Cyclopedia Square

Often when I'm typing at the computer, like right now, my three-year old will come up to me and tell me to, "click on the monkey!" It took me a while, but I finally figured out what he was talking about: *click* For some reason he finds that to be pretty darn funny. Three years old and already a greasemonkey fan.

This was originally posted on my family blog on 4/28/06. I will be slowly moving the geeky stuff from there to this blog. I decided to try VMware Server instead of just VMware Player on my new system. Installing either seems to be a little tricky on Ubuntu. The reason is, they've worked hard to make Ubuntu installable with only one CD image, and in order to do so they've left of a lot off the developer tools. Apparently you need these to install teh vmwarez. Ubuntu users seem to take good notes, here's some help for installing vmware on Ubuntu . Worked for me. Server is pretty slick. It looks like you can use it to create your own vmware images, install the vmware tools in an image, and do snapshots too. Very nice.

While I'm pointing out new interesting blogs (because what blog that doesn't mention blogging is complete?), I should point out that my long-time friend, Lane has an important new blog . So important, that I'll let him explain it . Now go join the crucial debates taking place there.

I just found out that Dr. K has a blog . Dr. Knutsen, or Dr. K, for short, was by far my favorite professor over in the CS department (I just realized that all my favorite professors had knick names. Hmmm, I mean, knick names they knew about and were OK with. Ahem...anyway...). He taught my introduction to C++ class, which was also supposed to have a smattering of "Software Engineering" thrown in. Dr. K gave us more than a smattering. He spent many a lecture telling us story after story from his industry experience in order to expound on this topic. He was not only very interesting, but hilarious. His blog looks to be the same.

I decided to convert my simple .emacs cvs repository to mercurial. The instructions for converting repositories on the mercurial wiki were a little confusing, but here’s what I got to work on my Ubuntu Edgy Eft box: aptitude install mercurial aptitude install tailor Then, in the directory where I wanted my mercurial repository (make sure there isn’t a cvs checkout of the module you are converting there!): mkdir hg-temp cd hg-temp tailor -v --source-kind cvs --target-kind hg --repository /home/bryan/cvsrepositories/dot-emacs --module dot-emacs -r INITIAL > dot-emacs.tailor emacs dot-emacs.tailor In the dot-emacs.tailor file, change subdir from . to MODULENAME (which is dot-emacs, in my case), and remove /MODULENAME from root-directory, like the wiki says. Then add the line: patch-name-format = at the end of the “project” section 1 . Then: tailor --configfile dot-emacs.tailor This creates three files, tailor.state.old, tailor.state, and project...

This morning I somehow ended up on a string of random readings on the good ol' world wide web. It was one of those times where I can't even remember how I got started, but I ended up reading a few blog posts on some blogs that I've never really come across before, but were totally awesome. And I guess that's how this whole web logging thing got started. People finding cool stuff and feeling the need to write it down, because it was just so cool. So, as best as I can retrace my steps, I was looking for something emacs related, or maybe just reading the Planet Emacsen feed, but I found this wonderful emacs blog that I hadn't really noticed before. Specifically I found the imenu feature. Wow, that's just so handy. Especially when you bind it to your right mouse button . Somehow I also ended up on this googler's blog . I realized I had been there before because of Joel's story on Windows XP shutdown craziness . But what was more interesting was...

This was originally posted on my family blog on 5/10/06. I will be slowly moving the geeky stuff from there to this blog. Real quick, two nice little things about Ubuntu that I have neglected to mention, but that show just how fine a Linux distribution it is. I installed it on a second hard drive, along side my Mandriva install on the first hard drive. Ubuntu actually detected Mandriva there, and copied the grub entries into the Ubuntu grub.conf, so I could still boot Mandriva after installing Ubuntu. I could have done that my self easily enough, but that just made life that much easier. The other I just noticed this morning. After all my messing around with mondo (which I have working quite nicely now, by the way), Ubuntu includes a Simple Backup Suite ( nice write-up here ). It's a nice little GUI app and the default settings are exactly what I would want. How cool is that?

I have to admit that I’m kind of a tools guy. Every now and then I get this hankering to try out new tools and see if there is a better way to work. For the past few weeks I’ve been researching the latest and greatest revision control tools that are available Free and Open Source. I’ve done some quick comparisons of what appear to be the front-runners as of this third month of 2007. Background Before this adventure of mine I had only used three revision control systems. At work I have used CVS on a couple projects, and currently my team uses Clearcase. At home I’ve used CVS and Subversion (svn) for my various little bits of code. All are annoying in their own special ways. You’ve probably heard the annoyances before: CVS doesn’t keep history of renaming files; Clearcase is complicated, slow, completely reliant on the LAN , and complicated; and Subversion, well, I’ll get to that in a second. First I need to talk about their good ...

This was originally posted on my family blog on 4/26/06. I will be slowly moving the geeky stuff from there to this blog. My good friend Nolan asked why I switched to Ubuntu, or more general, how did I choose my linux distribution? Easy, I just used the linux distribution chooser ! OK, not really. Here's the long story. I first used Caldera OpenLinux, mainly because the company was practically just down the street from where I lived. Then I switched to RedHat because there was a lot more help online, since way more people used it. Then I found Mandrake. I didn't need any online help, most everything just worked, and it has this fabulous control center with fairly intuitive GUIs for configuring more advanced stuff that I had never tried, like firewalls and internet connection sharing and the like. It also made installing rpms much much easier because it had this awesome tool called urpmi that automatically downloaded dependencies and installed them for you. There was eve...

This was originally posted on my family blog on 4/23/06. I will be slowly moving the geeky stuff from there to this blog. Setting up file sharing on my new Ubuntu install was super easy, I just followed these samba instructions . Now I can access my files from my windoze work laptop when I'm on my home network.