Wez Furlong

Blowing out some cobwebs

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It's been a long time since I last wrote anything new here, so long in fact,that BitBucket killed their Mercurial product which was hosting a number of myO...

Watchman

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of days ago we announced Watchman on the Facebook Engineeringblog.

Watchman watches files and records information about them as they change. Youcan arrange to trigger build or test steps in response to changes in matchingfiles, but the main the reason that we built it was so that we caninstantaneously query file status for a set of files.

Watchman maintains a view of the filesystem that is kept in sync using kernelfilesystem notification facilities. This view is indexed so that we canquickly return information about the watched portions of the filesystemand also query the set of files that changed since a given point in time.

Diet + Weight loss

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This year one of the changes I made was around my eating and exercise habits.I managed to lose 30lbs in just under 3 months. I wanted to share how I didthis because it seemed much easier than I thought it would be.

My Facebook Adventure Continues

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I'd promised a couple of folks back in Maryland that I'd keep updatingthis blog to let them know what I'm getting up to. I'm a little overdue onthis, but it does mean that I get to write a more substantial update. (I postmuch more frequent but smaller updates on my Facebook timeline!)

As I write this entry, Juliette, Xander and our two dogs are having their finalsleep in our house in Maryland. It's taken a bit longer than I'd hoped, but inthe morning we'll be reunited and can really get this new life going.

My Facebook Adventure

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year I made a difficult choice: to leave Message Systemsand join Facebook.

I moved countries to work with OmniTI/Message Systems back in 2004, andI've worked with the team for almost 8 years, seen things growfrom a couple of engineers and a sales guy to a company with multipleoffices in the USA, Europe and Asia/Pacific. In my time with thecompany I've learned a lot about many things, worked hard with somegreat people and had good times.

So why leave? It was time to try something new. My day-to-day hadsettled into a fairly repetitive and steady pattern and there wasn't ahuge amount going on in the neighborhood where I lived; rural Marylandisn't exactly a hotbed of activity! Add to that the oppressivehumidity in the summer and the snow in the winter, I felt like I wasnever really all that comfortable getting out of the house.

So it was time to try something new, and the time was right to giveFacebook a shot.

Ideas of March

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This time last year, Chris wrote about blogging and howTwitter has reduced the quality of online discuss...

jQuery Tools Form Validator and Twitter Bootstrap

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I've had a couple of folks ask me about the form validation Imentioned in my lastpost, sohere's the code.

It's fairly basic IMO. This is public domain code; use as you will andat your own risk. You'll be able to make a form that looks like this:

Node.js - First Impressions

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I've spent some of my personal time over this past week looking intoNode.js. I'll be up-front in stating that myefforts have not been particularly broad, but I have gone reasonablydeep into the parts that I looked at.

I've been building evented systems for more than a decade, mostly in the"C" language, so Node is particularly interesting to me; it blends anevented I/O model with the Javascript language in such a way that itdoesn't feel like a continual struggle.

To get a feel for Node, I decided to look at what it would take to getsome kind of mtrack implementationrunning on Node; don't get too excited, I didn't finish anything worthyof public scrutiny.

For the purposes of the experiment I selectedRiak for the data storagesolution; it has a compelling mixture of document storage, full-textsearching, secondary indices and map-reduce facilities.

Two Factor SSH on Joyent SmartMachines

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

After reading this scary blog entry about domain hijackingI've been a bitconcerned about brute forcing of credentials and have been turning onthe two-factor authentication facilities that folks like Google providefor my gmail and personal domains.

I've just found out about Duo Security, aservice that allows you to add two-factor authentication to your SSHserver, Juniper VPN and even Wordpress blogs. Their service is free forup to 10 users and they start charging when you pass that threshold.

Read on to find out how to set it up.

I'll be at Surge

Tue, 24 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I'm pleased to announce that my proposal for the OmniTI Surge 2011Conference has been accepted!

[TL;DR: read the session description at the Surge site][sess],otherwise, read on for some background and additional commentary.

Short Sleeps on Solaris

Mon, 23 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Brendan Gregg raised this questionon Twitter:Cruel interview question: write a program on Solaris that sleeps for <1 ms.

The first choice that springs to mind is nanosleep(3RT), but you'll befrustrated because your requested sleep interval is implemented in termsof the standard clock frequency, making you sleep for longer.

So how do you sleep (not busy wait!) for time periods shorter than theregular clock?

Scriptable Debugger

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Adam Leventhal mentioned on twitter that he'dfound my umem slab allocator port onmacports. I commented that he might miss some of the umem debugging featuresthat are available on its native Solaris platform in mdb, and we dreamedbriefly of a portable version of mdb.

This weekend I took a peek at the mdb sources (via the IllumosGate) to see how hard this might be. Asit happens, this isn't the first time I've looked at porting mdb, so I was bitbetter prepared to go snooping around in there.

mtrack repo ACLs

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 18:01:00 +0000

Updated: Added schema and UI for Projects to own repos and manage groups.

Following through on user repos and SSH, I revised the ACL support in mtrack and added a permissions editor for the repo editing screen. When you create a repo, it defaults to granting you (the creator) full access and denying everybody else access (equivalent to a private repo in services like Github and Bitbucket).

mtrack user repos and ssh

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 04:05:00 +0000

I've just pushed a somewhat experimental change to the default branch of mtrack that enables per-user repositories, repository forking, SSH key manage...

mtrack: burndown and postgres

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 02:28:00 +0000

It's that time of the month... mtrack update time. Not a huge number of items to report on this time around, but it's a decently significant stepping stone--the schema management code takes us one step closer to an upgrade/deployment process.

If you don't explicitly include the burndown macro text in a milestone, a default burndown graph will now be displayed when the milestone summary is rendered in the roadmap section.
Added schema management code to handle upgrades that change the schema
Added preliminary postgres DB support on top of the schema management code.
Revised attachment processing so that the database stores a canonical copy of each attachment. This step helps to enable multiple front-end web servers to be used with the same backend pgsql DB.
Created a stable branch that holds the changes up to just before the PostgreSQL DB changes

mtrack: custom fields, snippets

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 23:32:00 +0000

It's time for another mtrack update; here's what's new:

Add "Snippets" feature; works like pastebin, but allows for comments to be supplied in wiki syntax in addition to the code or text snippet that you're pasting
Add Custom Field support. This is implemented by modifying the schema (custom fields always have an "x_" prefix).
Improvements to the "custom ticket query" screens, including ability to select which columns (including custom fields) are included in the results
Fix an issue with sorting the "Remaining" time column
Fix some IE compatibility issues
Improve presentation of tickets in read-only mode
Refactor search engine code and allow the use of Apache Solr as an engine. Indexer logs are now viewable in the Admin section
Improve perceived search engine performance by forcing it to work in smaller batches
You may now delete attachments from both wiki pages and tickets
Add post commit hook for the wiki repo, so that changes made outside of the mtrack UI are noticed and indexed
Improve diff visualization
Add syntax highlighting facility
File view now allows blame and line numbers to be turned on or off, and renders with syntax highlighting
Allow optional "hour", "hours" and "hrs" unit after the spent time command in the commit hook (Thanks Andrei!)
Display remaining time as 0 if the ticket is closed

mtrack: facelift + other progress

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 23:21:00 +0000

I've been working on some changes to mtrack (a software development tracker implemented in PHP) this weekend, with a focus on improving the user experience for the mtrack administrator. To be brutally honest, it was at best a meagre experience for the administrator, but now things are better. They're still not perfect, but it should be a low enough bar to encourage more folks to play with mtrack. I've also spent a little bit of effort to add some caching to improve performance for certain pages.

For those that have tried it in the past, there's a brief summary of what's changed and a couple of screen shots below. This effort is in alignment with the roadmap that I published a little while ago.

OSCON 2010 Redux

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 16:08:00 +0000

Another OSCON is done. As usual, it was a great mix of folks and ideas across many different areas of OpenSource technology.

The most valuab...

mtrack: roadmap RFC

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 00:53:00 +0000

I wanted to share some of my thoughts on future development in mtrack, andsolicit some feedback. Some of these are driven directly from user requests, and others are things that I've been thinking about on-and-off for a little while.

I really want to hear your thoughts, whether they relate to ideas and featuresuggestions, or whether you have some experience or anecdotes on these topics.

Custom Fields

I was hoping to avoid having to enable this as a feature, as I find theimplementation approach taken in the original Trac to be sub-optimal, both interms of run time efficiency and in terms of user experience when it comes toreporting on the custom fields.

Gimli at OSCON

Sat, 22 May 2010 21:01:37 +0000

<img src="http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/45/oscon2010_spkr_210x60.jpg" width="210" height="60" border=...