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andrew 08.30.09
 I’ve been wanting to pick up a 3G adapter for my laptop for quite some time. It’s not something I need on a regular basis, but there are times when one would have been useful. When I’m taking classes I often like to go to the bookstore and work on papers etc. while the rest of my family reads books/plays with trains/etc. The Starbucks in my local B&N used to charge 4.00 for 2 hours of wifi. A bit steep, but using it once every few weeks the cost was worth it to me. Being able to get out of the house with the family and still get some work done is great. Recently they decided to make the service free. Now that it’s free it’s next to useless. When I can manage to get connected it’s too slow to be useful. While I like being able to get some work done while out, it’s not worth 60.00 a month to me.
Enter Virgin’s broadband2go service. The usb adapter costs ~145 and includes a micro SD card slot (lets you use the thing as a thumb drive). The device is the Novatel MC760 (pictured). The pricing is decent for my needs as well (they’re steep for heavy use, but I’m not a heavy user). The pricing ranges from 10.00 for 100mb to use in 10 days, up to 60.00 for 1G to use within 30 days. In my mind, paying 10 bucks for a few days of light net usage occasionally isn’t too bad. The speed is definately usable for browsing, and shell work. I haven’t taken the time to run a bandwidth test on it.
One note, if you use a Mac you’ll need a windows box to get the device activated (I was able to use an XP vm in fusion). Once activated it works great. The device comes with drivers that will install the first time you plug it in.
andrew 06.27.09
I recently picked up a new iPhone. The 3gs is quite speedy and definitely an improvement from my 1st gen phone. I wanted to be able to post videos to twitter (now that the phone takes video, why not?) A few of the iPhone twitter apps are claiming they’ll support it in the future, but none do now. After a bit of digging I ran across posterous. Posterous is fairly cool. You email your media to post@posterous.com and it adds it to a web-page based on your email address. When I send mail from my personal gmail account, a post is created on baltdad.posterous.com. I have configured that account to automatically post to my twitter feed when anything is posted. So, from my phone, I mail video to post@posterous.com and stuff shows up on twitter. Kinda cool.
andrew 04.26.09
In my environment, it’s important to limit access to the vcs repository. We need to limit general access to the code, commit access on different branches, as well as the ability to create branches in certain areas. In this post I’m going to look at how to handle permissions to lock down/allow different operations. Here is the repository structure I’m working with:
[andrew karma] /Users/andrew/Development/BZR
>>>>>> tree repo
repo
`– myProject.trunk
1 directory, 0 files
Just my trunk branch in the repository. All of these files (the .bzr, the directories etc.) are owned by me. I should be able to do anything I want in the repository. Like creating a new branch. So, I have my trunk branch, and my first release branch in the repository.
[andrew karma] /Users/andrew/Development/BZR
>>>>>> bzr branch repo/myProject.trunk repo/myProject.R1
Branched 0 revision(s).
[andrew karma] /Users/andrew/Development/BZR
>>>>>> tree repo
repo
|– myProject.R1
`– myProject.trunk
2 directories, 0 files
Testing with various permissions
Below is a table of various permission settings and the directory/files I applied the permissions to. I chowned all of the files to root:wheel and messed with the global permissions. In actual production you’d want to use some combination of group permissions/setuid bits/umasks to make sure everything works. So, when I list the permissions below, I’m only referring to the permissions I had on the specified directory/set of files. x was only ever set on directories.
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andrew 04.25.09
I just setup a Downloads page. Currently there are two files there. wp_backup.sh, simple script to backup a wordpress install. Good for running out of cron. moveTV.pl, this helps to organize any episodic files with the general filename of name.s00e00.ext. Builds a sane directory hierarchy and normalizes filenames etc. I use moveTV.pl to automate putting content in a location where TVersity/Connect360 can find it.
andrew 04.24.09
I design user interfaces for a living, it is a strange blend of code, art, and guesswork. I want my interfaces to be useful, visually appealing, and functional. I’m writing software that people are using to do their job. As such, I want to provide an interface that allows my users to do their jobs as easily as possible. What may seem useful for one group of users may not be useful for another group of users. Trying to guess what people want to do, how they want to do it, and what results they want can be very challenging. While there are definitely wrong choices, I don’t believe it’s possible to satisfy everyone. Some people prefer Gmail, others prefer Yahoo Mail. I don’t think Google or Yahoo made mistakes that drove people away I just think that users have different preferences. To develop effective interfaces, you have to figure out who your users are and provide them an interface they want to use. Putting a good set of UI mockups in front of your users, or proxies for your users, can help determine which designs will work, and which designs won’t.
Mockups
I’ve used two basic strategies for developing UI mockups. First is hand drawing/using some tool like visio. Hand drawing is fairly inflexible, and the tools I’ve used have been fairly clumsy. I’d love to use something that is as quick as hand drawing, that still has the flexibility of using software. A second method of generating mockups is to write user interaction code to drive the mockups. While this method is also time consuming, ideally you will end up with some usable code. When you show the design to the user, you can actually demonstrate how things will work in a live environment, this too is a good thing. If your initial design is too far away from what the user wants, you may end up having to throw away work you were hoping to use later. I know we don’t have time for this in our organization, I doubt others do either. I think it’s useful to develop a set of hand drawn/computer drawn mockups to help present different design options to your potential users. Once you have an idea of what they like/dislike, you can start working on the coded interaction. This way, you are helping to ensure that you are effectively using your time.
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andrew 04.22.09
I started my series about bzr as an excuse to teach myself something that may be useful at work, and as a way to see if I enjoyed writing content. Which, for now, I do. I was using blogger, and quickly got fed up with the lack of options, and a fairly frustrating editing experience. So, I started to look into other options. I don’t think I’ve put a site online for personal use/work since 1998 or so. This project also served as a way to see how things are done these days. It’s been a fun experience.
First Steps
After doing some research I ran across Linode for my hosting solution. They were offering everything I wanted for not a ton of money. I get a pretty fast box, with 36oMB of ram, 12G of disk an 200G a month of transfer. This seemed like more than enough for me. I get full control over the machine; I can reboot/reinstall/do whatever I want. They even provide a remote console in case something goes wrong. They give you 10+ common linux distributions to choose from for the base install. The process was as easy as: pay them, pick your distro, click go. 30 second later I had my vanilla install.
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andrew 04.20.09
Using push/pull with bazaar. Before I started playing around with bazaar I spent a little bit of time with git. Since my background has been entirely CVS I thought that push and pull were generally “special” operations in newer vcs systems. It turns out, in bazaar push and pull do nothing other than manage mirrors of branches. If I’m sitting in a branch and issue a bzr push command, I’ll end up with a mirror of the current branch in the push target, like so:
[andrew karma] /Users/andrew/Development/BZR/myBranch
>>>>>> bzr push ../myBranch.mirror
Created new branch.
I now have a branch called myBranch.mirror in my BZR directory. I’m going to take a look at it now.
[andrew karma] /Users/andrew/Development/BZR
>>>>>> ls
total 0
0 myBranch/ 0 myBranch.mirror/ 0 myRepository/
[andrew karma] /Users/andrew/Development/BZR/myBranch.mirror
>>>>>> bzr info
Standalone tree (format: pack-0.92)
Location:
branch root: .
Related branches:
parent branch: /Users/andrew/Development/BZR/myRepository/myProject/myBranch
At this point, it appears that a pushed branch is really no different than a branch that you’ve made using the branch command. You can use push and pull to keep the mirror in sync, as long as the branches have not diverged. A branch is considered to be diverged if there is a check-in in the dest that is not in the source. You can work around this by merging the dest onto the source prior to running the push, or by using –overwrite command that will overwrite the information in the target.
One thing I’m starting to notice is that there are many ways to get to the same place with bazaar. bzr branch/bzr bind is identical to bzr checkout while bzr checkout/bzr unbind is identical to bzr branch. I suspect that there are options to checkout/branch/bind/unbind that makes the operations a little more convenient but they really aren’t dramatically different commands. I think that push/pull fall into this camp. I don’t think they do much that you can’t accomplish with branch/commit/update, but they may let you think about what you’re trying to accomplish in a different way.
Below are a number of other commands that I’ve mentioned but haven’t really talked much about. I’m not going to go through examples, just describe what they do.
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andrew 04.19.09
In the third part of this series on Bazaar I’m going to spend some time examining repositories. The docs seem to indicate that these really facilitate sharing branches. I was going to cover repositories and push/pull, but this seems like enough for now.
Repositories
According to the bzr documentation a repository is nothing more than the database that holds all of the branch data. When you run bzr init, you create a repository within your branch (the .bzr directory). There is also what the manual calls a shared repository, these are created by the bzr init-repository command. A shared repository allows multiple branches to share the same database. This can yield some space savings, as well as keeping everything organized. I suspect that this organization can aid in keeping a sane permissions model. We’ll look at that in a later post though. For now, let’s start playing around with repositories. First I’ll create a repository. Remember, myRepository can use any of the remote URI specifications that Bazaar supports.
[andrew karma] /Users/andrew/Development/BZR
>>>>>> bzr init-repository –no-trees myRepository
Shared repository (format: pack-0.92)
Location:
shared repository: myRepository
The –no-trees option tells init-repository to not create a working-tree of the branches within the repository. Since we won’t be working in this directory, the –no-trees option makes a ton of sense.
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andrew 04.05.09
After part 1, we know how to create, checkout, and modify a single copy of code. It’s almost no different from CVS from a normal user’s standpoint. Add, checkout, commit, status, diff, etc. all do pretty much what they do in CVS. When dealing with a team of developers this can be a good thing, as the time spent learning the basics of the new VCS is minimized. Anyway, on to the point of this post, branching.
As I said in part one I still like the idea of a central branch, a “HEAD” if you will. I think there is also a need for “official” branches. Things like maintenance branches for each release/patch should be managed. However, I think users should be free to create their own branches for features as needed. In this post I’m going to take a look at how bazaar handles branches.
Creating a branch is very simple, you just issue the bzr branch command
[andrew karma] /Users/andrew/Development/BZR
>>>>>> bzr branch myProject myProject.branch1
Branched 2 revision(s).
[andrew karma] /Users/andrew/Development/BZR
>>>>>> ls
total 0
0 myProject/ 0 myProject.branch1/
As you can see, the branch operation created a new directory, myProject.branch1. Again, this would work with local files, remote files (via SFTP, or other protocol) as described in the documentation. Lets take a look at what myProject.branch1 is.
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andrew 04.05.09
Ok, this is going to be nothing new for those of you who have gone through the 5 minute tutorial on the bzr website. I’m going through it again here, so the rest of this follows. First, I created a directory like this:
% ls -R myProject
0 myDir/ 8 test1.txt 8 test2.txt 8 test3.txt
myProject/myDir:
total 0
0 test4.txt
All of the .txt files have the line “Initial Content” in them. Once this was setup, I did the following:
put myProject under management.
[andrew karma] /Users/andrew/Development/BZR/myProject
>>>>>> bzr init
Created a standalone tree (format: pack-0.92)
add the files in myProject to bzr
[andrew karma] /Users/andrew/Development/BZR/myProject
>>>>>> bzr add
adding myDir
adding test1.txt
adding test2.txt
adding test3.txt
adding myDir/test4.txt
finally, commit
[andrew karma] /Users/andrew/Development/BZR/myProject
>>>>>> bzr commit -m “First Commit”
Committing to: /Users/andrew/Development/BZR/myProject/
added myDir
added test1.txt
added test2.txt
added test3.txt
added myDir/test4.txt
Committed revision 1.
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