I pinged Kohsuke about an "official Hudson blog"; my role has been nothing more than writer and editor of a community resource, while I have invested a lot of time in Continuous Blog it is not "mine" so much as it is "ours." I feel I have a responsibility as the current maintainer of this resource to be as open as possible about what's going on with CB. When I sat down to write the inaugural post, Welcome to Continuous Blog, I set forth a few goals:

• Help advocate the use of Hudson to the larger internet community
• Be a central source for tutorials and helpful information to Hudson users of all skill-levels
• Recognize the numerous contributors to the Hudson project for their efforts

Being a community resource, I wanted to review our progress on those goals along with some other interesting details about Continuous Blog and my community efforts. My metrics for achieving these goals are largely based on web traffic to this blog and retweets via the @hudsonci twitter account.

A couple weeks ago in the post outlining the release of Hudson 1.347 I mentioned that Alan Harder (a.k.a. mindless) had undertaken a deprecation-crusade; that is to say Alan has taken it upon himself to rid Hudson's code-base, particularly in the plugin area, of older code. One of Alan's branches old-data-monitor was merged into trunk with r28147 bringing with it some changes to help migrate older plugin datasets to newer formats.

When I reached out to Alan earlier today on IRC (#hudson on the Freenode) about the subject he agreed that polling the community for beta testers would be a good idea; this is where you come in. Per Alan's message to the dev@ mailing list:

Visit your "Manage Hudson" screen to see if the notice about old/unreadable data appears. I'll be curious to see which of the old deprecated data structures are actually out there in people's XML files.

Instead of waiting for the release candidate to be packaged Wednesday evening, I've gone ahead and published the artifact from build #4544 which can be downloaded here: hudson.war

If you have an old Hudson installation with, testing this build would be incredibly useful. Alan went on to say:

If people find issues with OldDataMonitor, they should file them at issues.hudson-ci.org in "core" component and assign them to "mindless".

This change does not mutate any data (or at least it shouldn't) so it should be safe, be on the look out for exceptions in Hudson's log on startup.