This blog seems to be turning into a sort of a TODO list, i.e. stuff for TWAL to do to make my life easier. It’s another computery one today.
Cygwin is a nearly-great tool that lets geeks (who prefer unix-a-like environments for multifarious reasons - think of it like the Roman Catholic church prefering latin) talk unixey stuff to their windows box and do away with all the nonsense of a windows command prompt. (Of course we have to contend with the nonsense of a unix command prompt but we’re acclimatised to that and the payoff is bigger)
But I digress. The point is that cygwin makes lots of things easier like building programs, manipulating and searching files, making backups grabbing stuff from the web and communicating with servers. It’s an environment - a collection of tools and conventions that, taken together, enable the user to express their complex requirements to the computer.
Now, I like cygwin so I have it installed.
The people at Montavista linux like cygwin, so their toolset runs on it.
The people at Xilinx like cygwin so their toolset runs on it.
So far so good, BUT:
The people at Montavista assume that, as a numpty Windows user, you don’t know anything about cygwin so they bundle a cut-down cygwin installation on their disk. Which COMPLETELY NOBS your existing installation.
So do the people at Xilinx.
So here’s my wish-list item for TWAL to fix today: PLEASE make installers for cygwin-based tools check for an existing installation of cygwin and not NOB IT UP EVERY TIME.
That is all.
I was going to blog about clutter, but that entry has been put on the pile of “things that might come in useful” for now…
It seems 2006 is the Year of Fighting for me. This isn’t a bad thing. Fighting, even the grown-up sort without actual fisticuffs, helps keep your coat healthy and your claws sharp. It gives one a sense of focus that can be lost in peacetime.
This specific fight is the fight not to end up buying a turkey of a house. There are issues with the rights of way to the hardstanding at the back of the property. Hopefully, armed with the facts and my best diplomacy, I can end up with what is on the title deeds, to whit, a terraced property with garden and detached garage, rather than what is presently there, a terraced property with an unusable off-street parking space. Preferably, I will achieve this without ending up with neighbors who hate me.
The vendors managed to tick “no” to questions like “is access obtained to any part of the property over private land…” and “Do you know of any disputes or anything which might lead to a dispute…”. This gave me a distinct feeling of being fobbed off, though I am willing to believe it was just oversight on the part of the vendor, who seems to be bright yet honest, a fellow geek.
What bothers me the most is there isn’t an established way of saying “Hi, I’m your new neighbor, I wondered if I could borrow a cup of sugar, and by the way, you can’t park there ever again”. Once I have the land registry stuff from my solicitor I will have to pop round for a nice chat.
I probably won’t mention timbales.
At the Basement Bar, city screen. What a good night!
As seems to be all too common with live bands, the mambo tracks were a bit too fast and interspersed with cha-cha-cha slow tracks, though there were some paso-dobles in there too and some fantastic soulful trombone in places. This time there were a couple of guests in the band, some excellent though ear-splittingly LOUD trumpet from Enrico Marchesi of Bourbon y Tequila and a familiar-looking mystery Timbalero, who may well have been Chris Sykes of the same band. Must pay more attention to what the compere is saying rather than cheering and dancing like a loon all the time.
The band weren’t quite as tight as last time it has to be said, occasional contra-clave cockups, and the rhythm ensemble lacking conviction after pauses of any length. But then, it’s tough enough getting a lone drummer to come in all at the same time sometimes, so this ensemble rhythm section really had its work cut out to stay tight in the face of the complex rhythms and breaks.
The City Screen’s Basement Bar is a bizarre place. It has the WORST POSSIBLE setup for dancing - a tiny RUBBER dancefloor bisected by a wide bench with a railing on top of it under a low beam with padding on it. The demarcation between seating and dancing couldn’t be clearer. It says “If you intend to dance, bloody well dance, otherwise sit the hell down and shut up!” of course nobody’s THAT sure.
But the venue manages to combine this with somehow maintaining the friendliest, groovingest crowd. Maybe it brings out that British coming-together-in-the-face-of-adversity thing, I dunno.
After first enquiring (unsuccessfully) into whether they still had the vinyl flooring that used to be put down for salsa classes there, we thoroughly talcum-powdered the floor and managed to get some spintastic moves down anyway, much to the amazement of the general public…
The final song was a doozy, really fast. The maxim is “take small steps!” when the music gets faster, but Boy, they had to be pretty small. It was a real workout, especially for the poor followers who had enough on their plates just stepping in time before worrying about spinning and reading the lead!
All in all it was a good night, it would have been great if we’d had more guys present, as we couldn’t quite hit critical mass to keep a small crowd on the dancefloor at all times…
this. That is all.
Last night at salsa someone gave me a look which said “Are you going to finish up soonish and cycle home with me like we usually do and shall I hang on while you finish this dance, or are you staying longer and shall I go without you”.
Yes, I really got all that from one look.
But I made her say it anyway. I figured it’s better to say things rather than just think them as then people who don’t have the psychic link can understand you too. Hope I can be forgiven.
I spent the entire weekend discovering how bad my diet is, in the best possible way: by being fed by other people at gatherings. I need to slow down my brain a bit and make time to cook and to taste what I’ve cooked.
Well, professor, I wonder what leads you to believe I am in the USA?
SCM(MEMO) Attention: Date: jan. 06/2006 INRODUCTION I would like to start off by introducing myself.I am Prof. Steve Godo, I run a private financial consultant firm. My head office is in London, United Kingdom, but I also do have branch offices in Manchester, South Africa and Holland. PURPOSE OF LETTER First of all, it may please you to know that I got your contact through a private search engine online.
I represent a lot of high profile clients, both home and overseas. One of such clients unfortunately was recently held by the British Government on money laundering charges. You can find the news on the BBC news link below: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4291350.stm…
he has personally requested that I commence on an immediate search for a partner for him in the United States who will act as the next of kin/beneficiary
…
well over 40Million UK Pounds. So if it is what you think you can handle, kindly reply, if not please do not bother as we have no time to waste. Thanks, Prof. Steve Godo Phone(Direct):+44-797-941-8208. Email: profsteveGodo006@yahoo.co.uk
Now that’s just not trying. Why can’t I have decent spam, like about camel spiders?
Subversion made me very happy when I installed it. It’s prettier than cvs, and less buggy than wincvs. It supports concurrent development, unlike SourceSafe and is free, unlike ClearCase.
However, I think it falls short of being a real, honest-to-goodness excellent version control system.
A couple of items for my wishlist for SVN.
- allow projects within a repository to have their own revision number. For small projects, I dont want to have to set up new repositories all the time, nor do I want my first cut to be revision 55.
- have keyword expansion (a) on by default (b) configurable by the server admin. Better still, do it server-side.
- Why are tags implemented as subdirectories? That’s a cop-out. Why should a tag not be a symbolic name for a particular revision of the repository?
- Why are branches implemented as subdirectories? Why not mask this from the user so the user requests a particular branch of the code.
- Allow revisions to be submitted by coders, then reviewed by a second person before getting to the main trunk. I believe ClearCase does something like this - where people have their own working copies based on some “baseline” - then someone with suitable authority moves the baseline - this sort of thing would support pipelining a proper testing process whereby one tag indicates what to ship, a second, branched codebase represents the candidate for next release, with any fixes placed in there by testing, and the coders are working on the bleeding edge in their own branches.
Harissa, some of wot I got for Χmas from Stu and Sarah, contains three key ingredients:
- Something that makes it taste and smell great
- Red fabric dye
- A special kind of magnet that attracts any piece of food you put it on to pale clothing
Hopefully there is a stain devil for harissa.
Many weeks ago I came off the A64 to enter York and there was a car stopped on the sliproad. I slowed and the car eventually moved off. It had stopped because there was a squirrel lying there in the carriageway, seemingly stuck to the road, motionless except for its twitching tail. I hate to see suffering so I made a snap decision and ran over its head. It was one of the most traumatic things I had done all year.
A couple of weeks back I was walking in the park and a bold grey squirrel came up to me to see whether I had any food. When I turned to face it, it did exactly the same motion. Seems squirrel A was not dying, but was trying to scare me off.
“Oops” doesn’t really say it.