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I’ve never mentioned it, but my sister gave me a pedometer for Christmas, and it has been a fun toy. I discovered that I travel about 47 inches per step when jogging and about 28 inches per step when walking. I also learned that I walk/jog/sprint about 4 miles when I play Ultimate Frisbee at lunch time, and that if I walk to work, I take about 2664 steps from my front door to my desk. That’s about 1.18 miles if you are following along and doing the math. Cool stuff to know (and I didn’t have to carry around an expensive battery-devouring GPS to find it all out). This week my 6 year-old got a pedometer from a box of cereal. He loves wearing it around. He puts it on and starts running around the house and then checking how many steps he’s taken. It’s amazing how quickly he can get up into the hundreds just bouncing from couch to couch. I wonder how accurate his free pedometer is, but if the idea was to get kids to exercise more, it’s working ...

I stumbled upon a really interesting blog entry about the Mozilla Project's research into version control. I actually remembered reading the first part a while back, and now part two is out. They have done some good research, and considered things like importing from CVS, performance, and how well the different systems work on windoze (hitting different areas than I did ). Follow the links in the entries to see the nitty gritty details, and, if for no other reason, go read both parts to see the awesome Mortal Kombat screenshots. I won't spoil the end and tell you which one they are going with (though the news is two weeks old and you probably knew all of this already. Where have I been? Sheesh).

I upgraded my Edgy Eft box to Feisty Fawn today at work (my home machine is more, um, sensitive and will come later). Had a few problems. When Gnome first loaded up and I started firefox and thunderbird, everything froze. I did the magic reboot and started searching google on my other machine. Nobody has a good answer, but I have only seen it one more time, and it passed without me having to reboot. Another issue is that apache wouldn't start because of the PythonPath directive in my MoinMoin wiki setup. I did some aptituding and it got fixed. I think I did: aptitude update, aptitude upgrade, aptitude dist-upgrade, aptitude install python-moinmoin, and aptitude install libapache2-mod-python. I think a missing mod-python was the final culprit. Don't know why that was removed during the upgrade. Then I had problems getting the ever important Beryl to run. First I tried the new System->Preferences->Desktop Effects, but that started Compiz with none of my key...

The product I'm helping to develop at work has a TCP service that you can telnet to and get a simple command-line shell for development purposes. In our firmware we have a simple framework for writing commands that can then be called from this shell. You can do all sorts of handy things like check sensors, run calibrations, query ASIC registers, read and write memory locations, and so forth. We also use this to play with different configurations and new features before making them permanent. The big downside to this shell is that, well, let's just say that for anyone used to a modern shell like bash, this one is stone-age. There is no command history, no command-line editing except to backspace and retype, and no scripting. This can get very frustrating when you have a command or set of commands that you need to run over and over. Especially when you start using fairly complicated ones with hexadecimal memory addresses, bit masks, and other esoteric parameters. Sure, so...

How to fix bizarre merge conflicts with emacs will be in a different chapter. Here you will just find tips for working with the Bazaar revision control system , also known as, bzr. This assumes you are fairly comfortable with the basics of bzr and emacs . When you do a bzr merge to pull in changes from a different branch (try bzr pull first, it will tell you if you need to bzr merge instead), it's possible that conflicting edits have been made to the files you are versioning. In that case bzr will tell you about it, and drop three new files in your directory tree for each file with conflicts. They will be named, file.THIS , file.OTHER , and file.BASE . "Whoa! Scary! What do I do with all of these?" you might say to yourself. I'm here to answer that question, with a handy emacs tool called ediff. Open emacs and and type M-x ediff-merge-with-ancestor . It will ask for three files, which you should give in this order: file.THIS , file.OTHER , and file.BASE . ...