I mentioned [earlier]{ubifs-on-sheeva} that I will be giving a talk at Flourish Conf next month. While preparing for the talk I decided to I wanted to share my terminal with the participants of the Workshop via telnet. The more popular alternative would be to use screen built in sharing, or maybe vnc, which would require more memory and CPU overhead… and additional accounts using the former method. I only have a SheevaPlug to work with, so I am trying to be as conservative as possible.

I picked up a SheevaPlug recently. In a few weeks I’ll try to use it as a git server in a classroom setting at Flourish Conf, where I will be speaking about [Git]{tags/git}.

This platform consists of a 1.2 GHz ARM processor (Feroceon 88FR131 rev 1 (v5l)), 512M of SDRAM, 512M of NAND flash, 1Gbit ethernet, USB, SD card reader, and … well, that’s it.

Some people have asked me to review my experience with Nexus One as a user in Canada.

Here be my first impressions.

My aunt asked that I get my mom hooked up on skype for my mom’s B-day. That involved getting a webcam and hooking it up on my parents’ Ubuntu system. Since I’ve never done anything with webcams, I didn’t know where to start. This blog entry is about trying skype and the webcam going on my Debian Sqeeze laptop.

See the updates below if you want to keep your root.

I just received the following text from Rogers, and as it claims my data access has been disabled. Since I am running CyanogenMod I never had the 911 issues that the stock Rogrers firmware experienced.

    Rogers/Fido Safety Message: URGENT Reminder 911 Calls HTC Dream
    software update: Mandatory software update is now available to help
    ensure 911 calls are completed from your phone. Please go immediately
    to rogers.com/dreamsoftwareupdate on your PC to download.

    In order to help ensure 911 calls are completed internet access was
    temporarily disabled on your phone at 01/24/10 6:00AM EST. To
    reactivate internet service, please complete your software update
    immediately. Upon completion, internet access will be re enabled
    within 24 hours.

    For users of Macintosh and Windows 7, please call 1-
    888-764-3771(1-888-ROGERS1) for update instructions.

    We apologize for the inconvenience but we prioritize customer safety
    above all.

So I called rogers to get it straightened out and get my data access back. However since everyone in the country that has a Dream or Magic got their service cut… you can imagine I wasn’t the first one to call and complain. When the automated system told me that I would have to wait for 30 minutes I hung up. My time is a bit more important than that.

Ben Selinger wrote about his experiences and it seems to me that Rogers doesn’t want people with phones they don’t control as customers.

Well, this is one more strike for Rogers, and one more reason to leave. Let’s hope WIND is all that it’s cracked up to be.

Everyone that uses the shell eventually learns about nice – the tool that runs a process at a reduced priority. Well, there is also ionice that allows you to tweak processes from taking over all disk IO.

I added a vnice() function into my ZSH config so I can run or mark processes for lower priority for both nice and ionice levels.

Quite some time ago now, I tried sup but found it’s indexing latencies unacceptable for my workflow. I also found the user interface a bit foreign and hard to get into.

More recently I’ve found notmuch, a project that started as a C rewrite of the core bits of sup. Basically, it’s a program that indexes and searches through your existing mail.

I had two issues with it.

• it had an emacs interface, and
• it uses maildir instead of mailbox.

In the past few months apt-get update started failing when using a squid3 web cache.

It woudl give errors like these…

• 404 Not Found [IP: 149.20.20.135 80]
• The HTTP server sent an invalid reply header [IP: 130.89.149.227 80]
• Failed to fetch .../Packages 404 Not Found [IP: 149.20.20.135 80]
• Failed to fetch .../Sources 404 Not Found [IP: 149.20.20.135 80]
• etc

I am experimenting with a new workflow to help solve the problem of lost work between commits. As described [in my previous post]{20091104194146}, there are already several ways to deal with keeping track of frequent edits. The only problem is that they all involve dedication and extra effort.

A few days ago a buddy, Jean, had stumbled into a problem caused by infrequent committing to his git repository. Committing after the feature is implemented is common when working with tools like SVN… but we have multiple workflows available to us under git to manage frequent commits.