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Well I still won’t say that hg is my vcs of choice.  But it has one very cool feature – my Dad can use it.  It wins over GIT is a big way, git doesn’t have much in the way of sexy, cross platform guis.  The integration of tortise-hg, hg and bitbucket mean my Dad’s thesis work is all version controlled across his lappy, work PC and uni PC as well as being backed up to the bitbucket repo.

So, hg wins on IDE and GUI integration.  I guess it doesn’t scare the SVNners as much as the more intense DVCS systems so will be the first point of contact for most people.  Any DVCS is a good DVCS so I ’spose I should really just about quit my bitchin.

Or maybe I’m just getting soft in my old age.

Or maybe the christmas pickling has softened me good.

Happy new year all.

As some of you might know, I’m a co-maintainer of the Linux Robotics Framework which is just about now going public.  I’ve been convinced that the version control system of choice there should be Mercirual.  Up to now I’ve not used much except GIT and SVN so I was keen to find out what other features the world can offer.

The first thing that strikes me about Mercurial is it seems to be fairly stuck in the middle – SVN which has had Quilt stickytaped to the side then pasted across a bunch of computers.  OK, that’s not fair, it looks like a pretty good system but for one thing.

Whenever one makes a commit in Mercurial one has to think what the commit is going to be used for.  If it’s going to have to be rebased, commit it as a patch.  If it’s history needs to be immutable, commit it normally.  I’ve already chosen my VCS overall, now I have to choose its subspecies on a commit-by-commit basis?  Hmm, don’t love it.

In a short while I’m about to embark on a process of typing the LRF, trying to get rid of a bunch of void* lying around.  Under GIT, I’d create a new branch with this work which would periodically be rebased against the main one.  Under Mercurial I’ve got a choice.

1) I can create this branch as a branch and merge in mainline changes periodically, thereby screwing up my history and bisectability

2) I can do the changes as MQ patches.  This means I can rebase the patchset whenever I please, hurrah.  But what if I want to do another similar type of changeset at the same time?  Then I have to branch the underlying working copy and build a stack on top of each then remember to change *both* underlying branches when there’s a change there.

I admit my hg-fu isn’t anywhere near elite just yet but it seems to me that’s a fairly average pair of choices.  Well, best go back to training in the VCS dojo, see if I can’t work out just what the point of hg actually is..

Well I guess it’s about time I get back to blogging.  And what better to report than a 24-hour OS upgrade ordeal the day before a really very critical exam.  Huzzah, the uni work ethic is alive and kicking!

I’ve got a Toshiba M200 tablet which shipped with windows and I subsequently upgraded to openSUSE10.3.  It did not ship with an optical drive.  That hasn’t been a problem up to now, I’ve got a little external drive which allowed me to install openSUSE10.3 in the first place.  10.3 was getting fairly long in the tooth so I thought it was a good plan to upgrade it.  In fact, with fantastic bloke logic, I decided that the best way for me to get some good study time was to upgrade OS, then I’d go a few hours during the install without a working laptop to distract me!

Well as I say, I’ve got a little external cdrom drive so I thought the upgrade would go no worries.  Unfortunately that cdrom drive had been sitting in a shed for many months and didn’t work fantastically at the best of times.  When booting off CD then the drive would spin up, the drive would spin down, the computer would boot off hard drive.  Bugger.

No worries though, I wanted to get an external dvd burner anyway so I got one and tried to boot off that.  Then I started searching around the internet and found that my old cdrom just, coincidentally, happened to be the only one in the world apart from the expensive official Toshiba one which the M200 can actually boot off.  So I couldn’t boot off CD.  And this took me 7 hours of potential study to track down.

So, what other boot options do I have?  The M200 has an SD card reader which is supposedly bootable, sweet!  So, I put the contents of the ISO on a sufficiently large SD card and tried to boot in to it.  The bios didn’t even try and find it.  (And yes the partiton was FAT32 and bootable just like it should have been).  Reading a bit more the SD card isn’t recognized as a hard drive, but a virtual floppy.  So I put the contents of a nice boot disk on the SD card, toil for about an hour attempting to make it work but still epic fail.  Ooh, how about the nice mksusbootdisk utility?  Did that.  Try to boot.  FAIL.  This is getting repetitive.

Well wait a second, I’ve already got GRUB on there, howzabout I chainload the CD from that?!  Brilliant!  Having searched around the world wide interwebz I found that GRUB itself doesn’t have such capability but it in turn can chainload SBM, the smart boot manager.  SBM booted nicely first try, hurrah!  But it didn’t find my external drive.  OK so not so nice.

Well, I can boot from a hard drive can’t I?  Yes I can!  Right, well let’s extract the cd contents to a partition and boot from that!  But I can’t resize a partition and I didn’t want to corrupt the existing installation lest I build a brick.  I don’t need one of those.

But I have a swap partition, so lets swapoff that, format ext, extract to that, boot!  Yes, kernel sp00dge!  But it still thinks it’s on a CD.  Gawdarnit.  Bit more google, get the linux and initrd images for a working openSUSE11.0 install, replace the CD ones in the ex-swap partition, boot.  Success!  An installer screen.  And there was much rejoicing.  And there was 12 hours gone.

Alriiight, so where’s my installation media at now?  Well it’s on the hard drive.  But the installer doesn’t see it on the hard drive, so I’ve got a working installer but nothing to install.  No matter, openSUSE has web-based install media, just to find them!  Boot back in to the working install, note the australian mirror, boot in to installer, enter insta.. Nope.  Needs the IP address not the domain.  No DNS at this stage.  Right, back in to the working install, resolve IP, back in to installer.

Now I get to select which ethernet interface to use.  Well I’m on the couch, it’s seen my wireless card, sounds good!  I should have known *that* wasn’t to work.

So dig through the shed, find a cable, try to find a spare patch of desk within cable reach of the router, fail.  Balance laptop on top of the printer, success!  It’s installing!  It’s actually downloading files!  14 hours gone.

STUDY TIME!

30 minutes later the installer comes to detecting network devices and takes down the ethernet interface it’s installing off.  That’s always a really good plan, innit!  After some scary text-mode warnings it appears to come back up, but lo, more errors!  Can’t find the repo.  AH FFS.  Check the repo URL.  OK, so the installer’s gone ahead and inserted random characters in to the repository URL, remove them and the thing boots!

Of course, as with any virgin Linux install on non-standard hardware there was a fair bit of userspace tweaking to do but that’s prolly the topic of another rant.  But now I’m blogging off it, F10nning and getting nice macosX-like sexy window switching and all’s right with the world.

I think my next laptop will have an optical drive.  That might be a better plan.

Righteo,

So, as you can see, this blog as been recreated.  b2evolution exploded in spectacular fashion, taking out all the online backups too.  And reinstallation of the b2 scripts still exploded.  So here it is in all it’s new, sexy glory, BennoBlagv2 based on apparently less volatile WordPress.

For those who don’t know me, a brief rundown.

I tend to have quite strongly held but generally weakly founded opinions on pretty much anything to do with computers and programming.  As such, pretty much everything you ever read here is going to be simply opinion pieces.  If you ever find a good hard fact, it was probably an accident.

I like a reasoned debate.  If you don’t agree with me, let me know why.  I recognise many of my opinions are weakly founded and am happy to change them if the argument is there.

Despite all this I’m not really a prick.  Honest.

Long live the new blag!