Tag Archives: tech

10 Mar
2009

Simple SVN Merging

Today I had a big SVN merge to do – i’m at the end of a development cycle and I needed to merge my branch of changes back into trunk. I dug out my crib sheet for merging and tweeted that I had – and a few people asked me to blog it so here it is.

diff the relevant paths until the + and – shoe the operations you want to perform to your working copy

change into the equivalent directory on your working copy and replace the word “diff” with the word “merge”

That’s it.

Seems like a bit of a short blog post for something that a lot of people find painful, so here’s what I actually did, in more depth.

Example

  1. I had the branch I’d been working on checked out. I committed all changes and triple-checked that I had done that
  2. I ran svn log --stop-on-copy and noted the revision number which was the commit where I created the branch
  3. Next I took a checkout of trunk so that I could break things in my own space
  4. I changed into the new checkout and from the root of it, figured out what I should be diffing, piped it to more and read through the output to make sure I really was applying what I thought I was applying. svn diff -r[branch create rev]:HEAD http://path/to/repo/branch/ | more
  5. Then I ran the same command again but without the |more and with diff now replaced by merge
  6. I then checked my working copy, if there were conflicts I’d have resolved them, checked the system still worked, that sort of thing
  7. Committed my changes

I hope that helps – the same principle applies whether you are applying one fix or many fixes to trunk or branches – the key is to think about what it is you want to merge, and make sure the diff looks right. You can play with the diff without breaking anything for as long as you need to (which today was just as well because the first thing I tried was completely not the right one!) and once it looks plausible – merge those changes in and then untangle anything which has gone wrong from there. Hope this helps!

05 Mar
2009

Blurb Book of Peru Holiday Photos

In January, Kevin and I went to Peru for a few weeks – to visit our friend Cally, and we did some touring while we were there. Between the two of us, we took almost 3,000 photos. Which is way too many to make granny sit through when we got home. I tried showing people the photos I put on flickr, but they make little sense since Kevin has (at least) half the good ones in his flickr stream. So instead, got a blurb book of our holiday photos – to easily show people, and to keep.

Blurb Book

Apart from a few that came out darker than we expected, and the book taking WEEKS to arrive, its absolutely ace! Some of the photos look amazing in print – even more so than they do on the screen. We rarely have hard copies of any of our photos so this is quite a treat for us as well, and the book is really nice quality for us to have on our bookshelves.

Inside the Book DSCF4982

Doing it this way was much less labour intensive than getting them printed and then scrapbooking them up or something – OK potentially this was less fun but at least its actually done and not sat on my to-do list :) We did all the layout ourselves, combined both our flickr sets (after we’d both gone through and edited and captioned the lot anyway), and just pressed the button. A few weeks later, the finished book arrived – yay!

11 Feb
2009

Speaking at GeekUp Leeds

On 18th February, I’ll be making an appearance at Geekup Leeds, to give a talk entitled “Linux-Fu for PHP Developers”. Basically this is a tour of some of my most-favourite command line tools available in Linux, and its a pre-cursor to the talk I’ll give later this year at php|tek in Chicago. What’s different about the Leeds version is:

  1. I have no idea yet if I can type and talk at the same time
  2. Its in a pub
  3. I will be using the Geekup-standard 20/20 format – 20 seconds per slide, 20 slides

I’m not panicking exactly, but I am thinking I need to get some practise in and decide which commands need to be included in this initial short talk version. Suggestions welcome, add to the comments please!

05 Feb
2009

Locked Joomla! Content

I run the website for my local netball club and when I implemented this site I chose Joomla! to run it on. It seemed like a good idea at the time, in fact I even thought some of the other club members might log in and type into the user-friendly WYSIWYG editor to make content appear. Well, it doesn’t happen often – and when it does it seems like Joomla! locks up all sorts of things, from articles to menu items, which means I can’t edit them!

It turns out there is a simple solution to this problem, in the admin panel, just go to System -> Global Checkin … and all the locked items will become unlocked!! The concept of locking anything which is web-based annoys me immensely, but at least I know how to work around it in this instance – hopefully I’ll remember next time I have this problem.

03 Feb
2009

Locking Session in KDE

I’ve been using KDE full-time long enough that I ought to know this, but I had to look it up! I was working in a shared location and I wanted to lock my session when I walked away from my machine. There’s an option in the start menu but the keyboard shortcut is ctrl + alt + L – then you need your password to unlock it when you get back.
15 Jan
2009

Ubuntu Launching Apps

Since I started using Linux on the desktop, I’ve always used katapult to launch applications. However I have another machine that doesn’t have katapult and (since I don’t use a mouse) I’ve always used Alt+F2 to launch appilcations on there. Well, since installing Kubuntu Hardy Heron I notice it (it = KDE4 I think) has a funky new launcher thing that appears when you press Alt+F2:

As you start typing, it autocompletes and shows the icons of possible matches below – then you can click (or tab and arrow) to them, or keep typing until only the one you want remains. Very cute!

24 Dec
2008

Colourful Tabs in Screen

A while ago I posted about screen, and included my .screenrc file. I got some teasing for this, since the tabs show up pink. In fact this .screenrc file is one I stole from somewhere a few years ago and didn’t really think much about the colours. Since then I’ve fiddled with the colours and now use different colours on different servers, which is a nice little addition.

Its really easy to do – using the .screenrc from my previous post – just replace all the M and m characters in the last line with the colour you’d like. I started off with something like this:

Y is for Yellow

replacing m with y and M with Y I get:

Green and Cyan

I’ve also used g/G and c/C codes for other servers, which looks something like this:

Titles

I seem to be keen on subtitles in blog posts, but I’ve not labelled many of my screen tabs in these examples (I have no idea why, I usually do). The yellow example has one where one of the tabs is named and this is really helpful once you get past about three tabs and start losing which one was tailing the apache logs! To label a tab in screen, go to that tab and then ctrl+a, shift+a and you are typing in the box. Enjoy :)

18 Dec
2008

Stale NFS File Handle

We had some fun and games with our house server recently, when one of its disks died horribly*. I’ve only just got around to sorting out the backups again now, which use an external USB hard drive and rsnapshot. I started by reading my earlier rsnapshot post and also the one about the gotcha with mounting external drives. And yes, I do use this blog instead of a working human memory, much easier to find things.

When I mounted the drive, I saw I had one of the older daily.* directories with question marks for its name, date, permissions and so on when I ran ls. When I tried to do anything with the directory, I got the error stale NFS file handle, which was interesting since we don’t use NFS. After some looking around, I got the recommendation to run fsck.

Before running fsck, the drive must be unmounted.

Then, since mine was sdb1 I ran:

fsck -y /dev/sdb1

The -y switch asks fsck to try to fix every problem it encounters (this was quite a life saver, there were thousands of them before I stopped holding my finger down on the “y” key!) – it comes with warnings that experts may do better to fix manually, but really that’s not me.

The disk is now fine and the backups run fine, I guess it was just the old disk on its way out copying nonsense onto the external drive during backups.

* The stupid thing then blew up its power supply and took the UPS with it a week later, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

12 Dec
2008

Relocating a WordPress Installation

WordPress is a fine basic website tool, and I’ve used it for a few different odds and ends. One thing it does have that suprises me every time is that it uses a setting for its web address. So as part of the install, it sets this setting and then everything works. Or rather it does, so long as the web address of the application doesn’t change.

Well I’m working on something that I’m developnig locally, checking in to a subversion repository, and then deploying to another server (and other people will be doing the same when they collaborate with me). WordPress isn’t really designed for that, or for the situation where you have a copy of the database, and the code and need to restore it to a different place for any reason. The admin login form is accessible – but then submits to the old location before you can get in to change the settings.

Anyway it turns out to be really straight forward. The URL is in the database and a one-line query mends the problem. I’m putting it here for the next time I need it :)

update wp_options set option_value = 'http://new.path.to/blog" where option_name = 'siteurl';

I found some complicated instructions for moving a blog too – but this will also work for that scenario. This was wordpress 2.7 (their new and shiny version!), I’m not certain which other versions this would apply to but add a comment if you can expand on this please!

26 Nov
2008

Girl Geek Dinner Next Week

I’m getting quite excited now about the next Leeds Girl Geek Dinner which is next Wednesday (3rd December 2008). Got some cool speakers by the look of it – I know Monica (and she is fab) and from Katie’s bio we are in for a treat. Also I have been promised there is more food this time (hot and christmassy food …. yum) so count me in.

I often get asked why we don’t allow men at these events – well of course we do. Men can attend but only when they are invited by one of the attending girl geeks (maximum one man each please, ladies!) – meaning we can have men who are likely to contribute to the event but not be invaded if we don’t want to be. If you’re a guy and looking to go, find a girl geek and ask nicely :)

I’ll definitely be at this event – I look forward to seeing some others. I had a great time last time – so go and buy a ticket (cheap night out at £15!) and I’ll see you there!