Category Archives: meta

Mon, 16 Mar 2009

Git Weirdness

So I have a git repo on my machine at home, that’s cloned from a repo on git.xfce.org. I was doing some work in it the other day — in a private branch, not published to git.xfce.org — and I wanted to continue working on the private branch from another machine. But… it won’t work. Let’s say ‘machine1′ has the repo with the private branch, and ‘machine2′ is where I want to work today.

So, on machine2, I cloned from the master repo on git.xfce.org:

[brian@machine2 src $] git clone git@git.xfce.org:kelnos/airconfig
[... stuff happens...]
[brian@machine2 src $] cd airconfig
[brian@machine2 airconfig $] git branch -a
* master
  origin/master
  origin/pre-hal

Ok, cool, that’s what I expect. So I ssh over to machine1 (the one I eventually want to pull from), and I check out my list of branches there:

[brian@machine1 airconfig $] git branch -a
  advanced-ip-settings
  master
* nm-frontend
  notification-rework
  reconnect
  origin/master
  origin/pre-hal

Ok, cool. the ‘nm-frontend’ branch is the one I want to pull to machine2. So on machine2, I do this:

[brian@machine2 airconfig $] git remote add machine1 machine1:src/airconfig
[brian@machine2 airconfig $] git pull machine1 nm-frontend
fatal: Couldn't find remote ref nm-frontend
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

Uh… what? Do I have the wrong syntax? Ok, let me just try to pull everything from the remote:

[brian@machine2 airconfig $] git pull machine1
remote: Counting objects: 1085, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (301/301), done.
remote: Total 1085 (delta 774), reused 1085 (delta 774)
Receiving objects: 100% (1085/1085), 323.43 KiB | 14 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (774/774), done.
From machine1:src/airconfig
 * [new branch]      advanced-ip-settings -> machine1/advanced-ip-settings
 * [new branch]      master     -> machine1/master
 * [new branch]      pre-hal    -> machine1/pre-hal

And then at the bottom it prints out a message about not knowing which local branches to merge stuff into. That’s fine, no big deal. But… how come it pulled 3 of my local branches on machine1, but left off 2 of them (‘notification-rework’ and ‘nm-frontend’). No combination of src:dest refspecs seem to do the trick. Pulling one of the 3 branches it seems to like using the syntax I used above seems to work fine, but it can’t see the one I want. What am I doing wrong…?

3 Comments

Filed under everything, frustrations, meta, software

Wed, 30 Jul 2008

Microblogging

I’ve had a Twitter account for a while, though I never really made much use of it. I recently signed up for an Identi.ca account as well. I was pointed to this video which tries to show how Identi.ca isn’t just another Twitter. My understanding is Identi.ca is mainly an interop and OSS play, which certainly appeals to me. Identi.ca also lets you use your OpenID to log in and set up an account, which is cool (despite OpenID’s inherent phishing problems that its designers have chosen to ignore).

But, as we all know, the value of such a tool mainly lies in network effects. So, who has an Identi.ca or Twitter account? Feel free to subscribe to my feed or drop me a note so I can find you.

Since I don’t write (publicly) in this blog so much anymore, perhaps microblogging will be my next public “thing.”

Advogato?

Some time ago I registered an Advogato account, but never really did anything with it. I was just poking around, and it seems there isn’t much I can do with the site without being certified by some unknown number of people first. So, if you believe that I’m actually me, and have an Advogato account, gimme some kind of certification.

1 Comment

Filed under everything, meta, networking

Sun, 25 May 2008

WordPress 2.5.1 hates mod_security, sorta

I upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1 a few weeks ago. Overall, it seems pretty nice.

Friday, everything was fine. Saturday, I tried to make a post, but when I clicked the “Publish” button, I got a blank webpage. Suck.

So I spent a couple hours (ugh) tracking the problem down today, and finally discovered this in the Apache error log:

[Sun May 25 14:41:59 2008] [error] [client 24.130.18.75] mod_security: Access denied with code 503. Unknown error [severity "EMERGENCY"] [hostname "spuriousinterrupt.org"] [uri "/journal/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php"]

Not a particularly useful error message. Fortunately, my web host (Dreamhost) allows me to disable mod_security on a per-domain basis, so I tried that, and voila, everything works fine. Presumably my web host upgraded mod_security, or changed its configuration, sometime between Friday and Saturday which broke things, as I didn’t change anything with WordPress or my website.

So, if WordPress breaks for you at some point, be sure to check your mod_security configuration, or temporarily disable it entirely to see if that’s the problem.

Hopefully Dreamhost can help me find a better solution than disabling it entirely…

Reverse Blog

Over the past year-ish I’ve turned this blog into more of a private journal, sometimes writing a public post here and there (from mostly public, with occasional private entries). I just updated WordPress to version 2.3.2, which was long overdue, as I’d been running 2.0.9 for a very long time. Not much has changed, it seems, which is good in some ways (I didn’t have to touch my theme for the new version), and not so great in others (I was hoping for a couple new features, maybe stuff that I hadn’t even thought of but would find cool).

At any rate, I’d like something a bit opposite of what WordPress currently offers. I want the default action to be post privately, with a separate button or setting I can hit to publish it. Currently it’s a little awkward. There’s a per-post “Post Status” setting, which can be one of Published, Pending Review (not sure what this does; 2.0.9 didn’t have it), Draft, and Private. The default is Draft, but that’s a little misleading. There are three buttons: Save and Continue Editing, Save, and Publish. The two Save buttons keep the Draft status. The Publish button acts like the Save button, but “helpfully” also sets Post Status to Published.

This UI is kinda confusing, and a bit prone to error: on more than one occasion I’ve published something I’ve wanted to keep private (fortunately no harm was done as I noticed the error quickly). I’m not sure what a better UI might be. One option is to just have two buttons: Save and Continue Editing, and Save. Then the Post Status field would always be maintained when clicking either of those buttons. As a consequence, the default Post Status would probably be Published. As a bonus, it would be great if the default Post Status were configurable. Then I could set it to Private and selectively change things to Published when I want to. Anyone know if there’s a way to achieve a similar effect (with WordPress)?

1 Comment

Filed under meta, software

Mon, 5 Mar 2007

On Blogging In General

As my two faithful readers have no doubt noticed, I haven’t been posting about my life since mid-December or so. I think this is pretty normal for me; every now and then I get too busy to post, and then I just let it go for a while, not really having the motivation to catch up.

I do feel a little bad about this, because there are several people who I don’t talk to all that much who have told me they enjoy reading my blog every now and then to see what I’m up to.

I think my “privacy pendulum” might be swinging back a bit the other way as well. Clearly, I’m very open about myself on the Internet. I’m easily contactable, and Google knows a lot about me. While I don’t post every little detail of my life (I often make good use of WordPress’ “private post” feature), it’s usually easy to get a pretty good impression of what I do during the week, on the weekend, etc. While I’m not uncomfortable with this, I really do just write that stuff for myself. There’s little to no exhibitionism component to it. It’s more like a private journal that I don’t mind other people reading (well, except for the actual private/personal things). I do frequently go back into my archives just to see what I was up to at a particular time. I’m often very interested in how my life changes, and how the things that constitute a “normal week” for me change over time.

On a side note, I’ve also started thinking a bit about the other people in my life. While I don’t reveal any intimate personal details about my friends, they do figure prominently in my life, and I write about the things I do with them, usually giving names and places and whatnot. Again, this makes perfect sense if you think of this as my personal journal that just happens to be readable by anyone: why would I censor myself? But still, some of my friends in particular might feel a bit uncomfortable about being mentioned so publicly by name. It’s a bit late at this point to invent pseudonyms or just use first initials; anyone who has read my blog for a while would easily know who I’m talking about. And besides, I don’t want to do that for my own sake: I’d have to decipher the names or initials later when I go back and read them, and I don’t want to do that.

There’s also another annoyance from my perspective: sometimes when I’m writing about public stuff, there are sections of private material that I want to add in there. Invariably, I end up making a separate private entry, but that’s a pain and doesn’t really fit the flow of my writing very well.

So, I probably won’t be posting about day-to-day stuff all that much anymore, unless it’s unusual or interesting. I’ll reserve that for private posts when I feel like doing them. If you want to know what’s going on with me, ask! Email, IM, or — god forbid — call me. Those of you who are likely to want to do so already have my various forms of contact info.