Category Archives: Project

Integrating Go with C: the ZooKeeper binding experience

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ZooKeeper is a clever generic coordination server for distributed systems, and is one of the core softwares which facilitate the development of Ensemble (project for automagic IaaS deployments which we push at Canonical), so it was a natural choice to experiment with.

Gozk is a complete binding for ZooKeeper which explores the native features of Go to facilitate the interaction with a ZooKeeper server. To avoid reimplementing the well tested bits of the protocol in an unstable way, Gozk is built on top of the standard C ZooKeeper library.

The experience of integrating ZooKeeper with Go was certainly valuable on itself, and worked as a nice way to learn the details of integrating the Go language with a C library. If you’re interested in learning a bit about Go, ZooKeeper, or other details related to the creation of bindings and asynchronous programming, please fasten the seatbelt now.

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Gocheck: A rich testing library for Go

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It’s time to release my “side project” which has been evolving over the last several months: Gocheck. I’ve been watching Go for some time, and have been getting more and more interested in the language. My first attempt to write something interesting in it made it obvious that there would be benefit in having a richer testing platform than what is available in the standard library. That said, I do understand why the standard one is slim: it’s pretty minimalist, because it’s used by itself to test the rest of the platform. With Gocheck, though, I don’t have that requirement. I’m able to trust that the standard library works well, and focus on having features which will make me more productive while writing tests, including features such as:

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Integrating IRC with LDAP and two-way SMSing

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A bit of history

I don’t know exactly why, but I’ve always enjoyed IRC bots. Perhaps it’s the fact that it emulates a person in an easy-to-program way, or maybe it’s about having a flexible and shared “command line” tool, or maybe it’s just the fact that it helps people perceive things in an asynchronous way without much effort. Probably a bit of everything, actually.

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Released editmoin 1.15

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Version 1.15 of editmoin is now available.

The following changes were made:

  • Moin used to work with numerical IDs for identification, and editmoin was still based on this model. This release adds support for direct authentication as available in current Moin releases. This was inspired by Reimar Bauer.
  • The new file ~/.moin_users is now parsed to obtain usernames, supporting the feature above. Shortcuts are also supported in this file.
  • Added support for textcha question handling.

Xpresser – Python library for GUI automation with image matching

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In a hurry?

Go check it out!

The context

A while ago I found out about Sikuli, a very interesting project which allows people to script actions in GUIs based on screenshot excerpts. The idea is that you basically take images representing portions of your screen, like a button, or a label, or an icon, and then create a script which can detect a position in the screen which resembles one of these images, and perform actions on them, such as clicking, or hovering.

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The last 4 years (and the next N?)

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Some interesting changes have been happening in my professional life, so I wanted to share it here to update friends and also for me to keep track of things over time (at some point I will be older and will certainly laugh at what I called “interesting changes” in the ol’days). Given the goal, I apologize but this may come across as more egocentric than usual, so please feel free to jump over to your next blog post at any time.

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Geocaching on the Easter Island

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This post is not about what you think it is, unfortunately. I actually do hope to go to the Easter Island at some point, but this post is about a short story which involves geohash.org, Groundspeak (from geocaching.com), and very very poor minded behavior.

The context

So, before anything else, it’s important to understand what geohash.org is. As announced when the service was launched (also as a post on Groundspeak’s own forum), geohash.org offers short URLs which encode a latitude/longitude pair, so that referencing them in emails, forums, and websites is more convenient, and that’s pretty much it.

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Wiki + Spreadsheet

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The underlying concept is very simple: spreadsheets are a way to organize text, numbers and formulas into what might be seen as a natively numeric environment: a matrix. So what would happen if we loosed some of the bolts of the numeric-oriented organization, and tried to reuse the same concepts into a more formatting-oriented environment which is naturally collaborative: a wiki.

While I do encourage you to answer this with some fantastic new online service (please provide me with an account and the best e-book reader device available once you’re rich) I had a try at answering this question myself a while ago by writing the Calc macro for Moin.

Basically, the Calc macro allows extracting values found in a wiki page into lists (think columns or rows), and applying formulas and further formatting as wanted.

I believe there’s a lot of potential on the basic concept, and the prototype, even though functional and useful, surely has a lot to evolve, so I’ve published the project in Launchpad to make contributions easier. I actually apologize for not publishing it earlier. There was hope that more features would be implemented before releasing, but now it’s clear that it won’t get many improvements from me anytime soon. If you do decide to improve it, please try to prepare patches which are mostly ready for integration, including full testing, since I can’t dedicate much time for it myself in the foreseeable future.

Google using Geohash

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According to Dave Troy, Google seems to be using the Geohash algorithm:

Google is employing the GeoHash algorithm I’ve been pushing to do spatial searching using BigTable. Since database schemes like BigTable don’t support traditional GIS extensions/spatial indexes, GeoHash allows for a simple bounding box search using truncated GeoHash substrings. I will post separately about this shortly, as I am working on some GeoHash tools to expand this functionality. This is of particular interest to AppEngine developers.

Nice!