Tag: Coding

Unicode 7 in CentOS 7 TUI Code

I’m in the middle of developing a project in C which uses NCurses and Unicode 7+ characters. This has been working out great in macOS and Fedora 31 where I have been doing most of my testing. But in CentOS I have been having big problems getting the characters to render. This post goes into why and how to fix it.

Continue reading Unicode 7 in CentOS 7 TUI Code

My Open Source projects that still live on

I have recently created a new library called libMariaS3 for a couple of teams at MariaDB which provides a simple C API to Amazon’s S3. This was created because we needed a library which could link to GPLv2 software and Amazon’s own library is Apache 2.0 licensed which is incompatible.

It is not a perfect code base because I had a very short amount of time to get the first release out but it was a very fun project to work on. It led me to take a quick look this morning at a couple of other things I have created in the past to see where they are at today.

Continue reading My Open Source projects that still live on

Coding and decoding crash dump handlers

All software has bugs. Even if you could possibly write the perfect bug free software all the layers down have bugs. Even CPUs as can be seen with the recent Meltdown and Spectre bugs. This means unfortunately sometimes software will crash. When this happens it is useful to capture as much information as possible to try and stop it happening again.

One of the first things I did when coming back to work from the holiday break is code a new crash dump handler to be used in MariaDB ColumnStore. This will spit out a stack trace for the current thread into a file upon a crash. It is very useful for daemons to try and find the root cause of a problem without running through a debugger. Continue reading Coding and decoding crash dump handlers