Just about the time I believe the UTF-8 beast is in the cage, it escapes and runs amok. This AM, I started to deploy an update to the webapp on EC2. Seems that some of the static strings in the app contained UTF-8 encoded non-ascii characters. The java compiler barfed. “The heck?”, I thought. I […]
I wanted to complement my bash directory crawler post with a bash array crawler example. Sometimes, it’s easier to jack a list of identifying tokens into an array and process them rather than to build an end-to-end script with database access. For this contrived example, I grab a list of UUID from MySQL with a […]
I’ve been building systems lately on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). At first, I was only interested in Amazon’s Simple Storage Solution (S3) after seeing the SmugMug slide show. I hadn’t really considered using EC2 since we had more servers in colocation than I really needed. But I had a file storage problem. When you […]
Currently, popular filesystems (ext3, hfs+) have a practical limit on the number of files and directories you can store in a single directory. Certainly, most of the unix command line tools will not work once you exceed some magic threshold. In my experience, 10,000 files and or directories is the practical limit. So what do […]
At work, we have legacy systems with problems which no one had taken the time to fix. One such legacy problem involved an FTP server. Client applications would FTP files up to the server for processing. That part worked fine. What didn’t work was knowing when the FTP was complete so we could start processing […]