Sunday, 19 May 2013	Dereel
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Another power failure

Topic: general

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Another power failure this morning at 2:03.

Laziness and new houses

Topic: general

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I've been relatively lazy lately, much to the disgust of Peter Jeremy, who complained today that there's not enough to read in my diary. And I always thought it was too verbose. Today I did little. Yvonne found a newly listed house for sale in Tantaus Road, interestingly almost adjoining the property in Snowgum Road that we looked at a month ago. It looked quite good, and since it's only 1.5 km away, we went over to take a look from the outside. To our surprise it belongs to the Leahys, from whom we bought various things last year. The photos are really good; it makes the place look much better. They were in the garden, and though you're not supposed to speak to the sellers directly without the estate agent being present, it seemed rude not to say hello. They're moving to Ballarat for age-related issues. I wonder when we'll end up having to do that.

Getting my head around Subversion

Topic: technology, opinion

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I've been using revision control systems, notably RCS, for over 20 years, and for all sorts of things, including this diary:

It's been 5 years since the FreeBSD project moved from CVS to subversion, but I haven't really done any merging until yesterday. That worked fine, but today's didn't. Followed the instructions and discovered that my source file (/usr/src/lib/libc/stdio/printf.3) didn't have any mergedata at all:

Is this the first time that anything has been merged to this file? Tried the next step:

So far, so good. What does the mergeinfo look like now?

That was more than I expected, to say the least. But svn diff shows exactly my change:

Where did the other mergeinfo come from? Sent a message to the committers list and got back a very nicely worded reply that basically amounted to RTFM. Further up in the instructions was the admonition:

1. Never merge directly to a file.

2. Never, ever merge directly to a file.

3. Never, ever, ever merge directly to a file.

And I had read that, and even thought the repetition a little silly. So why did I do it anyway? Because that's the way our grandfathers did it with RCS. RCS is file oriented. CVS is too, really. But Subversion is change set oriented, and the mergeinfo is associated with the changeset, not with the file.

Pkgng: first impressions

Topic: technology, opinion

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So now my ports are roughly up to date. Can I use Pkgng to keep them up to date? Read the instructions, which are still a little preliminary. The best entry point seems to be the Pkg Primer, though there's also a Handbook section. First you need to run pkg2ng, which takes quite a while, and produced about 4,500 lines of output, not all of it pleasant:

At the end it came up with:

OK, that's simple enough. Remove and reinstall:

The third line (prompt 6) is subtly different: instead of pkg (Pkgng) it uses pkg_delete (old packages). That might be because it failed to register, of course. But pkg also can't find the remote packages. In other words, pkg doesn't seem to do anything useful—yet. Maybe it's related to the repository, but I didn't find a description of that. This was all in a virtual machine, and I had taken a snapshot before running pkg2ng, so I just restored it. I'll try again some other time.

Monday, 20 May 2013	Dereel
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Computing for non-techies

Topic: technology, general, opinion

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Our neighbour Jenny Bartlett, whom I only met 9 days ago, has been on a shopping spree and bought herself a digital (“personal”) video recorder and a Samsung Galaxy tablet, which she calls an iPad, possibly because that's what the salesperson called it. And she had difficulty installing it, so Yvonne persuaded me (“No, I will not repair your computer”) to go along and help.

The thing's wireless, of course, so apart from the pad she also had a wireless router to connect to her existing installation (laptop connected to IPStar satellite), and her real issue was how to connect things up. That wasn't difficult, apart from the fact that the router required a login to connect. But what do you do with a tablet? This is the same question I asked myself a year ago, and in Jenny's case it's not clear what advantage the tablet would have over her laptop, which, she says, she doesn't use. In addition, I had great difficulty with the touchscreen, which seemed very unresponsive. Chris Bahlo has a Samsung; we should send her by and see what she thinks.

The main issue with the DVR was wiring again, not helped by the lack of an antenna cable. The display (via HDMI) was surprisingly unstable, but it got the EPG and we were able to set it up to record. But what terrible documentation! In general, it's amazing how bad the documentation for everything is. I think there must have been about 20 pages of badly reproduced black and white documentation for the tablet, router and DVR put together, and much of my interaction with the DVR was through trial and error. I wonder how much use Jenny will get out of the devices.

More subversion pain

Topic: technology, opinion

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OK, now I have learnt not to talk to files when using subversion—or so I thought. The list goes on (my interpretation of the last one):

1. Never merge directly to a file.

2. Never, ever merge directly to a file.

3. Never, ever, ever merge directly to a file.

   ...

12. OK, sometimes you can merge to a file.

Still, the “sometimes” didn't apply here, so I started my next merge as described in the instructions. Something went wrong and I got a conflict where no conflict should have been. Tried moving the directory, checking out again, confirming that the mergeinfo had been reset, and starting again. No changes to the files. Tried again, and this time the mergeinfo had changed. OK, not a problem: that's what propdel is for. But no, I can't do that:

So somehow, without trying, I've managed to corrupt the repository metadata, and I can't fix it. This whole setup is too fragile: it shouldn't be possible to make this kind of mistake. I seem to remember having similar problems in Rocksoft years ago, but I don't seem to have noted it in my diary. It looks as if I'll have to blow away the checkout and start again.

Watch calibration

Topic: general

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How accurate is my new watch? Hard to say. My old watch gained about 15 to 20 seconds a month. I thought I had set the new one to be 2 seconds behind the old one (because that one was currently about 2 seconds fast), but when I checked today the new one was 2 seconds faster than the old one. Is it gaining a lot, or did I just set it the wrong way round? Today at 15:00 odd I set it exactly to the time on eureka (NTP synchronized). Now I'll have to wait a few days and see how it drifts.

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