Fun with ones and zeros - bugs

Simple debugging output in C

2011-04-03T18:35:29-07:00

I don't do a whole lot of C programming, but when I do it tends to be in difficult environments like Apache modules or Samba VFS modules, where you can't just do simple printfs to get some output from your program.

I've come up with this small chunk of code I can plop in a C file to allow for optionally writing out useful information to a file somewhere on the disk.

#ifdef DEBUG_FILENAME
    #include <stdarg.h>
    #include <stdio.h>
    #include <time.h>
    #define QUOTE(name) #name
    #define STR(macro) QUOTE(macro)

    static void debug_log(const char *msg, ...) {
        char timestamp[32]; // really only need 21 bytes here
        time_t now;
        va_list ap;
        FILE *f;

        now = time(NULL);
        strftime(timestamp, sizeof(timestamp), "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S ", localtime(&now));

        f = fopen(STR(DEBUG_FILENAME), "a");

        fputs(timestamp, f);

        va_start(ap, msg);
        vfprintf(f, msg, ap);
        va_end(ap);

        fputc('\n', f);
        fclose(f);
    }
#else
    #define debug_log
#endif

Within your program, you'd just sprinkle in calls to debug_log() with a format string and optional arguments, such as:

x = 5;
y = 10;
debug_log("Currently, x=%d, y=%d", x, y);

The code can then be enabled and configured to output to /tmp/foo.log (for example), by adding either

#define DEBUG_FILENAME /tmp/foo.log

to the top of your source file, or even more slickly for some things, from the commandline with

cc -DDEBUG_FILENAME=/tmp/foo.log myprogram.c

When the program is run, in your /tmp/foo.log file you'd find something like:

2011-04-03 20:30:05 Currently, x=5, y=10

If you don't define DEBUG_FILENAME, the code basically goes away, shouldn't take up any space in your binary at all.

RabbitMQ FreeBSD port

2008-09-01T17:29:06-07:00

I was happy to see a FreeBSD port added for RabbitMQ, net/rabbitmq, although I found a couple problems with it: it doesn't start automatically when your machine or jail boots, and when building the rabbitmq-erlang-client, it errors out with:

src/amqp_channel.erl:28: can't find include lib "rabbitmq_server/include/rabbit.hrl"
src/amqp_channel.erl:29: can't find include lib "rabbitmq_server/include/rabbit_framing.hrl"

I worked on the port a bit, and submitted a bug report and patch, ports/127033, that fixes these problems.

Full Text Searching with SQLite

2006-12-03T16:20:17-08:00

I'd like to add a search feature back on this site. Previously, I had an arrangement setup with PyBlosxom and ht://Dig, but now that it's Django-powered, I'd like to do something that worked directly from the database instead of crawling the site like ht://Dig did.

After looking a while at various text search engines, I remembered seeing that SQLite just added an FTS1 module in version 3.3.8, which sounds pretty easy to use. Unfortunately the FreeBSD port databases/sqlite3 doesn't build with that feature.

After poking around a bit, I got it to build with FTS manually, and after a whole bunch more messing around, came up with a patch to add an option to the port to build sqlite3 with FTS. The patch has been submitted to the FreeBSD bug tracker as ports/106281. Hopefully I have all my ducks lined up on that.

Anyhow, in testing the FTS a bit, I found one thing they only hint at on the SQLite website. There's a Porter stemmer built in, even though the wiki says: "The module does not perform stemming of any sort." You activate it by adding tokenize porter to the table declaration, for example (adapted from their example).

CREATE VIRTUAL TABLE recipe USING FTS1(name, ingredients, tokenize porter);

once you've done that, and inserted some sample data:

INSERT INTO recipe VALUES('broccoli stew', 'broccoli peppers cheese tomatoes');

the searches don't have to be quite as exact, for example:

SELECT name FROM recipe WHERE ingredients MATCH 'pepper'

hits the 'broccoli stew' recipe even through it has 'peppers' and you searched for 'pepper'.

Not sure why the Porter stemmer isn't documented in the SQLite wiki, perhaps it's still a work in progress or being changed for FTS2.

Django, SCGI, and AJP

2006-11-20T18:33:44-08:00

I've been doing a lot with Django lately, and initially set it up using mod_python as the Django docs recommend, but still have some reservations about that kind of arrangement. I'd like to go back to running it under SCGI or something similar.

Django has support builtin for FastCGI, but after trying to install mod_fastcgi in my Apache 2.0.x setup, decided it was a PITA. mod_scgi is quite easy to setup in Apache (even though the documentation is mostly nonexistent). After finding where Django implements its FastCGI support using the flup module, I saw that with just a few minor tweaks Django could be made to support all of flup's protocols, including SCGI and AJP (Apache Jserv Protocol).

AJP turns out to be very interesting because it's included standard with Apache 2.2 as mod_proxy_ajp, and can work with mod_proxy_balancer - meaning you could setup multiple Django instances and have Apache share the load between them.

After testing a bit, I submitted a patch, and will probably switch to running my Django sites as AJP servers managed by daemontools, and frontended by Apache 2.2

mod_python segfault fixed

2006-02-12T19:40:49-08:00

Just as a followup, it seems the segfault in mod_python on FreeBSD I mentioned before was found and fixed. Turns out to not be any kind of pointer/memory corruption like I thought, but rather a mishandled return code from an APR (Apache Portable Runtime) function. Oh well, I got to play with gdb, ddd, and valgrind a bit, which is good stuff to be familiar with.