venerdì 29 maggio 2015

Me, myself and Dataflex

I hate Dataflex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataFlex with a passion!
Well, when I say that I hate Dataflex I should say I hate the so called "console" mode Dataflex, the only one I've ever worked on. And I have to also say that part of my hate is due to a wrong training, or better, no training at all.

How did I ever meet Dataflex (df31d)? Well, you know, the rent is a good motivation to work with tools you don't like very much.
Since the beginning the language itself appeared awkward to me. Coming from some real languages (C, Perl, Java), I felt not at home with a language case-insensitive.
The total lack of braces and the return to the BEGIN-END syntax was quite a shock.
No multi-line comments.
A compiler that crashed each time you had a line longer than 256 characters...and no, I'm not joking! I don't remember how many hours I spent trying to understand why a program was not compiling at all, without any error message, to just discover that somewhere I had a quite complex IF clause (indented) that has exceed the right margin. And I have to say that I often laugth thinking at this stupid bug, probably implemented in a way I only have seen in didactic examples of C such as:

#define MAX_LINE_SIZE 256
...
char current_line[ MAX_LINE_SIZE ];

However, I started writing my programs, and as usual with a new language, my first developments were baby steps in the Dataflex world. My programs were simple, written in a simple and well documented way, so that they looked even more stupid to me.

There was not an IDE to develop in Dataflex, so I fired up my Emacs to the aim. But it was not a simple task, since Dataflex was displaying masks on the screen using the DOS character set, that at that time was not shipped with Emacs. I had therefore to compile the appropriate encoding, add to Emacs, and configure the editor to load such encoding for every Dataflex file (.frm). At that time I was at the very basic of Emacs, and so it was quite an hard job to me.

As I said, I was coming from some experience with real languages, and if you can pass over the syntax and the buggy compiler, you cannot live without methods. Well, my Dataflex was without methods. I had two choice: define a "routine", invoked via a far jump (GOSUB) or use labels to far jump to other pieces of the programs (GOTO).


The operator set was...tiny. Moreover, many operators were verbatim, so that comparisons use GT,GE,LE,LT and so on.
Assignment was performed via a MOVE...TO command. If my memory serves me well, the only "smart" arithmetic operators were INCREMENT and DECREMENT.

To complete the nightmare, I did not have any kind of good documentation (and I was not able to find out any on the Web).

But you have the opportunity to define "macros", in the C language sense. Ok, this sounds good, until you clash some variable or loop name.

Last but not least, the compiler was reporting errors at lines with macro expanded. In other words, while the compiler was reporting an error on line X, your error could be a lot before due to some macro expansion.

After a while I was working with all this mess, I found the special DEBUG command. The purpose was to print out to the screen at which line the program was executing. But it was not very helpful, since it was just printing out a number (like 123) on the screen exactly where the cursor was, so filling your application of digits making me feeling I was looking at the Matrix screen.

Next I discovered the -v switch on the compiler, and I found it could be increased at least to -vvv to get more verbose messages. Or better, the messages were obscure as usual, but the processed file (with macro expanded) was printed on the screen, so that you can find out the line number with more accuracy.

Then came methods. Yeah! A great day, one that made me feel a bit more at home.
Well, methods in Dataflex are not what you would expect from other languages. The prototype is extremely verbose, the invocation reminds me to lisp since you have to put the method name in parentheses (as well as arguments):

(foo(1, 2, 3))

But hey, at least you have some real reusable code without the name clashing of a macro and with a return value!

The special key handling was a pure mess! Dataflex used subroutines to handle events generated by special keys, with some confusion on what, when, and how to resume the control flow.

The database structure was...not a database structure, at least in my opinion.
If my memory serves me well, you had to define a new archive (kind of ISAM) using a specific program, that ensured that the data file and the indexes (also separated files) where in place. The fresh archive was then added to the so called filelist, that was in charge of listing all available databases (it was a kind of schema to a RDBMS). Modifying an archive (e.g., adding a field) was of course a locking operation, so you had to schedule for maintanance. And being the filelist limited in size, you had a limited number of tables/archives in your deployment.

One way to overtake the number of archive limitations was to play with user paths: as happens with the concept of search schema in RDBMS, an user can have several copy of the same archive, with the same binary structure and different content, in different disk positions. Pointing to one or another would do the trick.
We used this in particular to scatter a few utility archives among users, so that every one could have its own copy.

Relying on the file system, data corruption was dumpered by the operating system and its own file system. Using Linux, luckily, there were no many corruptions, but ship happens, and so you had to run a specific tool to reindex the whole archive. Of course, this was another full-locking operation.

In general, the speed of data retrieval was good, but the approach was that of single record (opposed to the one of whole set), and therefore all programs contained long and nested loops to extract the information you need. The relational part of the query (e.g., join) was all in charge of the developer, and therefore missing a single attribute could destroy all your retrieve logic in a subtle way.

Ok, so there were BEGIN-END, loops, GOTO/GOSUB and locking operations...but the system workded. And it worked up to a few gigabytes of data, therefore I have to say I was quite impressed about.

Of course, you did not have the flexibility of SQL, and you did not have even a way to specify a query that was not "pre-built". Allow me to elaborate a bit more: as I said, you had to define indexes for every archive. An index defines how the archive can be read, that is in which order you can loop thru the records. What if you want to retrieve the record in another order? You have to either define a new index (but you are limited by number of indexes and locking operations) or to use existing ones in an esotheric way, making your loops even more complex and your program a lot less readable.

Last but no least: an index was not only an access method, but a way to define an unique constraint. Therefore, you were locked to only a few indexes for every archive, and the rest was a huge REPL.
There was also the catch-all looping mechanism: the sequential scan of the whole archive (also known as BY RECNUM).

Adding records was quite simple, a special instruction SAVERECORD was there for the aim.
Modifying a record was a little more complex, since you had to lock via the REREAD command, modify fields and then issue a SAVERECORD followed by an UNLOCK.

Perl came to a rescue.
At that time I was mainly using shell scripting, but here I needed something a little more complex to handle all the mess left around by Dataflex. For instance, I used a Perl script to convert and mangle output text before sending it to the printer. Dataflex was absolutely not good at handling text!
I also used Perl to control how the users jumped into the Dataflex runtime, and this allowed us to ease the management of the sessions when locking operations were absolutely necessary.
Finally, I used Perl to mangle some Dataflex source code in order to avoid some boring stuff.

I have to say that, in order to automate some looping, Dataflex provided WINDOWINDEX and FIELDINDEX, two special (global) varaibles to iterate over UI and database fields. Please note that the above variables were global, so a wrong initialization could make you fly to the wrong record or field!

Now, after all this mess, I have to say that I'm aware of a lot of good uses of Dataflex, that has also a kind of OOP interface. As I told, I had to work on a lot of legacy code, and without documentation and appropriate training, it was quite impossible for me to use "advanced" features.
As final word, please note that Dataflex was a quite old language, therefore it is obvious that when compared to modern languages it looks scaring and awkward.

But sometimes I still have nightmares about Dataflex!

martedì 26 maggio 2015

Banale come farsi una fototessera

Farsi una fototessera è una operazione abbastanza comune, banale, priva quasi di significato.
Eccetto se è la tua prima volta, come è stato per me oggi.
Non proprio la prima volta che mi sono fatto fare una fototessera, ma la prima volta che me l'ha fatta uno sconosciuto.
La prima volta nella quale ho fatto caso alla professionalità alla quale ero inconsapevolmente abituato: i fondali sempre in ordine, i flash sempre al loro posto, la macchina sempre pronta e in posizione e il monitor in cui guardare il risultato. Perfino il portafoto con logo e nome.
Cose banali, dettagli quasi insignificanti che aumentano ancora di piu' il senso di distacco da chi quella fototessera la scattava.
Già, per la prima volta da quando sono nato, ho cambiato fotografo.
E oltre agli aspetti professionali, non posso che dire che quello di prima era di gran lunga il migliore che abbia mai visto all'opera.
Banale, ma sincero.

domenica 24 maggio 2015

FreeBSD and lagg at boot

I was experimenting with my FreeBSD and lagg(4), the link aggregator.
The idea is to perform a network interface teaming using more than one at the same time with a specific protocol, for instance, to provide high availability and redundancy.
So I fired up my VirtualBox instance with the more NICs I could and did some aggregation. Nothing special so far.
When I was satisfied, I tried to put the same configuration in /etc/rc.conf to enable it on boot, but here comes the problem: I was unable to create the lagg interface and, consequently, to aggregate NICs.
It tooks me a while, but finally got the hint from the rc.conf(5) man page: cloned_devices! This variable contains a list of interfaces that are clonable, and therefore created on boot.
Since it was not so simple to find out how to setup the rc.conf, the following is mine in the hope it can help anyone.


############################
## Link Aggregation Setup ##
############################
#
# First of all bring up the interface,
# then create the lagg0 interface using the
# cloned_interfaces (which in rc.conf means
# to create the interface) and then
# with a single command bring up the lagg0, specify the
# protocol to use and add each interface (laggport).
#
#
ifconfig_em1="up"
ifconfig_em2="up"
ifconfig_em3="up"
cloned_interfaces="lagg0"
ifconfig_lagg0="up laggproto roundrobin laggport em1 laggport em2 laggport em3 192.168.200.222 netmask 255.255.255.0"

sabato 23 maggio 2015

CPAN PR Challenge: May done!

In order to recover from the April failure, I decided to do my May assignment as quick as possible.
And just a few days after I was on Mouse I placed a Pull Request:
As you can see I'm still doing more a clean-up refactoring, and this allows me to improve my Perl skills and learn about the module I'm working on. By the way, I tried also to fix up an official issue.

Qt compie 20 anni

Il mondo sta festeggiando 20 anni di Qt.
Come vola il tempo.
Per chi non lo sapesse Qt è un framework grafico che si è molto esteso nel tempo. E' scritto in C++, originariamente da TrollTech, una ditta norvegese. L'utilizzo forse piu' ampio e conosciuto di Qt è nel desktop grafico KDE.

Personalmente ho incontrato Qt per caso, nel 1999. O meglio, ero già al corrente di Qt, ma non avevo mai guardato sotto al cofano. Ebbene nel 1999 ho trovato un articolo su Linux Magazine che spiegava come creare una piccola applicazione grafica con le librerie KDE, che in effetti ricordano molto quelle di Qt sulle quali si appoggiano.
Da lì ho iniziato a esplorare l'universo Qt, facendo arrivare anche il Tucano Book (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781565925885.do). Ahimé, nonostante l'interesse costante per Qt, non ho mai avuto l'opportunità di usarlo in un progetto di produzione, ma solo per piccoli progetti personali.

Qt mi ha insegnato molte cose.
Anzitutto la documentazione è eccellente (specialmente se comparata a quella delle KDELibs, che a mio parere è lacunosa).
L'API è straordinariamente semplice e coerente, cosa che non ho trovato in nessun altro framework analogo.
La gestione della persistenza database è semplicemente disarmante: nessun altro framework/ORM riesce a dare gli stessi risultati in termini di codice.
Il codice risultante è sempre compatto, chiaro, e conciso.
Il concetto di signal/slot è apparentemente piu' complesso rispetto a quello di eventi/handler di altri framework, ma alla fine risulta di gran lunga piu' elengate.

Qt è definitivamente per me l'esempio di come dovrebbe essere una libreria.

venerdì 22 maggio 2015

Improvements to a little Perl script to find out duplicated files

I made a few changes to my little Perl script that finds duplicated files on a set of directories.
I always wanted to use File::Find::Rule, and this has been an appropriate context for plugging the module in so that the code now looks as follows:

die "\nPlease specify one or more directories\n" unless ( @ARGV );

my $files = {};
File::Find::Rule->file()
->nonempty()
->exec( sub{ push @{ $files->{ digest_file( $_[2], "SHA-1" ) } }, $_[2]; } )
->in( @ARGV );

while ( my ($sha1, $files) = each %$files ){
say "\n\n#Duplicated files: \n\t#rm " . join( "\n\t#rm ", @$files ) if ( @$files >= 1 );
}

As you can see I've also removed a few tests for the arguments, since I rely on the in() method to check that every entry in @ARGV is a directory.

CPAN PR Challenge: April skipped!

I totally missed the April assignment.
I was assigned to Net::Pcap, that was definetively too much complex for my skills.
And besides, I did not have even time to study it in deep.
Sorry guys.