Katrina’s sneeze

The picture to the right is of my brother’s backyard after Katrina paid South Florida a visit. Some in that area of Davie/Ft. Lauderdale went without power for almost two days. My brother still has not had his phone service restored. I was able to call my Dad though. Of course, compared to what Lousiana and Missisippi are going through Katrina was merely an inconvenience here. My family including myself lived through Andrew which I belived up to now was the biggest or at least most costly hurricaine to hit the U.S. Andrew was a category 5, Katrina made landfall at category 4 levels but a much bigger storm and therefore a much bigger mess. The nightmare is yet to begin. I was not able to move back into our home for about 10 months. The insurance relief is not quite enough and not very timely. There is a ton of red tape and life does not just wait for you. Whatever plans, goals one may have had may have to be put on hold for a while. Hurricaines are not huge killers at least not in the States but they can very definitely bump you and your plans off path and getting back on track can for many be very difficult.

These things are really getting out of hand, we are already up to the K’s and we have not yet passed Labor day.

Making your filenames work in Linux

So I am in the middle of porting the NYC Smalltalk servers to CentOS. One of the issues that I ran into is that in Windows I setup the “start in” directory for the images (VisualWorks images i.e not gifs, etc) that I launch to be the directory where the image resides. In Linux I did not know how to do this. As a matter of fact, some folks that I know did not know either and build their own mechanism for resolving filenames. However, I want simply for code that worked in Windows to work in Linux without change or without changing the respective file locations.

Basically I wanted for the following to be true:

Given that ‘blah.txt’ exits in the same directory as where the current image exits then the following should be true:

(ObjectMemory imageName asFilename directory) = ‘blah.txt’ asFilename directory.

Well, thanks to one of the member of the VisualWorks Non-Commercial List I was able to to as much. The answer is simple: “change to” the working directory in your shell script to be what you need. This exactly what we do with a Windows shortcut except that in Linux we use scripting. So for example my startup script looks like this:

VISUALWORKS=/apps/visualworks/vw7.3.1

export VISUALWORKS

cd /apps/visualworks/vw7.3.1/image/wiki

/apps/visualworks/vw7.3.1/bin/linux86/visual /apps/visualworks/vw7.3.1/image/wiki/visual.im

Hope this is useful, it sure saved me some headaches.

[Presentation] SUnits and Test Driven Development

Joseph Pelrine will be presenting at NYC Smalltalk on September 14th. Same place same time. A post in comp.lang.smalltalk and the NYC Smalltalk yahoo groups will follow. It will also be announced on our wiki shortly. Anyhow here’s the heads up, it should be an interesting presentation.

Abstract:

Rarely have 3 classes and a handful of methods changed the face of software development more. SUnit, first described in an article published in the October 1994 Smalltalk Report, was an instrumental part of eXtreme Programming and its offshoot, Test-Driven Development. It has also spawned a legion of clones for other languages.

The last few years have seen a number of powerful features added to SUnit, features whose use isn’t all that easy to understand. In this talk, Joseph Pelrine, current maintainer of the Camp Smalltalk Sunit project, will talk about the past and present history of SUnit, the reasons behind the new features, and will show a number of handy tips and tricks which can be used to turbocharge your testing.

Bio:

Joseph Pelrine is C*O of MetaProg, a company devoted to increasing the quality of software and its development process, and is one of Europe’s leading experts on eXtreme Programming as well as Europe’s first certified ScrumMaster Practitioner and Trainer. He has had a successful career as software developer, project manager and consultant, and has spoken about it at such diverse places as IBM, OOPSLA and the Chaos Computer Club. His work in organizational complexity has led him to currently focus his interest on the Cynefin sense-making framework and its application to Agile processes.

CentOS

Its late and I’m tired but I had decided a while back that I was going to port my servers to CentOS and tonite’s the night, everything is going to be all right. Well let’s hope. The cd is cranking but it seems sluggish in taking me through the graphical installation wizard. Ok, it is not happy about something. Maybe the graphical installation option was not the right decision.

Ok, I now opted for the “linux text” installation option and this is going through the options much quicker. This is also the option that I have used in the past with Red Hat. It has that ole Clipper / Paradox look to it. In the meanwhile I had made sure to move my wiki to my other Windows box and change the port forwarding tables on my router. However, I forgot that I had been supporting some of my blog posts images with an Apache server. That directory is now gone i.e. since I clobbered it with the CentOS installation.

I wonder how much of a dent CentOS is making into Red Hat’s Enterprise business. We use RHE at work and so for me it does make sense to use CentOS for my personal needs.

For those of you who don’t know CentOS is basically free Red Hat Enterprise. I don’t like the idea of not paying for things. Yes, I’m weird that way so If CentOS works out for me I’ll probably PayPal them about $50.00 per year. I recently purchased an inexpensive clone with an AMD Semprom board overclocking at I believe 3200, with 512 mb ram for less than $300.00. Its pretty amazing to me that one can very inexpensively setup a viable cluster. Reliability can be a matter of redundancy as opposed to dropping a lot of cash on HP blades.

Ok, the installation is finished. Gnome looks much better from what I recall last. I had switched to KDE sometime ago. What is cool about CentOS is that it has an update service such as RHE.

Now, I just have to get VNC to work from my Win XP notebook to the Linux boxes, install VW , Postgres, Gemstone and look into switching from SmallWiki to the WikiWorksForSSP framework. Not tonite. I keep nodding off , I’ll go to bed once I confirm that the packages updated without issue.