martinmurphy.com – Martin Murphy

Continuing in the online video theme, The Register has a story about video ads:
Future looks bright for video ads
The article talks about ad-funded online video, and video ads in web pages. Both of these are relevant to me at work.

This is an interesting introduction to Flash Lite – including getting data from the network – in the current issue of Dr. Dobbs Journal. Well it’s probably only interesting if, like me, the only thing you already know about Flash Lite, is that some people can make nice looking demos with it
Dr. Dobbs | Flash Lite: Graphics for Mobile Devices | June 8, 2007

Just found out about this command today.

“lsof” displays information about open files by processes on *nix systems (including network “files” – TCP/UDP). I don’t know how I managed to miss such a useful command over the years.

As an example, listing network ports (which I would previously have done with netstat):

# lsof +c0 -n | grep IP 

java             1022    martinm   28u     IPv6
          467902                 TCP 192.168.2.104:51769->192.168.10.1:xmpp-client (ESTABLISHED)
java             2961    martinm    6u     IPv6
          322274                 TCP *:8083 (LISTEN)
evolution        6408    martinm   59u     IPv6
          472527                 TCP [fffe:111:11:2:111:72ff:fe10:2bd]:51943->[fffe:111:11:1::11]:imaps (ESTABLISHED)
mysql           18407    martinm    3u     IPv4
          489375                 TCP 192.168.2.104:49021->192.168.2.146:mysql (ESTABLISHED)
firefox-bin     24396    martinm   52u     IPv4
          490170                 TCP 192.168.2.104:52906->192.168.0.1:webcache (ESTABLISHED)

I added linebreaks to make it more readable
As usual, further information is available with man lsof.
Now I’ll just need to find out a way of setting the command to be the Java Start Class to identify which java program has the port open.

Update: the number after the command is the PID so a ps -fpXXXX will show the comamnd line.

The heating system at work seems to break down a lot. I just found this link mentioning a minimum of 63°F within 1 hour (in the Irish Statute Book Database.) I must remember to bring a thermometer with me tomorrow morning. I suppose I should also check if that has been superceded.

Lately, when writing JUnit tests I’ve been doing things like:


...
String result = some.method();
assertTrue("Expected " + expected + " but was " + result, result.equals(expected));
...

However, a similar result can be achieved with the semantically more accurate

...
assertEquals(expected, result);
...

This is even easier to type

I did know this, honest!

These are my experiences of installing Ruby on Ubuntu. I didn’t install the Ubuntu package but went with the source on the Ruby On Rails website. Everything worked fine out of the box, just downloaded the files and followed their instructions (basically the following, in this order.)

Download ruby-1.8.4.tar.gz and rubygems-0.9.0.tgz from the links on http://www.rubyonrails.org/down

Ruby

tar xzf ruby-1.8.4.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.8.4
./configure
make
make test
sudo make install

RubyGems

tar xvf rubygems-0.9.0.tgz
cd rubygems
sudo ruby setup.rb

Rails

sudo gem install rails –include-dependencies

Test installation

rails railstest/
cd railstest/
ruby script/server

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