from the belgian, a few weeks back.
Bellevue is good
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Monthly Archives: March 2005
revision control
Brian Aker has blogged about BitKeeper versus CVS
no doubt this has stemmed from somebody’s rant on the BK license. Now, this is a valid rant, but, really – it’s getting[1] old.
Personally, I quite like the GNU Arch Revision control system. Unfortunately, the UI is sort of sucky and takes a bit of getting used to. Bazaar is one to watch for improvements on this front (although I haven’t made the switch, mainly due to there not being enough hours in the day).
One thing that Arch does really well is cherry picking changesets. A simple ‘tla reply’ will do the equivilent of ‘patch -p1 < foobar’, but preserving where it came from. BRILLIANT. I wish bk did this. I once looked at branching in CVS and quickly ran away.
A smaller player, Darcs is one to take a close look at too. The UI is really sweet. I’ve only used it to test/submit fixes upstream on a small project (namely xseq – a project that is way cooler than the name suggests[2].)
In the future, bazaar-ng (back online soon) will probably be the way to go. Now is the time to bombard it with ideas though :)
At least we’re not stuck with Visual Source Safe. Full on MS people bag that pile of poo.
[1] Many would, in fact, believe i should be leaving out the word ‘getting’.
[2] I’m sure Andrew would be appreciative of funky names as well.
Update: why, oh why does this edit post thing think it must fight against the will of the correct closing tags?
Update 2: it seems that wordpress doesn’t want to save an update if you’re only fixing your markup. you have to add text. the suck.
Bugzilla bug 51149
Bugzilla bug 51149
For those of you migrating from MacOS X to Linux, this is something that should be good for you. Get Evolution to import your vCard’s from the MacOS X Addressbook without my little perl script.
I’m full time on Linux these days, but it would be awesome for people to check that this is, in fact, working now.
Dear Senator Dumbfuck…
Frist
This made me laugh – largely at what is just a stupid situation I’ve had trouble putting into words.
All these people protesting could actually do something constructive like not putting up with government corruption.
Where are these people insisting on universal healthcare? Education on academic merit rather than ability to pay?
hrrm…
it’s somebody who’s been brain dead for 15 (yes fifteen) years that gets them out onto the streets.
pass the head reading machine, these people need it.
bluetooth is cool. phones suck donkey
Why do phones crash?
upgraded laptop memory
1.5GB is much nicer than 768MB. Makes running MySQL cluster tests a lot easier (doesn’t hit swap).
the same apps still hog memory though (and for no real good reason).
Yes, i’m looking at you Evolution.
what you don’t want to see from gdb
/build/buildd/gdb-6.3/gdb/linux-nat.c:1208: internal-error: wait_lwp: Assertion `pid == GET_LWP (lp->ptid)' failed. A problem internal to GDB has been detected, further debugging may prove unreliable. Quit this debugging session? (y or n) /build/buildd/gdb-6.3/gdb/linux-nat.c:1208: internal-error: wait_lwp: Assertion `pid == GET_LWP (lp->ptid)' failed. A problem internal to GDB has been detected, further debugging may prove unreliable. Create a core file of GDB? (y or n)
Westpac hasn’t changed anything
it seems. so they keep me as a customer. everything still looks the same, and seems to function the same.
maybe it was just a behind the scenes upgrade, and the support guy was just saying what’s on his screen from before?
Bblog: Westpac: standards avoidance
Bblog: Westpac: standards avoidance
Hrrm… I really hope that everything works fine in mozilla derived browsers.
Personally, I use epiphany. It was ready and working before firefox was (although I used it exclusively for a hell of a long time on IRIX last year). So, if it doesn’t work, and they’re not going to fix it – I’ll have to seriously consider switching banks.
This is an extra annoyance as Mark Tearle has gone through a fair bit of re-organising moving LA’s bank accounts over to Westpac (largely because their internet banking stuff made a lot more sense for us).
The old site was great. I only ever had one problem with it – mozilla based stuff rendered the page slightly wider than the screen. But, I’ve happily put up with that. Everything worked .No bloody java stuff required (this is due to the problems of getting a working java plugin on linux-ppc – i don’t want binary only stuff).
I could view things, bpay, export statements out into a format suitable for import into GNUcash.
So Westpac – will you loose a customer? I guess we’ll soon find out.
Airshow 2005
Was at the airshow yesterday – with all the benefits of knowing people in the business :)
Mad people doing airobatics, mad guy hanging upside-down off the wing of a plane while it then barrell-rolled so he was standing up. Pretty cool to watch.
Of course, then there was the fighter jets. fast, loud, and i swear the F16 can do a u-turn in less space than half the cars on the road.
Then, of course, there’s the air force supply planes that do crazy landings, take offs and can fly a few feet above the ground while dropping supplies/releif out the back.
When the US air force guy was saying what missions some of their fighters had flown in, notably absent was Gulf War II. Hrrmm… maybe a touchy subject? Who knows.
An F111 doing a dump and burn is always pretty to see.
arjen_lentz: Google Code
their multithreaded core dump lib and their memory stuff looks interesting…
being able to core dump a multithreaded app *while running* would be so cool.
Hit an error condition, dump out a core file to send to engineers to fix it. even if it’s recoverable. rock.
Install Day (Semester 1, 2005) – Monash IT Society (Clayton)
Install Day (Semester 1, 2005) – Monash IT Society (Clayton)
So, back at uni (you know, that place you’re at when you’re a student), and back with the old computer science club (but under a different name… well… ah…urrr…because… who the fuck knows why) they’re having a linux install day next week.
i’ll probably go along for a couple of hours and hand out lots of ubuntu cds that i’ve got lying around and probably get asked a lot of mysql questions.
maybe it’d be cool to have a “MySQL CD” with all mysql stuff for all platforms on it (with lots of autorun stuff). esp if we could make them cheaply enough to give away at a bunch of events (like install days).
Maybe i’ll burn a couple of CDs to take along (windows, mac, linux binaries)
GCC4 in Ubuntu
… and not in debian.
so, can see if it makes a difference to performance on my desktop. should be fun!
1GB laptop ram sticks
are finally at a decent price! hopefully one should come in for me this afternoon. Would love an extra bunch of ram in my laptop…. should (by tonight) have 1.5GB instead of just 768MB.
FC4t1
tried FC4t1 on desktop – with SELinux. barely got anywhere. firstboot didn’t run, X config was strange (but that’s a norm, two monitors generally confuses things).
It also overwrote my MBR, despite being told not to. grr..
Beer sampling at the Belgian
Went to the Belgian Beer Cafe yesterday with daniels. Was good – good beer and good catch up.
Had lunch at Chocolate Budda in Fed Square too. Good food there.
This also marked the first time I’ve been to Flinders St station since at least the start of December last year. Went okay.
Ringu
Anyone who has seen Ringu will know what this looks like.
This is where we went for holiday.
Liferea Newsreader
I’ve just switched to using Liferea for my RSS feeds. It’s really quite sweet. Fast, categories, smart vfolders (e.g. ‘unread’), choice of Mozilla or gtkhtml rendering.
Funky, funky, funky, funky.
sometimes it’s scary when…
after lots of hacking and modifying and tweaking, something actually builds.
Of course, linking is another thing alltogether.
oh, and if anything remotely works.
OpenOffice.org 2.0
Well, I installed the preview packages in Ubuntu on my desktop this morning – just to play with for a few mins. Guess What? It looks like it doesn’t completely suck!
Some of the UI still feels/looks really weird – but that seems to be a legacy of the strange widget stuff that it used to use.
The “File->Send->Document as E-Mail” and “Document as PDF Attachment” are pretty funky things (assuming they link into evo properly).
The presentation module, Impress looks to have improved no-end. 1.1 was sucky (just like PowerPoint). If you’ve ever used Apple’s Keynote, you know how good presentation software can be. The new one looks to be usable and may mean I swear a lot less when preparing presentations.
Although why OO.org has it’s own package manager is totally beyond me.
I do wish the MySQL connectivity worked out of the box though… maybe it’s just this beta (or the fact that when you select OO.org in synaptic, it doesn’t load up all the Java stuff needed for JDBC connectivity, or ODBC).
Note that I still love Gnumeric and Abiword.