For prototyping web applications, I have recently come to rely on having Redis handy. In various sketches or early versions, I’ve used it to store event logs, to persist a collection of simple objects, or to conveniently manage a particularly large dictionary. To make it easy to have a redis-server running on an OpenSolaris-derived system, [...]

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A government agency I interact with has updated their web-based client software. The original application was a basic sequence of web forms. Its replacement? An approximately ~50MiB Silverlight-based application. In the process of the update, they discarded my original web account and password. The backend service that the application must communicate with is still slow, [...]

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Recently, I’ve been experimenting with supervisor, which is a Python-based process restarter for Unix/Linux. Lincoln Loop recently offered instructions on running supervisor under upstart, which is applicable to some of the current Linux distributions. On OpenSolaris and related systems, the service management facility, smf(5), can be used to ensure your supervisors stay online. Below is [...]

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An occasional porting problem you may encounter when compiling programs for OpenSolaris is the absence of d_type in the directory entry structure returned by readdir(3C). I hit this issue when experimenting with mu as a search solution for my accumulated email. A trivial example of the failure you might see would be caused by the [...]

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I seeded the 2008.05 release candidate for about 45 hours, ultimately shipping a little over 4100 megabytes. I’m going to take a break, because I want to update my DP2-based workstation and get some work done, but, once we have new bits, I’ll getting seeding again. (I found the actual result: 4237MiB sent up, so [...]

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I’m sure that there are Firefox users out there who want to restore their previous session; I never do, and so deactivating that dialog is a big timesaver. If you search, you’ll find a few writeups on how to adjust the configuration, but I want to document the minimum steps to suppress the restore session [...]

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Just prior to the Board election, we ran a poll of the core contributors to get some sense of what one active subset felt were the five most pressing obstacles to open development. Dan just issued an initial Beta of a webrev-based approach, derived from his earlier experiment on http://cr.grommit.com, so that’s a starting point [...]

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At work, I’ve ended up on many email aliases; since we moved to pursuing open development on opensolaris.org, my subscriptions and incoming email flow have grown tremendously, to the point where they were interfering with my ability to get work done. My present filter setup involves delivery to 56 inboxes. I’ve had a small email [...]

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At work, I’ve ended up on many email aliases; since we moved to pursuing open development on opensolaris.org, my subscriptions and incoming email flow have grown tremendously, to the point where they were interfering with my ability to get work done. My present filter setup involves delivery to 56 inboxes. I’ve had a small email [...]

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For the OpenSolaris governance discussions, the community is using the wiki at genunix.org. The genunix team installed Mediawiki, used most famously for the Wikipedia, to support communal editing. I’m a creature of Vim, and am quite happy with the recently released Vim 7. Tying the external editor feature of Wikipedia to Vim is straightforward, if [...]

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