F = T ∇ Sτ

A lot of management practices are used to optimize to current state of the projects and get the situation under control, but it does not always work as intended. Unfortunately, many people think that just applying the required process does the trick, however, in many cases it does not. I've published the presentation Management Tactics regarding that, and you can find the corresponding notes with the detailed explanations below.

I would like to present my pet project: A Sample of Lambda Architecture Project, the boilerplate for detecting IoT sensor anomalies using the Lambda architecture. It's based on Akka/Scala cluster, and utilizes Cassandra database and Redis in-memory data store.

Debugging issues with LinuxKit images could be a serious challenge in some cases. Unfortunately, the documentation is not full enough to cover all the caveats, and in this article I'm going to show the general principle how to deal with arbitrary containers and run the commands in them.

LinuxKit is a promising toolkit for building secure, portable and lean operating systems for containers. One of its advantages is having a predictable container set (in other words, installed packages in the system), hence providing a homomorphic environment for QA and benchmarking tests. However, the project is fairly new, and users may have problems setting and running it up, especially on the real hardware. The documentation and packages are under way, but it's already possible to get it working.

The Scala/Java environment has a certain lack of features regarding process management - it's in a very good shape, but sometimes we need more. It's totally understable considering that the underlaying system is the JVM (in most cases), however once in a while we have to leave the sandbox. That was the case I've faced, and it got me to the problem how to get the ID of the process I started in JVM for various operating systems.

C printf() function doesn't flush buffers by default, and a lot of code using it may miss this, therefore creating interactivity problems to the end user. It's not specific to C though - it's about the standard I/O streams, and the problem may appear anywhere. The post is based on StackExchange discussion, so you can dig deeper if you want: Turn off buffering in pipe.

Xcode build locations may mislead developers hoping to fully control the output of the IDE. While we can use CONFIGURATION_BUILD_DIR for the xcodebuild tool during continuous integration, IDE generates files in different locations, and sometimes we want to control it too.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/grammar-checker/

This is a maintenance release that has fixed the compatibility issues with the LanguageTool API v2 (the current one) and the new Thunderbird API. No functionality has been added, but now the add-on actually works.

Development of the add-on have been moved to Github: https://github.com/nuald/thb-gramchecker

Unfortunately, I can't actively maintain the add-on, but all pull requests are welcomed.

Android build toolchain, albeit being powerful, sometimes lacks some essential functionality required for the modern software development. In particular, running instrumented unit-tests in the CI environment: those tests require a device or a simulator running, however developers need some scripting to make it work.

To simplify the task, I've created a Gradle task that verifies if any Android device or simulator is connected. If not, the task launches a simulator with the first AVD in the list (or fails if no AVDs are found). It's up to you to make the dependencies for the connectedCheck task. The sample output:

> ./gradlew connect --info

...

:AndroidSampleApp:connect (Thread[main,5,main]) started.
:AndroidSampleApp:connect
Executing task ':AndroidSampleApp:connect' (up-to-date check took 0.001 secs) due to:
  Task has not declared any outputs.
Detecting devices...
Launching emulator for Nexus_5_API_25 ...
:AndroidSampleApp:connect (Thread[main,5,main]) completed. Took 14.18…