Older blog entries for robertc (starting at number 71)

Ran into an interesting thing a couple of days ago. It looks like mercurial suffers from a race condition wherein a size-preserving change made within the same second as the last hg command's completion (or possibly the last time hg observed the file) will be ignored by hg.

This isn't particularly bad for regular human users (as long as you don't have your editor open while running commands in the background), but its pretty harsh for scripting users - size preserving changes are not *that* uncommon.

I'm immensely glad that we don't have this race within bzr (even on FAT filesystems where you only get last-modified to within 2 seconds!)

Just spent some time bringing bzr-avahi up to play nice with current bzr. This gives it integration with bzr-dbus (and thus bzr lan-notify) and bzr commit-notify (in the bzr-gtk plugin)

I want to know when we will get interesting talks like this happening! Competing on the basis of speed.

I got an invite to mugshot today... but apparently *it* cannot accept the terms of use.

Error message

I've finally hooked up bzr-dbus to bzr-gtk: When a local branch changes its HEAD, that notifies a background task 'commit-notifier' (when the branch can be read by that task). You need to be running 'bzr commit-notify' and have bzr-dbus correctly installed (see its README). Its only just working now, so will be tweaked and tuned a bit to have the commit-notify command started automatically by GNOME, have it read remote branches (not done right now to avoid issues with needing a login box).

One nice thing is that this will notify on 'pull' commands too, so when a bzr branch or pull command completes, you get a notification.

Speeding up bzr info on the hpss with a good sized branch - samba 4.0 (which is > 200MB of bzr repository).

bzr info bzr+ssh://host/home/robertc/SAMBA_4_0
Location:
  branch root: bzr+ssh://host/home/robertc/SAMBA_4_0/

 
 Related branches:
  parent branch:
http://people.samba.org/bzr/jelmer/mirror/samba/branches/SAMBA_4_0/

 
 Format:
       control: bzr remote bzrdir
        branch: Remote BZR Branch
    repository: bzr remote repository

 
 Branch history:
     11316 revisions
      1035 days old
   first revision: Sun 2004-04-04 08:56:30 +0000
  latest revision: Wed 2007-01-24 12:23:42 +0000

 
 Revision store:
     11316 revisions
    111019 KiB

Before our latest optimisations:

real    14m21.769s
user    1m23.377s
sys     0m11.017s

After:

real    0m11.203s
user    0m0.632s
sys     0m0.104s

I say 'whoot' to the sprinters!

So we've been sprinting here in Amsterdam all week. So far we've:

• created a prototype of windows explorer integration for bzr-gtk
• overhauled the commit, branch, push gui commands
• enabled plugins to import other plugins as-needed, allowing code sharing between plugins
• improved the smart-server branches performance for revno ~900% - and potentially an unlimited improvement as it no longer needs to read the entire revision-history file
• made good strides towards push in bzr-svn
• worked on the shallow branches spec - checking out or branching from a repository without having to read ALL of history
• more that I can't remember :).

So, phone call today went something like this

• Hello Robert [voice I dont recognise]
• Hi, who is this.
• This is a courtesy call from Telstra mobile, is that ok?
• Maybe, what do you want?
• Are you aware that Telstra a running a special right now - 400 dollars credit and a BRAND NEW PHONE absolutely FREE if you bring your number over to Telstra today?
• Are, so you are calling me unsolicted even though I'm not a customer of yours?
• <starts to say something>
• Let me make this clear, <shouting>FUCK OFF</shouting>
• dead phone..

Yeah, I was seriously cranky - after the amount of email spam I cleaned out this morning, it was -not- a good day to be spamming my mobile phone number.

I feel somewhat guilty about the abusive (its not my normal persona!) language to the poor shmuck (who sounded like they come from an Indian call centre by accent) whose job it is to spam people, but not very: they are willing to do so - so I dont feel guilty.

I do feel quite a sense of satisfaction though : imagine having one of the pharma spammers on the phone - what would you choose to say to them ?

Added to my list of 'things we need'... a version of icheck that requires less configuration to hook into package builds. Ideally one that we can get running automatically on any package build.

Yes, its sci-fi, but avoiding ABI breaks across all libraries would be fantastic.

Well, UDS mountain view is over, and all-hands.

I found the USA fun in a number of ways. However, for some reason I recieved the 'SSSS' ("Selected for Secondary Security Screening") marker on my boarding pass in both directions, which is known to not be a coincidence. So someone out there with my name is a security risk, or its because I flew from .au to .us on a .nz passport or perhaps they think I'm this guy.

I think its time we did something about this. I urge every American to start writing to your senator or representative about this.. Bruce Schneier and others have already commented on how ineffective the SSSS mechanism is.

For my part, I'm now boycotting as much as possible every company based in the USA. And I shall never visit the USA except when work compels me to.

Which is of course a shame, as many of the people in the USA are nice: but unless they collectively *do something* and fix their out of control government, the USA is heading into being a surveillance state.