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posts
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Using mercurial on windows with cygwin
So for the longest time, well, about 5 months, I have used the mercurial package in Cygwin as my mercurial at work where I run windows on my desktop. I use Cygwin as my terminal on windows because it’s Unix-like and the window command line isn’t very good. No sane command/path completion nothing. Scripting is a nightmare etc. Anyway, the reason I used it was because I was under the false impression that all other mercurial installations wouldn’t play nice with Unix paths. Well, I was wrong. The hg.exe that is shipped with TortoiseHG deals with the paths, at least...
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Mobile phones are not Desktops
While John C. Dvorak generally writes flamebait that you shouldn’t pay attention to, there is usually a nugget of truth in his writing. This time Mr. Dvorak points out that iPhones are not desktops. He says iPhones but he really means all mobile devices of various shapes and sizes from mobile phones to laptops. The idea that mobiles are not desktops might seem obvious. “Duh, a desktop is not mobile” you might think but the point is really about building applications. Are people willing to trust putting their personal data into a mobile device that is easily lost, stolen, dropped...
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Website Update
Today I finally updated my website and gave it a new look. I hope everyone likes it. The theme is a customized version of the “Simple Zen” theme by Foppe Hemminga. I thought it would work well since I wanted a theme that where the header would expand no matter what resolution you view it at and wasn’t a fixed pixel size. The fact that’s it’s a zen theme and I live in Japan just makes it all the better. There are still some rough edges to work out but they should be fixed within the week. With this upgrade...
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BBC Open Source
I took a look at the Google summer of code mentoring organizations for 2008 and was surprised to see BBC research listed. They were probably previous participants but it seems that BBC maintains a number of open source projects on their open source page. The most notable ones seem to be the ones that they are going to use the interns for, Kamaelia, which is apparently a test system for large scale media distribution, and Dirac, an open source video codec. All in all, some pretty cool stuff.
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Mercurial and named branches and hgweb
Mercurial is a nice distributed SCM system written in Python which I have been using at work and at on OSS projects for a little while now. Mercurial allows three types of branching, cloning, named branches, and local branches. Each of these has it’s uses but I have only really used cloning and named branches in my own development. Cloning simply allows you to create a new branch of a repository by creating a copy of it. Simple. You make a copy of the repo, make changes in that copy, and you can merge the changes back into the original...
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hg email and gmail
I just set up my e-mail settings with Mercurial so that I can e-mail patches via my Gmail account. I have Debian installed on my machine which has exim installed by default so it was pretty easy to set up. I’m not terribly versed at setting up mailing agents so I basically followed these instructions on the Debian Wiki. After getting that set up it’s easy to set up Mercurial to use exim4 since it’s a drop in replacement for sendmail. To set up Mercurial to use exim I followed the instructions on the Mercurial Wiki: email:: ... method;; Optional....
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Backup with rsync
I wanted to have a simple incremental backup system I could use on my machine to back up to an external drive so I came across this post on Benno’s blog. Basically it involves using rsync with the --link-dest option to compare files you are backing up against a previous backup and only create new copies when the files have been modified since the previous backup. The rsync command would look something like the following: rsync -a --link-dest=backup.0/ /dir.to.backup/ backups.1/. If the files have not been modified then it creates a hard link to the files so it doesn’t have...
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MochiKit does makes java suck less
So the last few days I’ve been playing around with MochiKit and working with Javascript. Until now I have done some JavaScript here and there but not too much. MochiKit seems to make it a lot easier by providing you with lots of useful functions for things you do often. In fact it’s so popular that I have a hard time explaining to myself why I hadn’t tried to use it up until now. I’m certainly not on the bleeding edge here. Anyway, like I said, MochiKit makes JavaScript less painful. I have a little mockup for a page that...
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Bob Ippolito
I found out today that the principle author of a popular Javascript/AJAX library Mochikit is my former highschool classmate Bob Ippolito. I remember him being pretty smart. I supposed he would make a name for himself in some CS circles and it looks like he has. He is also apparently a co-founder of Mochi Media, a company that makes products for content creators. Mochibot can be used to track usage of Adobe Flash content. It looks like they are moving into some advertising space by creating an advertising system for casual online games. Interesting that Bob has moved into this...
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cp interactive copy
Is it just me or has the behavior of cp in linux distributions changed recently? cp is non-interactive by default so a lot of people, myself included, set an alias to include the -i flag so that cp was interactive by default. alias cp=cp -i But I used to enjoy the fact that if I set this alias it would prompt me when overwriting files but if there was a situation where I wanted it to be non-interactive I could do that by specifying -f. Basically, the last -i or -f would win. I want interative by default but the...
