TCP traceroute

Peteris Krumins posts on TCP Traceroute, a nifty trick to "see" through firewalls. His pudding:

# traceroute -T -p 80 www.microsoft.com
traceroute to www.microsoft.com (65.55.57.27), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1  50.57.125.2 (50.57.125.2)  0.540 ms  0.629 ms  0.709 ms
 2  core1-aggr701a-3.ord1.rackspace.net (184.106.126.50)  0.486 ms  0.604 ms  0.691 ms
 3  corea.ord1.rackspace.net (184.106.126.128)  0.511 ms corea.ord1.rackspace.net (184.106.126.124)  0.564 ms  0.810 ms
 4  bbr1.ord1.rackspace.net (184.106.126.147)  1.339 ms  1.310 ms bbr1.ord1.rackspace.net (184.106.126.145)  1.307 ms
 5  chi-8075.msn.net (206.223.119.27)  3.619 ms  2.560 ms  2.528 ms
 6  * 204.152.140.35 (204.152.140.35)  3.640 ms *
 7  ge-7-0-0-0.co1-64c-1a.ntwk.msn.net (207.46.40.94)  52.523 ms xe-0-2-0-0.ch1-96c-2b.ntwk.msn.net (207.46.46.49)  3.825 ms xe-1-2-0-0.ch1-96c-2b.ntwk.msn.net (207.46.46.53)  3.355 ms
 8  xe-0-1-0-0.co1-96c-1a.ntwk.msn.net (207.46.33.177)  61.042 ms  61.032 ms  60.457 ms
 9  * * xe-5-2-0-0.co1-96c-1b.ntwk.msn.net (207.46.40.165)  100.069 ms
10  65.55.57.27 (65.55.57.27)  53.868 ms  53.038 ms  52.097 ms

Eliminating sales commissions

Brilliant.

On being the bearer of bad news

Elena Yatzeck writes 6 Steps To Success With Your Executive Boss, or "On being the bearer of bad news" (my title), another good post on the timeless theme, Do The Right Thing.

The Java enum factory

This comes up in interviews with intermediate programmers (and some seniors), the "enum factory" in Java:

public final class Money {
    // Infrequent that new currencies created,
    // old currencies never vanish, just fade away
    public enum Currency {
        USD, PHP; // And many more

        // Additional fields as needed, e.g., locale

        public Money print(final BigDecimal amount) {
            return new Money(this, amount);
        }
    }

    private final Currency currency;
    private final BigDecimal amount;

    private Money(final Currency currency, final BigDecimal amount) {
        this.currency = currency;
        this.amount = amount;
    }

    // Appropriate methods
}

And elsewhere with static imports:

Money pocket = asList(USD.print(ONE), PHP.print(TEN));

The key observations:

• Amounts of money are intimately attached to a particular currency
• Currency has few qualities not attached to money
• Ok to add more currencies through code
• Code reads better with factory than without

Mana on leadership

Mana of Geek Diva posts on leadership. Key point (emphasis mine):

When I see people who I consider good leaders, be they of any age, gender, height or ethnicity, I see one thing that they do very well. They make decisions quickly. Quickly does not mean recklessly. It just means that they make a decision knowing that if it isn't right then they can correct at a later time.

Java 8 lambdas and all that

Lovely post from Anton Arhipov at JRebel, Java 8: The First Taste of Lambdas. Kudos for javap decompilation for an "under the hood" explanation. His conclusion:

We can definitely say that lambdas and the accompanied features (defender methods, collections library improvements) will have a great impact on Java very soon. The syntax is quite nice and once developers realize that these features provide value to their productivity, we will see a lot of code that leverages these features.

It was quite interesting for me to see what lambdas are compiled to and I was very happy when I saw the total utilization of the invokedynamic instruction in action without any anonymous inner classes involved at all.

Prolegomena to programming

UCB's Brian Harvey explains why Berkeley teaches Scheme, not Python.

Superior teams

Venkatesh Krishnamurthy writes The 4 Ingredients of Building Hyper-Productive Teams. What he means are agile teams, quoting Jeff Sutherland:

We define Hyper-Productivity here at 400% higher velocity than average waterfall team velocity with correspondingly higher quality. The best Scrum teams in the world average 75% gains over the velocity of waterfall teams with much higher quality, customer satisfaction, and developer experience.

Agile for me, though worded awkwardly: how do the best scrum teams compare to the best waterfall teams?

GapList, an alternative to ArrayList and LinkedList

Thomas Mauch presents GapList, an alternative to ArrayList and LinkedList in Java, with the best performance behaviors of both: fast random reads and compact, cache-friendly storage like ArrayList, fast random updates like LinkedList.

Marz on Lambda Architecture

Nathan Marz writes on Big Data Lambda Architecture, promoting his upcoming book from Manning, Big Data. It's a comprehensible take on big data architectures. (See Chapter 1 [pdf].)

In a nutshell:

Computing arbitrary functions on an arbitrary dataset in real time is a daunting problem. There is no single tool that provides a complete solution. Instead, you have to use a variety of tools and techniques to build a complete Big Data system.

The lambda architecture solves the problem of computing arbitrary functions on arbitrary data in real time by decomposing the problem into three layers: the batch layer, the serving layer, and the speed layer.

Why go?

Rob Pike explains Go at Google: Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering, or, Why go?

Passing of an era: No more i386

Thus spake Linus Torvalds:

Pull "Nuke 386-DX/SX support" from Ingo Molnar:
 "This tree removes ancient-386-CPUs support and thus zaps quite a bit
  of complexity:

    24 files changed, 56 insertions(+), 425 deletions(-)

  ... which complexity has plagued us with extra work whenever we wanted
  to change SMP primitives, for years.

  Unfortunately there's a nostalgic cost: your old original 386 DX33
  system from early 1991 won't be able to boot modern Linux kernels
  anymore.  Sniff."

I'm not sentimental.  Good riddance.

Guicing your jars, part 2

In Guicing your jars I mention using Java's service loader feature to automate finding modules for Guice, along these lines:

public class MetaInfServicesModule
        extends AbstractModule {
    @Override
    protected void configure() {
        for (final Module module : ServiceLoader.load(Module.class))
            install(module);
    }
}

What I did not mention was the secret sauce, Kohsuke's MetaInfServices annotation processor which creates the META-INF/services file for you:

@MetaInfServices(Module.class)
public class FooModule
        extends AbstractModule {
    @Override
    protected void configure() {
        // Awesome foo-ness here
    }
}

Now using your Maven runtime dependencies to control the classpath, Guice automatically installs your modules:

Guice.createInjector(new MetaInfServicesModule());

(Dependencies between modules is beyond the scope of this post!)

Coming in Kernel 3.7 from The H-Open

1. Filesystems & storage
2. Networking
3. Infrastructure
4. Drivers
5. CPU and platform code

WebPageTest

Ryan Hurst posts How Facebook can avoid losing $100M in revenue when they switch to always-on SSL, an interesting discussion of web page performance when using SSL.

What I noticed: WebPageTest, a fantastic resource for tuning public web pages courtesy AOL, Google & others. WebPageTest can also be downloaded, for testing your internal web site.

See more debug data in IntelliJ

Mark Needham posts a useful IntelliJ debugging tip, IntelliJ Debug Mode: Viewing beyond 100 frames/items in an array.

Parker on Ordesky

Andrew Parker writes on learning Scala from Ordesky through an online course. Who needs a university?

Alternative to Java 8 virtual extension methods

Tired of waiting for Java 8? Project Lombok brings a little piece to you today, virtual extension methods similar to those proposed for JDK8. The most interesting bit: Lombok works using only JDK annotation processors and no required run-time library.

JUnit testing that a call blocks

Certain that I missed an existing solution, I post this in hopes of helping anyone who also misses it. But if you know a better way, please comment.

Usage

class SomeTest {
    @Test(timeout = 1000L)
    public void shouldBlock() {
        assertBlocks(new BlockingCall() {
            @Override
            public void call()
                    throws InterruptedException {
                // My blocking code here
            }
        });
    }
}

Implementation

import javax.annotation.Nonnull;
import java.util.Timer;
import java.util.TimerTask;

import static java.lang.String.format;
import static java.lang.Thread.currentThread;
import static org.junit.Assert.fail;

/**
 * {@code BlockingCall} supports blocking call assertion for JUnit tests.
 *
 * @author <a href="mailto:binkley@alumni.rice.edu">B. K. Oxley (binkley)</a>
 */
public interface BlockingCall {
    /**
     * Calls blocking code.  The blocking code must throw {@code
     * InterruptedException} when its current thread is interrupted.
     *
     * @throws InterruptedException if interrupted.
     */
    void call()
            throws InterruptedException;

    /** Wrapper class for block assertion. */
    public static final class Assert {
        /**
         * Asserts the given <var>code</var> blocks at least 100ms.  Interrupts
         * the blocking code after 100ms and checks {@code InterruptedException}
         * was thrown.  When not blocking, appends <var>block</var> to the
         * failure message.
         *
         * @param block the blocking call, never missing
         */
        public static void assertBlocks(@Nonnull final BlockingCall block) {
            final Timer timer = new Timer(true);
            try {
                final Thread current = currentThread();
                timer.schedule(new TimerTask() {
                    @Override
                    public void run() {
                        current.interrupt();
                    }
                }, 100L);
                block.call();
                fail(format("Did not block: %s", block));
            } catch (final InterruptedException ignored) {
            } finally {
                timer.cancel();
            }
        }
    }
}

UPDATE: Idioms like this would be far more attractive with Java 8 lambdas:

public void shouldBlock() {
    assertBlocks(() -> { /* blocking code */ });
}

Python's enumerate for Java

Surprisingly I did not find Python's enumerate in Guava Iterables.

A little static import and all is well:

import com.google.common.collect.UnmodifiableIterator;

import javax.annotation.Nonnull;
import java.util.AbstractMap.SimpleImmutableEntry;
import java.util.Iterator;
import java.util.Map.Entry;

/**
 * {@code EnumerateIterable} wraps an iterable like Python {@code enumerate}.
 *
 * @author <a href="mailto:binkley@alumni.rice.edu">B. K. Oxley (binkley)</a>
 */
public final class EnumerateIterable<T>
        implements Iterable<Entry<Integer, T>> {
    @Nonnull
    private final Iterable<T> delegate;

    public EnumerateIterable(@Nonnull final Iterable<T> delegate) {
        this.delegate = delegate;
    }

    /**
     * Creates a new enumerated iterable for the given <var>delegate</var>.
     *
     * @param delegate the underlying iterable, never missing
     * @param <T> the underlying wrapped type
     *
     * @return the new enumerated iterable, never missing
     */
    @Nonnull
    public static <T> Iterable<Entry<Integer, T>> enumerate(@Nonnull final Iterable<T> delegate) {
        return new EnumerateIterable<>(delegate);
    }

    @Nonnull
    @Override
    public Iterator<Entry<Integer, T>> iterator() {
        return new EnumerateIterator<>(delegate);
    }

    private static final class EnumerateIterator<T>
            extends UnmodifiableIterator<Entry<Integer, T>> {
        @Nonnull
        private final Iterator<T> it;
        int i;

        EnumerateIterator(@Nonnull final Iterable<T> delegate) {
            it = delegate.iterator();
            i = 0;
        }

        @Override
        public boolean hasNext() {
            return it.hasNext();
        }

        @Override
        @Nonnull
        public Entry<Integer, T> next() {
            return new SimpleImmutableEntry<>(i++, it.next());
        }
    }
}

UPDATE: Completeness requires a static factory method for arrays as well as iterables.

ISO8601 UTC with XStream

I need ISO8601 conversion with XStream for UTC (GMT/Zulu) time. Originally I went with ISO8601DateConverter which comes with XStream and uses Joda. However I found that it read in UTC (GMT/Zulu) time but wrote back out local time.

To fix this I wrote my own converter using JAXB in the JDK, and dropped the Joda runtime dependency from my project.

I unit tested full roundtrip with "2012-10-22T12:34:56Z". The original converter parsed correctly but serialized as "2012-10-22T07:34:56-05:00". My converter serializes as the input string.

import com.thoughtworks.xstream.converters.basic.AbstractSingleValueConverter;

import java.util.Date;
import java.util.GregorianCalendar;

import static java.util.TimeZone.getTimeZone;
import static javax.xml.bind.DatatypeConverter.parseDateTime;
import static javax.xml.bind.DatatypeConverter.printDateTime;

/**
 * {@code UTCConverter} converts {@code java.util.Date} objects in ISO8601
 * format for UTC without milliseconds.
 *
 * @author <a href="mailto:binkley@alumni.rice.edu">B. K. Oxley (binkley)</a>
 */
public final class UTCConverter
        extends AbstractSingleValueConverter {
    @Override
    public boolean canConvert(final Class type) {
        return Date.class.isAssignableFrom(type);
    }

    @Override
    public String toString(final Object obj) {
        final GregorianCalendar gmt = new GregorianCalendar(getTimeZone("GMT"));
        gmt.setTime(Date.class.cast(obj));
        return printDateTime(gmt);
    }

    @Override
    public Object fromString(final String str) {
        return parseDateTime(str).getTime();
    }
}

Man page humor

YESTERDAY(1):

BUGS

	It’s hard to use this command without singing.

The sensible man

Jon Pither is the sensible man. He writes a practical argument for Clojure over Java. Which is more industrial, Scala or Clojure? Yes.

Unsafe magic heap

A brilliant post from Martin Thompson, Compact Off-Heap Structures/Tuples In Java, using sun.misc.Unsafe to avoid VM-managed heap and bypass JVM memory limits. Not of the feint of heart.

UPDATE: A lot of interesting things in Thompson's comments.