Had an interesting problem today with one of our servers at work.
First thing I noticed was yesterday that an upgrade of Apache2 didn’t
complete properly because /etc/init.d/apache2 stop didn’t
return. Killing it and starting apache allowed the upgrade to
finish. I noticed there was a zombie process but didn’t think too much
off it.

Then this morning got an email from the MD saying that various
internal services websites were down (webmail, wiki etc). My manager
noticed that it was due to logrotate hanging, again because restarting
apache had hung. Looking at the server I noticed a few more zombie
processes. One thing I’d noticed was that all these processes had
reparented themselves under init and a quick web search later confirmed
that init(1) should be reaping these processes. I thought maybe
restarting init would clear the zombies. I tried running
telinit q to reread the config file, but that returned an error
message about timing out on /dev/initctl named pipe. I checked that file
existed and everything looked fine. The next thing I checked was the
other end of the named pipe by running lsof -p 1. This
showed that init had /dev/console rather than
/dev/initctl as fd 0. I tried running kill -SIGHUP
1
, but that didn’t do anything. Then I tried kill
-SIGUSR1 1
, but that didn’t do anything either. I checked the
console, but there wasn’t enough scrollback to see the system booting
and decided to schedule a reboot for this evening.

Rebooting the server presented me with an interesting challenge.
Normally the shutdown command signals to init to change
to runlevel 0 or 6 to shutdown or reboot using /dev/initctl. Of
course init wasn’t listening on this file, so that was out. Sending it
an SIGINT signal (the same signal init gets on ctrl-alt-delete) had no
response. Obviously telinit 0 wasn’t going to work
either. I decided to start shutting services down manually with the help
of Brett Parker. The idea
was to stop all non-essential services, unexporting nfs exports,
remounting disks read-only and then either using sysrq or a hardware
reset. Unfortunately someone accidentally ran /etc/init.d/halt
stop
, hanging the server, but he is suffering from a bad cold today so I forgive
him. The server restarted without a hitch (thank god for ext3) and
running lsof -p 1 showed init having
/dev/initctl open. I don’t know what happened to init the last
reboot on Monday, but a reboot seemed to fix it. Odd bug, but thankfully
it was a nice simple fix. I could have spent the evening debugged init.
🙂

I’m currently mourning the loss of my laptop’s hard disk. I don’t think
there was massive amounts of data on there that I needed, but it’s still
upsetting. Looks like I’ll have to buy a new 2.5″ drive. At least it
gives me a reason to reinstall Debian.

Update: The bad news is that it is actually a 1.8″
drive, which means I need to spend 93GBP including tax and postage for a
new drive. Should get it by Friday. The good news is that having left
the laptop off during the day, I managed to get the laptop booting and
am not rsyncing the data off as fast as I can. Shame about the money,
but at least I haven’t lost much in the way of data.

I’d like to announce the initial release of Eddie, a feed parser
library written in Java. It’s taken me over 100 hours, but it now correctly
parses 90% of the FeedParser unit tests, including all the rss and atom
tests. It’s GPLed, with an exception allowing you to use it in any open
sourced program. Get it at my website.
Need to add documentation and character set and encoding support. Also
need to separate the testing infrastructure from the rest of the code.

This is the first time I’ve done any java programming in anger, and I
have to say I’m surprised to discover I quite like it. In many ways it
seems a very quick language to program in. It seems almost like
programming in a scripting language, but stronger typed. This is
probably due to not having to worry about memory management. Certainly I
don’t think I could have written this quite so quickly in C++.

Having said that, there are a couple things that I don’t like about
Java. Everything is a pointer. This is useful at times, but it means
that every time you want to call a method on an object you have to test
whether it is null or you run the risk of getting the dreaded
NullPointerException. Java also doesn’t have keywords for
and, or and not. I know not everyone likes
these, but I keep finding myself trying to use them.

I’m sure there are other things I hated, but I can’t remember them
now. I think I’ll end up doing more java programming in the future.

To the anonymous Texan that thought it would be a good idea to point
out a Perl module in response to my date parsing class in Java:

I’m well aware of date parsing modules in other languages. In fact
I’ve used them for similar tasks. But the post wasn’t asking “How do I
parse dates in Perl?” It was giving some code that some people might
find useful.

Commenting with “man Date::Parse” doesn’t make you look clever; it
just makes you look like a twat and the kind of person people are
relucant to invite to parties. You may be a geek and you may know stuff,
but that doesn’t mean you have to try to look clever, because you will
invariably fail.

</rant>

Oh and Erich, I’ve got some more date formats I want to add support
for, so I’ll add german dates and post the updated code. 🙂

I’ve recently had cause to parse some date values in Java. As a
result I’ve produced a class which can manage to parse an awful lot of
date formats. I thought I’d better document it in case someone found it
useful. Certainly there doesn’t appear to be anything elsewhere which
shows you how to parse lots of formats. I have found the order of
date_formats to be very brittle, so I don’t recommend you
change it without an awful lot of test cases.

Anyway, without further to do, I present to you, the Pathological
Date Parser for Java

// Copyright 2006 David Pashley <david@davidpashley.com>
// Licensed under the GPL version 2
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Calendar;
import java.util.TimeZone;

public class Date {
    private Calendar date;

    static String[] date_formats = {
            "yyyy-MM-dd'T'kk:mm:ss'Z'",        // ISO
            "yyyy-MM-dd'T'kk:mm:ssz",          // ISO
            "yyyy-MM-dd'T'kk:mm:ss",           // ISO
            "EEE, d MMM yy kk:mm:ss z",        // RFC822
            "EEE, d MMM yyyy kk:mm:ss z",      // RFC2882
            "EEE MMM  d kk:mm:ss zzz yyyy",    // ASC
            "EEE, dd MMMM yyyy kk:mm:ss",   //Disney Mon, 26 January 2004 16:31:00 ET
            "-yy-MM",
            "-yyMM",
            "yy-MM-dd",
            "yyyy-MM-dd",
            "yyyy-MM",
            "yyyy-D",
            "-yyMM",
            "yyyyMMdd",
            "yyMMdd",
            "yyyy",
            "yyD"

    };
    public Date(String d) {
        SimpleDateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat();
        d = d.replaceAll("([-+]\d\d:\d\d)", "GMT$1"); // Correct W3C times
        d = d.replaceAll(" ([ACEMP])T$", " $1ST"); // Correct Disney timezones
        for (int i = 0; i < date_formats.length; i++) {
           try {
              formatter.applyPattern(date_formats[i]);
              formatter.parse(d);
              date = formatter.getCalendar();
              break;
           } catch(Exception e) {
              // Oh well. We tried
           }
        }

    }
}

The only date formats I can’t get it to parse are <4-digit
year>-<day of year>
and <2digit year><day of
year>
(e.g. 2003-335 and 03335 for
2003-12-01). If you can add support for those and other date formats
I’ll gladly take patches.

Have you ever wanted to call a member function in your class, but not
known what it will be at compile time? I’m writing a SAX parser and
would like a function for every element name. I could write a massive
switch statement in the startElement function, but this will
quite quickly become unmanagable for a large schema. The alternative is
to look to see if a particular member function exists and call it.

To do this little bit of magic we need to use Java’s introspection API. The
first thing to do is to get a Class object for our class. We
can do that by calling:

Class klass = this.getClass();

We can then look up the method we are looking for using
Class.getMethod, but this function requires an array of types
that the method we are looking for takes as parameters, so we get the
right version of an overloaded method. We can do this with:

Class[] arguments = { Int.class, String.class, URL.class};
Method method = klass.getMethod("foo", arguments);

Now we have our method, we can call it using the
Method.invoke() call. This takes an object as the first
parameter, which we can use this, and an array of
Objects for the parameters.

Object[] values = {bar, baz, quux};
method.invoke(this, values);

But what happens if our class has no member method called
foo()? Well, Class.getMethod() will throw a
NoSuchMethodException, so we can just throw a
try/catch block around the code to deal with unhandled
functions. It’s worth pointing out that Class.getMethod() also
throws SecurityException and Method.invoke() throws
IllegalAccessException, IllegalArgumentException and
InvocationTargetException, so you’ll want to catch
Exception too.

We can chain some of these calls together and the result for my SAX
parser is:

public void startElement(String uri, String localName, String qName, Attributes atts)
            throws SAXException {
   try {
       Class[] argTypes = { String.class, String.class, String.class,
               Attributes.class };
       Object[] values = { uri, localName, qName, atts };
       this.getClass().getMethod("startElement_" + localName, argTypes)
               .invoke(this, values);
   } catch (NoSuchMethodException e) {
       log.debug("unhandled element " + localName);
   } catch (Exception e) {
       e.printStackTrace();
   }
}

With this arrangement, when I want to handle a new element in my code I
can just make a function like:

public void startElement_foo(String uri, String localName, String qName, Attributes atts)
            throws SAXException {
   ...
}

Another article for your viewing pleasure. This
article
describes how to use Perl’s IO based IO::Handle IO system and a
couple of modules that allow you do to some interesting things like seamlessly
handle compressed files and calculate MD5 sums as you read a file in.

use IO::Digest;

my $fh = new IO::file($filename, "r");
my $iod = new IO::Digest($fh, ’MD5’);

read_and_parse($fh);

print $iod->hexdigest

I hate backticks. They have no place in modern shell programming.
Here is a couple of reasons why this is the case.

Not nestable

backticks, by their nature, are not nestable. You can not have a
command expansion inside another with back ticks.

command `foo ` bar ` baz`

Should the shell expand foo and baz or bar
and then foo <output of bar> baz? As it happens
it will run the first one. Using the modern command expansion syntax you
can write:

command $(foo $( bar ) baz)
command $(foo ) bar $( baz)

Backticks are invisible

The backtick symbol is too small and too easily confused with a
single quote to be used for writing maintainable code. The alternative
is significantly larger and therefore more obvious.

ls "'`!!`'"
ls "'$(!!)'"

Here is a zoomed version of the line above in my terminal:

Please consider using the bracketed version of command expansion
rather than backticks and make the world a nicer place

Ever wanted to know who was logged into your oracle server and where
from? This SQL will show you the username connected, which machine they
are connected from and what time they connected.

SELECT s.username, s.program, s.logon_time
   FROM v$session s, v$process p, sys.v_$sess_io si
   WHERE s.paddr = p.addr(+) AND si.sid(+) = s.sid
   AND s.type='USER';

Since upgrading to GNOME 2.14, I have been revisited by an annoying
problem with gnome-terminal. Gnome-terminal sets your character encoding
to being the same as your locale by default, which unfortunately was
being detected as ANSI_X3.4-1968, while I had my $LANG set to
en_GB.UTF-8 in my ~/.bash_profile. The reason it wasn’t being
detected was because nothing between logging in and starting
gnome-terminal looked at that file, so gnome-terminal thought the locale
was C.

The result was corrupt
display when programs attempted to display unicode characters. I could
fix it by changing the character encoding using the menu, but I’d have
to do this for every tab, which quickly becomes annoying. Time to find a
fix.

Turns out that you need to tell gdm to set the right locale, which
you can do by configuring ~/.dmrc. Mine now looks like:

[Desktop]
Session=gnome
Language=en_GB.UTF-8

Obviously, the important section is the Language line. You
need to set it to a locale that exists on your system, which you can
find using locale -a. Once
you’ve set that and logged in again, everything should be working
correctly.