Notes

This is cool and helpful: placing your pet transponder ID in a web page for Google to index it.

It is also somewhat obvious, so, duh...

Now we just need a micro-format and profit!

Posted by Pedro Melo at 03:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Once a year, I look around and re-evaluate my SCM decisions.

In the last year, I've been using darcs as my main SCM and I love it: simple and powerful. And given that I don't branch and merge a lot, I don't run into his issues.

Yet, for fairly big projects with lots of files, it starts getting a bit on the slow side. Also, I haven't find any graphical change-set browser yet. I can have one for SVN and git but not for darcs (not a web frontend, a graphical desktop application).

Also, the projects I work on are all using SVN, and I don't like to move from one to the other.

So my requirements now include the following:

• offline operation;
• real branching and merge (basically this requires change-set history);
• darcs-style interactive commit;
• supported on Mac OX X and Linux;
• SVN gateway.

The last bullet point is new this year.

So I went looking for something that matches all of this and I found the set of git, cogito and git-svn. They seem to fit the bill perfectly.

Right now, I've compiled git from source. Its as simple as:

curl -O http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.5.1.tar.gz
tar zxf git-1.5.1.tar.gz
cd git-1.5.1/
make configure && configure --prefix=/usr/local
make all
sudo make install

You should now have all the git goodness installed in /usr/local/bin. If you type git at a Terminal and you get an error like -bash: git: command not found, it's probably not in your path, so:

echo 'export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin' >> ~/.bashrc

A freshly open Terminal should find it now.

After git, you should install cogito. The first is the core SCM, a meta-SCM, a set of tools to create a SCM. The second is a porcelain layer, a more user friendly user interface to git. You can download and install it with:

curl -O http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/cogito/cogito-0.18.1.tar.gz
tar zxf cogito-0.18.1.tar.gz
cd cogito-0.18.1/
make
sudo make prefix=/usr/local install

That's it. The README of cogito is actually quite good to get you up to speed, and I would recommend reading it as the next step.

With this environment you already have everything you need to start working. To test it out, you can download the cogito git repository with:

cg-clone http://www.kernel.org/pub/scm/cogito/cogito.git ~/cogito

To see the history of change-sets graphically, you can:

cd ~/cogito
gitk --all

If the fonts and layout seems butt-ugly and unreadable, check out the alternative configuration file for gitk.

For now, I'm just testing this setup. I'm pretty happy with it. I will have to try git-svn and the cool-looking git-hunk-commit script (to have something like darcs interactive record) before I decide to switch, but it is looking very likely.

A good thing about modern SCM systems: you can switch from one to the other in a relatively simple way...

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

This is just too cool not to buy. Checkout Meraki.net and their meshed network gear. It looks amazing.

I'm trying to buy a pack of three here in Europe. I'm hoping the scandinavian reseller is able to ship them to our little corner of land.

Can't wait to play with these...

Posted by Pedro Melo at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Yeah, Web 2.0 fan-boys will likely point out Amazon Simple Queue services, but I tell you, us UNIX old timers will stick with lpd, I tell ya.

It never ceases to amaze me the length people will go to abuse a UNIX system and get away with it...

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

There I was cleaning up my "presentation inbox" when I came across the Scary Jifty presentation by Jesse Vincent. He's crazy, in a very sane sort of way.

Anyway in the middle of the presentation he mentions IPC::PubSub which is a nice publish/subscribe system that you can embed into your own applications.

But the prize came in the SEE ALSO section of IPC::PubSub: IPC::DirQueue. I can't remmember how many times I needed something like this. Amazing stuff.

It allows you to create a set of worker processes sharing a single job queue. Clients queue jobs, and a worker gets it. The system assures you that each job will only be processed by a single worker.

Very simple and nice.

I need to read the code and compare it to Gearman, given that IPC::DirQueue also includes a TCP-based server.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 01:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (view)

Recently, Rui pointed me to Drobo.

The feature list and the ease of use look amazing, and the box is pretty too. Unfortunately there is no NAS version (yet?).

One of the features is the seamless storage expansion. Just add disks, and the box takes care of the rest (all that RAID non-sense).

The best NAS product that does the same thing that I could find is the ReadyNAS NV+ (Anandtech review). They have something called X-RAID that does basically the same thing as Drobo, although Drobo is much smarter in terms of using all of the storage space, splitting it between protected and unprotected storage space. You can see the Drobo storage space calculator (the Drobolator!) to see what I mean.

Anyway, I would like to buy one of these. Now begins the hunt for a Portuguese reseller...

Posted by Pedro Melo at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)

If even after you apt-get install libxml2 libxml2-dev you still can't install XML::LibXML, look for this error message:

 CPAN.pm: Going to build P/PH/PHISH/XML-LibXML-Common-0.13.tar.gz

enable native perl UTF8 running xml2-config... ok looking for -lxml2... no looking for -llibxml2... no libxml2 not found Try setting LIBS and INC values on the command line Or get libxml2 from http://www.libxml.org/ If you install via RPMs, make sure you also install the -devel RPMs, as this is where the headers (.h files) are.

Basically, the installation of XML::LibXML::Common failed.

To solve, try this:

apt-get install zlib1g zlib1g-dev

Aparently libxml2 depends on -lz but the .deb doesn't notice or something.

Posted by Pedro Melo at 08:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (view)