Code Trips & Tips

April 19, 2015

HOW-TO Build Mesos on Mac OSX – Eclipse

Update – El Capitan upgrade If you have recently upgraded to El Capitan (OSX 10.11.1) your Mesos build may be broken, due to “missing libapr-1 headers”: ../configure will cause the following error: libapr-1 is required for mesos to build. To resolve, install `apr` using `brew` and then add the `–with-apr` flag to `../configure`: brew install […]

April 14, 2015

Build and Install Google Test on Mac OSX

How to build and install Google Test on Mac OSX

April 13, 2015

Automating the creation of a MongoDB ReplicaSet

I have revisited an old Github Gist of mine, adding some bash nicety to allow the user to specify the number of servers and the starting port range. This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals […]

April 7, 2015

TextMate (sane) follow hyperlink

If you use TextMate on Mac, you have certainly come to appreciate its many useful features, not least its ability to “understand” the syntax of your text and adapt accordingly. I mostly use it to edit RST (ReStructured Text) markup text files; one nice feature of TextMate Hyperlink Helper bundle is that it automatically recognizes […]

April 3, 2015

Building and Installing Apache Mesos

I have just published a gist that shows how to build and install Apache Mesos on a Ubuntu 14.04 VM or physical box. The Getting started instructions are a good start (well…) but are somewhat incomplete and currently look a bit outdated (I plan to fix them soon): however, the outcome has been that I […]

April 2, 2015

Consider void Futures for One-Shot Event Communication

Recently, Scott Meyers, the author of “Effective Modern C++” book gave a webinar presentation titled Consider void Futures for One‑Shot Event Communication, which addressed the issue of how to enable two threads to communicate to each other when a particular task A was completed, but which do not require any shared state. The solution is to use a […]

February 16, 2015

Building a Spark / SciPy / Cassandra “SparkLab” on AWS

I have just completed for a client a complete setup of a “SparkLab” on a cluster of AWS machines: the setup has been completely automated via a Bash script which I have published to this public github gist. The following is a copy of the README file there; the script can be used also on […]

January 25, 2015

Do Not Allow Bad Smells In Your Code

Smelly Code I have recently been involved in a distributed SaaS application that was originally built by an offshore team; the chosen technologies (REST, Java, MongoDB) were actually valid technical choices for the problem at hand: they then proceeded to get it spectacularly wrong with a bloated (and unmanageable) data schema and an even worse […]

January 16, 2015

Data-driven tests for Spring Data (MongoDB)

When testing a project that uses Spring Data repositories, we may want to insert ‘known-good’ data into arbitrary MongoDB collections, reading it, for example, from JSON iles (typically somewhere in the test/resources subtree). However, some of the data stored in Mongo is in BSON format, which extends the plain JSON format with some Object types […]

January 2, 2015

Globals are evil

And hard-coded strings are the tools of the devil. On my NAS I had implemented a simple script to alert me of failures on various scripts/backup jobs, using the Mandrill API and that had worked just fine for quite a while. However, it recently had started failing with the following tracelog: 01/01/2015 19:59:08 [INFO] Starting […]