Every now and then I have to pull out all the stops and migrate legacy systems to the latest-and-greatest, leaping over several intervening versions of programming languages and platforms. Recently I have been migrating systems that have been stable for a decade or more but need to be upgraded in order to avoid their underlying systems going completely out of support. There are several technologies involved, but three of them are “old friends” and while I am looking at the migration process I am also astounded by the many positive changes that have occurred in the past decade. While most of the changes don’t have much effect on process, some of them are quite significant. Some changes are minor, but [click title to read more…]
Sometimes, just for exercise, I go nuts. This time I figured my exercise would be to create a Hello World micro-services demo by building a bare bones cluster on the bleeding edge Rocky 8.4 operating system. I say “bleeding edge” but in fact I would just be using recent stable versions of several technologies, rather than the actual bleeding edges.
You can read about my chosen technologies elsewhere, along with all manner of explanations, charts, diagrams and occasionally some sample configurations or lines of code. For this document I stick to command lines and raw configurations, with the aim of providing something that you can copy/paste verbatim and achieve the same result. If you [click title to read more…]
Many years ago, a work colleague/friend and I had a disagreement over the use of tabs and spaces in software source code. At the time, my preference was to indent my code with two spaces as I often had complex nested operations that would vanish on the right-hand side of my screen if I were using the conventional 8 spaces.
Indenting with 2 spaces:
while ( unopenedThingsExist() ) { for ( eachThing in theCollection ) { with ( opened ( eachThing ) ) { if ( lookInside ( eachThing ) == something ) { display ( nameOf ( eachThing ) ); } } } }
Indenting with 8 spaces
while ( unopenedThingsExist() ) { for ( eachThing in theCollection ) [click title to read more...]
Sometimes the only way to get a development tool installed is to compile it from source. In fact, many Open Source projects will assume this is how you intend to install. Some nice people out there might actually compile it for you and make the binaries available, but unless you have 100% trust in whoever is supplying these, compiling from source might be the best route. Perl, my Swiss Army Knife of choice, has many contributors offering modules that go through an elaborate compile/configure/test routine. Such installation processes can take a few minutes to complete, which is often a good excuse to go get a coffee.
The build scripts accompanying such from-source resources often include liberal dollops of commentary that [click title to read more…]
A few years back I blogged about the RPM Hell (TreeTops, Jan 2012) that came about because of ineffective dependency checking. Needless to say, this reminded a lot of people about the infamous DLL Hell from many years prior. DLL and RPM dependency issues have generally been overcome with a variety of approaches and improvements in the tools and operating environments. Pushing functionality onto the Web or into the Cloud can help move the problem away from your local machine. After all, if the functionality is now just some JavaScript on a Web page then this shouldn’t be affected by whatever mess of libraries are installed on your local machine.
That worked for a while. Eventually the JavaScript workload grew [click title to read more…]