Centralized VS. Distributed Version Control

I’ve been feeling a bit weird having my SVN repos hanging out on one partition and the checkout directory hanging out in $HOME. It just seems like a waste of space, and like a bit of overkill for my needs. While I was looking at different version control systems I stumbled across GNU Arch. (not the distro)

Unlike Subversion, GNU Arch has a distributed repository model. At first this method of version control seemed like a chaotic way of developing software, but the more I think about it the more I think it may be just what I’m looking for.

With distributed version control your working copy IS your repository. This sounds perfect for single person development. Another big plus for me is that this type of revision control seems better suited for offline development. Distributed version control systems tend to be speedier since they don’t have to contact a central repository for commits. (according to the websites for Git, and Mercurial)

Here’s some links if you want to learn more.

• http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2006/12/case-for-distributed-revision-control.html
• http://blog.ianbicking.org/distributed-vs-centralized-scm.html
• http://rg03.wordpress.com/2007/06/10/distributed-versus-centralized-version-control-systems/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Control_Management
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_revision_control_software

Javascript Modal Windows

At one point in time I was looking for how to create those little boxes that popup to show a picture. I didn’t know what they were called, so of course I didn’t find what I was looking for.

Anyway, wikipedia has some links to some of those types of scripts.

CLI for 30: Summary

Yeah, I know there hasn’t been anything new since day 21, but it’s time to call it quits.

I learned a lot from this experience, the most important being that I didn’t plan at all. I should have spent more time deciding what I was going to do each day, as well as picking a more convenient time to start.

I discovered that most of a normal desktop user’s tasks can be done without X running. You can type, listen to music, surf the Internet (even with graphics), watch videos (and not just the ASCII ones!), and even run multiple applications at the same time.

If you want to live at the command line many applications have steep learning curves to become a power user, so don’t expect to be instantly good with any program you use. Many CLI programs are also insanely configurable.

I think I may do something like this as an anual feature of this blog, so stick around for next year’s CLI for 30! I might even do some windows CLI only stuff 😀

CLI for 30: Day 15-20

Boy I picked a horrible time to do this. School’s over now, but there’s still lots of work to get done around the house. I’ll have to try this again when I have some more time. (maybe a annual thing?)

Anyway, here’s what I’ve been doing for the past 5 days.

I discovered fbxine comes with Slackware in the xine-ui package. This is great! I really didn’t want to resort to installing Mplayer. It’s always buggy when I use it (sometimes even enough to lock the computer) and it doesn’t handle some of the commentaries on my DVD’s correctly. It also doesn’t give track titles or show in the menu which is a pain to find the episode I want to watch. (maybe it’s missing a lib) I hate apps that use more than one window too.

fbxine is  the framebuffer interface for the XINE engine. It’s the only XINE framebuffer front-end I could get to work. (Oxine is the only one I can remember off the top of my head, and it locked up the computer.)

When playing an audio file fbxine works just like any other audio player, except it doesn’t display tags and you get xine keyboard bindings. Video plays in full screen and doesn’t allow the use of other consoles (I think) The color was OK, and so was performance. It could probably be better with some tweaking, but I’m horrible with video stuff. fbxine looks really promising to make a “DVD player” Linux distribution sort of like HP’s quick play, but without X and (hopefully) more efficient battery usage.

I also learned that the internal playlist file format for gxine is the same as Window Media Player. (ASX).

Today I sent my first email with mutt. Sendmail is evil! Well, mainly it’s a pain to configure. 😉 Thank goodness there’s something almost as easy to configure as getmail. Putmail complements getmail nicely. The config file syntax is similar, both are written in python, and putmail doesn’t need to be run as a daemon (or as root!) like sendmail does. To use it with mutt just add `set sendmail=”/path/to/putmail.py”` to your ~/.muttrc.

CLI for 30: Day 14

I’m working on a rewrite of my 3d-desktop howto on the slackware blog for a new website I’m working on. (which will hopefully be ready to go public this summer)

I thought now would be a good time to try some of the many document markup languages that *nix is famous for. I’ve tried LaTeX in the past which was nice, but it seemed more suited for books than simple tutorials. I didn’t find groff very readable from my experience writing man pages, so I decided to give docbook a try.

I really liked it except for a few quirks. My first problem with it was that it was not a “pure” XML format. There looks like there is an attempt to “purify” it, but it is still more SGML than XML.

The standard also seems slapt together to me too. (on first impression) Still, it looks like it’s the closest to what I need, but it’s cetainly not the only option.

CLI for 30: Day 13

Today I thought I’d try a playing some games

For some reason I never install the ‘y’ package series in Slackware. This package contains the BSD games package, which is a collection of text based games.

I figure I’m not patient enough for nethack, so I’d give these a try. Robots is my favorite game in the collection. You play as an @ and you are being chased around by a bunch of +’s (robots). Each step you take the robots get closer and closer. The goal is to get the +’s to crash into each other or an * (junk pile)

It’s a whole lot of fun 🙂

CLI for 30: Day 8 and 9

I didn’t really do much with my computer yesterday, so I decided to group day 8 and 9 together.

Yesterday it was mainly more ctorrent stuff, and today it was mainly reading about mutt.

Unfortunatly I left the CLI briefly because I had some school work that required special page formatting.

This could have been done using special markup languages like groff, TeX, or even RTF, but there were a lot of "I don’t knows" about what was going to happen when I pipe one of those documents to a lpr. Is that even how you print formatted text? Hmmm… maybe I’d have to convert it to postscript first. (Guess that’s what I’ll have to do tomorrow 😉 )

Sorry Guy 😦

CLI for 30: Day 5

Most of today was spent messing around with cron. I had no idea that a command run from cron will send its output to your local email account (/var/spool/mail/$USER) if the output isn’t redirected to anything. This can be annoying sometimes, especially when I want to send a text reminder to the terminal. I guess I’ll have to check how to do that later, since bash natively handles “you got mail” mail warnings.

Anyhoo, I now have getmail checking my email every 10 minutes. I also learned bash will check my mail spool in /var/spool/mail every $MAILCHECK seconds and print a message if there is.

I’ve also been trying to reorganize my user account. My biggest gripe with my current account is that there’s a lot of stuff under version control that doesn’t belong. That, and there are some programs that change configuration files even if I don’t change any settings. Take firefox for example. Just opening up the program changes my bookmarks file. GXine also will change the audio
settings settings if I don’t stop the movie before exiting. What’s the point of having a config file if you’re just going to overwrite it?

CLI for 30: Day 4

Well, I didn’t get too much done today. I’ve mostly been playing with my .vimrc file. I tried to get the current line to be highlighted, but I never got it to work quite right. With CurrentLine highlighting enabled the current line of text would have the same color, but the rest would have syntax correctly colored. I decided I didn’t need it after all and started working to turn my status bar into a stoplight 😉

Now whenever I’m in command mode the status bar is red. I guess I was going for “STOP! Can’t type in this mode!” 😛 Going into insert mode makes it turn green. I wanted to make visual or replace mode turn the status bar yellow, but I haven’t figured out how yet. This is based on vim tip number 1287 if you wan’t to have a look for yourself.

I also tried messing around with getmail again. I kept getting an error about the files that keep track of recieved mail not having section headers. I couldn’t find anything in the docs about them needing headers (plus they’re auto generated) so I guess I’ll just have to live with it for now. Everything works fine, but the errors clutter the output.

Oh, and I think finally got the hang of screen basics now.

CLI for 30: Day 3

Well, it’s day 3 without X and there’s a few things I miss. I gotten better at surfing the web with links (it’s much easier if you use space instead of the arrow keys.) So far I’ve had the need to switch between links and elinks in order to get some pages to work right. w3m is another console web browser that I may have to try. Last time I checked it was supposed to be the most advanced of the console browsers.

One web site that refuses to work is the one for my ISP. It uses a lot of javascript even for simple stuff that shouldn’t need it. (like page redirection) The only way I can use the site is by using google to load a spacific page. This of course means that webmail doesn’t work very well, so I figured it was time to configure getmail.

getmail is supposed to be more secure than fetchmail (how I’m not exactly sure) but it achieves the same overall result. The main difference between the two is that getmail doesn’t need a mail delivery program (like sendmail) to work. The getmail configuration file, at least for me, seems much easier to configure and is easier to understand.

Once getmail was configured to dump mail into the local mail spool all I had to do was fire up mutt and all my email was magically there. Mutt looks more complicated than pine, or elm, but I think it will be more flexible in the long run.