Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 23, 2022

• Clear out MySql/MariaDB binary log files

  This is due to the excesive binary logs which are generated by database server.

  From MariaDB documentation – The binary log contains a record of all changes to the databases, both data and structure, as well as how long each statement took to execute. It consists of a set of binary log files and an index.

  It is required to periodically clear out those logs to avoid runninng into the problem of No space left on device.

• Associative arrays in Nim

  One thing that I like very much about BaCon is the simple implementation of associative arrays:

  https://www.basic-converter.org/documentation.html#ASSOCIATIVE_ARRAYS

  At first glance, I could not see that capability in Nim, and a search came up with something about using tables -- and the example given was unclear.

• The Fridge: Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 749

• Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 749

  Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 749 for the week of August 14 – 20, 2022.

• diziet | prefork-interp - automatic startup time amortisation for all manner of scripts

  Since the update to current Debian stable, the website for YARRG, (a play-aid for Puzzle Pirates which I wrote some years ago), started to occasionally return “Internal Server Error”, apparently due to bug(s) in some FastCGI libraries.

  I was using FastCGI because the website is written in Mason, a Perl web framework, and I found that Mason CGI calls were slow. I’m using CGI - yes, trad CGI - via userv-cgi. Running Mason this way would “compile” the template for each HTTP request just when it was rendered, and then throw the compiled version away. The more modern approach of an application server doesn’t scale well to a system which has many web “applications” most of which are very small. The admin overhead of maintaining a daemon, and corresponding webserver config, for each such “service” would be prohibitive, even with some kind of autoprovisioning setup. FastCGI has an interpreter wrapper which seemed like it ought to solve this problem, but it’s quite inconvenient, and often flaky.

  I decided I could do better, and set out to eliminate FastCGI from my setup. The result seems to be a success; once I’d done all the hard work of writing prefork-interp, I found the result very straightforward to deploy.

• Team Roles and Tuckman’s Model, for Debian teams – jwiltshire.org.uk

  When I first moved from being a technical consultant to a manager of other consultants, I took a 5-day course Managing Technical Teams – a bootstrap for managing people within organisations, but with a particular focus on technical people. We do have some particular quirks, after all…

  Two elements of that course keep coming to mind when doing Debian work, and they both relate to how teams fit together and get stuff done.

  [...]

  There are all sort of teams in Debian – those which are formally brought into operation by the DPL or the constitution; package maintenance teams; public relations teams; non-technical content teams; special interest teams; and a whole heap of others. Teams can be formal and informal, fleeting or long-lived, two people working together or dozens.

  But the all have in common the Tuckman stages of their development and the Belbin team roles they need to fill to flourish. At some stage in their existence, they will all experience new or departing team members and a period of re-forming, norming and storming – perhaps fleetingly, perhaps not. And at some stage they will all need someone to step into a team role, play the part and get the team one step further towards their goals.

• podman-compose in RHEL8 | IT-Hure

  If you are – like me – running podman-compose from EPEL in RHEL8 and running into the error message “invalid config provided: extra host entries must be specified on the pod: network cannot be configured when it is shared with a pod” the problem is a incompatibility between the very old version of podman-compose in EPEL8 and podman 4.1.

• Checklist for people testing ROME (Rolling) Tech Preview

  We have a checklist that is a Work In Progress but I believe is useful right now.

  One could use the checklist and fill out the elements one can answer. Then rename the checklist with your nick or handle in place of nickname_checklist, and post in this forum.