January 2010 Archives

January 26, 2010

Gitolite

I've just spent a few hours rearranging my Git repositories to use Gitolite, something I've been meaning to do for a long time. This gives me much better control over access permissions, potentially letting me give other people access to my repository without handing over shells and/or real user accounts.

I've done some testing, but things might have broken.  If they have, address your complaints to the usual address..

January 25, 2010

New Toys

So, I'm now the proud owner of a Lenovo Thinkpad T500 with WSXGA+ screen (1680x1050), 7200rpm HDD, Core 2 Duo, UK keyboard and 9-cell battery. Exactly to specification, and within budget :D

I've also ordered myself a second Freerunner.  This was a bit less of a budgeted expense, but I have no real shortage of money at the moment (thanks to not drinking regularly).  I realised that the reason for my recent lack of productivity wasn't time as such, rather the faff involved with switching into a very unstable environment for development then having to go back to a usable setup at the end of a "session".  Developing in "sessions" like this seems to be a nice way to avoid getting anything done at all - I had the same problem at the start of my DRM work when we changed to Linux 2.6.29 from 2.6.24.  It's much better to be able to work in a semi-continuous stream as time allows.

There's another reason for this purchase though.  I'm affected strongly by the infamous Freerunner buzz problem in Germany, whereas I didn't notice it back in the UK.  I was going to send my FR in to get both the buzz and #1024 (standby time) fixes done, but I've decided instead just to buy a new one with both fixes already.  Then I'll use the new one day-to-day while my current one becomes a development platform, installed with all the latest and most unstable software I can find, so that I can stomp on the nastiest bugs with some degree of comfort.

And there's one more new toy:  A 32TB RAID6 array with 4 optical fibre channel connections for storing and analysing our data on at work.  All my analyses just went from being I/O limited to being firmly CPU bound..

January 23, 2010

Code Offsetting

I just came across The Alliance for Code Excellence, where you can offset bad code you've written in the past with donations which support open-source projects which "decrease the propagation of bad code".