Eclipse code formatting
After reinstalling Eclipse lately I was having trouble setting up a proper code formatting for tabs. Despite setting 'Preferences | General | Editors | Text Editor | Insert Spaces for Tabs' I still got tabs in my code. You can check that by enable 'Preferences | General | Editors | Text Editor | Show whitespace characters'. I really couldn't figure out why this happened and it was driving me nuts. It turns out that there is another setting in the code formatter options that overrides this setting. The Descent (D programming language plugin) default code formatter setting 'Preferences | D | Code style | Formatter | Indentation | General option | Tab policy' was set to 'tabs only'. It needs to be set to 'spaces only'.
Installing Tokyo Tyrant in custom directory
In the process of testing Tokyo Cabinet and Tokyo Tyrant I just came across some small difficulties setting both up. Although the installation and configuration is almost straigth forward I stumbled about some small issues. The documentation on Tokyo Cabinet/Tyrant is not very comprehensive so far apart from the extensive API documentation. Installation and operations information are rare at the moment. There I've just written down my path to a running and manageable installation, which can easily deployed to several linux servers (OpenSuSE).
Key/value database storage engines
I recently dived into the world of distributed Key/Value database stores. Although key/value storage engines are nothing particular new, distributed implementation seem to gather some attention lately due to high scalability demands of current online services. Below are interesting reads about this topic together with some links to project I found particular interesting.
Articles
A very good overview article about different storage engines has been written by Richard Jones from Last.fm, in which he compares the different engines with the needs of last.fm in mind.
The following articles are more about specific implementation of a certain storage engine, but interesting to get to understand the whole principles more deeply.
- http://www.igvita.com/2009/02/13/tokyo-cabinet-beyond-key-value-store/
- http://bytepawn.com/readings-in-distributed-systems/
- http://push.cx/2009/rules-of-database-app-aging/
- http://bret.appspot.com/entry/how-friendfeed-uses-mysql/
Bob Ippolito gave a very comprehensive talk at PyCon 2009 on "Drop ACID and think about data", where he summarizes his experiences with different storage engines while implementing the service at Mochi Media. He presents the different storage engines and shows how their are being used for different purposes:
Perfect Dev Environment now with VirtualBox 2.2.0
VirtualBox 2.2.0 was released a week ago with a neat feature, that I really missed although I really like woking with VirtualBox. Now VirtualBox comes with a virtual Host interface called host-only interface, that enables the communication between the host and the guest even when no physical cable is connected to the machine, which happens a lot when you are on the road and would like to do some development.
Reference
Some pitfalls while switching from PHP to D
Generally writing D code is straight forward, but at certain points I found myself banging my head on the table. Some things are just not working as I am used to it from PHP. That begins with typing. Everything needs to be typed and conversion between types need to be made explicitly. I'm just not used to it. Getting a char[] converted into an integer seems such an easy tasks, but when it comes to the point where you actually need it, it becomes very unusual for a PHP developer. In this short article I will report about some of the pitfalls I had to solve for my first little D project. I do not claim that it is beautiful code or even if it is free from errors and possible misconceptions, but it worked for me so far.
