Igmar Palsenberg's blog

GDB 7.3a and a new elfutils

Igmar Palsenberg — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 14:14:47 +0000

I just uploaded gdb 7.3a It can be found on my RPM repo. I’ve also added new elfutils packages, since these are required by this version of GDB.

Binutils 2.21.1a on CentOS 5.6

Igmar Palsenberg — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 20:59:51 +0000

I just uploaded binutils.2.21.1a. It can be found on my RPM repo. GDB will be uploaded begin next week. Happy compiling !!!

GCC 4.6.1 on CentOS 5.6

Igmar Palsenberg — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 15:14:30 +0000

I’ve just created packages for CentOS 5.6 that replace the default compiler with gcc 4.6.1. That version has some interesting options, so I wanted to use that as my default compiler. It’s also more strict, so it’s a good check for my own code.

Packages can be downloaded from my RPM repo

Later today I’ll upload my binutils and gdb packages.

VIM 7.3 with Python 2.6 on CentOS 5.x

Igmar Palsenberg — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:43:33 +0000

I’ve been a OSX user for some time, but my main C development happens on CentOS. OSX has TextMate as editor, which has snippets : A sort of runtime macro’s on steroids. It saves lots of time with common language constructs such as loops.

Vim has a UltiSnips, but that has some preconditions : It need vim 7.3 with Python >= 2.6 compiled in. CentOS has neither of them. You can’t just upgrade Python on a CentOS machine, since lots of things (yum being one of them) depend on a specific version. So if you overwrite the default version, all hell will brake loose.

I’ve created packages for both Python and Vim (x86 and srpms), available at http://www.palsenberg.com/rpmrepo/

Happy VIMming !!!

Migrating to JIRA 4.4

Igmar Palsenberg — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 09:28:51 +0000

Migrating to JIRA 4.4 is now complete. It has’t been without hickups however :

JIRA 4.4 en Fisheye 2.6.0-2.6.3 don’t get along when using trusted authentication. You get Seraph errors : Error handling trusted applications authentication attempt:BAD_SIGNATURE
Make sure the user that is authenticating the application link (and managing the JIRA project) has read errors to Fisheye projects. Else you can’t link you repo to the JIRA project.

Make sure you have adequate backups before attempting to upgrade. Without them, it’s a one-way ticket of something goes wrong.

Confluence

Igmar Palsenberg — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 12:32:12 +0000

I’ve installed an milestone of Confluence. I never liked the 3.x editor : Wiki just isn’t my thing. Fortunately, the 4.x release has a brand new editor, and it’s WYSIWYG. No more fancy tagging, no more thinking on what wikimarkup to use.

A nice addition is that it also allows macro’s to be embedded into that page. I’m going to use that to add some information of my own personal projects, like commit history.

Migrating to Atlassian tools

Igmar Palsenberg — Tue, 24 May 2011 12:14:58 +0000

So.. Finally found to spare time : I’ve migrated my old setup to include (most) of the Atlassian tools. I’ve got Crowd, JIRA, Confluence, Bamboo and Fisheye up-and-running, with SSO authentication.
Next step is to figure out how to make Bamboo build my C / C++ projects (which use make, not Ant or Maven which are supported native in Bamboo). I also need to look at the testsuite, for which Bamboo assumes it generated JUnit XML reports. At this moment, it doesn’t. I’ll be opening Confluence spaces for most of my (old) projects soon.

Working with re2c, lessons learned

Igmar Palsenberg — Thu, 05 May 2011 13:54:09 +0000

I’ve completed the parser that parses bind9 style config files. The parser itself is based on the lemon parser generator, and the lexer is based on re2c. While testing and developing the parser, I’ve ran into some strange, undocumented issues.

Error checking is practically absent. Bad input results in bad runtime behaviour instead of errors.
Make sure that all input in conditions is handled; Input encountered in states without a matching rule results in the resulting code jumping to a (semi) random rule. Again, this doesn’t result in errors.
RTFM about what regular expressions re2c supports. No error checking what so ever.
Rules with wildcard conditions (<*> ) are first processed, above all other rules. A condition with a matching rules overrides the wildcard condition. This is important if you have a match-all condition [^], since that will precede the wildcard condition rule.

If you live up to the above undocumented things, re2c make writing lexers as easy as it gets.

Migrating from Xen Citrix to RHEV

Igmar Palsenberg — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 12:53:13 +0000

Since I’ve got fed-up with all Citrix bugs (operations that het stuck on locks, resumes not working, etc) and the fact that the’re probably going to drop Xen in favor of Microsoft Hyper-V we are going to migrate to RedHat RHEV.

The software installs fine (except for the know issue that you can’t register on RHN), but migrating 35 VM’s is not something I really like doing. Well, virt-v2v comes to the rescue according to the docs.

Uhm.. Well… not exactly. What the docs don’t really mention that it depends on a Xen with libvirt on top of that. And that is exactly what Citrix Xen doesn’t use. So, only errors, and no migration.

So.. I’m stuck with a manual migration, using or friends dd and netcat. Bah

PHP and the reasons why we consider switching

Igmar Palsenberg — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 13:28:59 +0000

PHP is a nice language, with numerous advantages :

Easy to learn
Easy to install and upgrade serverwise
Interpreted, so no compile and deploy worries

The disadvantages are starting to annoy me more and more over time :

Zend engine is huge. It’s a major memory consumer
Not all extensions are stable. When it comes to thread safety, there are major problems
Some language constructs simply suck : __construct(), the 5.3 namespace seperator
No type hinting for build-in types (int, string)
No OO function overloading
Multibyte support is basically non-existent

Our current framework (I-Content) is based on PHP4 code, and therefore not object orientated. There are some improvements, but the PHP limitations don’t go away.
Our new framework is on it’s way, and build using JAVA. The above limitations go away, althrough we get some new disadvantages in return. Time will tell if the switch is really going to happen…