Older Posts

May 14, 2011: handle_core

Recently I became aware of a fascinating mechanism that Linux offers to handle core dumps. Basically, Linux can spawn a userspace process to handle the core dump as it is generated.

I wrote a little program called handle_core to take advantage of this functionality. It can send you an email whenever a core file is generated. It can also limit the number of core files in the "cores" directory to a predefined value-- allowing you to enable core dumps without worrying about filling your disk. Since it tries to preserve the newest core dumps, it's better than just using a small static partition.

Red Hat has a daemon called abrtd that does much the same thing. Similarly, Ubuntu has Apport. Neither of those quite did what I wanted because of their distro-specific parts.

May 1, 2011: OpenStack 2011

I went to OpenStack 2011, and it was a lot of fun! I really enjoyed hearing about Lunr and the new network-as-a-serivce stuff.

April 18, 2011: Poker-odds

Poker-odds is now in a working state! Learning Go was easier than I thought. It really does remind me of C, because of its elegance and simplicity.

April 25, 2010: Embedded Linux Conference 2010

I enjoyed going to the CELF conference this year. I felt like I really 'got' some of the presentations much more than I had last year. For example, now that I've had a chance to work with a kernel running RT-PREEMPT, the issues are more real to me. I really appreciated David VomLehn's No crash dump? No problem presentation, about effective crash diagnosis and logging on embedded systems.

February 28, 2010: New web site

I redid my web site today. The old site was getting kind of stale.