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CouchDB on Arch was a bit of a pain to get working. I wanted to share my thoughts on how I got it to work and hopefully that’ll help solve a few people’s similar problems.

First, I couldn’t find a prebuilt package within arch (pacman) so we had to go totally by source of couchdb, to make this work. You can do it by the following steps:

1. Install Pacman Dependencies
pacman -S gcc make erlang extra/icu spidermonkey automake autoconf curl
2. Download the source code from the web site:

http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi?path=/couchdb/0.10.1/apache-couchdb-0.10.1.tar.gz

3. Unpack the source code: tar -xzvf apache-couchdb-0.10.1.tar.gz
4. cd into the directory and run ./configure –prefix=/
5. Run make and make install

What you’ll notice is that if you don’t run the above prefix, it goes into strange places, such as /usr/local/rc.d, which complicated matters when it came to finding the install locations for everything. If you already tried to install it, just cd back into the directory at step 4 and run “make uninstall” which will clean it all out first, then rerun configure, make and make install listed above.

You’ll notice that if you run /etc/rc.d/couchdb start, it won’t exactly work. This is because it wants a couchdb user, so lets create that:

useradd -s /bin/couchdb

But…it’s still not happy! Well, now we have permission issues. First we should fix the permissions:

chown -R couchdb:root /var/log/couchdb
chown -R couchdb:root /var/lib/couchdb

This should get you up and running smoothly at least with the basics, but there was one more thing I ran into, and that’s when running ps aux, the paths now have double front-slashes infront of everything. This is OK to my understanding, but you can edit /etc/rc.d/couchdb, and remove the double front-slashes as you see fit.

Now, you should be able to run /etc/rc.d/couchdb start successfully. You should notice some output like the following similar output, if you see only one process and a sleep then there’s a problem:

[root@tdtdev lib]# ps aux | grep -i ‘couchdb’
couchdb 1942 0.0 0.1 13544 1748 pts/3 S 16:38 0:00 /bin/sh -e /bin/couchdb -a \”//etc/couchdb/default.ini\” -a \”//etc/couchdb/local.ini\” -b -r 5 -p //var/run/couchdb/couchdb.pid -o /dev/null -e /dev/null -R
couchdb 1959 0.0 0.0 13544 1012 pts/3 S 16:38 0:00 /bin/sh -e /bin/couchdb -a \”//etc/couchdb/default.ini\” -a \”//etc/couchdb/local.ini\” -b -r 5 -p //var/run/couchdb/couchdb.pid -o /dev/null -e /dev/null -R
couchdb 1960 0.0 1.3 169508 13708 pts/3 Sl 16:38 0:00 /usr/lib/erlang/erts-5.7.3/bin/beam.smp -Bd -K true — -root /usr/lib/erlang -progname erl — -home /home/couchdb -noshell -noinput -smp auto -sasl errlog_type error -pa //lib/couchdb/erlang/lib/couch-0.10.1/ebin //lib/couchdb/erlang/lib/mochiweb-r97/ebin //lib/couchdb/erlang/lib/ibrowse-1.5.2/ebin //lib/couchdb/erlang/lib/erlang-oauth/ebin -eval application:load(ibrowse) -eval application:load(oauth) -eval application:load(crypto) -eval application:load(couch) -eval crypto:start() -eval ssl:start() -eval ibrowse:start() -eval couch_server:start([ "//etc/couchdb/default.ini", "//etc/couchdb/local.ini", "//etc/couchdb/default.ini", "//etc/couchdb/local.ini"]), receive done -> done end. -pidfile //var/run/couchdb/couchdb.pid -heart
couchdb 1969 0.0 0.0 3668 480 ? Ss 16:38 0:00 heart -pid 1960 -ht 11

So a total of 4 processes. You should also be able to visit your local URL too:

http://127.0.0.1:5984/

If you’re still having problems after this, some things I’ve done is edited /etc/rc.d/couchdb as mentioned above, as well as /etc/couchdb/default.ini to remove the double slashes from there.

I hope this helps, it took a bit to really get it here.

I’ve recently begun to dabble in Clojure, a rising project with a fair bit of drive behind it. In a lot of ways it kinda reminds me of the Rails drive, in that the project itself is changing quite rapidly and a number of new people are joining the ranks fairly quickly. First, it’s worth mentioning what Clojure is – incase you haven’t heard of this before. Clojure can be defined as a lisp-like language that sits on top of the JVM. The purpose of it is to give the power that Java has in terms of concurrency and libraries and combine it with the best features of Common Lisp, without including “ugly-aspects” of the lisp history (extremely subjective…)

Common Lisp was pretty much the first language I’ve ever used that I actually fell in love with. There are many things that Common Lisp supports; including a REPL for interactive programming, extremely flexible error handling (restart case, handler case), macros, the multi-paradigm universe, and so on. I’ve found it extremely difficult to really think in a functional way when programming in PHP, Ruby, Python, and so on. Most of my programming, therefore, was done in Common Lisp because it feels cleaner and more simple. Clojure, though, I am finding is a nice balance point that Lisp has a difficulty meeting when it comes to being applicable to the masses. It includes much of the benefits of Lisp, but gives the options to call Java code too. Clojure feels also a little more on the functional side than Common Lisp does in a lot of aspects, or at least the presentation feels to lend itself more toward the functional aspect anyways.

Clojure’s project page can be located here:
http://clojure.org/

Using Clojure is fairly simple and straightforward. There are currently 3 books (that I’ve seen) for this language that talk about syntax, setup, and so on. The one book I decided upon was Programming Clojure, from the Pragmatic Studios. The book is fairly cheap and is of decent quality. You can find a link to it here:

http://www.pragprog.com/titles/shcloj/programming-clojure

There are many editors that support Clojure development, with plugins. Each one of them have different ways of being setup. Personally I settled upon using Emacs and Slime because that’s what I use for my Common Lisp development, and not having to change development environments is really helpful for me. Emacs and Slime may be a bit of a jump for many people, so there are many options when it comes to editors out there. Netbeans with Enclojure was well recommended from my searches. Textmate also has a LISP mode (but it doesn’t have the REPL – I really recommend not using it for serious development).

Clojure is also fairly simple to setup, as long as you find a good guide for doing so. Unfortunately there are many ways to setup Clojure and at a minimum you need JDK, ant, and so on – but this may differ significantly depending on your editor of choice. Emacs with slime offers an option in Emacs 23.X, for automated installed from using ELPA. To be honest, and I really hated this option, setting up this all by ELPA was probably the most simple. Your jar files are downloaded automagically to the ~/.swank-clojure directory and things are magically setup. If you use emacs 23.X and don’t currently do common lisp development, then this will work well. If you want to build stuff manually, and aren’t using emacs then your best bet is to get maven – then build your clojure .jar files accordingly. You can find detailed directions on building it on Ubuntu here:

http://riddell.us/ClojureOnUbuntu.html

If you decide to use Emacs, this video has been helpful from my perspective:

http://www.bestinclass.dk/index.php/2009/12/clojure-101-getting-clojure-slime-installed/

For general clojure development, there are a few areas that I find extremely helpful is leiningen. Essentially what this tool does is give you a working directory that makes clojure development a bit easier. There’s little I can say that the project page doesn’t say better – so you should visit this:

http://github.com/technomancy/leiningen

One last thing I’ll add is if you do Common Lisp development as well. If you do, some time may be sunk into trying to figure out how to make that work. Following the directions in the video you’d be left with an (eval-after-load “slime) block. In there, add something like: (add-to-list ‘slime-lisp-implementations ‘(sbcl (“/usr/bin/sbcl”))), then run slime by hitting M– (hold meta hit dash), M-x and type slime. You should get a prompt that asks you what lisp, type “sbcl” then enter. The other issue I want to bring up is CVS version of swank/slime don’t work with clojure. You should get git://github.com/technomancy/slime.git instead. Note that if you use ELPA to install clojure and deps, it will already install parts of the compatible slime. Running M– M-x slime, sbcl will generate errors about not being able to find source .lisp files. You can fix this by going into the .emacs.d/elpa/slime-../ directory and copying all the .lisp contents from the slime checkout from technomancy into this directory. If you find a cleaner way of accomplishing this, without separate .emacs conf files, please add a comment.

Clojure is a bit of a handful to get started on, but if you find yourself having problems I’d check the google groups group for clojure, and #clojure on freenode IRC.

Common Lisp surprises me more and more each and every day. I never thought of using it for SQL interaction, but the adventures of CL-SQL for my linguistics class lately really opened my eyes.

CL-SQL is an ORM, like that of ActiveRecord, Django’s ORM, and so on. It leans a little more toward the SQL Alchemy side of things, though. I will likely provide a much more detailed tutorial later once I get a general understanding of this library – but for now I’ll provide a bit for links on where to find more information:

CLSQL Main Site: http://clsql.b9.com/
Script I learned a lot from: http://www.boundp.net/files/weblog.lisp
Github post of my wordnet stuff: http://gist.github.com/244360

Now for a bit of information about wordnet. I’m currently in a computational linguistics course at the university, and part of the class is to develop a project of sorts. Mine relates to the use of wordnet, which is a fairly complicated database. Basically, wordnet was developed by Princeton, that has a fairly large set of words and their definitions, synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, and so on. In sort, it shows a lot of ways that one word relates to another word in various ways. I found a web site that had the MSSQL files for Wordnet, which I downloaded and attached. Along with that, a number of example view code that I modified to add to a listing of views. Since I do my development, most of the time, on Linux – I decided to get ODBC setup to the MSSQL server. CL-SQL works beautifully with this setup. The gist above shows the details.

For the SQL Server database I got, you can view the information here: http://opensource.ebswift.com/WordNetSQLServer/

I will likely provide more information as I go with this, as I’m finding wordnet more and more fun to mess with.

I finished my presentation for Iowa Code Camp this morning – it went pretty well I feel, although a very little turnout. Here are my notes and other information!

Here are some download locations for my notes and my code itself:

Sides themselves:
http://static.thedarktrumpet.com/theory-iccn09.pdf

Code:
http://static.thedarktrumpet.com/code-iccn09.lisp

I’ve been into these services for awhile, but have done a fairly poor job of communicating these from this site.

So for some of my tech-related comments, especially that of Common Lisp, Twitter is a good source:

http://twitter.com/TheDarkTrumpet

For more personal stuff, I tend to use Facebook (although VERY little)

http://www.facebook.com/dthole

For code that I’m releasing publicly github tends to be the better spot, at the moment, for that:

http://github.com/TheDarkTrumpet