Caching autotools outputs for fun and profit

GNU make parallell building feature is cool. And ccache which speeds up rebuilds of same files is cool too. But even with this great tools rebuilding some project is still not as fast as it can be. Why ? Because preparing GNU autotools files (./configure & friends) takes quite long time. And there is no way to parallelize it.

But we can cache autotools products just as ccache caches compiler products. And now there is tool that's capable of doing that! You can grab it here. I've adapted fabricate.py for this job.

Just put fabricate.py into PATH and prepend it to your command. Like:

fabricate.py ./bootstrap

or

fabricate.py sh -c './bootstrap && ./configure'

And it'll copy command outputs from cache if all dependencies are same. Nearly instantaneous!

Welcome to 21th century, Aliaksey!

I'm used to slow, expensive & unreliable Internet. Because of that I tended to keep as much as possible on my local hard drive. I had tons of specs, articles, e-books. And I even kept local mirror of entire Debian unstable repository! That's because at home and until recently at Altoros office I had quite limited and expensive Internet access. I tried (successfully) to reduce my dependency on Internet as mush as possible.

Around 2 weeks ago I accidentally deleted most of my 'stuff'. And now I'm forced to use online resources. And quite surprisingly that's not bad experience at all! Internet here, at Bay Area, is fast enough. And googling for information and reading it online sometimes seems to be even faster than locating and opening it from local disk.

This is unusual and new experience. When I, for example, need some information on how something is done in python I just ask Google. And within mere seconds I have precisely what I need! I've even started reading PDF articles online via Chrome's plugin without downloading them first.

I'm slowly getting used to 21th century Internet. I'm still not quite 100% comfortable with depending on Internet availability. And some lookups are definitely much faster against local data. For example, I don't think anything can be faster than local supermegadoc documentation lookup of some function. But I'm going to stop downloading interesting stuff and will instead bookmark it. Let's see how it'll go. I'm especially curious how it will work when I'll return home. Hopefully, we'll have speedy ADSL connection by then :)

How to use two monitors in IntelliJ IDEA

I'm working on some educational Scala project. And IDEA is natural choice for that. Normally I use Emacs for my work, but for anything Java related it's not as good as IDEA. And I cannot express how powerful and polished this nearly free software IDE is.

However, I was missing one very useful feature of Emacs, which is ability to open several frames to effectively use two monitors. Until few minutes ago.

When you want to open same "buffer" on two monitors you can first split it horizontally (C-x 2 if you use Emacs key bindings) and then you can simply drag one of the windows out of it's frame to second monitor! If you want different files you can just drag tabs out of main frame.