jd:/dev/blog

Ah, Erich, that IS so true. I never found a well written PHP application anyway, or it was only 10 lines long.

I guess that's primarily the language fault. It permits to do a lot of stuff and does not simplify, help nor force the simplest implementation methods like MVC which should be the base in Web developement.

Well, take as example what we would do with Python and GTK+ if they were like PHP and HTML (I do not have the API reference so it will be somewhat improvised):

#finally we do not need this module I wrote everything myself
#import somemodule
def main():
    # Well we want to do some printing
    window = GtkWindow()
    # Connect to the database without any abstraction, that sucks
    db = mysql.connect()
    data = db.query("select RANDOMLYTYPEDDATA from MYONLYTABLE");
    while data:
        # Ah, we do not have include() so we cannot reuse code
        # I'm a PHP developer, I do not know functions
        import somestuff
    window.print(somestuff.result)
    # Obviously, forgot to close db connection, etc.
    if form.data.field == "hello":
        # The user asked for hello, print hello
        window.print("hello")
    # debug
    print data[0]
    if form.data.anotherfield[0] == "morning":
        data = db.query("select anotherdata from MYONLYDATA")
    else:
        sys.exit(42)
    label = GtkLabel()
    # Yes know we construct the view!
    window.add(label)
    label.print(data)

That is typical PHP code: we just take randomly typed data from our DB eng... no wait, from MySQL (remember that's LAMP!!! Not LAPP or anything else, bitches!), then we print some HTML code with data, and we do tests on environment, forms, etc, and we get back data, reprint them, do not use functions but include() multiple times thousand of files and then do not close/free anything.

It's so easy to do bad code that lot of people coming from nowhere and who did not learn anything from other languages are doing it.

Another hypothesis coming from my experiment: PHP is a language which can be developed under any OS since it's server-side executed. A link between mostly brain dead "developers" from the Microsoft world and whose from the Free Software world. A clash.

I apologize to some of my coworkers doing better PHP all the day.

It's official: I'm beginning to be a bit overloaded.

Luk gently asked me about my status in the (stable) release management team. That just made a bit more guilty not doing that I'd like to do.

Current TODO list involves:

• release awesome 2.0-rc1 and update website and documentation for it;
• work on rebuildd, finish and polish 0.3 version;
• run a full rebuild of the Debian archive to test rebuldd 0.3, do some QA work;
• update mod_defensible to fix problem with udns timeout;
• work on Debian release management, at least rewrite lost script for (old-)proposed-updates which were on ries'
• work on Debian Xen;
• handle a lot of waiting task on my network/servers.

Now, the thing that will help: I'm house moving this week-end with no (real) Internet connection yet. I only managed to establish a VPN over port 53/udp on a hotspot from a pub near my new apartment with 25-30 KB/s bandwidth, which is better than nothing actually.

• awesome* is asking me a lot of time right now, and since it's my last launched project, I am motivated and have a lot of idea, so I like to hack on him right now. I think I will have to postpone future release to not forget other things.

I'm going to see what happens by the end of the year and if I'm able to catch up with everything. Otherwise I might need to drop some things…

Life is too short.

I wonder if there are tools to do pretty git statistics, something like that:

(done on linux-2.6 git repository).

I just wrote a quick'n dirty Python script to do that, but I'm too lazy to write a full program for now…

This time I L O L.

Now my fvwm is segfaulting almost at each startup.

Seriously, there's great software everywhere, but still no good window manager (I know, I tested almost them all).

Life sucks.

I've switched from xmms to Audacious.

The end of 10 years of love.

At least I can use last.fm again…

I just set up a small rebuildd test daemon on a dev box. You can see it here.

I just failed to migrate a big project at work because of that, the D day:

Jun 15 10:46:39 hostname mysqld[20095]: Version:'5.0.32-Debian_7etch1-log'  socket: '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock'  port: 3306  Debian etch distribution
Jun 15 10:46:43 hostname mysqld[20095]: mysqld got signal 11

So no, you won't use NDB, at least with MySQL 5.0.31 (included in etch). It's _so_ buggy that we get a segfault on the first DELETE statement with a 30 MB database.

Backporting version 5.0.41 from sid gives better results (at least for now).

I knew we should have used PostgreSQL from the beginning...

Hopla, a new version of mod_defensible. I added a custom page in order to explain to the client why it is forbidden to access to the page.

In the mean time, my webserver load dropped to somewhat 20% less than without this module.

I have several servers around the Internet, and one of my need is to have VPN between them to access various data and services, like SNMP or NFS. I used to build VPN with OpenVPN between some of them.

My main problem was that I had to set up IP interfaces at each end, build multiple tunnels or make some routing, and... that was not what I wanted, too complicated.

I took a deeper look in OpenVPN and found a solution: I created a FLAN… No, not a cake, a Faked LAN! This is so easy and powerful that I beat myself to not have though about that before.

I did it with 3 servers for now, this is how it works: on each server I create an interface named if-remote hostname which is a tap (Ethernet) interfaces connected to the remote host. On server1, I have two interfaces, if-server2 and if-server3 which are like direct wired connection to the remote host, and I can do Ethernet on them.

When each server has its link up, I create an Ethernet bridge. In this bridge, I put the two interfaces connected to the remote servers. This finally build something like that for each server:

server1 -- eth0
  \ 
 if-bridge 192.168.4.88
    \  \_ if-server2 -- VPN -- if-server1 -- if-bridge 192.168.4.89 -- server2
     \_ if-server3 -- VPN -- if-server-1 -- if-bridge 192.168.4.90 -- server3

Obviously, you will have a loop in your faked Ethernet LAN, so you'll have to active STP in order to have a working LAN. And it works.

The main advantage with this solution is that each server has only one IP on this virtual network, and there's no connection problem if one of your host is down: STP will rebuild the network in a transparent way. The main problem is that you may have to set up a lot of link if you want a full redundancy. I think I'll setup only two links between each server, because it maybe too painfull otherwise.

You can also do some optimization if you need, because the current bridge implementation in Linux is so powerful that you can put cost on interfaces for your bridge, or define which bridge should be the root of your tree. Have fun!