Being Cellfish

pthread_cond_timedwait is a nice little function that can be used to "atomically" release a mutex, wait for a condition with a timeout and then acquire the mutex. The first pitfall of this method is that the "timeout" is an absolute time, not a relative Read More...

I recently needed to move all my private domains to a new hosting solution and the new solution did not allow any other access than FTP. I considered setting up a mirror on my ubuntu host at home but that didn't feel like the best solution. So I thought Read More...

Sometimes you might want to read a file non-blocking . It could be /dev/random because waiting for entropy might take very long. Also when you have to read device files on unix you sometimes have to read them non-blocking. A common pattern is to open Read More...

I recently was involved in troubleshooting a problem on a HPUX system.It turned out that the system command iostat showed one disk and the configuration (/etc/lvmtab) showed another disk. Yet another symptom was that lvdisplay didn't work at all. Since Read More...