Stefaan Lippens' webface

I recently had this strange problem with running a 32 bit executable on a 64 bit machine. It executed just fine on 32 bit machines and some other 64 bit machine. But on this particular machine I got the strange error message:

bash: some32bitexecutable: No such file or directory

which is confusing because bash seems to complain that it does not find the executable, while I knew it was there. Using absolute paths and double checking the permissions didn't help.

The problem was however that the 32 bit runtime libraries were not available.

The fix on Ubuntu is to install the ia32-libs package, described as:

ia32 shared libraries for use on amd64 and ia64 systems.
This package contains runtime libraries for the ia32/i386 architecture, configured for use on an amd64 or ia64 Debian system running a 64-bit kernel.

(FYI: it will pull down some other packages too, like lib32gcc1, libc6-i386 and lib32stdc++6.)

I finally found some time to upload the slides of my public PhD defense to SlideShare. It's all in Dutch, but if that's Chinese to you, you still can watch a lot of pretty pictures.

Indentation with spaces and the tab key in Eclipse. I've pulled quite some hair on this one and now that I found the solution, I decided to write it down, so I don't have to loose my precious hair anymore.

Everybody has its own preferences, but I like 2 space indentation for PHP (code style of Drupal) and 4 space indentation in Python. And when I press the tab key, I want to increase the indentation level, not insert a tab character. Doesn't seem like much to ask, but it took a long and frustrating process to get this working in Eclipse (3.5 aka Galileo at the time of this writing), Aptana Studio actually, with PDT for PHP development and the excellent Pydev for Python development.

Finally! I found how to get the keyboard shortcut for code completion working in Eclipse on Mac OS X. At work, on Linux, I use CTRL-SPACE all the time in Eclipse. Unfortunately that did not work on my MacBook: CMD-SPACE triggers the spotlight search widget and CTRL-SPACE is tied to the Quicksilver launcher in my case.

Abstract

Gearman provides a basic command line tool that helps to distribute work from clients to worker processes/machines. By default the worker process can only receive data from its standard input. With the xargs tool we can circumvent this and route data to the process arguments of the worker process.

Occasionally, I have to convert a PDF file to Postscript (e.g. for subsequent processing with some PostScript utility). In the Linux/command line area, I know two options: pdf2ps and pdftops. I also know that one of the two sucks has some issues and the other is better. But because their names are so close I can't manage to remember which one to take. This post should put an end to that!

[Spoiler alert and a questionable mnemonic: pdftops is da top.]

Here's an update of the post about the size tracking of the Drupal 7 issue queue I made more than a month ago. January has been a pretty fruitful month for Drupal core development: we hit the point were the critical D7 issue queue halved in size. It reached its maximum around 15 October 2009 (code freeze) with 440 critical D7 issues and on Wednesday 27 January 2010, it dropped below 220.

If you want to profile a Python applictation, you can get some basic functionality with the cProfile and pstats modules, as described in the Python Profilers documentation. After some curious experimenting, I discovered that the pstats module provides a handy interactive mode. To my surprising, I didn't found any substantial documentation about this time saver, so let me entertain you with a dump of my findings.

Some notes I made on DrupalCamp Ghent 2009 on 11 and 12 december. Mainly for my own reference, so please don't read any further.

Since May 2009, I'm monitoring the Drupal 7 issue queue sizes. I use a cron job in Python that goes out four times a day to drupal.org to scrape the issue queue sizes mentioned in the "contributor links" block.

The idea is to see if the time series can be used to have some estimate when Drupal 7 will be ready. For a long time, the overall trend was a rising one and simple extrapolation would tell that Drupal 7 would never be ready :)

Since the beginning of December 2009, it seems that the "critical D7 issues" queue is finally in shrinking mode, so I thought the time was right for releasing an overview of my current data. Moreover, there is now a public Drupal 7 issue size tracker with more web-2.0-shininess by Damien Tournoud (with less history however), so I should contribute my data instead of keeping it for myself.