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We use some arm boxes at work for testing, and do our provisioning with Chef. Chef bootstrap doesn't work because ARM is not an official supported platform for Chef.

To work around this, I installed a few packages:

apt install ruby
apt build-dep ruby-yajl

Then Installed Chef as a Gem:

sudo gem install chef

With this done, I could use knife boostrap as normal :).

Attempting to build a Rust package on Arch, I ran into a problem that the version of the openssl crate depended on by one of the dependencies didn't correctly detect the latest OpenSSL, 1.1.1. To solve this, I ensure a previous version (OpenSSL 1.0) was installed, and setup my environment with:

#!/bin/bash
# Only needed on Arch to use an older openssl version

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/openssl-1.0/pkgconfig/
export OPENSSL_LIB_DIR=/usr/lib/openssl-1.0
export OPENSSL_INCLUDE_DIR=/usr/include/openssl-1.0

And then things built :).

The error message the started me on this:

error: failed ...

To use libraries with CMake, its much easier if there is a package for it. Below is a script which can be used to locate YottaDB using CMake, and make it much easier to build with.

In your CMakeLists.txt, add:

SET(CMAKE_MODULE_PATH ${CMAKE_MODULE_PATH} "${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}/cmake/")
find_package(YOTTADB REQUIRED)

In cmake/FindYOTTADB.cmake:

# This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain.
# 
# Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or
# distribute this software, either in source code form or as a compiled
# binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any
# means ...

For a long time, I was using the cmake CDT generator to make cmake projects. I started getting very strange errors in the most recent version of Eclipse, and stumbled upon this thread which explained the CDT generator was super old.

To do this with a modern Eclipse version, you basically want to:

1. File -> New -> New C/C++ Project
2. Select "Empty or Existing CMake Project"
3. Uncheck "Use default location", and navigate to your project

Then things should magically work.

Pictures for those who need them:

Recently, I spotted a line in Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms that caught my interest because it ran counter to my understanding of thread performance on a Linux system.

Instead of using processes, an application can also be constructed such that different parts are executed by separate threads. Communication between those parts is entirely dealt with by using shared data. Thread switching can sometimes be done entirely in user space, although in other implementations, the kernel is aware of threads and schedules them. The effect can be a dramatic improvement in performance. (Tanenbaum, A. S., & Van Steen, M. (2007 ...

This guide documents the steps I took to setup my Elixir/Phoenix/Docker environment on my Windows 10 machine. It might be worth nothing that I'm running Windows 10 Educational, which includes the Hyper-V supervisor; this is required for Docker.

Install Docker

Rather than repeat stuff here: go search Google, and follow the official guide.

This will probably require a restart.

Setup a Dockerfile and docker-compose file

To get started, we need a Dockerfile to build the web host. In addition to elixir, we will need NodeJS and some extras. This should do it:

FROM elixir
ADD . /code
WORKDIR ...

This doesn't seem to be documented anywhere, but just a quick tadbit; the dex autostart program (https://github.com/jceb/dex) looks in:

• $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/autostart or $HOME/.config/autostart
• for dir in $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS; $dir/autostart or /etc/xdg/autostart/

For things to run. You can look for yourself at github link

GT.M is a high performance, NoSQL database coupled with a MUMPS runtime. In this guide, we will install it on a fresh Ubuntu system, verify that it works, and build a sample database.

Installing GT.M through the package manager

The easiest way to install GT.M is using the Ubuntu package manager; apt.

chathaway@blaze:~$ sudo apt install fis-gtm
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
  fis-gtm-6.3-000a gcc-6-base icu-devtools libasan3 libatomic1 libc-dev-bin
  libc6 libc6-dbg libc6-dev libcilkrts5 libgcc-6-dev libicu-dev libitm1
  liblsan0 libmpx2 libquadmath0 libstdc++-6-dev libtsan0 libubsan0 ...

For the first time in years, an update was published to the biblatex package. This is quite exciting, but presents a problem for those of us who use "bleeding edge" software, like Arch Linux, and need to submit our papers to sites like arXiv, which use more stable packages. This is a quick work around.

The Problem

At the time of writing, there is a new version of biber and a new version of biblatex on my Arch system, which produces a .bbl file a version of "2.9". arXiv emits an error message, informing me that the bbl was ...