Trinitum

Today deployed at work a new service that based on zeromq. I never liked zeromq because it does not provide any feedback about what is going on, and this is exactly what caused problems. After deployment service worked as expected on all servers except one. Daemon was starting, creating zeromq socket and waiting for messages, but zeromq did not establish connection and of course did not report any errors — it is supposed simply work, and if it does not… well, it will pretend that everything is fine, zeromq developers assume that it is better to do nothing than return an error or at least print some warning.
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We spent four days in Cameron Highlands in December. Here are photos of sunset I took from balcony of our hotel room.

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Recently I got a lot of failures from CPAN Testers for RedisDB on NetBSD i386. After investigating a bit I’ve found that NetBSD 6.0 comes now with 64-bit time_t on all architectures. It means that the way I used to pack struct timeval value to set timeout on socket, didn’t work anymore. Previously it was the same as long, long on all systems and pack looked like:

Now I had a special case for NetBSD there the first part is always 64 bit number. And pack on 32-bit perl doesn’t even support “Q” unless is was compiled with 64-bit integers. Read the rest of this entry »

Spent the whole day looking for sources of memory leaks. One of them was because I decided to use named captures. It so happened that perl leaks some memory if named capture doesn’t match. Here’s an example:

Funnily, if you replace “08-Oct-2012″ with “08-Oct-2012 22:17″ it will stop leaking. I can reproduce the problem with 5.10.1 and 5.14.2. It was fixed in 5.16.0, but at the work we are using Debian, so have to wait around 2.5 years before fix will make it into stable and we will be able to start using named captures.

Another one was in ZMQ::LibZMQ2 library: https://github.com/lestrrat/p5-ZMQ/issues/15, so I had some fun fixing XS code. Fixed version is already available from CPAN.

Uploaded RedisDB 2.00 to CPAN yesterday. It features XS parser which improves performance about 25%. It still loses to Redis::hiredis in pipelining mode, but in synchronous mode it is faster.

Three and a half years ago while playing with maps on my then new Nokia 5800 I marked McDonald’s somewhere on another side of the planet. Last month I ate double quarter pounder there, it wasn’t that far after all.
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