Ironically, Bryan Cantrill provides a perfect answer to the second question when recording this video

Circuit bending: Hacking a Furby in the name of music

In case you're using Jenkins' Email-ext plugin in conjunction with Description Setter Plugin and want to use ${DESCRIPTION_SETTER_DESCRIPTION} anywhere in the email templates but can't help but wonder why it's just not working, grief no longer!

As it turns out, the implementation for setting DESCRIPTION_SETTER_DESCRIPTION is a bit awkward and uses a parameter to achieve this goal. A while ago (due to problems with i.e. ant and possibly more) Jenkins was changed to suppress any undefined parameters.

In conclusion, you have to set the This project is parameterized option and define a DESCRIPTION_SETTER_DESCRIPTION parameter for the above to work. Pretty hackish for my taste. Luckily there's Hidden Parameter Plugin for hiding this kludge.

In need for great color palettes to use for drawing charts in Javascript? Look no further: palette.js

var colors = palette('mpn65', data.length).map(function(hex) { return '#' + hex; });

Last year I tried to setup several VPN solutions on FreeBSD, failing at each of them. Then Uwe pointed me at sshuttle which is easy to get up and running (and which totally rocks)!