Inventor's Paradox

Background Docker is fast-growing trend that I could no longer ignore, so I tried Docker running in a Linux server machine. Running server app is a breeze inside docker, but I need to run Pentaho Data Integration in the server, which uses X11 display. There is several references about forwarding X11 connection to a Docker container but none works for my setup, which has Quartz XServer running in  Mac OS X laptop and Docker service running in a remote Linux Server. The usual way The steps to run X Windowed Applications in Docker containers can be read from  Running GUI Apps with Docker  and  Alternatives to SSH X11 Forwarding for Docker Containers , which essentially is as follows : Forwarding DISPLAY environment variable to the container Forwarding directory /tmp/.X11-unix to the container I already tried such steps with no results, because I need to add another step before these two, that is forwarding X11 connection thru ssh connection to the serve...

Background To do stuff, I usually create web-based applications written in PHP. Sometimes we need to run something that takes a long time, far longer than the 10 second psychological limit for web pages. A bit of googling in stack overflow found us this  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2212635/best-way-to-manage-long-running-php-script , but I will tell the similar story with a different solution. One of the long running tasks that need to be run is a Pentaho data integration transformation. Difficulties in long running PHP scripts I encountered some problems when trying to make PHP do long running tasks : PHP script timeout. This could be solved by running set_time_limit(0); before the long running tasks. Memory leaks. The framework I normally use have a bit of memory issues, this can be solved either by patching the framework (ok, it is a bit difficult to do, but I did something similar in the past ) or splitting the data to process into several batches. And if ...

Background This blog post will record my efforts to install Pentaho Data Integration in Ubuntu Trusty Tahr (14.04). I worked mostly remote, using vnc desktop, so this should be installed too. Because OpenJDK is not quite compatible with Pentaho Kettle (see this forum post ), we need to install Oracle Java 7 as a prerequisite, and we also need to ensure SWT browser dependencies & configuration are installed as well. Oracle Java 7 installation Referring to http://www.webupd8.org/2012/01/install-oracle-java-jdk-7-in-ubuntu-via.html, the steps is as follows : sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-installer The author said that the installer is alpha software, but I like it better than manually installing from oracle website. From governance point of view, linux software should be installed in native packagers such as using dpkg or rpm, so this is one minus point that the oracle's java license prevented the crea...