| < December 2007 | Matthew Loar > Blog | February 2008 > |
Last night I made some tentative plans with my sister and her boyfriend to go see a movie this afternoon. The plan was, she would call in the morning to make firm plans.
My phone showed no missed calls when I got up, and nothing until 1600, when I got a voicemail alert. She had called twice, and my phone helpfully decided not to ring. It had been plugged in all night and I get more than adequate signal in my apartment. Piece of shit.
So I set out for the AT&T store intent on purchasing a Pantech Duo. I had originally bought my refurb Blackjack because AT&T did not have a WM6 phone at the time, and I figured, hell, it's my birthday, I'm going to buy myself a new phone.
Well, I ended up balking at the $450 it would have cost. I've only had my phone about three months, so no upgrade pricing for me. The guy at the store suggested adding a line to get a discount, but then I'd be stuck paying $10 extra per month. For two years. So fuck that.
I ultimately chose to do a warranty replacement and get another Blackjack cross-shipped to me. I had been under the impression that the warranty period on my refurb was up, but apparently not.
I still hate the Blackjack, but I hate even more the Byzantine way that phones work. I have three phone numbers: home, work, and cell, but no sane way to link them. I was just looking at GrandCentral. They still claim to be in private beta, though the Wikipedia says they usually extend an invitation to people who sign up through their reserve thing. Looking at the feature list, it looks rather cool. I especially like the email notification of voicemail feature. However, I am weary of GrandCentral for a few reasons:
They mention no costs on their site, and Wikipedia says that they basically eat all of the costs at this point. I am weary of becoming dependent on a service with no idea of what it will cost when they exit beta.
There is currently no other service that offers those kind of services as far as I can tell, so I would have little choice but to pay what they ask when they go commercial.
It is owned by the G-entity, after all. :)
For all the talk I have heard about the end of phones as we know them, it still seems slow in coming.
So a few months ago I was looking at a bunch of the 3rd-generation VCSs out there, and found all lacking in one way or another. Well, I recently started looking into it again, since I have been struggling with the problem of maintaining patched local versions of various projects, and the inability to do so in any sane manner using Subversion.
This time around Windows support was less of an issue for me. I have a Linux box running Samba that I use as my main home server, and so in the worst case I could use the VCS tools on the Linux box and compile the project from my Windows VM.
I tried the new bzr 1.1 and found it still to be severely lacking stability. It seemed to spit out a traceback if I so much as looked at it funny. I used bzr-svn to import both the PuTTY upstream Subversion repository and my local svn repo, and then attempted to merge them. I got tracebacks the first few ways I tried, and then I somehow managed to get it to do a merge - kinda. Apparently bzr has this way of representing every file in every repo using a unique identifier. The result of this was the my merge resulted in renames of every file to itself. Like x11fwd.c => x11fwd.c. That's not what I wanted at all! So I gave up on bzr.
hg, on the other hand, turned out to be just what I needed. I don't know if hgpushsvn.py existed the last time I looked at this stuff, but it does the logical thing that I mentioned in a previous post. You have an hg repo and an svn checkout in the same directory. You use hg to update the working tree to the way it existed at a certain revision, and then commit it using svn. Simple.
Here's the process I used to set up my checkouts:
Use hgimportsvn/hgpullsvn to import the upstream repository into directory upstream.
Use hgimportsvn/hgpullsvn to import my local copy into directory local. You could just import an empty directory in your svn repo if you're starting from scratch.
Use hg pull --force /path/to/upstream from local to pull the changesets.
hg merge to merge the changes.
The crazy thing was that hg somehow managed to do step 4 perfectly without any intervention on my part, even though the two branches had no shared history as far as it knew. I think it worked because it looked at the changesets on a purely chronological basis, but I'm not sure.
After that, it was very easy to use hgpushsvn to push my changes to my svn repo. I plan to migrate all of my svn checkouts of projects I don't own to hg in this fashion.
I write this from the sound booth of the Rendezvous, a bar with a "jewel box theater" in the back. It's my sister's boyfriend's 40th birthday, and since he is a musician, what better way to celebrate than to rent the Rendezvous and have a musical bash with all of his musician friends. My sister has a surprise planned for the end of the evening, and so I am up in the sound booth to play PowerPoint jockey.
This weekend is just full of excitement. Tomorrow I have the holiday party for work, where "semi-formal" was qualified with "don't feel you need a suit or anything." Then Sunday I am going to a party that Clayton (and someone named Zoe, who I presume is his girlfriend or something) is holding. That's kind of cool, I haven't talked to him since I got out here again. Or Keith, for that matter. I ponder whether Keith might be there as well.
Anyway, so full weekend. Which is good, because I have had a very busy week at work, and it's only going to get worse. At least I'm coding again, so I'm having fun.
Well, the show is getting started. Time to get off.
| < December 2007 | Matthew Loar > Blog | February 2008 > |