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In a recent post, I explained how to install the Thrift RPC framework on OS X 10.5. Another scenario that doesn’t install as advertised out of the box is building Thrift on Ubuntu server. Again, an issue with pkg.m4 is to blame – follow the steps below to get Thrift built on your Ubuntu system:

As in the previous guide start by getting the latest revision of the Thrift library, and extract the archive.

Install the necessary prerequisites, which is much easier than on OS X thanks to apt. Fire up a terminal, and use apt-get to pull everything. Substitute java5 with your favorite jdk, if you’re not a fan of the Sun implementation.

apt-get install libboost-dev libevent-dev build-essential
python-dev automake pkg-config libtool flex bison sun-java5-jdk

Now, for the pkg.m4 workaround!

cd [thrift root]
cp /usr/share/aclocal/pkg.m4 aclocal/

At this point, all that remains is to build Thrift. (If you want Ruby support, add ruby-dev to the apt-get list above, and get rid of the ruby flag below.)

./bootstrap.sh
./configure --with-ruby=no
make
sudo make install

Enjoy!

Thrift is a efficient framework for cross-language serialization and RPC that recently became an Apache Incubator project. It’s definately a cool project to check out if you are building a high traffic web application or are writing distributed computing code. Installing the framework on OS X isn’t currently totally straightforward, provided below is a guide to get Thrift built on OS X Leopard.

First, gather required sources – Thrift depends on the Boost and libevent libraries, grab the latest revisions of each and then download the latest Thrift snapshot.

Build Boost first:

cd [boost root]
./configure
sudo make install

This takes a while, go make a cup of coffee – and when it finishes build libevent, which takes much less time:

cd [libevent root]
./configure
make
sudo make install

At this point is where most Thrift builds will run into trouble, as the pkg.m4 file required by autoconf in upcoming steps does not get correctly found.The following error will be encountered when trying to configure the package:

./configure: line 21183: syntax error near
unexpected token `MONO,'
./configure: line 21183: `  PKG_CHECK_MODULES(MONO, mono >= 1.2.6,
have_mono=yes, have_mono=no)'

The official faq says that in order to get this file, one should install macports, and then use it to install pkg-config – but as macports is a colossal pain in the ass, we’ll do something else.  The pkg.m4 file is also installed when X11 is installed off the OS install disc, and since X11 is something you can’t live without if you’re working on or with mainstream open source software, that is the route we will take. After installing X11 (not shown here, because it just consists of running the installer package on the OS X disc), do the following to get pkg.m4 where it needs to be:

cd [thrift root]
cp /usr/X11/share/aclocal/pkg.m4 aclocal/

After doing this, Thrift can build without issues, which will take some time, but not nearly as long as Boost did:

./bootstrap.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install

Hope this helps anyone trying to write Thrift code on OS X!

Jeff Atwood of the popular Coding Horror blog, has a new site in closed Beta right now called StackOverflow. It’s awesome and is addictive as hell. The site has a digg style interface for programmers to interact and ask each other questions, and hopefully this will be the nail in the coffin for that godforsaken hell hole known as Experts Exchange, and their ROT13 nonsense. I got fast tracked on the waiting list (apparently already in the thousands?) by transcribing a section of the project’s weekly podcast, and this will definitely be a site that I hit up 10 or more times a day.

 In my brief experience with StackOverflow so far, I’ve noticed a handful of innovative and interesting features that I think make this site stand out regardless of its content matter. I really like the fact that the site uses openID, because unless sites start using it – it’s not going to gain critical mass, and I don’t feel it was that inconvenient to signup for one. This site actually made me finally go take the 15 seconds to acquire one from verisign, and I’m glad that they finally made me get around to doing this.  The interaction model also seems much more solid than a regular forum, in its methods for the community to self-police and up/down mod posts via a reputation based system. What this boils down to, is that if you ask good questions, or provide good answers – other users will notice and boost your reputation, which increases your standing in the community and allows you to have more influence on the site. For example, until I hit 100 reputation, I lack the authority to down-mod anything which will be an effective measure against griefers and spammers.Looking at how StackOverflow is handling their beta, I will admit right now I intend to steal their process for managing signups and feedback because it is that solid, and imitation is the highest form of compliment. Signups for the beta are handled via a Google Spreadsheet form, which is quick and painless to set up – requiring maybe 15 minutes tops to get running, and that’s assuming you didn’t already have a Google account. Second, the developers are leveraging a new service called uservoice.com, which allows them to have a Dell Ideastorm feedback system at no cost, and no effort. This is huge. A public beta is useless if you can’t get effective feedback from your users, and I guarantee that my new venture pip.io will be using this webservice.

If you haven’t gotten your name on the waiting list yet, do it now. Even at closed beta, the community is vibrant and lively. At 8 AM CST I was able to ask a question regarding good workarounds for the fact that Java has no unsigned byte primitive and got 3 answers within 10 minutes. This is awesome, don’t wait, this site is going to become the defacto place to get programming answers online.

In an old episode of the Simpsons, Homer reveals that his aol account is ‘Chunkylover53′. Someone has gained access to this account and has posted in the away message:

 ’CHECK OUT THE NEW SIMPSONS EPISODE THAT WE’RE ONLY RELEASING TO THE INTERNET AIM FANS! BE THE FIRST TO EXPERIENCE THE MAGIC BY CLICKING THE FOLLOWING LINK: http://d4.myfreefilehosting.com

SELECT RUN, (or RUN from current location) OR save to DESKTOP and DOUBLE CLICK!

ENJOY, AND SEND US YOUR FEEDBACK!‘

This link points towards a kimya.exe (hmm, why would a video file be a windows executable?) My virus scanner shows this to be the trojan Truko-431.

As I doubt Homer Simpson is the kind of guy looking to mess up my system with malware, I wonder what kind of jerk would want to hack him? As I would assume that Matt Groening or one of the other Simpsons cabal created this account, has someone compromised one of their systems?

UPDATE:

Whomever has access to this account is now posting the following away message, probably because the first one was too obvious.


The link is now fixed everyone.

CHECK OUT THE NEW SIMPSONS EPISODE THAT WE’RE ONLY RELEASING TO THE INTERNET AIM FANS! BE THE FIRST TO EXPERIENCE THE MAGIC BY CLICKING THE FOLLOWING LINK: http://66.197.197.101/~ydelcom/Episode439.exe

SELECT RUN, (or RUN from current location) OR save to DESKTOP and DOUBLE CLICK!

If the hyperlink is unavailable to you, you can copy and paste it into your browser.

ENJOY, AND SEND US YOUR FEEDBACK!

I carefully downloaded this file, and it has an identical md5 hash as the originally posted kimya.exe. Are people really this stupid? Doing a whois on the ip address provided the email address abuse@hostnoc.net, and I’ve informed them about their service being used to spam trojan horses. So far exploration on this server hasn’t provided much of interest, but it’s still early.

It continues to elude the top brass at Microsoft that the world has changed and Windows 7 manager Steven Sinofsky is doing his best to ensure that the next offering of their desktop operating system will be just as big of a commercial flop as the version that preceded it. In an interview with Ina Fried of CNET’s Crave blog posted yesterday, Sinofsky was asked some very broad questions about the next version of Windows and basically refused to elaborate on anything other than the fact that it will be the successor to Vista. He then goes on to mention that a classic closed-doors development model is not outdated for the production of software.

In the age of Web 2.0 and agile software development this is quite possibly the stupidest thing someone could say, and further proof that Microsoft is on an express train to irrelevance. Rule #1 of business is “give the customer what they want”, and the gurus in Redmond haven’t learned yet that it might be beneficial to ask. Imagine all of the often complained about “features” present in Vista that might have been refined to a level of acceptability or removed if the Windows team had set up something like Dell’s Ideastorm? Windows users would be able to gripe about things that they don’t like, and ask for things that Microsoft committee groupthink hasn’t imagined – so that by the time the product actually ships… people might actually want to buy it! This is underscored by the philosophies of agile development where you are constantly in contact with your customer and making incremental refinements towards exactly what the customer wants.

Also one might wonder what point there is to all the secrecy, when Microsoft holds a defacto monopoly on desktop operating systems – it’s not like IBM is waiting in the wings to unleash OS/3 and steal their feature set, offering it on a line of PC’s that they don’t even make anymore. This point is underscored when the Linux and Mac developers have already branched off in entirely different directions and would probably rather die than admit imitating anything that came from Windows.

Amazon, Google, Dell and countless others have harnessed the wisdom of crowds to refine their business models and it seems that Microsoft thinks that their insulated community knows best, and would rather pretend that its still the 80’s where market will love anything that they send to production. Much of the techworld as of late has become defined by transparency, and one must wonder if the lack of discussion on Windows 7 specifics is because of the lack of innovation, or insecurity regarding their ability to deliver on anything they promise. (WinFS, anyone?) With a release date still years away, there’s still plenty of time for the development team to throw together a webapp that would take less than a day to write, and that will save millions of users all over the planet from Windows ME v2.0. I wouldn’t hold your breath though.