Init is the parent of all processes.

cgit is a web frontend to git. I like it because it is fast and does what I need and not more or less. Well, kind of.

In the stats page, cgit provides a table with the list of committers along with the amount of commits in a given timeframe. The table contains valuable information, but it is somewhat hard to read. At least for me. I prefer to visualize things.

That was when I decided to include some charts, with the help of the d3.js library.
Below is a screenshot of a development version of it.

If you want it, be my guest and fork it from my github:

git clone git://github.com/nlopes/cgit.git


Although EMC provides command line tools to do (almost) everything you can do through the interface, I still think they should scrap the interface at all on the enterprise level Storage solutions they offer.

If you have a high tiered storage, you most probably (and should) know what you are doing. Instead of focusing in a web interface and nice icons, they should instead spend that energy writing good (or better) documentation on the command line tools; more options are also welcome.

@EMC: you should worry about good interface for graphs and related stuff. Not that you should not provide a command line interface to those graphs, or even externalize the links on the graphs. For example, externalizing links on the performance graphs would make it easier to integrate it with monitoring tools people already use and prefer (e.g. zenoss).

Just to tell the world I am currently writing this from EMC World.
VIB Lounge FTW.

For some years now that I’ve been keeping a decent amount of hack-ish libraries that do exactly what I want them to do. I have a library that provides me with a nice interface to different databases; another one keeps my sessions in check; others take care of cookies and encoding and decoding. To be honest, I never wrote any big website. I don’t really like web programming that much. But I do keep my libraries just in case. It’s like having that handy swiss army knife.

The other day, a co-worker asked me which framework he should use. He mentioned django and pylons I believe. There are plenty others, and the big difference is in how they do things and how good the interface they present is. Anyway, my answer was a manly one: write your own. I told him the time he would spend learning one of those frameworks and doing his own thing was about the same, considering he would realize the framework wouldn’t do exactly what he wanted. My answer has been bothering me for a couple of days and I’ve changed my mind. What I’m about to say is for all of you out there that want to start writing some websites in python.

Don’t write your own thing. It will be a nightmare for you to maintain it. You will write site specific stuff that you’ll regret later and then you’ll have to re-engineer some parts or even the whole thing. You will probably forget parts of the libraries that you rarely ever use and your documentation won’t probably match the (mostly good) documentation those projects (e.g.: django and friends) have. Not only that, but you will also regret you didn’t think about scalability and/or some other thing you should have thought when you wrote them. Believe me, my libraries have been with me for more than 8 years now and 8 years ago I didn’t think about scalability. I didn’t need to. Maybe one day I will and that is the day I am not looking forward.

My best advice to you is to learn one or two web frameworks and pick the one you feel most comfortable with. If you need stuff the framework doesn’t have, do the effort to extend it. In the long run, you will be better off that way. And if you really don’t want a complete web framework, at least look into some wsgi utility libraries to help you (e.g. werkzeug). Again, do not write your own thing.

As for me, I’ll be issuing a “rm -rf Projects/web-utilities” in my home folder.

P.S.: One of these days I may even write a tutorial on one of these frameworks.

Do you hate having 30 tabs open in firefox/chrome/whatever when 7 or 8 of those you would really wish they were an application?

I met Fluid this weekend. Mac OS only unfortunately. It made my day.
One of the things I wished for was Google Reader as an application, and now I do. Did you mention Facebook? That also works. I guess Playboy would work too.

CentOS is widely used by some well known corporations around the globe as their distribution of choice. Without wanting to start a flame war (because I wouldn’t – if you haven’t figured out by now, there aren’t many readers to this blog) no one cares about your opinion on that. Doesn’t matter what you like, what you pick, that’s what those companies picked, they stick with it and it works pretty well for them.

One could argue that is because a rpm based system is better than a dpkg based system (or compared to any other package management system for that matter). One could argue that a distribution based from one from a corporation (Hello Red Hat) would be the best solution without having to pay one cent.
One could argue a lot of things about corporations choosing CentOS as their default distribution and never ever finish arguing. Maybe and probably because it is a worthless discussion.

But CentOS netinstall not supporting proxies? Really?

No comments on that.

Nigel Tufnel: My RAID array are all RAID-11. Look, right across the rack, RAID-11, RAID-11, RAID-11 and…
Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most arrays go up to RAID-10?
Nigel Tufnel: Exactly.
Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it’s faster? Is it any faster?
Nigel Tufnel: Well, it’s one faster, isn’t it? It’s not RAID-10. You see, most blokes, you know, will be serving files at RAID-10. You’re on RAID-10 here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you’re on RAID-10 on your database backup. Where can you go from there? Where?
Marty DiBergi: I don’t know.
Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Marty DiBergi: Put it up to RAID-11.
Nigel Tufnel: RAID-11. Exactly. One faster.
Marty DiBergi: Why don’t you just make RAID-10 faster and make RAID-10 be the top performer and make that a little faster?
Nigel Tufnel: [pause] These go to RAID-11.

It’s as easy as:
# pkg set-publisher -P -O http://pkg.opensolaris.org/release/ opensolaris.org
# pkg image-update -v
# reboot
# pkg set-publisher –non-sticky opensolaris.org
# pkg set-publisher –non-sticky extra
# pkg set-publisher -P -g http://pkg.oracle.com/solaris/release/ solaris
# pkg install pkg
# pkg image-update -v –accept

A small explanation:
– set a new OpenSolaris publisher
– upgrade the current image (I was running snv 134)
– reboot into the new environment
– set the current opensolaris.org and extra as non-sticky so that a new one will be higher ranked
– set the new publisher for Solaris 11 Express
– update the packaging client
– upgrade the current image (don’t forget to use –accept, otherwise you will just see a license text and a note to repeat ‘pkg image-update’ with the –accept option)

I had a script in debian that was sending emails with the following:

mail -a 'Content-Type: text/html; charset="utf-8"' -s "Some Title here"

When migration ocurred (for some reason or another that I won’t discuss here) to CentOS/Fedora, I discovered the hard way that there is no 'mail -a' in this side of the world.
If you’re wondering how to do it, here’s *one* way:

mutt -e "my_hdr Content-Type:text/html" -e "set charset=\"utf-8\"" -s "Some Title here"

Hope it’s useful to someone out there.

I have a Windows XP with a 5GB disk running as a VirtualBox VM in a linux host. It started as a curiosity, but turned out to be kind of useful and 5GB just isn’t enough.
As far as I know, there are no easy-to-use tools for expanding a VDI disk. Installing a fresh copy of Windows and restoring a backup takes way too long.

Here’s my quick fix:
– download the GParted live CD;
– create a new (large enough) disk, say 20GB;
– attach both the live CD’s ISO and the new disk to the Windows VM;
– boot from the GParted live CD;
– use the copy-paste feature of GParted to replicate the content of the 5GB disk to the 20GB one;
– remember to expand the partition to the *whole disk* before confirming “Paste”;
– detach the 5GB disk from the VM, attach the 20GB one, and boot the VM.

It worked like a charm just 10min ago