I got a new domain name: foohack.com. All my personal stuff, like marriage announcements or political diatribes will remain here. Technical stuff is going to be moving over to foohack.com. So, if that’s the reason why you’re reading, then perhaps it would be good to go check the new digs. (The style is a bit dry, but only because I’m still not sure what it should look like, and also because I haven’t had much time to make it pretty.) If you are someone that I know and read this blog to keep in touch, but don’t care about Javascript or any of that nonsense, then Good news! It’s leaving!

Also, my email address is getting shorter. If you don’t like having to spell my name to send me email, you can use “quux” at that new domain, which is foohack.com and it’ll get to me.

If you’re going to be there, I’ll see you there!

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I will be using pushchanges and pushall no more! I found Unison, and my troubles are lifted. Unison is a great little app that hooks up a local folder with a remote folder via SSH. Since it runs on both machines as a user-level application, there’s no need for changing kernels and no lag from trying to scan a remote filesystem. However, you get the same effect that you’d have from an NFS or SSHFS mount. Changes take about a second to propagate between the two systems, but that’s pretty forgivable, since it happens in the background and only uses the network bandwidth that it actually needs to.

I did run into a few caveats with it:

1. You have to install it on both machines, and it has to be the same version on both machines. Since my yahoo BSD machine could only find version 1.16, that was what I had to install on the mac.
2. Read the command-line options, and use them. The UI is pretty nice, but without the -repeat option, it’s pretty much useless.
3. Older versions are a bit flaky, especially when it comes to symbolic links. Make sure that you carefully set the -ignore flags to avoid any symlinks in your sync folders. (Frequent use of gmake-symlink is a big culprit.)
4. If it dies on an error, it might corrupt the archive. Delete the archive on both machines, and try again. (Archive files are in ~/.unison/ and start with “ar”.)
5. The mac puts its unison stuff in ~/Library/Application Support/Unison/. Do ln -s "~/Library/Application Support/Unison" ~/.unison and you’ll save yourself a lot of remembering.
6. Sometimes, it’ll hit some file that makes it barf. I don’t know why. In my case, it was “Rate.php”. I just deleted the offending folders on both machines, and it ran fine. Then, while it was running in -repeat mode, I checked out the folders, on one machine and it synced them without any hiccups. Don’t know why, but it works.
7. Changing the .prf file in ~/.unison/ and running from the command line is a lot faster than loading up the GUI each time and changing the text fields.

The error message that I saw most often was Uncaught exception Invalid_argument("String.sub"). Once that showed up, I’d get disconnected from the server, and had to delete the archive and try again. The -debug option is handy for figuring out what’s going on.

I’m still mounting my home folder from my BSD box onto my mac. But I curse at my slow-as-dirt VPN connection a lot less now that I’m editing code files locally and only transferring the changes without any effort on my part.

It’s the first of many brand universe sites, and in retrospect, hopefully will have been our least satisfying or successful. (If it’s our best, then it means that we’re not improving after this one.) Nonetheless, it was a ton of work by everyone involved, and kind of feels like we all gave birth to a huge baby. With an eyepatch. Hmm… need to work on less disturbing metaphors.

Anyway, go look at the pirates site. And if something breaks, well, I’m sorry

See what the blogosphere says about this. Currently, only myself and Ben Margolin have written anything about it, but hopefully that’ll change once there’s some decent marketing sending traffic at it.

Since we’re in the beginning stages of a project right now, everything is working out of HEAD in the CVS tree. It’s in maintenance modes when you really need to worry about a lot of tagging and branching and whatnot. So, I’ve been finding that it’s easiest to just use the command-line CVS client. Also, I’ve been up in Sunnyvale, working long hours on my laptop in a hotel room. VPN is a lot of things, but it ain’t quick, so my NFS mount has been pretty much worthless most of the time.

So, I wrote a few bash shortcuts so that I can quickly copy *just* my changed files over to my FreeBSD box.

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Lemme know what you think! Terminal is my favorite

Hopefully, I’m not feeling a thing, and won’t come out of my drug-induced stupor for the next few days.

I’ll see if I can get a copy of the panorex and post it here. It’s wild to see your face from the inside.

It wasn’t as easy as we made it look.

It’s very important to make it look easy. It’s a morale booster for yourself and your teammates and dependents when you can say, “Piece of cake!” with a bit of swagger and a cocky smile. It’s just as important to communicate up the ladder that things are not always as easy as they seem.

Management likes to get the most out of workers that they can. That’s their job, and if they didn’t do it, then you’d never be your best. Thank them for pushing you. But, just the same, along with the swagger, make sure they know that the brilliant work you did was not as easy as you made it look; that it took a few late nights and stressful deadline-looming crunches.

However, for some reason, I got the following error message whenever I tried to use arrow keys in Vi:

Usage: [[

The problem is that Vi is faithfully responding to the TERM variable that iTerm is sending. (I’m not sure why Terminal.app and PuTTY don’t suffer from this issue, but c’est la vie.) So, you should keep the terminal setting in iTerm to xterm-color, since this is great for most things, but then add this setting to your .exrc file to tame Vi:

set term=linux

Not sure why this fixes it, but it does. set term=cons25 was another fix that I found, but it seems to break if you have line numbers turned on, because all tab characters are turned into backticks (`).