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4 Dec 2013
Feeling Developer Pain
My first blog post (co-authored wtih Steve Milner) on the Red Hat Developer Blog (@RHELDevelop) has just been published!
[..] this post describes our journey from initially trying to implement a simple solution to improve the day-to-day lives of developers, through the technical limitations we experienced along the way, and finally arrives at the empathy for our developers we’ve gained from that experience. We’ll wrap up with a note on how Red Hat Software Collections (announced as GA in September) would’ve simplified our development process.
Enjoy!
See also:
- GitHub: jsonstats - System information over a RESTful interface
- GitHub: Talook - Web frontend to jsonstats
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30 Nov 2013
Technitribe now Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0
I recently read the Creative Commons announcement, CC’s Next Generation Licenses — Welcome Version 4.0!. This made me think more about licensing in general, as it has been a topic receiving increased attention recently in Open Source/Tech communities. I think it’s a very important subject that anyone involved in Open Source should have at least some knowledge about.Incorrectly or unlicensed software (or any other digital resource for that matter) can become a serious barrier to people attempting to reuse published works. I received my first exposure to the this when I was contributing to the Ubuntu project.
Since then I’ve become quite a proponent of making sure resources are properly licensed.
I was thrilled when GitHub made it a priority to encourage and facilitate hosted projects having conspicuous and unambiguous licensing. They even made a site, choosealicense.com, to guide users through the process.
You can imagine I was quite surprised when I realized I never put a proper copyright/usage notice on the blog. That said, as of now this blog is officially licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license. That means:
You are free to:
- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
- Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
Under the following terms:
- Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
- ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
“4.0 It’s here.” image was created by the Creative Commons organization and is used under the terms of the CC BY 3.0 license,
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24 Sep 2013
Mac OS X, Sed, and strange document encoding
The Problem
You’re on Mac OS X (somewhere around 10.7.5) and you’re using the sed command to replace characters from the latin1 or Windows-1252 character encoding with their utf8 equivalents. Unfortunately you get an error like the following:
sed: 1: "s/#/’/g ": RE error: illegal byte sequenceLuckily you’re not alone!
This happened to me while working on HamDecks, a small project that creates Mnemosyne decks to help you study for the Amateur Radio Operator exams using questions from the official ARRL Question pools. The source question pool files (Technician, General, Extra) though have some problems… There’s a lot of characters with strange/exotic encoding in the ARRL pool files that could not be imported into Mnemosyne. That’s how I got myself into this whole mess in the first place.
Options
The stackoverflow link above makes two suggestions:
- Use the iconv utility
- Use a PERL one-liner
Your Mileage May Vary, but neither of those suggestions worked for me. So what did work then?
Potential Solution
Once again, we will visit our system locale settings.
Here’s what worked for the HamDecks project:
Instead of just prefixing the sed command with LANG=C, we prefix it with LANG=C LANG_ALL=C. I’m not saying this is a silver bullet, just that it worked for me and might work for you too.
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5 Jul 2013
A Munin plugin for OpenShift
I created a munin plugin to chart the number of gears present/idle on OpenShift application node instances. The plugin was written for/tested against OpenShift Enterprise 1.2.
Chart: One Host
These charts show the number of gears present/idle on a single OpenShift application node instance. Nothing special required to set this plugin up. Just copy the script/configuration to your node and then restart the munin-node service.
Chart: District
This is a combined/multigraph chart showing the number of gears present on all nodes representing my “small” district. This chart is created using the munin concept of ‘loaning’ data.
GitHub: openshift-munin-plugins
Interested in trying it out yourself? The code is up on github: tbielawa/openshift-munin-plugins.
Along with the actual plugin you can find example munin server configs for creating the multigraph chart of gears across all nodes in a district.
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23 Jun 2013
Update: Using TTF Fonts with DocBook and Dblatex
This is an update to a previous blog post where I described how I was able to use custom fonts in my docbook -> dblatex -> pdf toolchain by switching to the XeTeX backend.
I closed that blog post with a few caveats:
- remark elements no longer appear in PDF output
- The DRAFT watermark no longer appears
- screen elements no longer show a ‘wrapping character’ in long lines
I’m pleased to say that I’ve recently revisited my publishing toolchain and two of those three caveats are no longer an issue.
Through a series of unexpected clicks on the dblatex releases page I found myself looking at links to download newer versions of dblatex than I was presently using. Though the updates are not scheduled for inclusion in Fedora 17, they are (going to be) available in Fedora 18 and Fedora 19. I quickly skimmed over the changelogs and found some interesting bug fixes. Such as:
- Remove hard-coded paper size and add some parameters for page layout setup:
- Parameters to define page sizes and margins.
- Parameters to have crop marks for pre-press PDF output.
- Fix Debian bug #629514 to have draft watermark with XeTeX backend.
Because I’m targeting smaller book dimensions for the Virtual Disk Guide I was most interested in the first fix mentioned: the removal of hard-coded paper sizes. Unfortunately, the documentation on the official dblatex site has not been updated in quite some time. It seems that they’re still displaying an early 0.3.x release of the docs.
Wouldn’t you know it… Some kind souls out there on the Internets have actually built and host the most recent version of the dblatex documentation online! Now I’m able to get a smaller page format which is suitable for the dimension options on lulu.com without having to directly hack any of the dblatex styles. All it takes now is: <xsl:param name=”paper.type”>a5paper</xsl:param> Header and footer content receive appropriate margins automatically, too. No more fussing around!
Other notes
- The draft watermark works in PDF output once again.
- Hyphenation in examples works correctly again.
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Technitribe by Tim Bielawa is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.