The 12th DCC regional roadshow will take place on 6th and 7th June at the McClay library, Queen’s University Belfast. The roadshow is being organised in conjunction with Queen’s University Belfast. Turns out to be far more informative than I originally thought. Lot’s of real life examples of what people are doing and what’s relavent. It’s not the usual workshop, conference or meeting that I would attend.
It seems Joey Hess is in the process of getting git-annex assistant crowd funded. I had not been keeping up to date too much in the last year with git-annex partly because it met my needs and I never needed to upgrade to the latest tip. There are a number of really cool features now which is making git-annex more accessible. I particularly like how the merge and sync workflows have now been pretty much scripted so there is less to go wrong!
After almost 3 months supervising and working with two interns I’ve finally uploaded their work under the GPLv2 License. https://github.com/jcftang/dri-api https://github.com/jcftang/dris-workflows https://github.com/jcftang/dris-workflows-site https://github.com/jcftang/node-dri https://github.com/jcftang/node-fedora Please note that the packages above do not represent DRI at all, they just ended up getting labelled that way for whatever reason. So what are the above packages? Well they are an attempt at creating a workflow for the DRIS team in TCD who work on digital preservation, digitisation, cataloging and a host of other tasks which I probably don’t know about.
I’ve been keeping an eye on ceph for quite sometime now. It looks like ceph is almost ready for production usage. There is now a support infrastructure and a commercial company backing the product. So far the OSD, MDS and MON components all run on Linux since most of the implementation appears to be in the user land I wonder if it will be ported to non-linux platforms. It’s be quite nifty if one could have a heterogeneous network of servers providing storage.
In the world of digital preservation and repositories it seems that there is primarily fedora-commons, dspace, eprints and one or two other solutions out there for building up digital preservation systems. The one that really stands out as a framework and toolkit for building bigger and more complex systems is fedora-commons. It also happens to be written in JAVA and is a fairly big and complex system which implements best-practices for storing digital objects with the sole purpose of preservation.
It seems that git-subtree has been merged into the mainline git project. git-subtree is one of those really useful wrappers for manipulating git repositories if you are an integrator or don’t really like git-submodule. It certainly is a nicer alternative to git-submodule. There is less chance of the person cloning a git-subtree repository messing up the checkout because they forgot to initialise the submodules. There is also the added advantage of not needing to fiddle around scripting up the git-archive commands for exporting the source tree for a release if you use git-subtree; actually git-subtree is just plain useful.
This time the usergroup meeting is in BSC in Spain (this place is cool, I’ve been at BSC for a few conferences and meetings before). I wish I was doing some HPC right now, I’m very tempted to submit an abstract or two on the last two things with slurm that I was involved with. The php-slurm package needs some love, its somewhat in use at work. I just wish I had more time to fix the memory leaks.
This tool hasn’t been around for too long, but long enough to make it into quite a few distros. It looks like it’s a good alternative to autossh and tmux which I have been using for the past few years. Like many new tools like this, if it’s not around everywhere it’s not as useful as it could be. The only minor criticism of the application is that the mosh command itself is written in perl, it would be nicer if the wrapper command would be written in C/C++ like the rest of the application.
Looks like an interesting and useful tool, must take note of this tool for later use to kill all bugs that are found in the projects that we work on, well java ones at least. Anything to help squash bugs is good!
One of the issues with with dogfooding your own projects to accelerate development might be the lack of control and feedback from the specifications and requirements process. To try and mitigate this effect, automated testing should be done, that is specification, feature and behavioural testing. Call it what you will, but the basic idea is to get a common understanding between the stakeholder, project owner and developer to understand what is being built and to write automated tests collectively to ensure that it is being delivered.