the WIND excitement
I heard that WIND stores were actually open in Ottawa, but they are not authorized to sell anything yet. One such store is 5 minutes from my house, at the Westgate mall, so I dropped by on my lunch break.
sata hotswap pico-HOWTO
I had been unpleasantly informed by mdadm that sdc has been failing. Yey, another one – I thought. Not wanting to disrupt most of my day, I decided to try hot swapping the disk.
serving http content out of a git repo
While preparing for my [Git]{tag/git} Workshop for Flourish Conf, I thought about serving files over http directly out of a git repo. Here is a short shell script that I came up with: git-serv.cgi. It takes request URLs like http://domain/examples/dir/file and looks up the objects in a bare git repository in /home/git/examples.git. It looks only on the master branch, and nothing is ever checked out. If it finds a tree object, it prints the file listing at that point in the tree. If the object is a blog, it dumps the contents. Otherwise some error is reported.
pimped out zsh prompt
Here is [yet another]{zsh-git-prompt} update to the series. I’ve updated my git prompt again, now using the zsh 4.3.7 built in vcs_info module. This time the motivation came from Zsh Prompt Magic article. Here is what it looks like now: Everything is now self contained in one file: S60_prompt. Grab it and source it into your zsh config. The features are: name of current branch, git repo state (rebase, am, bisect, merge, etc), markers indicating staged/unstaged changes, little 1 after branch name indicates dirty working tree, little 2 after branch name indicates staged changes, highlight depth decended into the repository on the right, show failure of commands via prompt background change, show command/insert mode when using vi mode (set -o vi).
live termcasting of your terminal over telnet
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.
Debian on UBIFS upgrade on SheevaPlug
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.
nexus one
Some people have asked me to review my experience with Nexus One as a user in Canada. Here be my first impressions.
skype on Debian Linux (64bit)
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.
I am so peeved at Rogers
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.
running really nice
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.