The Eudyptula Challenge is a series of programming tasks, with the goal of getting one up-to-speed on Linux kernel programming. When I first heard about it, it immediately intrigued me. I’ve written a few production Linux kernel modules in my time — mostly device drivers — so I started the challenge today.
Tag Archives: linux
Drop, Throttle, or Buffer
Real-time — or near real-time — data pipelines are all the rage these days. I’ve built one myself, and they are becoming key components of many SaaS platforms. SaaS Analytics, Operations, and Business Intelligence systems often involve moving large amounts of data, received over the public Internet, into complex backend systems. And managing the incoming flow of data to these pipelines is key.
Monitoring Storm Kafka Spouts using Python
When running a large real-time processing system, monitoring is critical. But it does more than allow you to keep an eye on your system. During development it allows you test hypotheses about how it works, how it performs when certain parameters are changed, and takes the guessing out of working with dynamic systems.
Storm, a real-time computational framework open-sourced by Twitter, is such a system and comes with a Spout, allowing messages to be streamed from a Kafka Broker.
Bootstrapping Cassandra
Cassandra is an open-source, distributed database, informally known as a NoSQL database. It is designed to store large amounts of data, offer high-write performance, and provide fault-tolerance. I recently needed some hands-on experience with Cassandra, and being relatively new to Java programming, needed a simple set-up with which I would experiment.
Generating Type-1 UUIDs using C++
I needed some C++ code to generate Type-1 time-based UUIDs. The Boost libraries, while offering support for other types, don’t have support for time-based UUIDs.
A cut of my code can be found in github.
Kubuntu 11.04 on the Chembook 2370VA
My experience with Fedora Core 15 on the Chembook 2370VA
It’s been almost 18 months since I installed Fedora Core 12, so I decided to move onto Fedora 15.
While the install went OK, I am not (yet) convinced it was worth the hassle. While it’s nice to pick up bug fixes, I haven’t noticed much change to the feature set.
The Power of the Cloud
I recently wrote a entry for the Riverbed Technology blog, describing an interesting collaborative development experience I had with the AWS EC2 Cloud.
You can read it here.
My guidelines for reusable Django applications
I came to Django development from much lower-level development — embedded software, device drivers, and system software. What has impressed me most about Django (and python in general) is the manner in which it guides you to do the right thing in terms of code construction. The framework and language naturally make you think about better ways to express your designs.
Continue reading My guidelines for reusable Django applications
Do you use expect? You should
expect is a tool built using Tcl which allows you to automate many tasks that would otherwise mean tedious repetition at the command line. While many tools come with a command line interface, they don’t lend themselves well to scripting — telnet is the classic example. But with expect you can script these tools as easily as bash.