Author Archives: rusty

As the kernel archive debates replacing .bz2 files with .xz, I took a brief glance at xz. My test was to take a tarball of the linux kernel source (made from a recent git tree, but excluding the .git directory): linux.2.6.tar 395M For a comparison, bzip2 -9, rzip -9 (which uses bzip2 after finding distant […]

libreplace is the SAMBA library (also used in ctdb) to provide working implementations of various standard(ish) functions on platforms where they are missing or flawed.  It was initially created in 1996 by Andrew Tridgell based on various existing replacement hacks in utils.c (see commit 3ee9d454). The basic format of replace.h is: #ifndef HAVE_STRDUP #define strdup […]

I decided that every day I would review some code in ctdb.  I never spend enough time reading code, and yet it’s the only way to really get to know a project.  And I decided to start easy: with the popt library in ctdb. popt is the command-line parsing library included with the RPM source, […]

After slightly disastrous preparation  (my left knee in a brace as detailed for the perversely-curious here) my week went well.  I tried to get back to my hotel room early each evening to rest as per doctor’s orders (and managed it except Friday night), but polishing my Friday talk tended to take a few hours […]

Mikey blogs about linux-next workload with pretty graphs.  Ideally, we should all have our patches marshalled before the freeze, and there should be no pre-merge-window peak.  I’ve gotten close to this in recent times, by being lazy and being content to wait for the next cycle if I miss one. Rushing things in tends to […]

I will freely admit that kernel work has dropped in my priority list. But that didn’t excuse sloppy work like my ae1b22f6e46 commit which sought to sidestep an issue for lguest without me having to do much work. There’s a 64 bit atomic exchange instruction on x86 called cmpxchg8b.  This isn’t supported on pre-586 processors, […]

So, with my recent evangelizing of Bloom Filters, Tridge decided to try to apply them on a problem he was having.  An array of several thousand of unsorted strings, each maybe 100 bytes, which needed checking for duplicates.  In the normal case, we’d expect few or no duplicates. A Bloom Filter for this is quite […]

I haven’t used an iPhone in anger so I can’t compare, but I got this so I could use Google Maps to navigate public transport: Adelaide’s integration is excellent, and as I have no car it’s important for Arabella and me. The Good Typing on anything that size is suboptimal, but clever auto predict and […]

Had an old copy of the “Google Analytics For WordPress” lying around (which didn’t seem to put anything in my blog source), but after upgrading it it kept saying “Google Analytics settings reset to default” whenever I tried to change anything. See this thread which talks about the problem and waves at the solution.  Here’s […]