Thrift is a software framework for scalable cross-language services development. It combines a powerful software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby. Thrift was developed at Facebook, and we are now releasing it as open source

Those of you who aren’t software engineering nerds like me and haven’t spent the last year and a half elbow-deep inside one of the world’s largest service oriented architectures might not realize how huge that is.

When you set out to build a large distributed system, the first question you have to answer is how you’re going to glue it all together, especially if you don’t want to have to use the same language everywhere. You could use something standard like XML-RPC or SOAP, but XML is slow and sometimes inflexible. And you don’t really care about interoperability with third-party systems - you just want to be able to connect your pieces together. And what about server frameworks? Do you really want to have to implement all those annoying little bits like configuration and logging for every language you want to use?

What you really need is one standard framework for everything. Thrift provides this. Define your service APIs in a common language and the framework automatically creates bindings for every language you’d want to use, along with service code in your chosen language.

Very cool. If I manage to find some free time I’ll be sure to play with it some more.

So I finally figured out how to write AppleScripts that hook directly into Quicksilver’s “text clipping” interface. For the longest time I’ve wanted to be able to set away messages from Quicksilver… and now I can:

using terms from application "Quicksilver"
    on process text ThisClipping

    tell application "Adium"
        set my status message to ThisClipping
        set my status type to away
    end tell

end process text

end using terms from It may not look like much, but I’m a happy boy. Put that into an AppleScript using Script Editor and save it to ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions. Restart Quicksilver, and you’ll be able to set any text you type in Quicksilver after the “.” command as your Adium away message.

The on process text terms has lots of other uses too. I’m sure I’ll come up with more.

If you’re getting a “550-Sender verify failed” error when Monit starts because its trying to send you an email via SMTP to let you know it’s started (or if you’re getting that error for just about any other reason), make sure that the email address that the message is being sent “from” actually exists.

If “monit@yourhostname.com” doesn’t exist, your SMTP server will likely reject the message and cause you all sorts of trouble.

So a week or so ago I discovered lala. It may just be the simplest and best dotcom idea I’ve seen in a long time.

I have CDs. You have CDs. In all honesty, I’m sick of most of my CDs. And you probably are too. I might not have listened to my Nirvana “In Utero” CD in 8 years, but maybe you’ve recently suffered a bit of nostalgia and you want to listen to them again. So why don’t we trade?

Within a half hour or so of me having my beta account I loaded a bunch of the CD’s that I knew I had into my “I Have” section and I’d added a bunch of CD’s I wanted to my “I Want” section. About an hour or two later I discovered that I’d had my first match and that somebody wanted my copy of The Clash’s “London Calling” (an excellent CD by the way). And simultaneously somebody was shipping me Jurassic 5’s “Quality Control”. And I was only out $1.

Too cool.

Update: If anybody wants lala invites, add a comment below and leave the email address you want it sent to. I have a bunch.

Go pick up those dusty computer science “theory” books you decided to save thinking that maybe, just maybe, they might come in handy some day. Read them! Brush up on data structures, algorithms, and object oriented programming concepts. Practice big-O program analysis. Write some recursive algorithms. Review all those topics that you “forgot” because you thought you would never use them again.

I’m tired of screening Java developers who can’t tell me how the internals of the libraries they use are actually implemented. When computer scientists talk about “data structures,” we talk about hash tables, binary search trees, and linked lists, not java.util.Collection. We learned about program analysis in school because we were supposed to use it - if you can’t tell me about the runtime implications of the algorithms you choose, then you shouldn’t use them.

You got the degree, so you’re obviously not stupid. Now start using what you learned.

However, if you’re fortunate enough to be running Debian Linux, you can install the “hibernate” package. Hibernate is basically sophisticated Bash script with pluggable options for all the most common ACPI hacks. I had ACPI up and running within minutes.

If you’ve got a Thinkpad X31 or similar machine, feel free to download my hibernate.conf and tweak it to your purposes. The only additions beyond a fairly standard hibernate configuration I had to make were adding hooks to turn the Radeon backlight on and off.

The Debian “alternatives” system is basically a set of utilities designed for manipulating what is no more than a complex collection of symlinks. However, the flexibility it affords users is wonderful. It allows the administrator to set up intelligent “default versions” for system utilities such as editors, pagers, and terminals.

And it also, if you abuse it slightly, gives you an easy way to manage applications installed into /opt.

Debian, as you might know, isn’t that great at always packaging applications that don’t agree with its “social contract”. So you’ll usually find yourself jumping through hoops to get anything that involves Java installed. I install apps like Eclipse, Azureus, and VMWare into directories in /opt (/opt/eclipse, /opt/azureus, etc). And then I use update-alternatives to add intelligent symlinks back into the main system:

update-alternatives --verbose --install [desired symlink] [name] [executable location in /opt/whatever] 500

For a specific example: update-alternatives --verbose --install /usr/bin/vmware vmware /opt/vmware/bin/vmware 500

If you also want to install a link for the manpage, you can also do that:

update-alternatives --verbose --install /usr/bin/vmware vmware /opt/vmware/bin/vmware 500 --slave /usr/share/man/man1/vmware.1 vmware.1 /opt/vmware/man/man1/vmware.1

(I know that actually points to the manpage of the vmware XF86 driver, but you get the idea…)

And since all the links are tracked by update-alternatives, I can easily remove them when I uninstall the application: update-alternatives --remove-all vmware

Debian’s “Social Contract” forbids it from distributing “non-free” code as official packages. Thus, Sun’s version of Java is not in any of the official mirrors. You can sometimes find third-party packages from Blackdown and other groups, but they are often out of date and annoying. I prefer to get my Java directly from Sun.

I install my JDKs into /opt and use “dummy packages” to let Debian know that I really do have Java installed. That way I can install Debian packages requiring Java to be installed and everything will go smoothly.

This mini-HowTo assumes that you’re running Debian Unstable (Sid), but it should also work if you’re using Testing or even Ubuntu. It also assumes you’re doing all these steps as root.

Installing Sun’s Java on Debian Unstable

1. Go to Sun’s website and get yourself a copy of the J2SE Development Kit. Get the .bin package, not the RPM.
2. Put it wherever you want to finally reside. I put all apps that don’t come from Debian packages into /opt, so I created a /opt/java directory to contain all my JDKs and dropped the .bin package into there.
3. Unpack it. Basically that means running sh [package name].bin and saying yes to the licensing stuff. It’ll unpack itself into a new directory. Mine unpacked itself into /opt/java/jdk1.5.0_03.
4. Create a symbolic link from the unpacked JDK directory to /usr/local/lib/jdk. For me, that meant running the command ln -s /opt/java/jdk1.5.0_03 /usr/local/lib/jdk.
5. Install the java-common and equivs packages by calling apt-get install java-common equivs. These packages will be used to create the dummy packages.
6. Into a suitable temporary directory (I was in /opt/java), copy the Java dummy package control files, using the command cp /usr/share/doc/java-common/dummy-packages/*.control ..
7. Use equivs to create the dummy packages from the control files: for fn in *.control; do equivs-build $fn; done. You’ll end up with a bunch of .deb’s in your working directory.
8. Install the dummy packages: dpkg -i *.deb. Now Debian knows that you’ve got Java installed.
9. Still one more step to go… Now we’ll use update-alternatives to add in Debian-friendly symbolic links for all the utilities that come with Java. Change directories into the bin directory of your installed JDK (cd /opt/java/jdk1.5.0_03/bin) and run the following command: for fn in *; do update-alternatives --verbose --install /usr/bin/$fn $fn /usr/local/lib/jdk/bin/$fn 500 --slave /usr/share/man/man1/$fn.1 $fn.1 /usr/local/lib/jdk/man/man1/$fn.1; done. This loop will create Debian “alternatives” for all the utilities that came with your JDK package, along with links for their man pages. Neat, eh?
10. Now you should be able to run java -version as any user and get back the correct version of the JDK you installed.

All done! Enjoy your snazzy new Java install.

GtdWiki is a specially tweaked version of PhpWiki I’ve been using for a few months now as the core of my personal implementation of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”.

Download it, try it out, and let me know what you think.

Update: I’ve set up a online demo if you want to “try before you buy.”

So I got my name in the New York Times, in glorious 8-point type. Can I say I’m famous now?