• Exploring a 23 years old code base: LambdaMoo MUD Part 1

    calendar Apr 4, 2018 · 4 min read
     en featured software
     ·
    Share on: linkedin copy
    Exploring a 23 years old code base: LambdaMoo MUD Part 1

    On these days my greek daemon (the one which talk to me about deep nerd programming) was interested on LambdaMoo.

    LambdaMoo is an Object Oriented Multi User Dungeon born back in 1995. A MUD was a text based system you log in, talk with other, create adventures and so on. LambdaMoo has a script language and the entrire system could be customized.

    The LambdaMoo last version 1.8.3 was a work in progress in 2008. LambdaMoo today is 23 years old.

    So my daemon asked me: if you were able to do a  tech refresh of LambdaMoo, waht will you eventually suggest?

    To respond to this question, I need to study the original code


    Read More

  • OpsDev

    calendar Mar 23, 2018 · 2 min read
     devops en humor
     ·
    Share on: linkedin copy

    From an internal email of a very very big corporate company

    Incident Background: BIGPROJECT has been unavailable since APAC SOD due to a data refresh activity being wrongly triggered in from UAT to Production environments.

    Business Impact

    1. BIGPROJECT is unavailable for all users in the bank
    2. BIGPROJECT2 platform which sits on BIGPROJECT is unavailable this includes the Click-to-chat serviceCurrent Status
    3. Initial attempt of flashback Database to restore from the last good restore point failed due to errors due to absence of flashback logs– this was a quicker option, but now ruled out.
    • Currently going ahead with full restoration in the Primary database – this activity is tentatively supposed to take 8-9 hours (in place of 6 hours earlier mentioned)
    [...manual recovery instruction follows... ]

    After 5 hours in another email they dare to say:


    Read More

  • New Syntax library: Crayon

    calendar Mar 14, 2018 · 1 min read
     en site
     ·
    Share on: linkedin copy

    After some trial and error, I decided to switch to a new syntax highlighter library, mostly because the old one stopped working. I am very satisfied with Crayon because it is backward compatible with  the previous plugin based on SyntaxHighlighter3 and offer also a nice in-line editor.


    Read More

  • Emacs absolute minimum setup

    calendar Mar 7, 2018 · 1 min read
     en  · emacs lisp
     ·
    Share on: linkedin copy

    Sometimes I need a very very fast start on emacs. If you have the same need, put this in your init.el and live happy:


    Read More

  • Evolution of Service Architecture

    calendar Feb 27, 2018 · 5 min read
     en featured  · k8s unix
     ·
    Share on: linkedin copy

    Assembly: the only way

    In principle there was only one: assembly machine language. Hardware and software engineer was a one-role.

    The guy who was able to project a chip, was the one who was able to program it.


    Read More