Matt Williams

Author's details

Name: Matt Williams
Date registered: August 9, 2008
URL: http://matt@matthewkwilliams.com

Biography

Matt Williams lives in Columbus, OH, in a house filled with computers, cats, books and fiber. Pursuing the goal of being a modern Renaissance person, he plays with his daughter, cooks, roasts coffee, reads, weaves, studies, and hacks, including crazy ideas like a Cloud in a Box. Docker has been an especial passion since June of 2013.

Latest posts

Weaving with Light Pt. 1 — August 31, 2016
Abusing HAProxy: Stupid Simple Easy Dashboards — June 24, 2016
Rules for Operations — April 25, 2016
DevOps Creed (Work in Progress) — April 24, 2016
I am not a Mindreader: a mini-saga — April 11, 2016

Author's posts listings

Oct 08

Semantic Web

Categories:

philosophy, programming

by Matt Williams

I have been doing some site scraping of late. And as a result, I have really come to appreciate the semantic web. It’d make life infinitely easier for grabbing data. Of course there are other, better reasons for using the semantic web, but right now, it’d make a difference in my life.

Tags: semantic web

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Oct 07

Dear Mr. Designer

Categories:

idiocy, rants

by Matt Williams

Generally, if you are working with an external library, such as yui, it’s not a good idea to override the css for a widget’s css class. That means that every instance of the widget will have that property, whether you want it to or not. Moreover, it means that in order to fix it, you …

Tags: design, rant, snark

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Sep 25

JBoss run.sh may be harmful

Categories:

gotchas, jboss

by Matt Williams

A coworker and I discovered an issue with jboss’ run.sh (which starts the app server). The problem lies in different flavours of unix (or unix-like) shells returning different values for wait. The relevant code is:

      # Wait until the background process exits
      WAIT_STATUS=0
      while [ "$WAIT_STATUS" -ne 127 ]; do
         JBOSS_STATUS=$WAIT_STATUS
         wait $JBOSS_PID 2>/dev/null
         WAIT_STATUS=$?
      done

# Wait until the background process exits

WAIT_STATUS=0

while [ "$WAIT_STATUS" -ne 127 ]; do

JBOSS_STATUS=$WAIT_STATUS

wait $JBOSS_PID 2>/dev/null

WAIT_STATUS=$?

done

This is all well and good in linux — redhat uses /bin/bash and ubuntu uses /bin/dash for /bin/sh — …

Tags: gotchas, jboss, shell

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Sep 22

JRuby + jmx4r + rrd4j == Easy reporting on app servers (part I)

Categories:

howto, jruby, monitoring, programming

by Matt Williams

This is a how-to for using jmx and rrd4j, a java implementation of rrdtool, to report on app server statistics. Thanks to Jeff Mesnil(author of jmx4r), Werner Schuster (JMX the Ruby way with jmx4r), sishen (JRobin sucks), and the rrd4j team. You’ll need the following: JVM 1.5 or higher — JRE is not enough, you …

Tags: jmx, jruby, rrd4j, rrdtools, ruby

2 comments

Sep 22

JRuby to check connectivity…

Categories:

jruby, programming

by Matt Williams

I had an issue reported by a developer where their jboss connection pool wasn’t working properly. It looked good to me, so I decided to verify that everything worked in so far as connectivity from the box. So, I used the following jruby script to help:

require 'rubygems'
require 'jdbc'
require 'java'
Java::oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver
url = "jdbc:oracle:thin:@SERVER:1521:DB"
user = "user"
pass = "pass"
conn = java.sql.DriverManager.get_connection(url,user,pass)
stmt = conn.create_statement
query = "select 1 from dual"
rss = stmt.execute_query(query)
puts rss.next?                  # did we get anything?

require 'rubygems'

require 'jdbc'

require 'java'

Java::oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver

url = "jdbc:oracle:thin:@SERVER:1521:DB"

user = "user"

pass = "pass"

conn = java.sql.DriverManager.get_connection(url,user,pass)

stmt = conn.create_statement

query = "select 1 from dual"

rss = stmt.execute_query(query)

puts rss.next? # did we get anything?

Tags: jdbc, jruby, oracle

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Sep 17

Digging out

Categories:

administrivia

by Matt Williams

Columbus, OH got hit with the remnants of Ike. Large segments still don’t have power (and won’t fora while). So, connectivity is really spotty & I’m behind in a big way. So, if you’ve commented and it’s not been approved or is not replied to, please understand.

This post has no tag

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Sep 12

Class is Class, and Instance, Instance, and never the twain shall meet

Categories:

eating crow, gotchas, programming, ruby, Uncategorized

by Matt Williams

More about methods, it’s inspired/spurred by a comment on methods, public_methods, and private_methods by Pit Captain. It also corrects some misconceptions I had (and may have (wrongly) given others). I’ve added a new category, “eating crow” for this and any other postings where I step back and re-evaluate my posts. This is to keep me …

Tags: crow, gotchas, programming, ruby

2 comments

Sep 11

methods, public_methods, and private_methods

Categories:

programming, ruby, tips

by Matt Williams

Ruby’s Object has a method, methods. You can use it to see the methods which an object has. Sort of. In this post I’m examining methods, public_methods, and private_methods as well as some of their implications.

Tags: programming, ruby

3 comments

Sep 11

universal cat redux

Categories:

programming, refactoring, ruby, utilities

by Matt Williams

I have a neglectful relationship with inject. That is, I neglect to remember that it exists, having worked for so long with other languages which are “unfamiliar with the concept”. Amos King’s blog entry on Inject & Me – BFFs got me to thinking that ucat (see cat on steroids (or cat on a hot …

Tags: programming, refactoring, ruby, utilities

2 comments

Sep 10

cat on steroids (or cat on a hot ruby roof)

Categories:

programming, ruby, utilities

by Matt Williams

I got to thinking about SuperIO and how it could be used as a swiss army chainsaw to open files, whereever they might be on the net. From there, my fevered mind got to thinking about cat and how the two could be used together. That said, I present ucat — a universal cat, if …

Tags: programming, ruby, utilities

1 comment

Ramblings

Musings of Matt Williams

Matt Williams

Author's details

Biography

Latest posts

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Author's posts listings

Semantic Web

Dear Mr. Designer

JBoss run.sh may be harmful

JRuby + jmx4r + rrd4j == Easy reporting on app servers (part I)

JRuby to check connectivity…

Digging out

Class is Class, and Instance, Instance, and never the twain shall meet

methods, public_methods, and private_methods

universal cat redux

cat on steroids (or cat on a hot ruby roof)

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