I normally don’t play computer games, never been a big fan. Once in a while, though, I will try one, normally when some irc channel I’m in becomes a fan of it.
This afternoon Miriam introduced us to Krank. And now I’m hooked (though I’m not sure for how long, as the title hints).
There are basically four kinds of objects: two you can move, and two you can’t. The objective is to move the movable ones onto the static ones, in a way that makes the static ones disappear (according to the rules here).
I must say, I enjoy levels with links and anchors very, very much. Ah, and Miriam made packages available. (The code is Python and is public domain; the images are mostly free-for-non-commercial, hence the “-nonfree” suffix.)
Posted Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:57:19 +0200Lucas asks about how he hates reformatting paragraphs in text documents he keeps in Git, because it creates unnecessary noise in the diffs. He also hates, though, not reformatting the paragraphs, because lines can become very long then, and he wants some kind of “smart formatter”.
My take on this is that you shouldn’t change your preferred workflow to adapt it to how your tools work, but to adapt your tools to work well with your preferred workflow (here, reformatting paragraphs). Or, even better, reading the manual page to discover that your tools can already adapt to it.
In particular, for this problem, I recommend reading diffs for text
documents with git’s --color-words. A couple screenshots to show it in
action:
My theory is that we humans have faith on stuff in order not to throw ourselves through the window. It is my current belief, though, that one should not have more faith than strictly necessary — I’m not very sure why I think that, though, I just feel it.
Since I’m fine with the idea that there may not be any life after death, or that nobody superior created us, I choose not to have faith in any god, or on the absence of them, nor I follow any form of religion.
However, I do have faith in other stuff. Mainly, I have an immovable (and irrational) faith that, at some point in my life, I will find a life partner. And I do have such strong faith because the sole thought of not finding one would make me, indeed, throw myself through the window.
And I really wish it wasn’t that way.
Posted Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:20:02 +0200It’s time for recommending five films again. I’ve also decided that I may reserve the last of the five for films I watched prior to starting these series.
So here we go:
Au revoir les enfants (Goodbye, Children): just watch it, really. (France, World War II, children in a school run by priests, but there’s a part I’m not telling you.)
El bosque animado: a superb film that every Spanish person should watch. Magic comedy & drama set up in rural Galicia. Amazing Tito Valverde.
eXistenZ: yet another one by David Cronenberg, involving futuristic video games this time. Quite a good see, but predictable ending?
Billy Elliot: the kid who wants to dance ballet. Predictive and linear, but I just loved it, as I expected — maybe you will too.
The scene where Billy says goodbye to Michael just completely and utterly broke my heart, probably because I identified so much with Michael.
Now, Voyager: Bette Davis plays an ugly duckling, that obviously transforms into an awesome swan. Superb. Oh, and Bette Davis.
Managing a transition is not always easy, because many times they are bigger than you, and have parts you can’t directly take care of yourself because it’s not your area of expertise, you don’t have access, or whatever else. You end up, then, nagging people to do stuff for you, which for types like me is slightly uneasy.
It is a pleasure, though, when you find supportive fellow developers on the other side, just willing to help you, even if you always have more work for them. Thomas and Michael, thank you! (And thanks, in general, to everybody who helps the release team, past and future. We just can’t do everything!)
On reflection, I notice that I also find very gratifying to do stuff for others myself (particularly if I enjoy the task, of course), because it has an immediate payoff. Highly recommended.
Posted Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:22:43 +0200Sometimes, when you play with undo and redo and make, inadvertently or not, some changes in the middle, you find yourself unable to get to the state from where you parted, possibly loosing some words, or more.
Since version 7, Vim has a solution to this problem, named “undo branches”. The idea is simple: if you undo a change C, going back to state B, and make a new change D on top of B, instead of C becoming unreachable, it is stored in an undo branch.
Undo branches are navigated with the g- and g+ commands. For documentation:
:help usr_32.txt
:help undo.txt
To control volume, I can adjust the “Master” mixer offered by KMix or alsamixer. Or I can adjust the “PCM” one.
But then, I can also adjust volume directly in my loudspeakers. Or, even, use the hardware buttons in this Thinkpad (which, afaik, can’t be mapped into modifying ALSA values).
For once, so much choice annoys me.
Posted Wed, 28 May 2008 22:13:37 +0200Now that I use Git at various places, I wanted a tool to send commit diffs. And, I couldn’t find one.
There is the contrib/hooks/post-receive-email script, which does a lot of smart stuff to interpret the stdin of the post-receive hook, but which can’t send out diffs, nor produce nice subjects by default.
Since, to be honest, post-receive-email scares me a bit, and I dreaded the idea of carrying a modified copy around everywhere I needed commit diffs, I went on and created a simple script to send out diffs.
The initial idea was stolen from Philipp Kern (kudos!): abuse git-format-patch to produce the emails, and send those. The first hurdle was that the post-receive hook can receive packed updates, whereas you get notified that a branch changed from rev. N to rev. N+4.
I really wanted to keep things simple, so I didn’t want to find out a list of all the revisions between those two, and invoke git-format-patch for each of those. And I didn’t want to generate temporary files, either (just git-format-patch —stdout).
Then, while doing the dishes, inspiration came, and I saw I could easily let git-format-patch generate a stream of emails, and use formail(1) to split them.
Anyway, this story is becoming larger than the script itself. You can fetch it with:
% git clone http://chistera.yi.org/~adeodato/tmp/other/git-post-receive-diff.git
After a bit of using, and polishing it a bit more, I think I’ll submit
it for contrib/ in git.
So going alone to the cinema yesterday was not a first, but going alone and being alone in the room certainly was, and an unexpected one.
This was, as far as I know, the premiere in Alicante of Enloquecidas, which is certainly not that of a remarkable film, but which was entertaining enough, and provided some very good laughs.
What is wrong with this city?!
(Update: hm, seems I’m mistaken about the “premiere” bit. Oh well.)
Posted Sat, 17 May 2008 13:58:47 +0200Unlike Steve, I don’t particularly mind going to the cinema alone. In fact, it’s becoming a growing habit for Friday nights, when my friends go to some meetings about their faith I don’t participate in (nor their meetings, nor their faith). I really hate getting home early on Fridays, so I take chance to go to movies I know we wouldn’t be going together anyway.
(Oh, and in case I haven’t said here already, the movie offerings in this “city” suck big balls. Virtually no undubbed sessions, virtually no non-mainstream movies. I don’t think I’ll still be here in a couple years, but boy would I be unhappy if the circumstances forced me to.)
Posted Fri, 16 May 2008 20:55:08 +0200Here in this library, next to a couple computers available to query the catalog, a sign reads:
Do not connect your laptop to these jacks. You may loose all data in your computer.
If I wasn’t a computer-savy person, I’m completely sure I would’ve thought: “They’re bluffing.” And then shit happens, because they’re not.
(Oh, but then of course the sign is not 100% honest either.)
Posted Fri, 16 May 2008 20:20:14 +0200One of the people who most fiercely fought software patents here in Spain and Europe jokingly (?!) uses the word “fag” to insult random people he dislikes. (But so do tons of other people I don’t interact with, of course.)
I used not to be annoyed by this at all, but tonight I felt differently, and it really bothered me (possibly because it was somebody from my community who did it). Life is easier when you don’t care, I guess, but I think it’s a good thing that I care now, since without such caring things can’t and won’t change.
Posted Sat, 10 May 2008 04:20:46 +0200As I mentioned, this week I’ve been in Sevilla as a finalist for the 2nd edition of a Free Software contest. Each participant at this stage made a presentation of their project, and this afternoon the winners were disclosed. I’m happy to share that Minirok won the 1st prize in its category, yay!
Also, Dudesconf was simply terrific — I’m so happy I could attend this year. And, as for every conference, eternal gratitude to the organizers: people from GPUL, you simply rock!!
Posted Fri, 09 May 2008 19:42:53 +0200These last two weeks most of my time has been sucked into getting Python 2.5 as default into testing. That’s done now. I made use of the block uploads thingie ftpmaster implemented for the release team to use. Basically, if your package could disrupt an “almost there” transition, the upload will be rejected.
The blocks were in place for 5 days, which I think it’s acceptable. As long as we don’t end blocking stuff for very long, I think we should be fine. See the end of this post for more about this.
Though it was quite a bit of work, I’m very glad I took care it myself, since now I really feel I’m 100% back to Debian, after the time I spent off for health reasons.
Update: Oh, and I forgot to say: having control over britney has really really helped. Thanks a lot Joerg for that.
Dudesconf
Tomorrow I’m leaving to Coruña for Dudesconf, which is a kind of Debconf-ES. I’m giving an introductory talk to Git, a semi-lighting talk about grep-dctrl (30 min.), and (gasp) a talk about Debian packaging with a VCS. We may have a Debian Quiz as well.
I’m so looking forward to it, since many people who’ll attend are amongst my most loved ones, and I already missed last year’s since I wasn’t fully recovered yet. See you there!
Minirok and Sevilla
One of the reasons I wasn’t fully back to release management during the past 5 months or so is because I spent as much time as I had doing development for Minirok. I don’t think I mentioned here before, but I was participating in a Free Software Contest for college students organized by the University of Sevilla, Spain. Such effort finally paid off, since Minirok was elected as one of the finalists.
This means next week I’ll go to Sevilla, to make a presentation of the project, and who knows what more. ;-)
I’m very excited.
Finally, more on blocking uploads
This Python 2.5 transition was the first time the block uploads feature was used, and there were a couple bumps along the way. In particular, a couple packages were blocked, when they shouldn’t have been (libqt4-ruby and evolution-sharp), and one needed package was not blocked, though Rene Engelhard thankfully spotted it very quickly (mono).
The problem is it’s not completely straightforward to generate a list of all the stuff that could possibly affect the transition. What I did was to make a run of britney on an arch that had all the needed bits in place, and block all the packages that migrated together as a result of the hint.
This fails in two ways:
it can include stuff that is not needed for the transition, namely unrelated packages that happen to become candidates for testing by one of the their dependencies having migrated as part of the hint. This is what happened with libqt4-ruby and evolution-sharp.
it can miss stuff that is needed, like packages that can migrate by themselves, so the main run prior to the hint migrates them, and hence do not show up as part of the hint, but that some package of the transition depend on. This is what happened with mono.
The second problem, though, can be fixed by parsing the excuses list and blocking stuff that some bits of the transition depends on. Easy enough.
Yet, there are more cases when things can go wrong, for example a shlibs-bumping upload of a package (say, sqlite3) linked against by some package still needing a couple of builds (say, qt4-x11).
For that, blocking uploads is not an option, since that’d be an insane amounts of packages that, furthermore, can be uploaded if they don’t bump shlibs, so I guess we’ll have to ask in the next release update that shlibs-bumping uploads are coordinated in -release too, at least when close to finishing a transition.
Posted Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:41:37 +0200Yesterday I watched Les invasions barbares, a film by Canadian director Denys Arcand. I came to find it because one of my favourite cinemas in this oh-so-small city was premiering L’âge des ténèbres, the third part of a trilogy started by Le déclin de l’empire américain, and continued by Les invasions barbares above.
I loved Les invasions barbares. I think it’s a very honest film, but for me not only it portrayed a reality and set of characters that I found credible, I also felt empowered by watching attitudes towards life so compatible, if not similar, to my own. Reminds me a bit of some of the feelings I had when watching Juno.
It is also one film more to add to my (smallish) collection of films I’ve watched in French (with subtitles), though I’m intending to fix that: I really enjoy French, as well as enjoyed all Canadian or French I’ve watched in the past. We’ll see how it goes.
Posted Fri, 18 Apr 2008 11:58:37 +0200Sometimes, I’ll accidentally set my music player into “repeat track” or “repeat playlist” mode while working (my playlists are normally short, btw, one album or so).
The funny bit is the number of times the track or playlist needs to be repeated in order to get me to notice. Not that many, but interesting nevertheless.
Posted Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:36:25 +0200By pure chance I read somebody mentioning giggle in #git. It’s a visualizer for git branches written in C using GTK+. I find the output a bit nicer than that of gitk, at least on some repos. As Mike Hommey points out, though, it’s quite slow on medium and big repositories.
P.S.: It’s packaged for Debian.
Posted Wed, 09 Apr 2008 11:16:21 +0200Unlike Martin and Daniel, please do call me by my IRC nick in real life, mostly because that’s what I’ve been called by everybody since I was 0.
On writing the long version is ok.
Posted Fri, 04 Apr 2008 14:41:27 +0200I had never seen a prank upset so many people. On the other hand, almost 50 people (blindly?) said thanks!
Posted Tue, 01 Apr 2008 20:24:55 +0200I knew I liked to make my shell aliases short, but I wanted some statistics (FSVO “statistics”). With a simple pipe:
% alias | sed -e 's/^alias //;s/=.*//;s/././g' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
27 ....
25 ...
20 ..
12 .
11 .....
7 ......
6 ........
4 .........
2 .............
2 .......
1 ...................
This means 2-4 character aliases are the most common (surprise, surprise), followed by 1-character aliases, of which I have (oh god) 12.
That’s 117 aliases total...
Posted Fri, 28 Mar 2008 09:46:53 +0100