I've been doing a lot of build automation lately. Build automation, it's one of those things that other people did, but I never did. Always seemed a bit of a silly waste of time. Well, come back and say that when you have 4 active interdependent projects, which you need to release all on the same day, with cross-dependencies, manuals, you need to automatically generate XHTML and PDF versions of the manuals, you need to actually, you know, test the software to make sure it works each time you make some changes, etc etc etc.

So yeah, build automation is silly until that day when you really, really need it. Which happened to me recently. So now when I go to the right directory and type ant -f src/build.xml dist it goes and cleans every project and builds it and tests it with real, actual tests, not just to make sure that it runs, but actually scans something or generates a tag and if the test fails the whole build fails and all of that. Peace of mind. Big time.

What else is new? Oh I made this tag, do you like it:

I can't believe it took me 18 months or whatever to figure out that I could make these picture-inside-tag things look good if I just put some whitespace and a thick black border around them. Without the border, it looks like crap. With the border it looks great. Go figure.

Oh yeah. Yes, it scans. And yes, you can make your own with whatever picture you want eh? Just don't cover up too many of the square module things or the border of the tag.

I've been messing around with the software section. It's probably not very good right now. But it's got some whiz-bang new icons and stuff. I'm sure you can make an educated guess as to why I'm updating it. I'll give you a big hint. Now, when I type ant -f src/build.xml web-dist I can automatically push all-new versions of all the software onto the website. And then, when I just change one tiny little string on the site I can automatically flip between old and new versions of all the software and the whole software section will change automatically too.

I kind of went nuts with the colours in the icons though. We'll see if that works out.

I may have mentioned this before but if you go to the commercial site you can now order commercial trials of the software (30-day trials, that kind of thing) and the store is also somewhat improved . Actually a lot. It's also got a lot of whiz-bang automation going on there too. Although I haven't got it going with the whole one-button version upgrade thing yet. Have to do that.

Well I do have a nice little to-do list going on. Integrate FOP directly into the tagger. Finally get around to linking to Guido Sohne s truly awesome and amazing semafox , a cool-ass semacode tag creator written entirely in Javascript. Cool eh? Try it!! Also it's based on open source GPL'd code which I can't use in my software because then I couldn't sell it anymore. Oh well. Guido also has a Mac OS X tagger as well. Check it out!

OK, there's also a fully functional Over The Air download page now for semacode java standalone reader ... at semacode.org/ota .. just point your phone browser there and everything should be cool. Thank you very much to Stan and Alex (well, mainly Stan) at Semapedia for constantly badgering me until I made that work and work properly.

Can I also say that their web page is beautiful?

Subversion rocks. I need to switch everything over to SVN.

Also a big thank you to all the people who have been emailing with hardware page updates . Keep them coming! I'll catch up again soon... I hope :)

That's all for now. Sleep time.