CodeWord: Apokalyptik

Lunch

apokalyptik — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:24:50 +0000

I make a fruit salad kind of thing almost every single day for lunch. And for some reason, today, I thought I would record the process. This is how I make a fruit salad… How do you do it?

for the record this is not an exciting or cool video… its just me… cutting up fruit… silently

Nikki In Training

apokalyptik — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 02:51:35 +0000

I just want to share with everyone how proud I am of my Nikki. She’s been training to do a half marathon for charity (and to get into shape.) She’s just been stellar about it. She’s walking tons, and lost a bucketload of weight. I’m sure that she would love it if anyone wanted to drop by and give her some words of encouragement on her blog where she’s keeping a log of her Journey. Thats my wife!

This is actually pretty cool

apokalyptik — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:09:08 +0000

First person tetris… awesome… http://www.firstpersontetris.com/

Time based bloom filters

apokalyptik — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 04:29:56 +0000

I find this concept fascinating and plan to investigate further down this road.

lockd, a memcached like locking daemon in php

apokalyptik — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 22:07:09 +0000

You might have seen my last post about this code (here) if you are one of my 2.3 loyal readers . It wasnt nearly so complete or robust then (segfaulting? come on! right?)

The segfaulting was caused by stupidly using $this->function() from inside of $this->function() for recursion, overloading the stack. Note to self: don’t be lazy about recursion

If you’re interested in the project I have it setup over here: http://code.svn.wordpress.org/lockd/ so please feel free to try it out.

What is it? It’s a network based locking mechanism. You can connect to it over TCPIP and get either exclusive or shared locks for as many arbitrary strings as you like. Shared locks have the added benefit of being counted. You can query to see if a string is locked (and how many times for shared locks.) You can also release locks.

All of this is useful, but… The nice thing about lockd, though, is that if your client disconnects (say the process which had locked a string quit unexpectedly) lockd will automatically orphan those locks for you. So you have no need to try and cleanup and guess the lock state of a failed process. And since this runs as a network daemon you can have as many of them as you like. You can use them for local (locks on the same box) or distributed (locks on the same resource from many boxes.) It also comes with built in stats which you could hook up to munin, or nagios, via netcat without too much trouble.

The protocol is also extremely simple

g (string) — get an exclusive lock on the string
sg (string) — get a shared lock on the string
r (string) — release an exclusive lock
sr (string) — release a shared lock
i (string) — inspect an exclusive lock
si (string) — inspect a shared lock
q — query stats
q full — query stats and dump the exclusive and shared lock arrays

Thats it. “(int) (string)” is returned for these commands. where (int) is for programmatic use, and (string) is for human consumption.

We use this with the Jobs system (also available as an OSS project) for WordPress.com, Intensedebate, Gravatar, and more, and is currently handling nearly a million operations per day… per server…

This is Itch-Scratch-Ware at its finest.

This made me laugh :)

apokalyptik — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 07:29:15 +0000

The Adventures of Lil Cthulhu

apokalyptik — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:40:55 +0000

php debugging the really really hard way

apokalyptik — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 22:18:56 +0000

If you’re ever in a situation where something is only happening intermittently, and only on a live server, and only while it’s under load… Lets say its not generating any error_log or stderr output, and you cant run it manually to reproduce… (we’ve all been in this situation) How do you get any debugging output at all?

Step 1: add this to the top of your entry point php file

if ( $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] == '127.0.0.1' ) {
       error_log( ' :: ' . getmypid() );
       sleep( 10 );
}

Step 2: use curl on the localhost to make the request

Step 3: (this assumes your error log is /tmp/php-error-output) run the following command in a second (root) terminal window

strace -p $(tail -n 1000 /tmp/php-error-output | grep ' :: ' | tail -n 1 | sed -r s/'^.+ :: '//g) -s 10240 2>&1

Good luck…

Howto: Enable regular expression highlighting in LimeChat

apokalyptik — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:25:03 +0000

in LimeChat.app/Contents/Resources/logrenderer.rb around line 419… WFM. IANAL. YMMV. RTFM. OMGWTF. WTL. GTFO. ETC.

    words.each do |w|
      next if w.empty?
      s = body
      offset = 0
# 
      rex = Regexp.new(w, true)
# 
      while rex =~ s
# 
        begin
# 
          left = $~.begin(0)
          right = $~.end(0)
          pre = $~.pre_match
          post = $~.post_match
          ok = true
 
          if exact_word_match
            if !pre.empty? && alphabetic?(w.first_char) && alphabetic?(pre.last_char)
              ok = false
            elsif !post.empty? && alphabetic?(w.last_char) && alphabetic?(post.first_char)
              ok = false
            end
          end
 
          if ok
            keywords < < { :pos => offset+left, :len => right-left }
          end
          s = post
          offset += right
# 
        rescue
          next
        end
# 
      end
    end

My inner geek is really showing tonight

apokalyptik — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 06:28:36 +0000

I think its the Penny Arcade posts… I really do… But lately I miss the old days when I used to play Magic the Gathering, or Dungeons and Dragons. Maybe some geek(s) out there in cyberspace and in the Pittsburg, Ca area will find this floating message in a bottle and reach out. Maybe not, and if they don’t maybe its for the better?