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Bazaar gedit integration

Javier Derderian is working on , the GNOME standard text editor, so that you can very easily record changes, push them to a server, and so on. Bazaar's model that a branch is just a directory with extra metadata fits pretty well here. He just made another exciting release (or should that be "excited"? :-)

posted Thu 8 May 2008 in /software/vc/bzr | link

Economist article titles, or indy playlist?

• Suicide in Japan
• Too soon to relax
• A lot to be angry about
• Fearful asymmetry
• Death be not proud
• Unsteady as she goes
• Speedy decline
• The Montana Meth Project
• Prove who you are
• Cristina in the land of make-believe
• Unfraternal
• Right back
• Hopes of healing
• Oceans apart
• Rank injustice
• Look behind you

Now I want to hear what A lot to be angry about sounds like.

posted Wed 7 May 2008 in /random | link

Avoiding "not permitted to upload" errors from PPAs

Morten asked today on irc about an error I have hit before myself: you go to upload your new package to a PPA, and get an odd message of Not permitted to upload to the RELEASE pocket in a series in the 'CURRENT' state.

What this means is that your upload was trying to go into the Ubuntu distribution, rather than into a PPA, and you're not authorized to put it there. The underlying reason is that the command line for dput, the tool for uploading source packages, is

dput [options] [host] package.changes ...

It's easy to forget the optional host parameter and if it's omitted it uploads into the Ubuntu archive.

There is a pretty easy (if crude) way to disable this behaviour, by adding these lines to your ~/.dput.cf:

[DEFAULT]
default_host_main = notspecified

[notspecified]
fqdn = SPECIFY.A.PPA.NAME

posted Wed 7 May 2008 in /software/launchpad | link

Using a Dvorak keyboard for a year, and pain avoidance

About a year and a half ago I switched to using a Dvorak keyboard layout everywhere rather than the more common Qwerty, as one of several measures to avoid keyboard-related wrist pain. After blogging about how I was going to switch I said no more about it, partly because ironically enough my typing speed temporarily decreased quite substantially. Marius asked me what happened.

I did stick with Dvorak and I'm glad I switched. I would recommend it to anyone who uses a computer for a substantial amount of time.

It really does seem to require less stretching and remarkably less hand movement. However it may be that part of this effect is just improving touch typing, being more aware of what finger is used for what key — in other words if one somehow forgot Qwerty and then sytematically re-learned it, it might give some of these benefits.

If you do want to switch, I'd recommend just jumping in: don't try to cut over gradually, don't put stickers on your keyboard, don't rearrange the keycaps. I put a printout of the layout near my screen and just kept looking when I got lost until I'd memorized it. At the peak of switching I would type sentences in my mind in idle moments.

Command keys, and vim in particular take a bit of adaption. I found it best to just use mouse actions instead for a while, and then slow down and think about the letter of the key before pressing it. Once I'd adapted it generally worked well. I used to use emacs a lot and rarely do so now, and going back to it is very difficult because what I do remember is in muscle memory.

Passwords can be very difficult, as people tend to remember commonly-used ones by muscle memory rather than as characters. It may be wise to write them down somewhere safe, at least for the transition period.

I can't really touch-type Qwerty now: I don't hunt-and-peck but I do need to look at the keyboard when I rarely have to use it — hotel computers, boot loaders, other people's computers and so on. On the other hand I have no trouble using a Qwerty layout on my phone, I suppose because it's a different mental context.

Some people like to pry off the keyboard caps and rearrange them to correspond to the Dvorak layout. I didn't do this, and I wouldn't recommend it, for a few reasons. I think that to learn Dvorak, you need to be able to touch-type it without looking at the keycaps, if only so that you can use it on machines where you can't (or may not) modify the hardware. Conversely, sometimes you may need to type Qwerty on your own machine, or you may want to lend it to someone who can't touch type Qwerty.

Perhaps most important, the little nubs on the (physical) F and J keys really matter to me now, and if I'd moved the keycaps they'd be in completely the wrong place. Dvorak makes the "home row" concept much more important, and my hands really feel at home with the nubs under my index fingers.

The transition is easiest on a Mac: you can easily put a little switcher on the menu bar, and even use it to display an Aussie flag rather than insisting on showing the stars and stripes. On Ubuntu it works pretty well, with a few nits: the text-mode recovery environments tend to "forget" that you wanted Dvorak during upgrades, the GNOME panel indicator likes to show the rather unhelpful labels of "USA" and "USA2" (with unpredictable meanings) and in some places like the screen-lock dialog there's no indication of which layout is active.

Vista I found generally pretty poor, as it wants to set the layout per-application not per-session. I very casually play WoW on Windows, which needs both typing of text and control through keys, and so far found it's best to leave my keyboard layout in Dvorak so I can type text in the way I'm used to, and then rebind all the keys so they have the same position: the WASD diamond comes out as <AOE.

I only later heard of the Colemak layout, which is supposed to be like Dvorak but better optimized for actual typing patterns, including those that occur in programming. It may well be; the hassle of the Dvorak transition is far enough in the past and the benefits are clear enought that I'm open to trying it. Dvorak does have the advantage that although it is used by a minority of people, it is widely available: if you borrow a random person's terminal the odds are low that it will already be in the Dvorak layout, but the odds are very good that you can easily and quickly change it. This is probably not true for Colemak (as of 2008).

More later on other RSI avoidance techniques...

posted Wed 23 Apr 2008 in /computers | link

Bundle Buggy, for list-based code review

My favourite thing about Bazaar is actually a tool built on top of it, Bundle Buggy, a tool for managing contributions and reviews.

When you send a patch or a Bazaar bundle to the developer mailing list, Bundle Buggy gets a copy of it, sees the proposed merge, creates a web page about it, linked back to the mail thread and to a bug number if there is one.

By catching all patches to the list it makes sure that things are not accidentally dropped. The important thing though is the getting-things-done workflow and the integration with Bazaar. Seeing a long list of mails can make it hard to decide where to begin, which is an invitation to procrastinate. BB tries to sort out patches which are ready to merge, which have been reviewed by others, which you ought to review yourself, which need other work and other states. It knows about our quasi-voting process, where we try to get at least one core contributor to review all patches, and you can do the reviews entirely over mail.

BundleBuggy is (just about?) all Aaron Bentley's work, and credits Jeremy Kerr's Patchwork tool for inspiration.

We could do a lot more here, I'm sure: a nicer review interface than just showing the diff, perhaps automatically firing off a merge if the patch is approved, telling the bug and its subscribers if we believe a fix has been merged.

posted Wed 23 Apr 2008 in /software/vc/bzr | link

Tips for Launchpad PPAs

Launchpad has relatively new (well, a few months old) feature called Personal Package Archives.

PPAs have been taken up quite a lot by people making variations of packages in Ubuntu. One common situation is that developers will put pacakages with a proposed fix for a bug up into their PPA to let people try it out and confirm the bug is fixed.

I have been using them this week to make packages of Bazaar.

It's a pretty nice service; with probably less hassle than setting it up ourselves we have a nice apt archive that can be uploaded to by anyone in our team, and that rebuilds across several supported architectures. I hope with a bit more scripting we will be building these automatically on each release.

One piece of advice is to create a team specifically for packaging. PPAs as the name implies are owned by people or teams, so the URLs people put into their apt sources are bound to that team. So if, maybe later on, you want to allow more people, or indeed fewer people, to upload to the archive that can most easily be accomplished by making a specific team for it in the first place. Team memberships is transitive so you can always add your whole project's team to the PPA team. I put ours under ~bzr but it would have been better to use ~bzr-ppa. Or indeed, to allow for several different types of archive, maybe ~bzr-ppa-stable.

(More later, it's after 6 and enough for a week.)

posted Fri 22 Feb 2008 in /software/launchpad | link

About Launchpad betas

Launchpad.net has a fairly complex system by which new code is gradually exposed to a larger audience. This is managed through Bazaar branches, and automatic merging between them.

As this has evolved there has been a little confusion between launchpad.net, edge, beta, staging and so on. So to explain this there is now a help page about Launchpad beta testing.

posted Tue 5 Feb 2008 in /software/launchpad | link

Version control that doesn't make your eyes bleed

Nice positive comments on the benefits of Bazaar's simple and usable interface from the Java-GNOME maintainer.

posted Mon 23 Jul 2007 in /software/vc/bzr | link

zsh xterm mouse support

I just discovered a nice extension for zsh: mouse.zsh, which lets you click within the input line to move the cursor, copy or paste.

posted Wed 11 Jul 2007 in /software/zsh | link

lvm snapshots in ubuntu feisty

Ubuntu 7.04 has some pretty good support for LVM, the Linux Logical Volume Manager. You can set lvm on software raid from the installer - it's not quite obvious, but I guess given the variety of ways people might want to configure raid the configuration needs to reflect that complexity.

I thought I would be clever and take a snapshot of my root filesystem so I could recover if something went wrong. Bad move: the machine becomes unbootable.

It turns out that the dm_snapshot module that handles snapshots is not loaded by default, and without it you can't access the logical volume on which the snapshot is based. So there's no root filesystem block device, therefore no root filesystem and you're dumped into initramfs. (It makes some sense that you can't write without the copy-on-write code being loaded.)

lvm lvs shows this lv having the attributes -wi-do, where d means mapped (d)evice present without tables, a phrase that doesn't seem to be explained anywhere else on the web before today.

So the fix seems to be: from the initramfs shell, run lvm and lvremove the snapshot so you can boot again, and come into regular single user mode. Then add dm_snapshot to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules, and then update-initramfs -u and reboot, and then it should be ok.

Those not used to initramfs might be surprised that putting it into /etc/modules is not enough, that file isn't read (I think) until after the root filesystem is mounted.

(update) However, sadly this is not enough: bug 113713 means that snapshots on lvm on md don't work on the machine I tried it on.

posted Thu 17 May 2007 in /software | link

Chomsky on a motorcycle

Interesting example of framing in today's Age:

The man and woman died because their car struck a pole; the motorcyclist died when he struck a pole. Blame is imputed to the car rather than its driver, but to the rider rather than to his vehicle.

posted Thu 17 May 2007 in /media | link

Unanswerable

Q: Isn't it demeaning to treat women as sex objects?

A: ... female novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand wrote ...

posted Tue 27 Feb 2007 in /random | link

Turnbull off to a good start

Daily Flute writes:

Turnbull's first day in the cabinet as environment and water guru, and it's pissing down in Sydney. Well done Malc.

posted Wed 24 Jan 2007 in /issues | link

Working from home

Jonathan pointed out an interesting Radio 4 series on Working From Home:

The peculiar thing about working from home is that even people who do it are curious about it... Think of this series as a form of confessional for all of us.

"You get up in the morning, turn your computer and end up starting to work before you've put your socks on."

posted Wed 10 Jan 2007 in /business | link

Loggerhead: new bzr branch browser

Robey wrote a new and better web bzr branch browser, Loggerhead.

posted Tue 19 Dec 2006 in /software/vc/bzr | link

Launchpad as a directory for bzr

Launchpad is the Ubuntu bug tracker, and more than that. It handles bugs, translations, support requests and so on, and can relate them to the Ubuntu packages and the original upstream source. jamesh writes of his recent work to use Launchpad as a directory for Bazaar branches.

Also, the Jokosher audio editor is switching to the Launchpad bug tracker, and they have some interesting comments.

posted Wed 6 Dec 2006 in /software/vc/bzr | link

Mostly switched to Dvorak...

Earlier this week I thought I'd try a Dvorak keyboard. It's been fairly successful so far: I used it all day yesterday. I'm still clearly slower than I was, but my error rate and accuracy are improving and I see some more words are becoming "automatic". Passwords are especially tough because they're often known by muscle memory and not echoed to the screen, but I now generally get them right.

There is one very odd effect: I find myself trying to "speak in Dvorak": not mangling the words but just unnecessarily pausing to think about how they're spelled.

posted Tue 14 Nov 2006 in /computers | link

Rainbow Lorikeets in the rain

posted Wed 8 Nov 2006 in /photo | link

Switching to Dvorak?

I'm typing... this.. slowly.. on a Dvorak keyboard.

It's very popular among people at Canonical — which is confusing if you go to someone else's machine — so I thought it was worth a try.

I've been using Dvorak for an hour a day or so this week and I can now type without looking at my cheat sheet (much) but still not very fluently. I have to think about the spelling of words rather than that being subconscious/automatic. And I notice that I've learnt keyboard shortcuts as positions, not as letters, so they have to be retrained separately. I'm very dependent on the positioning dots as I haven't relabelled my keyboard.

I can believe this will be better for my wrists than QWERTY, which is my main goal. I'm more aware of where my fingers are, there are less bad reaches and they are more often on the home row. (And now back to QWERTY to get some work done.)

posted Tue 7 Nov 2006 in /computers | link

Introduction to dvcs and Bazaar for students

Presentation by Matthieu Moy for an introduction to version control for students, using Bazaar.

posted Tue 10 Oct 2006 in /software/vc/bzr | link

Cheetah

posted Mon 9 Oct 2006 in /photo | link

"Dogs and cats living together..."

The UNIX 03 Server specification requires Java support...

(OK, so Java is not really such a bad thing, but it doesn't seem like part of Unix as we know it.)

posted Mon 9 Oct 2006 in /software/unix | link

Rejecting lca submissions

Rusty writes on rejecting lca submissions:

I know, in the 250 abstracts I'm judging for linux.conf.au, I'm throwing out some pearls among the sand. And I'm probably unfairly biassing against people, but dammit, the number of "I am a member of an open source project so let me tell you how to code/run a project/create a community" papers I've seen is astounding.

posted Sat 7 Oct 2006 in /conf/lca2007 | link

Fruit salad and fur

posted Wed 4 Oct 2006 in /photo | link

Questions your conference website should answer

It's that time again when we try to wade through linux.conf.au proposals trying to sort the excellent from the good.

Mary wrote a good document on Questions your conference website should answer, following on in spirit from my How to get a Linux conference abstract accepted. Go Mary.

posted Wed 4 Oct 2006 in /conf | link

Made my day...

It's nice when you come in and see this mail:

Wanted to thank you for taking the time to write distcc. It is a model of elegant simplicity from a user's perspective.

I've been making infrastructure changes in our software which have roughly the same effect as "make clean" so my build times were consistently outrageous. I was able to reduce the build time by 76% without spending a penny on hardware. 'course management loves that kind of thing ...

The funny thing is nobody else seemed to mind how slow builds were until they saw how bad they were in comparison (I'm a recent hire). Now, when developers have to compile older versions of our code base that don't contain my parallel-safe makefile changes, they moan and groan about how long it takes. These are the same ones that didn't see a problem before I started. You gotta love human nature ...

posted Fri 29 Sep 2006 in /projects/distcc | link

yes it's the way of the future

posted Thu 21 Sep 2006 in /photo | link

SLAs, Chile Style

> I disabled cl.archive.ubuntu.com pointing to 200.89.74.17 around 24
> hours ago because 200.89.74.17 was unreachable for a long period of
> time.  In fact I could not reach any nameservers for calel.org so I
> could not send you an email explaining what we have done.
>
> Could you let me know what happened and if you are ready for me to point
> cl.archive.ubuntu.com back at your mirrors IP address 200.89.74.17?

In September 11 1973 General Pinochet lead a bloody military coupe in Chile, which overthrew democratically elected President Allende. Every september 11 there are demonstrations, or celebrations, depending on which band you belong to. There are riots, barricades, Molotov cocktails, tear gas, power outages and most of Santiago is in a war state. This year was no exception. The power to the university campus came back around noon september 12, after being out for more that 24 hrs. An average situation.

This will probably happen every september 11 until the generation that survived the Pinochet dictatorship is dead.

posted Wed 20 Sep 2006 in /random | link

Utterly obvious recruitment tips, #1

To get hired for a good job you should think of things from your would-be employer's point of view — to start with, that means the recruiter or hiring manager.

Here I have dozens of file attachments called cv.pdf or cv_canonical.pdf, and a couple called cv__jane_doe__software_engineer.pdf. In a just-barely-significant way it does show who is trying to understand the other person's situation.

posted Thu 7 Sep 2006 in /business/hiring | link

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Death)

(From jwz)

posted Wed 6 Sep 2006 in /random | link

Copyright (C) 1999-2007 Martin Pool.