Today's offender is the alledged XML output (which is the default) produced by the SVN log Ant task. It doesn't escape entities in commit messages, meaning that if any of <, >, or & appear in those messages, the file the log task creates is invalid.

Community Payback is unpaid work carried out by offenders on community service and the free mobile app will allow the public to easily nominate sites for Community Payback and upload a photo so it can be quickly assessed by the Probation Service. If it is suitable a work group will be sent out to carry out the work and a photo and feedback posted back on the site so people can see the effect. The app will raise awareness of Community Payback and participation in Community Payback projects.

I'm working with the Probation Trust on this project. Should be good fun.

Over the first six months, installs climbed pretty quickly for the first three months or so, then gradually plateaued at around 5500 active installs for the two months leading up to Christmas. Then Santa arrived. People obviously spent Boxing Day recovering, and then on the 27th of December they cracked out their new gizmos, installs ticked up and have continued on a straight line of about 30 new installs a day ever since.

According to the stats, about half of all installs are on Android version 2.3.3. Installs on Android 4 have gone from under 100 at the start of March to over 2,000 now. The majority of new installs are on Android 4.

95 people have rated the app in the Google Play Market, 79 of them rating it 4 or 5 stars. The people that like it tend to say things like "awesome" and "excellent". The more helpful feedback suggests the biggest problem people have is slow tile downloading. The less useful pick up on some specific quirk of routing locally ("Will not send me down ANY CYCLE PATH, even ones that are clearly show on the map") or overlook a feature it actually has ("many missing features including a proper way to save routes").

Other than "people are installing the app on their new phones and they seem to like it" I'm not entirely sure what these numbers actually tell us. I'm happy with that, though.

For me, it's been an interesting 18 months. I only started writing stuff for Android by accident, and I can't really remember how or why I offered to pitch in to the CycleStreets app. I'm glad I did – it's been good.

Thanks to Martin and Simon at CycleStreets HQ, to Theodore Hong who did the early work on the app that I picked up and without which I doubt I'd have bothered, to the other chaps who've contributed code and/or bug reports, and to those 10000 odd people wandering around with software I wrote in the pocket :)

Wonder where we'll be this time next year.

Just submitted my proposals to ACCU 2012. Only 35 minutes till submission dateline so hurry up. #accu2012

So I didn't go to bed. I created a new Bazaar repository, fired up Emacs, and started typing. To my mild alarm, the ACCU submission procedure this year is all through the web, rather than by emailing in and I almost blew it by misreading the sign up form and having to fill it in again. I hit Submit and read

Thank you for your submission. You may revise your abstract until the submission deadline in 28 seconds.

Making Jenkins Better

Jenkins is a widely used and extremely capable continuous integration server. While it's been available since 2007, under its original name of Hudson, its popularity seems to have really taken off in the past year or so. One of the primary reasons for its success is its extremely flexible configuration. Jenkins has a quite a small core, with most of its functionality provided through plugins. Jenkins' plugins provide access to different source code control systems, a wide variety of build tools, test result tracking and charting, static analysis tools, and so on. Nearly every aspect of Jenkins can be customised via a plugin. At time of writing there are over 400 different Jenkins plugins available.

Four hundred is too few.

Over the past two years, we've gone from dabbling with CI to Jenkins forming part of our core toolset. Jenkins builds on checkin, yes, but also deploys builds into development environments. It runs performances tests and records the history. It tells us which build contains which bug fixes. It also does our release builds - tagging the repository, building from the tag, writes release notes telling us which work packs have been updated, pushes the build up onto the live server, and emails Ops to say everything is ready to go. The standard plugins provide the foundation, but our own plugins have put Jenkins at the heart of our development process.

If you want to get the most from Jenkins, you really should write your own plugins. This session will explain why you should, what you can change or add to Jenkins, and how to do it.

The code is more or less constantly evolving, so there are often new features or bug fixes in the code some time before a release to the Android Market. Features or bug fixes you might like to have. Of course, not everyone has the time or skills to build the code themselves. Fortunately, we have software to that for us.

Each time I make a change to my copy of the app's code, a new build of the app will appear here. Whatever I'm working on might not be entirely complete, but it'll be the very latest code there is.

Once I have finished a feature, I push the code into the main branch. Those builds will appear here, in the master directory. Builds of this branch will happen less often, but new features should be complete.

To install any of these builds, you will first need to uninstall any existing version of the CycleStreets app you might have on your phone, and then turn on the "Unknown sources" setting. With that done, download the build and, once the download completes, select it. Your phone should offer to install it.

Unfortunately, there's no way to automatically update an application you've downloaded like this. The best I can offer is an RSS feed of builds.