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Thought, tips, tricks, and reviews on Software Development from a Linux enthusiast point-of-view.
10 March 2010 -
Filed under
tips & tricks
I’m not talking about The Skatalites song, but about two great tools you can use (and should use) when developing software for Linux : Valgrind and strace.
For those who don’t know Valgrind, well, it’s never too late (as discovered by Intel’s Ylian Saint-Hilaire). Valgrind is a framework for building dynamic analysis tools. It came with a nice set of tools : a memory checker, a cache profiler, a heap profiler, and a thread debugger. If you aren’t familiar with it, your are missing something. It can help you find bugs and performance problems a lot faster than you might think.
To help you start, here are some recent (< 1 year old) tutorials about using Valgrind :
For those who prefer books, the official Valgrind 3.3 documentation is available in a printed form.
Now, for strace, it’s a a utility which monitor the system calls made by a program and the signals it receives. Like Valgrind, it’s a tool you should be familiar with if you are doing software development with Linux. For good information about using strace, I suggest you to read the following articles :
So, the next time you have a problem with your software, try to give Valgrind and strace a shot. You could be surprised by the results.
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2010-03-10 ::
Laurent Parenteau
6 March 2010 -
Filed under
thoughts
Pawel Brodzinski recently affirmed that managers are clueless. While I have no problem agreeing with him (haha!), I think that his statement can easily be generalized for software developers as well.
I mean, I am certainly not the only one who have seen a software developer suggest a solution based on his personnel interest instead of those of the company. When you know that the best solution would be dull, but you could do something much more fun / interesting using some other technologies, it is easy to fall for the dark side… And how many time a software development process was selected only because it is currently the most popular one? Or because it’s the one more familiar to the person, and he didn’t wanted to learn something new?
Me too, I have to plead guilty. I try hard to be as objective as possible, but sometimes I’m not. It’s only after, when you re-think about it, that deeply in your heart you realize that you’ve made a choice for the wrong reasons. Even if it was the correct choice, if your reasons were wrong, that’s not good. As in poker, it’s the the result of a single hand that count, it’s the reasons behind your move. Even if you have win this hand, if you have made the wrong play, you’ll lose in the long run.
If we look further, can’t we say the same thing about any software professionals? In fact, can’t we say this for everybody? It’s part of the human nature. We may (and need to) fight it, but in the end, we can’t win all the fights. Sometimes, personnel interest win.
What do you think? Are we all clueless, or is it just Pawel and me?
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2010-03-06 ::
Laurent Parenteau
5 March 2010 -
Filed under
thoughts
Meet the Linux Family is a series of interviews with software developers, managers, and computer users who all have a point in common : they use Linux. They will bring different point-of-views on various Linux related topics and share their Linux experience with you.
Here are the published interviews :
Here are the (currently) upcoming interviews :
- Martin Lacasse
- Kyle Mestery
- Peter M. Groen
Photo credit : Marufish
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2010-03-05 ::
Laurent Parenteau
4 March 2010 -
Filed under
reviews
I will continue my Subversion Clients Review series with KDESvn.
KDESvn is a fronted to the subversion vcs.
Like all good frontend, it support all the functionalities of the underlying system. So, I’ll focus more on the added features that KDESvn has to offer.
The first thing to note is the GUI. It’s simple, clean, and quite intuitive. The color highlighting will show you immediately which files have changed, either locally or remotely. I also appreciated the fact that you always have the svn properties shown to you (in the lower right corner). This helped me discover svn properties problems more quickly.
Another nice feature is called “blame”. This show you the content of a file, with the revision and author in-line. No more searching in the history to find who made that change.
Also, even if it includes its own diff, merge, and conflict resolver tools (which is great), you can configure it to use your preferred ones. So its easy for first time users, but allow power users to take full advantages of it.
All in all, it’ the best subversion client I’ve used so far. In fact, it’s the one I use for work. This may change since I’ve not yet tried all the subversion client I plan to review, but in the mean time, I have no problem recommending KDESvn for every software developer.
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2010-03-04 ::
Laurent Parenteau
