Rusty Razor Blade

Vim: Use !make: to avoid auto jumping to files

jon — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 17:53:43 +0000

I get annoyed when vim jumps to another file when using :make. To disable it, just add ! to the end,

:make!

Weird Disutils Error When Running Python Scripts within MacVim

jon — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 21:27:15 +0000

I saw this today when trying to run a nosetest in MacVim:

DistutilsPlatformError: $MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET mismatch: now “10.4″ but “10.7″ during configure

Add this to your .vimrc to fix this weird message.

let $MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET = “10.7″

Installing vim-ipython with MacVim

jon — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 01:58:34 +0000

I got really excited at the notion of having IPython built into MacVim (vim-ipython), so over the last few days I’ve spent some time mucking around trying to get this whole thing to work. Unfortunately there’s not a lot of documentation on how to fix the issues that might pop up, so hopefully this will help some people. (spoiler – MacVim download is 32 bit zeromq is 64)

First, your prerequisites. I’m assuming you’re using the awesome HomeBrew. If you’re not, you’re on your own for some of these sections.

pip install pyzmq ipython
brew install zeromq

In a shell, type:

ipython console

and leave it here.

Go into Vim.

I’m using Vim Addon Manager (VAM). It’s a fantastic tool and made working with vim 100x better. Go ahead and install vim-ipython – if you’re using VAM it’s easy. If you’re not, use whatever system you’re used to (or start using VAM).

:InstallAddons vim-ipython

If you’ve done this with VAM, the docs say you should be able to open python file and type - but when I tried that this is what I got:

:IPython
ImportError: IPython.zmq requires pyzmq >= 2.1.4

Weird you say, because you know you have it installed. Lets see what happens if we import it directly into Vim:

:py import zmq
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “”, line 1, in
File “/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/zmq/__init__.py”, line 38, in
from zmq import core, devices
File “/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/zmq/core/__init__.py”, line 26, in
from zmq.core import (constants, error, message, context,
ImportError: dlopen(/Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/zmq/core/error.so, 2):
Symbol not found: _zmq_errno
Referenced from: /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/zmq/core/error.so
Expected in: flat namespace in /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/zmq/core/error.so

I won’t go into details here, but the short version of the story is MacVim (snapshot 64) was compiled as a 32 bit executable and it can’t read the 64 bit symbols. Bummer.

We can tell that MacVim is a 32 bit compile because of this:

haddad-pro:vim jhaddad$ file /Applications/MacVim.app/Contents/MacOS/MacVim/\
Applications/MacVim.app/
Contents/MacOS/MacVim: Mach-O executable i386

And zeromq shared library:

file /usr/local/lib/libzmq.dylib /usr/local/lib/libzmq.dylib: Mach-O 64-bit dynamically linked shared library x86_64

The solution: Use HomeBrew to compile 64 bit MacVim.

brew install macvim

You’ll run into a snag if you don’t have the old /Developer directory (I didn’t) so go ahead and fix like this

haddad-pro:vim jhaddad$ sudo /usr/bin/xcode-select -switch /Applications/Xcode.app/

Finally, open up your 64 bit MacVim and edit a Python file. You should now be able to send lines to iPython using , and see the results if you s.

I’ll follow up with a later post on how to get the most benefit from vim-ipython.

Applescripting A Remote X-Windows Session for Virt-Manager

jon — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 16:05:18 +0000

This isn’t just for virt-manager, but any X-Windows app you’d want to tightly integrate into your daily routine. Instead of firing up X11, then SSH’ing to your VM box and typing out virt-manager (insane!) you can script X11 to do everything with 1 mouse click. I have it in my Dock, and Launchbar also recognizes it as an app.

tell application “Finder”
launch application “X11″
end tell

set results to do shell script “ssh -X haddad-vmserver ‘virt-manager’”

Sweetness.

Also see my post about setting up a headless VM server using KVM.

Drizzle Differences from MySQL

jon — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 17:16:44 +0000

I decided to take a look at Drizzle today and was encouraged by what I saw. Here’s my favorite part:

There is no UNSIGNED (as per the standard). * There are no spatial data types GEOMETRY, POINT, LINESTRING & POLYGON (go use Postgres). * No YEAR field type. * There are no FULLTEXT indexes for the MyISAM storage engine (the only engine FULLTEXT was supported in). Look at either Lucene, Sphinx, or Solr. * No “dual” table. * The “LOCAL” keyword in “LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE” is not supported

GO USE POSTGRES. Awesome.

List of differences from MySQL.

Great Article by the Varnish Architect

jon — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 18:37:21 +0000

It’s been a while since I wrote any C, but I still appreciate reading posts about it. 6 years ago the architect of Varnish wrote an excellent post on how people are still managing their memory incorrectly. It reminds me of a post I wrote 5 years ago called Stop Trying to be Clever.

Original post by Poul-Henning Kamp

Making Better Use of your .ackrc file

jon — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 17:05:33 +0000

Many command line utils have a . file that people rarely use. Ack is one of them.

For a project I’m working on, there’s a var folder (ignored in git) where all the logs go. When I perform an ack search, I have no interest in ack looking through the var folder every single time.

By default, ack only checks your ~/.ackrc file for it’s default switches. You can have per directory ack settings if you add this to your .bash_profile:

export ACKRC=”.ackrc”

Now you don’t have to worry about random log file being searched every time you try to find something.

new-host-3:dev jhaddad$ cat .ackrc
–ignore-dir=var/

Just add whatever switches you want, one per line.

Nginx pub/sub module

jon — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 15:49:05 +0000

A coworker pointed me to this Nginx module today. You can write a chat server without actually writing a server. The message thread below indicates incredible performance. If you’ve got more than 50K users and 9000 messages / second you might be able to upgrade your hardware, or at least load balance your channels between 2 servers.

When I open 10,000 connections, it seems to behave quite nicely.
Sending half a million messages, I am able to get a throughput of
around 9,000 message per second. At this rate “top” shows the nginx
process as high as 90% of cpu. If I push it harder, I start to receive
SIGIO in the nginx main log and the writer/poster is throttled down
meaning a lower throughput but all messages appear to get through to
the clients on the other machine.
However, when I perform the same tests but with 50,000 connections I
see a similar pattern of throughput up to about 6,000 or 7,000
messages/second. As before, when I push faster I get the same SIGIO in
the log but the difference is not all the messages get through to
clients!

[...later down the page]

Many thanks for your explanation. Your suspicion was correct. I was
using the default 30sec for that parameter. I tried upping it to 5m
and I was able to receive messages more reliably with 50,000 clients
connected. Sometimes, however, the rate at which messages were sent
from nginx slowed right down. e.g. I could get 9,000/sec for a
sustained minute or so and then when the poster stopped posting, the
rate of messages would slow almost to a stop but not quite until all
messages were successfully sent.

- MichaelC, Google Groups post.

So awesome.

Nginx push stream module.

Coffeescript, Bootstrap, and Less are amazing

jon — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 17:15:13 +0000

I’ve been doing backend development exclusively for a long time now. When I decided to build splitmytab.net, I had sourced the front end development to HTML burger. I got the design through 99designs. Both were fine, but I really didn’t require anything past a basic utility site.

When I decided to add new functionality to the site, I realized I’d either pay someone to do front end, or do it myself. Eventually I started doing it myself, and remembered how much I hate Javascript.

Enter CoffeeScript. After only a few days, I realized that front end development could be less painful, even enjoyable. Writing CoffeeScript was an incredible experience, because I didn’t have to think about it. I didn’t need to nest a mess of parenthesis and braces to handle callbacks anymore, they just indented beautifully.

Fast forward a few weeks, and I start looking at Bootstrap 2.0. I decided to switch my custom CSS on splitmytab to Bootstrap. The defaults out of the box are pretty good – they give you easy to use grid layouts, nice buttons, icons… everything I needed.

The only hitch came when I realized I needed to change a few sizes. Most notably, I wanted a 760 layout in order to fit in a Facebook canvas. In order to customize the CSS, it’s time to install Less. I can’t say enough great things about Less. It has solved everything I despise about working with CSS.

I believe Bryan D K Jones has said it better than I ever could.

If you’re still building websites without it, you’re an idiot.

Editing the Less files to tweak the appearance of splitmytab has become incredibly simple. I can’t say enough good things about it.

Splitmytab ready for the public!

jon — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 19:37:35 +0000

Splitmytab.net is finally for the public to check out. Splitmytab is a bill splitting and IOU system for friends. It uses facebook’s login, so you won’t need to put in anyone’s emails, names, or get people to sign up for an account.

It’ll automatically keep balances of who owes who, so you can keep a running tab with friends and always know who’s buying the next case of beer.

Please note: I’m not a designer, so there’s a few rough corners, but what’s there is simple and it works.

Tech Notes:

Backend is MySQL 5.5
Written in Python
Nginx with tornado
Redis used on occasion
Originally was writing pure JS then switched to Coffeescript

Enjoy, and please leave feedback!