“… when [Google] founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were on the hunt for a chief executive they wanted Steve Jobs to take up the job. The only problem was that Mr Jobs had a much better job at Apple – a much more superior company at the time.”

Wow… that would have been the demise of “Don’t Be Evil!”

You can convert these null-delimited streams to a linefeed-delimited streams this way:

(cat /proc/1/environ; echo) | tr "\000" "\n"

This, of course, means you can use grep other text-oriented tools on the output.

Conversely, I have sometimes wished that ‘sort’ had a ‘-0′ option, but it doesn’t.  There have been cases where I have to use ‘find -name *something* -print0′ to create a list of filenames containing spaces and other evil metacharacters, but then wanted to sort the list, but with no -0 option on sort, I couldn’t.  Now I know I can feed find -print0 into tr "\000" "\n" and then into sort, and get what I want that way.

These “other people” are support and testing staff, and they log into Linux system using ‘personal’ IDs, then use sudo su - XXXadmin, which is what we call a ‘functional’ ID.  The directory entries at /proc/*/fd/* are owned by the first user, with permissions of (0620)

crw--w---- 1 tim  tty 136, 8 Apr  9 15:58 /proc/self/fd/2

But when the user does sudo su – XXXadmin, the ownership of /proc/self/fd/2 is still the original owner, and so XXXadmin can’t write to this ‘file’.

Long story short: I couldn’t find any bash-isms that allow echo to be redirected to file-descriptor 2 directly, so I ended up replacing the echo statement with a perl script

perl -e 'print STDERR "message\n";'

Not really happy forking an entire interpreter just to write a little message to stderr, but maybe someday I’ll stumble across a better way.

The Flex SDK is available for Linux, Windows and Mac. Sounds good so far.  However, the Eclipse plugins for Flex are only Windows and Mac (NOT Linux). SHAME ON YOU, Adobe! Fortunately, you will not need anything from Eclipse to accomplish a straightforward command-line build under Linux.  It will force me to choose between two undesirable options: to use Windows for development, or to buy an overpriced MacBook.

My company uses IBM’s Telelogic Synergy (currently we’re at 6.5, quite a bit behind the latest 8.something).  We use it to perform all of official product builds, whether they be written in C, C++, Java, or Flex.  We use the same build.xml (ant) file that the developers run from Eclipse. However, before ANT is invoked, our project contains a Makefile that runs a series of shell scripts that set up the FLEX_HOME, JAVA_HOME, JBOSS_HOME, ORACLE_HOME variables. The developers do not need the Makefile on their Windows PCs, but our Makefile and shell scripts are the interface between the traditional Linux type of bulid and the ANT world. Provides the best of both sides!  We’ve learned to live with Synergy’s warts and wrinkles over the years, but getting a Flex project to build under Telelogic Synergy 6.5 on a Linux host raised some surprising problems. Here they are, plus the workarounds we found.

• Adobe Flex does not like the comma character that Synergy typically puts in our build paths: i.e. /home/user/ccm_wa/project/project,username-int-1.00.00. These comma-infested paths get passed to mxmlc and compc via a command-line parameter called ‘output’. Upon seeing the comma (,), Flex thinks we’re trying to specify two output directories (i.e. outputdir1,output2), which is utter nonsense. The workaround is to tell our Synergy admin to NOT use the the comma a Synergy delimiter when he builds the Synergy database that will contain your flex files. In our case, he configured our database to use the tilde (~) as a delimiter, which only has special meaning at the very beginning of a path (i.e. ~/.profile). It has been a good workaround, so far.
• By default, Synergy databases are created in such a way that files are actually Unix symbolic links. This is no big deal in 99% of our code bases. However, Adobe Flex refuses to work with symlinks that point to files. The workaround for this is to have our Synergy admin create our prep/integration workareas  to use copies instead of symlinks. This works well too, but costs much more storage on the disk. This can be mitigated somewhat by having only your currently-active releases created in “copies” mode.  Our Synergy dude also suggested purchasing a dedicated disk volume just for our project. Well, maybe later…

It’s always frustrating working with tools that so obviously originated on the Windows platform, with Linux and Mac only thrown in as an afterthought.

At work, I wrote a set of JUnit tests.  They follow a similar pattern.

@Test public final void getSomeKindOfDataTest(strHome, strServ, startDate, endDate, iAppCtx) {
try {
   AL_al = internalLibrary.getSomeKindOfData(strHome, strServ, startDate, endDate, iAppCtx);
   for (int i = 0; i < AL_al.size(); i++) {
       ... dump out the record
   }// for
   } catch() { fail(); }
}

These methods all began as TEST.java which was written by an early team member. It only exercised all the methods, but didn’t return or otherwise indicate pass or fail.  In other words, you had to eyeball the output to see if there were any problems. When I made JUnit tests out of these, I added the assert() and fail() calls.

I discovered just now that assert() is NOT part of JUnit.  It is a Java keyword that was added in 1.4, and is an assertion that is not run at all, unless you start the JVM with –ea or –enableassertions.  See this for all the gory details: http://download.oracle.com/javase/1.4.2/docs/guide/lang/assert.html

What I had INTENDED to use was assertTrue (AL_al.size() > 0), which IS part of JUnit and is always evaluated.http://junit.sourceforge.net/javadoc/org/junit/Assert.html#assertTrue(boolean)

So I changed my assert() statements to assertTrue(), and suddenly found that 9 out of the 18 tests no longer pass.  If only I had discovered this a day or two ago.

Lesson: assert() is NOT Junit.  Ouch!

Here is why I care:  I have about a dozen domain names, all registered with directnic.com. Many years ago, I started purchasing unmanaged VPS space from one VPS provider.  Things went well, until one day, they didn’t.  I was naïve enough to host my own DNS servers on the same servers where I was providing web space.  Although I had backups, and little delay provisioning another VPS from another provider (making sure it ran a different virtual management product), and uploading my backups to the new VPS, I still had to wait between 1 and 3 days for DNS changes to my domain registrations to propagate through the DNS system before all my webhost customers were completely back up.  Because of this lesson, I changed all my domain registrations to point to EditDNS’s DNS servers, so that if this happened again, I could make the change immediately to another provider by editing my zone records at EditDNS.net.

I also gave a lot of thought to my email setup, selecting “GMail for Domains” to host my person accounts at timjones.com, linuxtampa.com, sunshinebrass.com, etc.  This means having my MX records at editdns.net point to servers within Google.  This also got me out of the arms race of defending my SMTP server at my VPS provider from SPAM and hack attack, and having to update SpamAssassin all the time.   At a moment’s notice I could repoint my MX records to any other SMTP provider (even my own VPS servers) and recover from that.  All was well,   except for one major flaw: that all my domain registrations point to my gmail (NON-domain) account (____@Gmail.com).

I never though the big G would let me down on a such a simple low-volume, non-spammed account.  So much for the backup plan.

Directnic.com has always served me well: based in New Orleans, LA they even had no apparent downtime even during Hurricane Katrina, which impressed me greatly.  I have no reason to abandon them, but this episode made my realize that my decision to use ONLY directnic.com for my domain registrations is really another single point of failure.

So, to improve my redundancy further, I’m doing two more things:

• I’m moving a couple of my domains to another provider, and making sure that my domain registrations contain email addresses that span across the two registrars.
• I’m going to not rely on FREE email any longer, not even from Google.  You must remember this: to the companies who give away resources, we are NOT the customer.  We are the PRODUCT.  The customer is the ADVERTISER.

This is the link that finally did it for me: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=52856&start=15

Which is why, kids, it is always a mistake to allow slick tools like unetbootin & usb-creator to substitute for actually knowing how to do stuff for real.

The players are all middle- and high-school students in the area, most of whom are also in All-County and All-State bands. Despite being a “quintet”, there are more than five players, because of the use of alternates. This flexibility helps the group survive the occasional schedule conflict, sports injury or illness.

I have become of the alternates, and on this recording, I played first Trumpet.  So far, I have filled in on Euphonium, Tuba and now Trumpet.  These kids and their teacher are AMAZING people, and I’m honored to be involved.

So, enjoy, and MERRY CHRISTMAS!

This is important in systems that have significant shell script components that rely on environment variables.  In the getenv “Dark Ages” (i.e. 1.3, and 1.4), this call was deprecated and the recommended workaround was to simply wrap all your Java command lines in a shell script that would map some of your environment variables into System properties: i.e.
    #!/bin/bash
    export FOO_HOME=/opt/foo
    java -Dfoo.home=$FOO_HOME com.timjones.foo.Main

Thankfully they came to their senses.  I just can’t believe it took me so long to hear about it.  I should spend some time reading all the Java release notes to see what else I have missed!