Git Down!
I’ll be doing a quick talk on git-sh(1) tomorrow night at the first ever
Git Down!, in San Francisco.
The Thing About Git
It’s as though every other version control system I've ever used was created by people who were really into version control and Git was created by people who were really into hacking.
On The Use of Code in Weblog Titles
So you've decided to start a weblog and have a really clever idea for titling it based on a snippet of code you find particularly novel. Rad!
GNU is killing Solaris
I can’t think of single piece (package?) of software I use, admire, and depend on more than GNU Coreutils. Maybe Firefox. Maybe OpenSSH. Some days rsync(1).
PrinceXML Is Extremely Impressive
I didn’t know it was possible to build such nice closed-source programs.
Bazaar Project Templates
Cheap branches make for new uses.
Here's a Nickel, Kid
The Dilbert cartoon referenced in Neil Stephenson’s “In The Beginning was The Command Line”
Top.app
MacOS X: How to turn textmode tools into first class applications. Mutt.app, Vim.app, Irssi.app, Top.app, etc.
OS X Network Location Support From The Command Line
How to get command line apps to respect the OS X network location. A neat little hack exploiting symlinks and $0.
Debug your shell scripts with bashdb
“The syntax for many of the commands in bashdb mimics that of gdb, the GNU debugger. You can step into functions, use next to execute the next line without stepping into any functions, generate a backtrace with bt, exit bashdb with quit or Ctrl-D, and examine a variable with print $foo.”
How can C Programs be so Reliable?
Laurence Tratt: “I had implicitly bought into the idea that C programs segfault at random, eat data, and generally act like Vikings on a day trip to Lindisfarne; in contrast, programs written in "higher level” languages supposedly fail in nice, predictable patterns. Gradually it occurred to me that virtually all of the software that I use on a daily a basis – that to which I entrust my most important data – is written in C. And I can’t remember the last time there was a major problem with any of this software – it’s reliable in the sense that it doesn’t crash, and also reliable in the sense that it handles minor failures gracefully."
FreshPorts -- textproc/rdiscount
RDiscount, a fast Markdown library for Ruby, is now included with the FreeBSD ports collection thanks to Daniel Roethlisberger.
Varnish's ESI Support
“Varnish implementes a subset of the ESI Language 1.0 defined by W3C, this document lays out some of the thoughts and rationale for choices made and advice for usage of these features.”
This lets you perform includes at the cache layer so that each included resource can have its own caching policy. Akamai edge proxies have supported this for some time, apparently.
Varnish 2.0 released!
Looks like a really solid improvement on 1.0. I haven’t had a chance to play with any of the betas but I'm anxious to see whether If-Modified-Since/If-None-Match validation made it in. There’s a note on “serving expired objects until we have a fresh one” but that sounds more like stale-while-revalidate.
The C10K problem
Dan Kegel: “You can buy a 1000MHz machine with 2 gigabytes of RAM and an 1000Mbit/sec Ethernet card for $1200 or so. Let’s see – at 20000 clients, that’s 50KHz, 100Kbytes, and 50Kbits/sec per client. It shouldn’t take any more horsepower than that to take four kilobytes from the disk and send them to the network once a second for each of twenty thousand clients. (That works out to $0.08 per client, by the way. Those $100/client licensing fees some operating systems charge are starting to look a little heavy!) So hardware is no longer the bottleneck. ”
Looks like this is from 2003 but is still pretty accurate as far as I can tell.
Effortless Thread Dump for Ruby:
Dump the stack trace of all threads in a running ruby process by signaling with -QUIT. Requires patching the ruby interpreter, which sucks because I need it for a process running right now.
Processes spawn faster than threads?
Sometimes! Or, fork(2) is a very fast operation on legitimate operating systems. I didn’t realize it could be as fast as spawning a thread, though.
Multiprocess versus Multithreaded ... or why Java infects Unix with the Windows mindset
Erik Engbrecht: “Java took cheap Unix processes and made them expensive. To compensate, it provided primitives for multithreading.”
Git for Computer Scientists
Okay, I've read about five of these articles purporting to explain Git’s internal conceptual framework. This was the first that really made things click in any significant way.
I Can Haz Hardcore Forking Action
More praise for GitHub from a small team of Django hackers that built a site in three hours on one night with a little help from git…
Vimperator
Make Firefox like Vim. No, like, insanely like Vim. Not just h,j,k,l mappings but everything. Looks like it’s been around for awhile. I'm not sure how I missed it.
FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE Announcement
I thought I had a few more months. Dammit. This is going to be a huge time-sink.
Csh Programming Considered Harmful
Uggghhh. I just spent 30 minutes hunting some arcane tcsh bug caused by coreutils dircolors. This is my revenge. I don’t even know I had any csh code running on this machine. It turns out that MacOS X’s /usr/bin/which is implemented in csh. Dumb.
Chroot in OpenSSH
“… adds a chroot(2) facility to sshd, controlled by a new sshd_config(5) option ‘ChrootDirectory’. This can be used to ‘jail’ users into a limited view of the filesystem, such as their home directory …”
GitHub
Seriously interesting web based git browser and collaboration tool from the folks at Engine Yard. If anyone has a spare invite laying around, hook me up: rtomayko@gmail.com. I have a bunch of stuff sitting in bzr repos that I'd like to flip over to git.
Ubuntu's Upstart event-based init daemon
I have a strange fetish for init systems (sysv, rc, launchd, etc). This is the first quick introduction to Ubuntu’s new init system (Upstart) I've seen. Nice examples of using the initctl command and writing job files.
Git User's Manual
Finally: “this manual is designed to be readable by someone with basic UNIX command-line skills, but no previous knowledge of git.”
Wanted: Git Cheat Sheet for Collaboration
There’s some good questions here. I've been running into a few of the same issues while experimenting with moving some of my bzr projects to git. Can one of the git pros out there have a look?
htop - top(1) replacement with hierarchical process listing, nicer keyboard interface, and more...
Runs on Linux and FreeBSD (with linproc mounted on /compat/linux/proc). I've always wondered why top(1) just kind of stopped being developed 10 years ago.
Mercury is a new, purely declarative logic programming language.
What PrinceXML is coded in, apparently. It’s like Prolog for large systems: declarative, strongly typed and type inferencing, module system, closures, currying, lambdas, and with a strong determinism system. Compiles down to C (as a portable assembler).
pv(1) - Pipe Viewer
pv can be inserted into any normal pipeline between two processes to give a visual indication of how quickly data is passing through, how long it has taken, and an estimate of how long it will be until completion.
Sun and MySQL: I don't get it
Oops: “At $1 billion … Sun paid a multiple of 10 times sales for MySQL today. Optimistically assuming a 20% profit margin, they are looking at a multiple of 50 times earnings for a return on investment of around 2% per year. Optimistically.”
In Unix, what do some obscurely named commands stand for?
Dennis Ritchie: “There was a facility that would execute a bunch of commands stored in a file; it was called runcom for ‘run commands’, and the file began to be called ‘a runcom’. rc in Unix is a fossil from that usage.”
Give Me a M: The MySQL/Sun Q&A
Steve does the Sun/MySQL aquisition Q&A and speculates on some interesting effects of the deal: “… YouTube sold for $1.6 billion, and consumed virtually no software. If that acquisition was to take place today, they would have been buying from Sun.”
DTerm - A command line anywhere and everywhere
Payware GUI shell thingy for MacOS. This is not a QuickSilver/Launchbar clone. It’s more like a magical bash interpreter that knows things about what’s happening in various Mac GUI applications (like Finder, Safari, etc).
Working Productively in Bash’s vi Command Line Editing Mode (with Cheat Sheet)
“I am going to introduce you to bash’s vi editing mode and give out a detailed cheat sheet with the default keyboard mappings for this mode.”
I need a woman who is willing to raise a child with me in the method of Unix
“Other than the fact our child will be bright, text-based and sarcastic, we will otherwise be a normal family.”
DNA seen through the eyes of a coder
“Like with unix, cells are not ‘spawned’ – they are forked. All cells started out from your ovum which has forked itself many times since. Both halves of the fork() are identical to begin with, but they may from then on decide to do different things.”
GNUpdf
“The goal of the GNU PDF project is to develop and provide a free, high-quality, complete and portable set of libraries and programs to manage the PDF file format, and associated technologies. ”
Bwana
Manual page URL handler for Safari (e.g., “man:bash”, “man:sort” in URL box). References to other man pages are hyperlinked very nicely and the pages themselves are formatted quite nicely.
ZFS Puts Net App Viability at Risk?
Schwartz: “… we will be going after sizable monetary damages. And I am committing that Sun will donate half of those proceeds to the leading institutions promoting free software and patent reform, and to the legal defense of free software innovators.”
pgAdmin III v1.8.0 Final Released
“v1.8.0 represents nearly a year of development and testing to bring you a host of new features and improvements”
Hotwire graphical terminal
Looks like they’re bringing the basic capabilities of readline up to the GUI level. Definitely interesting.
ManPageView
Vim add-in for viewing manpages, perldoc (both system and embedded), help, info, and php files. Maybe I’ll finally be able to read all that GNU info doc I keep hearing about in the GNU coreutils man pages.
Fear and loathing at the command line
“To average users, the suggestion that they use the command line – or the shell, or the terminal, or whatever else you want to call it is only slightly less welcome than the suggestion that they go out and deliberately contract AIDS.” That’s a damn sham
Configuring Apache httpd
Starting with absolutely no configuration file. This is why I've prefered lighttpd, because I can put together a separate config in about five minutes. httpd’s sprawling default config has always scared the crap out of me.
The rsync(1) Algorithm
Some detail on rsync’s “rolling checksum” algorithm invented by Andrew Tridgell.
Good Shell Coding Practices - Handling Command Line Arguments
Very nice look at different methods (good and bad) for handling the command line in sh scripts.
Unison File Synchronizer - User Manual and Reference Guide
I'm gonna give this a try for managing home directories now that I've convinced myself that version control is the wrong solution. I moved my homes from CVS to SVN a couple years ago and just tried going with bzr but VCS just isn’t right here.
Cronic - A cure for Cron's chronic email problem
“… cron’s pathological behavior has be petrified into the Unix standards. So if it isn’t broken, it isn’t cron.”
Java Native Access + JRuby = True POSIX [headius.blogspot.com]
Java becomes 100% more viable. So simple — why didn’t someone do this in the very beginning?
Ten OS X Command Line Utilities you might not know about [osxdaily.com]
About half of these will be well-known to the UNIX hacker but there’s a couple I've not seen elsewhere: lsbom, softwareupdate, screencapture, and lipo.
A New Way to look at Networking
PARC’s Van Jacobson (traceroute(8), tcpdump(1)) on, well, everything that matters. Hands down best talk I've seen in years. I'm going to watch it again tomorrow.
Does Linux "Fail To Think Across Layers?" [slashdot.org]
Slashdot has become a horrible discussion forum for most topics. Disk theory and UNIX sysadmin type stuff is an exception, though. This story on ZFS might have the most informational comments I've seen in years.
These are the systems and peripherals [Michael S. Dell] is using right now. [dell.com]
Michael Dell runs Ubuntu 7.04 on his personal laptop :)
What to watch out for when writing portable shell scripts
Nice look at techniques for writing portable sh.
ZFS Basics Screencast [opensolaris.org]
I haven’t had a chance to play yet but you can consider me on the ZFS bandwagon. It’s coming to FreeBSD 7.0, too. Oodalolly!
Using mutt on OS X [linsec.ca]
This is pretty darn close to my configuration but I used the mutt-devel port… Oh, and my ~/.procmailrc is pretty insane also :)
7 Habits For Effective Text Editing 2.0 [video.google.com]
Recent presentation by Mr. Bram Moolenaar on how to be a bad-ass with Vim.
How the vi editor would seem if it has been made by Microsoft
“It looks like you are trying to do a regular expression. Do you need some help with that?”
getopt and getopts
A complete look at the little used utilities for processing arguments in scripts.
What's cooking for FreeBSD 7?
Lots of stuff from Sun (ZFS, dtrace), Linuxulator translates Linux syscalls to BSD syscalls with not performance penalty, lots of performance enhancements to the network stack from the card up, and a new malloc.
UNIX® Load Average Part 1: How It Works
Love it! This is less of an article and more of a minute by minute account of hacker seeing something he doesn’t understand and following the trail (man, code, calculus) to understanding.
Web Developers: 13 Command Line Tricks You Might Not Know
Anyone who doesn’t know every single one of these probably hasn’t been developing for the web very long. Probably a useful crash course for newbies making their way over from FrontPage or ASP.net though.
Vi Input Manager Plugin
“Essentially, this add Vi command functionality (albeit a small subset) to any (and all) text editors that use the Cocoa text system; e.g., Safari, TeXShop, XCode, etc.”
demoroniser - correct moronic and gratuitously incompatible Microsoft HTML
“The demoroniser keeps you from looking dumber than a bag of dirt when your Web page is viewed by a user on a non-Microsoft platform.”
Text email clients revisited [linux.com]
I've been using a fetchmail, procmail, and mutt setup on my Mac for a few months now in an attempt to get control over five different mailboxes and it’s working pretty well. If you've got some free time and lots of mail, consider playing around with one o
PostgreSQL 8.2 Release Notes
We moved from Windows / MS SQL Server to FreeBSD / PostgreSQL about 5 months ago and I've been nothing but completely happy with the transition. 8.2 is a pretty nice upgrade if you’re doing data warehousing style stuff.
How to make multiple SSH connections to the same host faster
All you have to do is add a few lines to ~/ssh/config.
DarwinPorts Guide
Alright, it looks like I'm going to have to break down and learn how to package ports since none of this crap is working on Tiger.
How I learned to stop worrying and love the command line, part 1.
Introduction to being a complete bad-ass.
Mac Takes Honors as Best Unix Desktop
“KDE and GNOME have both gotten much better, but let’s get real. They’re not even in the same ballpark.” — Ouch. True though…
128 bit storage: are you high?
What do Moore’s law and boiling oceans have in common? Sun’s Jeff Bonwick explains in three easy paragraphs. Really brilliant stuff.
Secure programmer: Prevent race conditions
Some really good info on various methods of dealing with synchronization between processes on *NIX based systems.
Ten Commands Every Linux Developer Should Know
ctags/etags, strace, fuser, ps, time, nm, strings, od/xxd, file, objdump
Shell (sh,ksh,bash) scripting in 20 pages
“A guide to writing shell scripts for C/C++/Java and unix programmers”
The Rise of "Worse is Better" - Richard Gabriel
Old and still very valid. What’s the best mix of Simplicity, Correctness, Consistency, and Completeness in software design? Describes MIT and “NewJersey” approaches.
The Joel on Software Forum - Explain why emacs is popular? (Not a troll)
After using Emacs for three years, I think I finally need to learn how to use it. This has some good pointers.