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Entries from programming

  • July, 2009

  • interesting meetup on July 14

    I attended the Hackers and Founders meetup yesterday. It was a high energy meetup and I liked it. When I walked in, I was already 2 hours late but there were still quite a few people around. I walked in, took a name tag and tried to "merge in". Merging was easy - the folks were friendly and did not mind if you joined the discussion.

    Some observations

    • I did not have a good answer for "what are you working on right now" :-) . This made me realize that from a technology perspective, I have not worked on anything interesting for some time now. I have tinkered with a few things in the past 6 months (man!), but have not really done a deep dive on any of them.
    • There was a focus on programming language in the group. I am not sure if the choice of a programming language is really a big deal when creating a webapp. Rails, PHP, Python, Perl, Java - all have a good web framework. One of the arguments was that it would be difficult to organize PHP code in a coherent manner. In my opinion, that is a matter of discipline instead of language.
    • I did not find people thinking of totally different ideas. Or maybe, the folks were not telling those ideas :-) . The ideas floated around ads, community, social networking, websites etc.
    • I am not a unique case when it comes to the case of creating a startup. A few folks there had a regular job and were planning on side projects.
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  • December, 2008

  • benefit of scripting lanuguage

    I am using a Mac now, and this blog post is brought to you by the same php and lisp scripts that I was using on my linux box. Cheers! :-)

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  • November, 2008

  • debugging malloc

    Have you read the man malloc page recently? Did you notice this section there

    Recent versions of Linux libc (later than 5.4.23) and GNU libc (2.x) include a malloc implementation which is tunable via environment variables. When MALLOC_CHECK_ is set, a special (less efficient) implementation is used which is designed to be tolerant against simple errors, such as double calls of free() with the same argument, or overruns of a single byte (off-by-one bugs). Not all such errors can be protected against, however, and memory leaks can result. If MALLOC_CHECK_ is set to 0, any detected heap corruption is silently ignored; if set to 1, a diagnostic is printed on stderr; if set to 2, abort() is called immediately. This can be useful because otherwise a crash may happen much later, and the true cause for the problem is then very hard to track down.

    So, you can do export MALLOC_CHECK_=1 and malloc will print debugging messages to the stderr.

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  • October, 2008

  • lunatech-journal.el

    I have created a emacs major mode, called lunatech-journal, that I use for blogging. It is a derived mode from muse-mode, an excellent mode for writing and publishing.

    Currently, it has following functions defined

    • lunatech-journal-skeleton - loads a skeleton for blogging
    • lunatech-journal-show-hints - shows a buffer with questions to help me blog about my day
    • lunatech-journal-make-html - creates a html file from the muse-mode
    • lunatech-journal-preview - allows me to preview my journal in the browser

    I use a php script to post the blog entry to the website. To use it, I have the following in my .emacs file

    (defun journal ()
  (interactive)
  (find-file "~/blog/journal.muse")
  )
(require 'lunatech-journal)
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("journal\\.muse\\'" . lunatech-journal-mode))

    When I feel the need to blog, I do M-x journal, I get dropped into my journal file and I can blog.

    Links:

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  • testing, testing

    testing, testing - 1, 2, 3

    I should now be able to set the categories of my post.

    This post is brought to you by emacs, php and lots of cups of tea.

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  • April, 2007

  • Release of PythonOnPlanes-1.3.07 aka. SuperSunday release

    What is PythonOnPlanes ?

    PythonOnPlanes is a rapid development framework for Python which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC. Our primary goal is to provide a structured framework that enables Python users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility.

    See the Features list below to learn more about the framework.

    Release Announcement

    The Release Engineering Team is happy to announce the availability of PythonOnPlanes-1.3.07 , the latest release of the PythonOnPlanes Stable development branch. Since PythonOnPlanes-1.3.06 release we have made many improvements in functionality, stability, performance, and mod_snake_oil support for Apache web servers, as well as dealt with known security issues and made many bugfixes.

    Major highlights in the release include Active Scrum Manager 1, Sanity Preserver 3.13 and Lart 22.21. This is also the first release with the PythonOnPlanes Live CD Installer officially debuting on the x86 platform.

    Features

    The software development world is moving towards AGILE DEVELOPMENT, WEB-2.OH, GURU PRESENCE and LEAN SOFTWARE. Our Framework is geared to support all these features.

    "Out of the box" features available

    Out of the box PythonOnPlanes supports

    • Sprint Management
    • Pair programming using an editor that can be shared by 2 developers. We have named it ALN (Analog Large Notebook)
    • LoC2LoC to generate a report on each developer's productivity.
    • Active Suggest DESIGN PATTERN (ASDP). This feature will make your refactoring efforts a snap

    Beta Experimental Features

    These features are not enabled by default and you have to enable them by editing the configuration file.

    • Developers' Blog . Each developer in the team is given a blog which he can update. If enabled, PythonOnPlanes will generate a daily report of the developer activity log and post it on the blog too
    • CutesyErrorMessages-0.0.1-BETA. This replaces stern error messages with very user friendly messages

    GET PythonOnPlanes-1.3.07 IN NO TIME

    Download PythonOnPlanes-1.3.07 from <http://pythononplanes.com/>

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  • March, 2007

  • RIP John W. Backus

    The "B" in "BNF" is gone. NY Times has a nice artilce about him and his noteworthy quote is tucked in at the end

    Innovation, Mr. Backus said, was a constant process of trial and error.

    "You need the willingness to fail all the time," he said. "You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don't work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work."

    Link: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies - New York Times

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