beer planet

Updated: July 26th, 2010

This is a quick recipe that I found pretty interesting and relatively unknown.

Everyone who uses SVN knows that most repositories are set up to allow viewing of their contents via a web browser. For example, here's the trunk of WP Plugins SVN: http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/ and here is the current trunk version of a specific file, let's say http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/stats/trunk/readme.txt.

The Problem

However, what if you wanted to view a specific revision of a file or directory in your browser?

Let's say I wanted revision 100,000 of http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/stats/trunk/readme.txt

Normally, on a command line, you'd do something like

svn co http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/stats/trunk/readme.txt stats
cd stats;
svn up -r100000 readme.txt

or simply

svn export -r100000 http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/stats/trunk/readme.txt

However, how would you do this in …

Updated: September 28th, 2009

The Problem

I am throwing up a quick post about a relatively cryptic error that Solr started throwing the other day here at Plaxo. After happily running for a few days, I suddenly started getting pages about failed Solr indexing.

Upon closer examination, I saw the following repeatedly in the log file:

catalina.2009-09-18.log:SEVERE: java.io.IOException: directory 'DATADIR/index'
exists and is a directory, but cannot be listed: list() returned null

I tried to see if sending an OPTIMIZE command would help but the server returned the same response.

Digging Deeper

The reason was these errors was quite simple – Solr was running into the system level limit on allowed number of open files (ulimit). This limit can be seen by running

ulimit 

Updated: June 9th, 2009

Problem

While writing a 1093985th Perl script the other day I was facing the following dilemma:

• Let’s say there is a local library, called TheUberLib.pm. It is so uber that most of my scripts, located all over the machine, include it.
• Now, let’s also say that there’s an even more uberly important binary called run_me_now_or_you_will_die but the only way to find it is by using a relative path to the aforementioned TheUberLib.pm, for example ../bin (RELATIVE TO TheUberLib.pm).
• I don’t want to hardcode the path to run_me_now_or_you_will_die because it can be different on multiple machines and the code wouldn’t be robust enough – all I know is that the path is relative to an included library.

So …