microsoft

Credit where it’s due

Gregory Golberg drumwave , , , , , ,

Microsoft has a fix for an issue quite quickly (mentioned in a previous post).

Figuring out the reason for the magic number to backtrack from, though, I had posited another reason, and I was wrong… And overall it now reminded me of:

The appearance of our visitor was a surprise to me, since I had expected a typical country practitioner. He was a very tall, thin man, with a long nose like a beak, which jutted out between two keen, grey eyes, set closely together and sparkling brightly from behind a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. He was clad in a professional but rather slovenly fashion, for his frock-coat was dingy and his trousers frayed. Though young, his long back was already bowed, and he walked with a forward thrust of his head and a general air of peering benevolence. As he entered his eyes fell upon the stick in Holmes’s hand, and he ran towards it with an exclamation of joy. “I am so very glad,” said he. “I was not sure whether I had left it here or in the Shipping Office. I would not lose that stick for the world.”

“A presentation, I see,” said Holmes.

“Yes, sir.”

“From Charing Cross Hospital?”

“From one or two friends there on the occasion of my marriage.”

“Dear, dear, that’s bad!” said Holmes, shaking his head.

Dr. Mortimer blinked through his glasses in mild astonishment. “Why was it bad?”

“Only that you have disarranged our little deductions. Your marriage, you say?”

Which in turn reminded me of

И вот какого хрена “Shipping Office” переводится как “пароходство”?

Athena Federated Queries: Azure Data Lake Storage

Gregory Golberg drumwave, yak shaving , , , , , , , , , ,

Well, this one is super broken, which one finds out after shaving a number of yaks.

We want to query Parquet files that sit in Azure Data Lake Storage with Athena. AWS has what seems to be a nice documentation on how to do it… Except:

  1. Searching for it in Serverless Application Repository with “azure” or “adsl” terms is not yielding anything.
    • Additionally there seems to be a bug there, per AWS support:

      Issue:
      – The search functionality appears to be unresponsive when using the traditional “Enter” key method
      – This seems to be a technical bug in the console
      Workaround:
      – Enter your search term in the search bar – Instead of pressing Enter, click anywhere on the screen
      – This should trigger the search functionality and display the results
    • Search for something like “gen2” actually yields something… It’s a AthenaDataLakeGen2Connector — which is the same thing as below, so read on.
  2. Trying to add the Data Source from Athena, selecting “Microsoft Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen2” connector… It is based on athena-datalakegen2 code which is borken because the underlying mssql JDBC driver is borken.
  3. After patching the mssql driver and the connector, we realize that it is trying to connect via JDBC to ADLS, but that is not supported. And yet AWS claims “the documentation is correct“.

Srsly now, AWS and Microsoft, you even tested anything?

It’s already 2025, and still…

Content assist

Gregory Golberg holding forth , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

It looks like you are researching razors. I think you are about to go off on a yak-shaving endeavor, and I cannot let you do that, Dave.

What I would really like my DWIM
agent to do. That, and to stop calling me Dave.

Being lazy and impatient, I like an idea of an IDE. The ease of things like autocompletion, refactoring, code search, and graphical debugging with evaluation are, for the lack of a better word, are good.

I like Eclipse in particular — force of habit/finger memory; after all, neurons that pray together stay together. Just like all happy families are alike, all emacs users remember the key sequence to GTFO vi (:q!) and all vi users remember the same thing for emacs (C-x C-c n) – so they can get into their favorite editor and not have to “remember”.

So, recently I thought that it would be good for a a particular DSL I am using to have an auto-completion feature (because why should I remember ). So I thought, great, I’ll maybe write an Eclipse plugin for that… Because, hey, I’ve made one before, how bad could it be?

Well, obviously I would only be solving the problem for Eclipse users of the DSL in question. And I have a suspicion I am pretty much the only one in that group. Moreover, even I would like to use some other text editor occasionally, and get the same benefit.

It seems obvious that it should be a separation of concerns, so to speak:

  • Provider-side: A language/platform may expose a service for context-based auto-completion, and
  • Consumer-side: An editor or shell may have a plugin system exposed to take advantage of this.

Then a little gluing is all that is required. (OK, I don’t like the “provider/consumer” terminology, but I cannot come up with anything better — I almost named them “supply-side” and “demand-side” but it evokes too much association with AdTech that it’s even worse).

And indeed, there are already examples of this.

There is a focus on an IDE paradigm of using external programs for building, code completion, and any others sorts of language semantic functionality. Most of MelnormeEclipse infrastructure is UI infrastructure, the core of a concrete IDE’s engine functionality is usually driven by language-specific external programs. (This is not a requirement though — using internal tools is easily supported as well).

  • Atom defines its own API

And so I thought – wouldn’t it be good to standardize on some sort of interaction between the two in a more generic way?

And just as I thought this, I learned that the effort already exists: Language-server protocol by Microsoft.

I actually like it when an idea is validated and someone else is doing the hard work of making an OSS project out of it…