lunatechian (lunatech-ian) (Entries tagged as programming)

ops is not a dirty word

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 02:24:11 +0000

From https://charity.wtf/2026/01/19/bring-back-ops-pride-xpost/

What’s wrong with operations? Ops is not a synonym for toil; it literally means “get shit done as efficiently as possible”. Every function has an operational component at scale: business ops, marketing ops, sales ops, product ops, design ops and everything else I could think of to search for, and so far as I can tell, none of them are treated with anything like the disrespect, dismissal and outright contempt that software engineering

They’re our servants, tools

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Thu, 02 May 2013 18:48:49 +0000

"You can see that our real problem is another thing entirely. The machines only do figuring for us in a few minutes that eventually we could do for our own selves. They’re our servants, tools. Not some sort of gods in a temple which we go and pray to. Not oracles who can see into the future for us. They don’t see into the future. They only make statistical predictions—not prophecies. There’s a big difference there, but Reinhart doesn’t understand it. Reinhart and his kind have made such things as the SRB machines into gods. But I have no gods. At least, not any I can see."

— The Variable Man, by Philip K. Dick

Higher Order Perl

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 22:25:53 +0000

I am in love with the book Higher-Order Perl, especially the technique in the Chapter 2: Dispatch Tables.

GPL still matters

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:48:35 +0000

Today morning I came across this piece of writing - Does GPL still matter?. The whole article is based on a few anecdotes from CEOs and marketing droids. They have gotten quite a few points wrong in the article.

GPL is a developer friendly license. The basic premise of the GPL is that the user should not subtract from the freedom he gets when redistributing software. GPL is not restrictive. It merely insists that whoever takes from the common pool must contribute back to the pool.

I would like to point to these 2 articles in support of GPL -

interesting meetup on July 14

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 18:13:06 +0000

I attended the Hackers and Founders meetup yesterday. It was a high energy meetup and I liked it. When I walked in, I was already 2 hours late but there were still quite a few people around. I walked in, took a name tag and tried to "merge in". Merging was easy - the folks were friendly and did not mind if you joined the discussion.

Some observations

I did not have a good answer for "what are you working on right now" . This made me realize that from a technology perspective, I have not worked on anything interesting for some time now. I have tinkered with a few things in the past 6 months (man!), but have not really done a deep dive on any of them.
There was a focus on programming language in the group. I am not sure if the choice of a programming language is really a big deal when creating a webapp. Rails, PHP, Python, Perl, Java - all have a good web framework. One of the arguments was that it would be difficult to organize PHP code in a coherent manner. In my opinion, that is a matter of discipline instead of language.
I did not find people thinking of totally different ideas. Or maybe, the folks were not telling those ideas . The ideas floated around ads, community, social networking, websites etc.
I am not a unique case when it comes to the case of creating a startup. A few folks there had a regular job and were planning on side projects.

benefit of scripting lanuguage

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 19:01:09 +0000

I am using a Mac now, and this blog post is brought to you by the same php and lisp scripts that I was using on my linux box. Cheers!

debugging malloc

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 17:21:30 +0000

Have you read the man malloc page recently? Did you notice this section there

Recent versions of Linux libc (later than 5.4.23) and GNU libc (2.x) include a malloc implementation which is tunable via environment variables. When MALLOC_CHECK_ is set, a special (less efficient) implementation is used which is designed to be tolerant against simple errors, such as double calls of free() with the same argument, or overruns of a single byte (off-by-one bugs). Not all such errors can be protected against, however, and memory leaks can result. If MALLOC_CHECK_ is set to 0, any detected heap corruption is silently ignored; if set to 1, a diagnostic is printed on stderr; if set to 2, abort() is called immediately. This can be useful because otherwise a crash may happen much later, and the true cause for the problem is then very hard to track down.

So, you can do export MALLOC_CHECK_=1 and malloc will print debugging messages to the stderr.

lunatech-journal.el

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:45:30 +0000

I have created a emacs major mode, called lunatech-journal, that I use for blogging. It is a derived mode from muse-mode, an excellent mode for writing and publishing.

Currently, it has following functions defined

lunatech-journal-skeleton - loads a skeleton for blogging
lunatech-journal-show-hints - shows a buffer with questions to help me blog about my day
lunatech-journal-make-html - creates a html file from the muse-mode
lunatech-journal-preview - allows me to preview my journal in the browser

I use a php script to post the blog entry to the website. To use it, I have the following in my .emacs file

(defun journal ()
  (interactive)
  (find-file "~/blog/journal.muse")
  )
(require 'lunatech-journal)
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("journal\\.muse\\'" . lunatech-journal-mode))

When I feel the need to blog, I do M-x journal, I get dropped into my journal file and I can blog.

Links:

lunatech-journal.el - the blogging mode
Playing with your blog's xml-rpc interface shows the php script that I use to post entries to my blog
MuseMode

testing, testing

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 07:43:37 +0000

testing, testing - 1, 2, 3

I should now be able to set the categories of my post.

This post is brought to you by emacs, php and lots of cups of tea.

Release of PythonOnPlanes-1.3.07 aka. SuperSunday release

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 17:50:41 +0000

What is PythonOnPlanes ?

PythonOnPlanes is a rapid development framework for Python which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC. Our primary goal is to provide a structured framework that enables Python users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility.

See the Features list below to learn more about the framework.

Release Announcement

The Release Engineering Team is happy to announce the availability of PythonOnPlanes-1.3.07 , the latest release of the PythonOnPlanes Stable development branch. Since PythonOnPlanes-1.3.06 release we have made many improvements in functionality, stability, performance, and mod_snake_oil support for Apache web servers, as well as dealt with known security issues and made many bugfixes.

Major highlights in the release include Active Scrum Manager 1, Sanity Preserver 3.13 and Lart 22.21. This is also the first release with the PythonOnPlanes Live CD Installer officially debuting on the x86 platform.

Features

The software development world is moving towards AGILE DEVELOPMENT, WEB-2.OH, GURU PRESENCE and LEAN SOFTWARE. Our Framework is geared to support all these features.

"Out of the box" features available

Out of the box PythonOnPlanes supports

Sprint Management
Pair programming using an editor that can be shared by 2 developers. We have named it ALN (Analog Large Notebook)
LoC2LoC to generate a report on each developer's productivity.
Active Suggest DESIGN PATTERN (ASDP). This feature will make your refactoring efforts a snap

Beta Experimental Features

These features are not enabled by default and you have to enable them by editing the configuration file.

Developers' Blog . Each developer in the team is given a blog which he can update. If enabled, PythonOnPlanes will generate a daily report of the developer activity log and post it on the blog too
CutesyErrorMessages-0.0.1-BETA. This replaces stern error messages with very user friendly messages

GET PythonOnPlanes-1.3.07 IN NO TIME

Download PythonOnPlanes-1.3.07 from <http://pythononplanes.com/>

RIP John W. Backus

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 10:34:22 +0000

The "B" in "BNF" is gone. NY Times has a nice artilce about him and his noteworthy quote is tucked in at the end

Innovation, Mr. Backus said, was a constant process of trial and error.

"You need the willingness to fail all the time," he said. "You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don't work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work."

Link: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies - New York Times

s9y's xml-rpc interface

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 20:52:39 +0000

I have been playing with s9y's cml-rpc interface for a few days now. Here is a small article on how you can post to your s9y blog using the command line.

words of wisdom from an APC dev

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 17:16:49 +0000

Have you been using heredocs in your php scripts ? Gopalv shows why this is bad. Gopal is one of the developers of APC, so heed his words.

Trying out MySQL5

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 20:23:20 +0000

I have written a small article on how you can install MySQL5 alongside with MySQL4. MySQL5 has a bunch of new features and I am trying to spend some time in learining them. Read the article titled Trying out MySQL5 without clobbering your MySQL4 installation and let me know of your comments.

PHPCommunity Gazette third edition

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 06:12:41 +0000

Yesterday Lig and me put out the third edition of the PHPCommunity Gazette. It has some very nice articles, do check it out. If you want to write an article for it, drop us a mail, but remember that we would not be able to pay you anything, except a nice "thank you" note - it is a voluntary effort .