Category Archives: Codemonkeying

All your DB are belong to conductor

Well, it’s done. Hopefully. Over the last year, Nova has had a goal of removing direct database access from nova-compute. This has a lot of advantages, especially around security and rolling upgrade abilities, but also brings some complexity and change. Much … Continue reading

Posted in Codemonkeying, Linux, OpenStack Tagged , , , ,

Low-latency continuous rsync

Okay, so “lowish-latency” would be more appropriate. I regularly work on systems that are fairly distant, over relatively high-latency links. That means that I don’t want to run my editor there because 300ms between pressing a key and seeing it … Continue reading

Posted in Codemonkeying Tagged , ,

The beauty of automated builds

Just about any developer knows that if you’ve got even a moderately complicated project, you have to have automated builds. This helps to ensure not only that the builds you provide to the public are consistent, but also that you … Continue reading

Posted in Codemonkeying Tagged , , , , ,

A better way to process binary data in Python

One of my side-projects is CHIRP, which is an application for programming the memory contents of various radios.  Like other projects I’ve done where I want to cater to (or at least, not exclude) people running Windows, it’s written in … Continue reading

Posted in Codemonkeying Tagged ,

Jumping to the inbox in GNUS

I’ve used GNUS to read my mail for a long time now.  Every once in a while I try to move to something else because of simplicity or ease of use, but I always come back.  The unparalleled ability to … Continue reading

Posted in Codemonkeying

Expectations

I think that one of the hardest things to do as a programmer is anticipate the ways in which your product will be used.  If it’s not very powerful to start with, then it’s not likely that people will try … Continue reading

Posted in Codemonkeying Tagged

Using Py2App with GTK

In order to present D-RATS as a nice and neat App package on MacOS X, I have been using Py2App.  When it works, this utility generates a App package that contains everything D-RATS needs aside from the base operating system … Continue reading

Posted in Codemonkeying Tagged

Running strerror() from the shell

Reasonably often, I have a need to convert an errno variable to its string error message right at the shell.  This seems to come up relatively often in kernel development, but occasionally elsewhere.  Where I can, I usually just go … Continue reading

Posted in Codemonkeying

D-RATS hits 1000 changesets!

Even though I was looking for the counter to roll over 1000 changesets back at about 850, I completely missed the event and kept on going.  On November 4th, 2008 (which also happens to be Election Day in the US), … Continue reading

Posted in Codemonkeying

Making a KVM-bootable image

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to re-learn how to create a bootable image from a filesystem tree (such as a tarball of a root filesystem, or a Xen partition image).  If for no other reason than … Continue reading

Posted in Codemonkeying, Linux Tagged ,