c133.org/blog

Sun, 31 Oct 2004

.: qotd 10.31.2004 ::

cassie: "I'm not lying! I'm half-lying! ... which means I'm half-truthing."

Fri, 15 Oct 2004

mpyne has called me out and made it public that I have Grand Plans for a pyblosxom plugin which will read (via XML-RPC) a chunk of text and then throw it on the blog if it likes it.

The trick is getting the plugin to like it.

My idea currently is to make the chunk of text a valid GPG-signed message. Have the server plugin read it in, decode it, check the signature against the configured key ID from the pyblosxom config file, and then if all of the criteria match, post it on the blog.

Have a few small issues to work out, but it looks like a lot of the hard work has been done for me. daniels wrote a Perl script that sort of does this if you filter email into it, but I hate Perl and the setup for that is annoying. Editing pyblosxom's config files is easy; I doubt that I'm going to end up losing data that way. If I somehow misconfigure a mail server, such that everything for my email ends up at blog@c133.org or something, I'll be fucked.

And I don't like that. So, I guess this is the part where I formally announce that I have intentions to actually finish this module (since I have a half-aborted attempt at it from a while back), clean up the code so that my key ID and stuff are no longer hardcoded into it, and then there might actually be a public release.

(Of course, once it's out, a KDE app which will be able to post to it, probably by using DCOP to communicate with KGPG, will be forthcoming.)

[04:14] | [tech] | # | G

Wed, 13 Oct 2004

.: showdown ::

I blogged earlier about KDE potentially moving our repositories from the ancient and archaic CVS system to the new hotness known as Subversion.

This time around, I've got more ammunition for discussion and a lot of thoughts about the relative strengths and weaknesses of each system as they apply to KDE. Hopefully other KDE developers will read these notes and at least take them into consideration when discussing our eventual move away from CVS.

So - first off, a few words about CVS. CVS has served KDE faithfully for years, and has been (for us) fairly stable and reliable. It doesn't change much. And, believe it or not, CVS does have some strengths.

CVS
Strengths	Weaknesses
Ubiquitous (practically every operating system on every platform can run CVS) Relatively light on resource usage Comparitively light on disk usage It actually works	Branching is painful Lacking in certain very basic features Lack of atomicity with commits; no transactions Not very well-optimized for low-bandwidth Difficulty handling binary files properly

Now, Subversion fixes a few of these issues, but at the core Subversion's goal is to be a better CVS than CVS. It doesn't implement wire compatibility, nor can it natively use the old CVS repository format; instead, it maintains the same ideas as CVS (namely the same centralized development model), as well as a compatible command-set except for areas where changes are needed to deal with Subversion having features that CVS doesn't.

Subversion
Strengths	Weaknesses
Little to no learning curve if you already know CVS Atomic commits, with transactions File renames More efficient wire protocol for low-bandwidth	Disk usage is significantly higher than CVS for a converted repository Subversion seems slower than CVS, quite a bit so in some cases Not nearly as ubiquitous as CVS (yet) Resource usage is relatively higher than CVS

And, just for good measure (basically, because I like it) I'll throw in a little bit about Arch, also known as 'tla'.

Arch
Strengths	Weaknesses
Super intelligent merging support GPG signing support Seamless inter-archive branching support Very easy on server-side resources Offline commits	Relatively high learning curve Nowhere near as ubiquitous as even Subversion Rather difficult and verbose user-interface Disk usage is also higher than CVS Speed is not very impressive

What does this mean for KDE?

I think that Subversion is a much more natural fit for KDE than Arch. We have a very centralized development model; however, the disk usage issue is depressing to think about. I ran a test conversion of our kdelibs repository from CVS to Subversion, once using the Berkeley database backend and once using the new fsfs backend; the bdb backend takes up 1194M of space, and the fsfs backend takes 1130M of space on my system. In comparison, the CVS repository takes up 281M of space for the same revisions. Some of the Subversion developers have offered me a few hints, but I cringe to think about how difficult the migration will be for a large module such as kde-i18n.

[00:59] | [tech/KDE] | # | G

Sun, 10 Oct 2004

.: hooray for migration! ::

So there's some pretty heavy discussion on the kde-core-devel list about migrating from CVS to Subversion for the entire KDE project.

All I can say is, the sooner, the better.

Of course, I'm very much of the mind that tla > svn > cvs, but as long as we're moving up the stack, even if marginally, it's still progress. Plus, svn has the feature that it is much more like tla than CVS is, and the cvs2svn guys have already written an impressive script to convert the ancient RCS files into changesets. And since both Subversion and Arch are changeset-oriented... I'm very excited. In my mind at least, it shouldn't be too insanely difficult to migrate from svn to tla in the future...

[23:43] | [tech/KDE] | # | G

Thu, 07 Oct 2004

.: status 2004/10/07 ::

Damn. The past week has been awesome.

Did the functional testing and RHNQA on a KDE errata here.
Filed bugs against gnome-panel, evolution-data-server, bonobo-activation-server, and ran into a terribly amusing metacity crasher.
Did the functional testing on an ugly cyrus-sasl vulnerability.
Did a *new* round of functional testing on a bug caused by the fix to the ugly cyrus-sasl vulnerability.
Pushed a release of redhat-artwork sometime last week anyway.
Continued hacking on the Qt port of BlueCurve.

All in all, dangerously productive. Not to mention keeping track of email and IRC.

[17:59] | [tech/redhat] | # | G

Wed, 06 Oct 2004

.: you want the mustache on, or off? ::

I crave brownies.

That is all.

[02:22] | [random] | # | G

Tue, 05 Oct 2004

.: the past year ::

I was reading Cliff's LiveJournal and I started thinking about my own life, especially the past year.

Overall, I have to admit that I'm surprised at where I am today.

I mean, a year ago... well, without going into too many details, I don't think it's really an overstatement to say that October 2003 was by far the worst month of my life. (So far, anyway.)

In short - I got laid off from my previous job; Mickey had sex with another guy while we were "on a break;" and I got into a car accident.

All in the space of about three weeks.

This October is looking to be a lot better; I'm working at Red Hat, and they absolutely kick ass. I've still got the Tercel, and that car is awesome to drive. (The manual transmission continues to make me surprisingly giddy.) I'm living in my own apartment, and the weather is getting cold enough that I can see my own breath. I finally managed to get the fuck out of Arizona, where it hit a hundred degrees last week. I'm still single, and I continue to have the amazing luck of The Nice Guy, but I'm used to that, so it's not really surprising. Being single is both better and worse; my relationship with Mickey was so fucked up that it was worse than being alone, overall, but I hate being alone.

Still, taking everything into consideration... I think I'm doing a hell of a lot better where I am now. And it's good to know that - no matter how bad this month might be - it's going to be awfully hard for it to be worse than the same time last year.

[03:30] | [personal] | # | G

Fri, 01 Oct 2004

.: I can hear again! ::

WARNING: Story involving earwax follows.

About a week and a half ago, I took a shower and got some water stuck in my ear. This has happened many times before, but I was impatient this particular time and instead of waiting for it to drain I decided to take matters into my own hands. I grabbed a Q-tip and plunged it deep into my ear, and instead of freeing the water and making everything better I apparently pressed something shut and turned off my hearing in my left ear.

This condition of half-deafness lasted for over a week.

Just yesterday (well, the night before last night, anyway, but at like 3AM) I got so pissed off that I started digging at the inner canal of my left ear trying desperately to shake out or loosen up whatever it was that had gotten caught. Amazingly enough, I succeeded, without causing any damage. And now I can hear again.

It's amazing how much I took the whole being-able-to-hear-from-both-ears thing for granted. I shall never do so again.

[12:29] | [personal] | # | G