Ubuntu Karmik and Eclipse Galileo

The great Ubuntu Karmik is just around the corner. If you happen to use Eclipse from the official eclipse webpage and you see that some eclipse buttons do not work, then apply the following hack. Make yourself a one line script to execute eclipse like follows:

#!/bin/bash

export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1
./eclipse

and it will work again. For tptp (the profiling tools for eclipse) you’ll need libstdc++5 package from debian.

Log4Tailer 1.50

Log4Tailer 1.50 http://code.google.com/p/log4tailer provides interesting new features in order to monitor your logs. It’s a dedicated application to monitor the status of your logs regardless if your application provides its own monitoring platform or not. It is helping me a lot and this new release will help sys admins and testers alike.

In this new release, you will be able to specify regexes for every log, log4tailer will be able to update you by email every period of time you specify and lots more.

Log4Tailer 1.45 released

Log4Tailer 1.45 http://code.google.com/p/log4tailer/ has a new feature that could be interesting for many testers or engineers when they are tailing multiple logs at a time. It can tail the logs with different colors for each log, making it very easy to differentiate which log you are tailing. For instance, you could be tailing /var/log/messages in red, /var/log/mail.log in green and some other log in yellow. Just specify that in a config file and that’s it. Config file:

/var/log/messages = red

/var/log/mail.log = green

/var/log/otherlog = yellow

Then, just type:

log4tail -c configfile /var/log/messages /var/log/mail.log /var/log/otherlog

PyLazy

PyLazy is an small python app that reports the time you spend using your applications in the computer. I just published it in googlecode and the Python Package index http://code.google.com/p/pylazybreak/.

Log4Tailer release 1.0

In the last weeks, I’ve been hacking quite a lot with log4tailer and today I released version 1.0. This version is a major improvement over  the last ones, and I hope it is going to be a great tool for those who, like me, spend many time tailing logs for debugging purposes, or just for those who need to monitor logs during many hours. I released the software along with a very nice PDF manual, that I hope it is going to be very useful.

Log4Tailer’s project is hosted in googlecode http://code.google.com/p/log4tailer/

Eclipse Ganymede, TPTP and Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex

It seems that configuring Eclipse to work with Ubuntu is always a bit painful, mainly tptp and subversion. This post is all about tptp (test and performance tools for Eclipse). I have tested with Ubuntu 32 bit edition. First of all, of course, you’ll need to install tptp from ganymede. When you are going to profile some java app, you’ll get an error code IWAT0435E, saying that the agent could not be started.

First fix:

You’ll need to install libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2_2.95.4-27_i386.deb (no amd64 available) as the ACServer apparently was compiled against that old gcc version. Unfortunately, Ubuntu does not provide this library anymore, so you’ll have to grab it from Debian repos http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/g/gcc-2.95

Just click on it, and Ubuntu will install it. If you like command line (like me) and use 64 bit, then feel free to open a shell and type:

sudo dpkg –force-architecture –install libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2_2.95.4-22_i386.deb

Second fix:

Go to eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.tptp.platform.ac.linux_ia32_4.4.1.v200808290100/agent_controller/bin, and edit the files ACStart.sh, ACStop.sh. In first line, when it says #!/bin/sh, it should say #!/bin/bash.

The cool tptp now should work. Have fun, eclipse is an incredible ide

What do you do in your computer?

I just wrote some days ago a Python program that tells you how do you spend your time with in your computer. Take a look at http://www.jordilin.com/pyhacks. Only works for Linux and requires python.

Log4tailer, tailing your logs in multicolor

I’ve been hacking recently a lot with Python in my spare time, and to be honest, it is very powerful, lots of fun, and object oriented. It allows me to quickly transform my thinking into real code and python incredible and huge standard library helps a lot. One of the projects I’ve been hacking is log4tailer. Log4tailer is a multicolored python tailer for log4j formatted logs. If your job requires tailing logs every now and again, then you will feel the frustration I’ve had multiple times when using the linux command line “tail”. I began using launchpad and bazaar version control system to code log4tailer, but I just decided to use googlecode as I feel much more comfortable using subversion. The link to log4tailer is http://code.google.com/p/log4tailer/ and an image:

Perl, I didn’t know you were so powerful

Well, I am doing some Perl programming and what I’ve seen at the moment is really impressive. For system administration and coding repetitive tasks, Perl is the most awesome programming language I’ve ever come across. Perl really rocks, and what’s the most interesting thing is that is open source. Perl has a large community, and there are thousands of reusable modules ready to be installed from the comprehensive Perl archive network www.cpan.org. As I like coding for fun, and scripting is one of my favourite hobbies (apart from Linux), I will do some Perl interesting programs for the open source community.

Perl or Python

I’ve been a fan of Python for several years, but at this moment I need to learn some Perl, and what I have learned is quite impressive. Perl is a very powerful language with thousands of modules. I went for Python because it has a clearer syntax and it’s purely object oriented, and every time I saw a Perl script I thought it was very cryptic. Now with some tutorials and perl books (thanks to safari oreilly), I’m seeing that I was quite wrong. Perl is very powerful, even more than Python, when dealing with regular expressions, files, directories, and doing small tasks. Perhaps, for larger programs Python is best recommended, because of its object oriented nature (classes and methods). Long life for Perl!!