Tech

Since I’m running through the wordpress install again, I figured I’d take Marc’s advice and ‘blog my changes’. Plugins: Ultimate tag warrior feedburner related posts seo title tag sitemap widgets Tarski links widget Popularity Contest (disable visible rankings for external viewers) Tarski theme: Edit footer.php to remove the recent entries section and lower sidebar. Edit sidebar.php to always show the “Main Sidebar” widget thing, and only show the “Widget Footer” one for the front page, to make the sidebar shorter for individual posts. »

The Fedora Users and Developers Conference is on Friday. Weather permitting, I’ll be flying up to Boston to attend tomorrow night. In no particular order, here are the parts of FUDCon I am looking forward to: Cold Boston weather means I can wear my parka. Riding the subway. Meeting Mr. Katz and Mr. Vidal in person. The yum hackfest. Getting a free t-shirt. I plan to take lots of photos, but I usually forget my camera whenever I go anywhere, so we’ll see. »

Where possible, I use git for my scm now. All software on dangerously incompetent is stored in git, and I do my personal yum work with git-cvsimport. One of the reasons I like git so much is git- rebase. Here’s an example of how it works: There is some upstream project that you wish to work on. You clone this upstream project when it is in state A, and make some changes. »

I heard about SLOCCount the other day from Caolan McNamara’s post on Fedora People. Besides just counting source lines of code, SLOCCount also outputs some quick COCOMO calculations. According to these figures, wuja cost would around $55,265 to produce if it were written by paid programmers. Pretty neat. »

This is, of course, a reply to Devan’s post about the Z shell, as I was one of the curious folks always bugging him about why he used it. First, the one advantage I know of that zsh has over bash: It lets me say “The Zed Shell” which is great fun down here in North Carolina. The default keybinding for interactive command history search is ctrl-r (search backward through the history). »

I’ve moved my blog and associated pages from Dal CS to the dangerously incompetent data center. Also, I’ve moved it from pybloxsom to wordpress, mainly because of what Marc has written about it. So far I’m very impressed. The most difficult thing has been setting up redirects from my old cs pages to these new ones, due to the apache configuration at Dal. I’ve had to do silly things like making a directory called “cv.html”, and placing an index.php file in there that will write out redirect headers. »

**Update: **I’ve posted a revised version of my .gitconfig here. By default, git does not include aliases for commands. For instance, ‘git status’ works but ‘git st’ does not. This will hurt your noggin if you are used to using cvs or svn. Also, the internet is for posting config files on. So here are the contents of my .gitconfig: [user] name = James Bowes email = MY_EMAIL [alias] ci = commit -a co = checkout st = status -a praise = blame [apply] whitespace = strip [diff] color = auto rename = copy [pager] color = true [status] color = auto Just drop that into ~/.gitconfig and you’re all set. »

DNS lookups at home were extremely slow for me. For instance, while doing some profiling of yum this afternoon, 10 out of 15 seconds were taken up resolving the IP of download.fedora.redhat.com. Replacing Road Runner’s DNS servers with OpenDNS took this down to 5 seconds. Putting OpenDNS before my router’s DNS server makes the time negligible. Anyways, the details: Copy /usr/share/doc/dhclient-$VERSION/dhclient.conf.sample to /etc/dhclient.conf Edit /etc/dhclient, removing everything before the ‘prepend domain-name…’ line, and everything after the ‘initial-interval 2;’ line. »

Two things have got me thinking about SCMs lately: Discussion on Fedora Maintainers about replacing CVS with a distributed SCM. Hacking on Yum (which uses CVS), and needing some way to keep track of my patches. For Yum, I’ve been using a copy of the CVS repository imported into Git. This is working so nicely that it has led to explore replacing SVN for dangerously incompetent. So far I’ve done a test import of Wuja into various distributed SCMs. »

Following last week’s Planet upgrade, I’ve upgraded my blog to the latest release of PyBlosxom. Nothing seems much different, except its newer. »