unsigned long geek = random();

Over the past few weeks SourceForge.net has been moving projects from cvs.sf.net to projectname.cvs.sf.net. Not wanting to delete my currently checked out copy of pkgsrc-wip and check out again, I needed to update CVS/Root in each checked out directory. Neil gave me this useful snippet to accomplish exactly this:
find . -type f -name "Root" | grep "/CVS/" | xargs sed -i -e 's/cvs.sf.net/pkgsrc-wip.cvs.sf.net/'


It assumes a sed which supports the -i option - NetBSD’s doesn’t, so I used perl -i -p -e instead (I could also have installed textproc/gsed from pkgsrc, but I already had perl installed).

For a while I’ve been looking for a decent open source tool to test web services, without much luck. There are a number of commercial tools, including Parasoft’s SOAtest, but I struggled to find any open source equivalents. A few days ago I stumbled upon soapui, which is a GPLd web service testing and prototyping tool. It’s written in Java and should work on any operating system with a Java VM.

My initial impressions of version 1.5 are good - it had no problem importing the WSDL file for the project I’m currently working on (consuming a custom .NET web service) and allowing me to test it.

One small installation issue - if you have problems running bin/soapui.sh, it may be because the file contains carriage returns. Strip them out and it should work fine.

Recently I’ve been trying to customize my vim configuration to try and optimize it for software development. Although I’ve been using vim for many years, I’ve always used a configuration that’s very close to vanilla.

Yesterday I installed Tag List, a plugin that displays and allows navigation to the various tags in the currently edited file(s). It seems to work very well, and supports most languages, thanks to Exuberant ctags.

The screenshot below shows it in action editing some Python source.

459×530 pixels 58.7 kB

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about ABAP documentation referencing Pink Floyd’s Careful with that Axe, Eugene, I decided to do some further digging. It seems that there are quite a few musical references in the documentation:

• concatenate - Louis Armstrong’s We have all the time in the World
• condense - Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne
• find - Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s Everybody Knows this is Nowhere
• replace and shift- Lyle Lovett’s I Know You Know
• search - Chuck Berry’s Roll Over Beethoven
• split - The Rolling Stones’ Mother’s Little Helper
• translate - Pink Floyd’s Careful with that Axe, Eugene

There are probably some other little gems in the documentation, but I’ll leave those for someone else to find

Spotted this gem in the ABAP documentation for the translate statement on a SAP WAS 6.40 system today:

After the conversion, the variable text contains “CAREFUL WITH THAT AXE, EUGENE”.
DATA text TYPE string.
text = `Careful with that Axe, Eugene`.
TRANSLATE text TO UPPER CASE.


I guess someone in Walldorf likes Pink Floyd

Sometimes I love being proven wrong, and this is one such occasion. As a follow-up to my earlier post, a few people have pointed out to me that Embedded Common Lisp (ECL) works on NetBSD/sparc64. Yay!

There is a package in pkgsrc-wip. It didn’t compile cleanly on my -current system (it includes <frame .h> rather than <machine/frame.h>), but I’ll submit a patch to the maintainer to fix that.

I have a moderately complicated set of rc files for the login shells I use (zsh where available, otherwise bash). To make things easier to manage, I have a single set of scripts that set the appropriate options for whichever shell is being used. To make things slightly more complicated, I export my home directory via NFS, so the same set of scripts are used on Linux, NetBSD and Solaris systems. Everything seemed to work well, or so I thought…

For a while I’ve been getting strange error messages when trying to view manual pages or when running certain shell scripts on my NetBSD machines. Errors like the following:

Syntax error: word unexpected (expecting ")")

I couldn’t find anything in Google, but thought it must have something to do with one of my environment variables interacting badly with man(1). After clearing pretty much all of them and hacking /etc/man.conf without luck, I realised it was NetBSD’s sh(1) that was causing the problem - with $ENV set, it was running my standard set of scripts and dying when encountering some zsh’isms (hint: “/bin/sh -v” is very useful).

Solution: clear $ENV and all is well. The problem was masked on Linux systems because almost all of them use bash as /bin/sh…

(Apologies to Tom Christiansen for the title ;-)).

I went to the Cape Town Sun Developer Day today. Other than having incorrect info about the venue (which was communicated to me only after I got to the wrong venue!), it went very well. The focus was on Java development and talks were given by Srikanth Raju, Simon Ritter (who has a Sun.COM blog) and Dr Doris Chen.

The most interesting talk for me was Simon Ritter’s coverage of the Sun JVM Garbage Collector, which included a nice overview of the different approaches to garbage collection and some tips on tuning the JVM for different types of applications and server enviroments.

No freebies unfortunately - all I left with was a Sun pen and notepad. Bah! They also skipped the session on the Java Desktop System (Sun’s SuSE-based Linux distribution), but all three presenters delivered their presentations using StarOffice and were running JDS.