Sunday, August 29, 2010

Grub 2

I just realized that the newer Ubuntu versions use Grub 2 instead of the older Grub. And in Grub 2, there are some significant changes (see here):
  • Scripting support including conditional statements and functions
  • Dynamic module loading
  • Rescue mode
  • Custom Menus
  • Themes
  • Graphical boot menu support and improved splash capability
  • Boot LiveCD ISO images directly from hard drive
  • New configuration file structure
  • Non-x86 platform support (such as PowerPC)
  • Universal support for UUIDs (not just Ubuntu)

Note to self:

1. /boot/grub/menu.lst no longer exists, and this has been replaced by /boot/grub/grub.cfg and /boot/default/grub.
2. To edit the display settings, edit /etc/default/grub, and then run sudo update-grub, which will generate /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Monday, August 23, 2010

Unit Testing

Some slides on why unit testing is soooo important! (only opens correctly in Firefox)
There are also some slides on mock objects.

Also observe the brilliant use of XUL+JS+CSS to create a browser based presentation engine.

Saturday, August 21, 2010

War Story

Once in a while, we run into those pesky, irritating harddisk issues -- out of disk space on one partition, a few fat GBs of disk space on another partition.

Fortunately, there exist a cheap, simple, and neat trick to resolve such an issue on linux. The approach is as follows:

1. Perform the operations using root permissions.
$ su root

2. Do a recursive copy of the folder you want to copy.
Note that we use the -r flag for recrusive copy, and the --preserve flag to preserve important file attributes such as ownership and timestamp.
$ cp -r --preserve=all SOURCE TARGET

3. Delete the source folder

4. Create a symbolic link in place of the source folder.
$ ln -s TARGET DIRECTORY

Monday, August 09, 2010

C10k problem

The C10k problem is the name given to a limitation that most web servers currently have which limits the web server's capabilities to only handle about ten thousand simultaneous connections. This limitation is partly due to operating system constraints and software limitations.

Source: Wikipedia

Sunday, August 08, 2010

Design Patterns

High-level ideas:
- Lazy initialization
- Singleton/Multiton
- Proxy/Facade
- Decorator
- Factory
- Observer
- Publisher/Subscriber

Friday, August 06, 2010

HipHop for PHP

HipHop for PHP transforms PHP source code into highly optimized C++. It was developed by Facebook and was released as open source in early 2010.

See this Facebook post and GitHub (source)

Wednesday, August 04, 2010

Gearman

Gearman provides a generic application framework to farm out work to other machines or processes that are better suited to do the work. It allows you to do work in parallel, to load balance processing, and to call functions between languages.

See Gearman.org

Monday, August 02, 2010

stdClass in PHP

stdClass is instead just a generic 'empty' class that's used when casting other types to objects. I don't believe there's a concept of a base object in PHP

For the record... courtesy of stackoverflow.com
Further reading: here and here.

Sunday, August 01, 2010

COW in PHP

Copy-on-write (sometimes referred to as "COW") is an optimization strategy used in computer programming. The fundamental idea is that if multiple callers ask for resources which are initially indistinguishable, they can all be given pointers to the same resource. This function can be maintained until a caller tries to modify its "copy" of the resource, at which point a true private copy is created to prevent the changes becoming visible to everyone else. All of this happens transparently to the callers. The primary advantage is that if a caller never makes any modifications, no private copy need ever be created.
Recently, I was dealing with large data sets in PHP and I was wondering how PHP's garbage collection works. I discovered that PHP actually uses copy-on write (COW)!

Consider the following script, which demonstrates how PHP's GC works.
Note that before PHP 5.3.0, circular memory references result in memory leaks.

Vim Niceties

Some features that newbies may not know about:

1. Some default settings that I have found useful

In your .vimrc file:
set tabstop=4
set number
set nocompatible
set smartindent
set shiftwidth=4
set mouse=a

Basically sets line numbers, smart indentation, width of tabstop to be 4, and allow the use of the mouse for inserting text.

2. Omnicompletion

In your .vimrc file, add:
filetype plugin on
set oft=syntaxcomplete#Complete

Hit Control-P to see the completion menu pop up when editing code.

3. Auto highlight red whenever you exceed 80 chars in one line

highlight OverLength ctermbg=red ctermfg=white guibg=#592929
match OverLength /\%81v.\+/