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.

Tuesday, 21 May 2013	Dereel
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Another new house?

Topic: general, opinion

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Round to Tantaus Road this morning to meet with estate agent Phil Hayward and look at the Leahy's house. It's not obvious from outside, but in fact it's quite nice. But it seems that any house I buy between now and my 65th birthday (end of September) will attract in the order of $15,000 to $20,000 “Stamp duty” for the transaction; after my 65th birthday it will drop to roughly 0. So it's not a good time to buy houses.

After that, Phil came around to our place. Once again we had the case of a Really Impressed agent, who agreed with the others about what we could get for the house. I'm left wondering why we really want to move.

Network problems solved?

Topic: technology

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I can't say that my network connection has been good at any time this year, but the last 5 days were better than average, and the link stayed up the whole time. That was too good to last: round midday today things got worse again, including a lot of this kind of message, which I don't see very often:

May 21 14:05:21 eureka ppp[2657]: tun0: Warning: nat_LayerPull: Problem with IP header length (33563)
May 21 14:05:21 eureka ppp[2657]: tun0: Warning: nat_LayerPull: Problem with IP header length (13160)

My best bet is that this is an indication of poor reception, but the reported signal strength was better than average. Possibly it's related to my TV reception problems, though I didn't have any of those today.

So it was good to receive a message from Scott Weston: VCAT has rejected Wendy McClelland's objection to the radiation tower: it can go ahead. Hopefully it'll be done soon.

Subversion POLA

Topic: technology

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I'm still puzzled by my problems merging fixes with subversion. Started again by checking out a complete source tree on one of the FreeBSD project machines, not helped by the flaky network, and then trying the merge the way it's supposed to be. First, which revisions do I need?

OK, then the merge command should be:

Why the conflict? Still, selecting “theirs-conflict” should mean “in case of conflict, take the version in head”. And, sure enough, it accepted the update. Correct? To compare it, I copied the files to my local machine, where I have a copy of head checked out. The results weren't quite what they should be:

Why is that?

So the missing lines are from revision 242743, the first revision that I had specified. And looking more carefully at the merge command, I see:

So this is a violation of POLA. -r242743:r243202 excludes revision 242743. It seems that to do it right I should have written -r242742:r243202. To check that I need to blow away the checkout and start again, since even if I remove the modified files, svn's metadata claims that they've been applied. And just checking out the tree takes a couple of hours. Mañana.

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