2009 Aug 31, 4:53From Ira as part of The Balloon Project "... took the lo-fi diy map making essentials (portable helium tank, party balloons, and a disposable video camera) to Paris, France, where they launched a
video camera into the sky not knowing where it would go, and created some very unique aerial cartography of the Place de la Concorde.' I'd love to see this run through photo stitching
software like Photosynth and then layered on Google Maps.
map balloon art ira-mowen france paris 2009 Aug 6, 8:06"Man shaves head, walks across China for a year, grows beard & crazy hair, and takes daily photos and short videos of himself along the way". Like the hair and the ska!
via:kottke hair photo video timelapse china travel ska 2009 May 27, 3:39A fancy tab completion script for Vim that does neat things for Java. Links to other Java+Vim tips as wel.
vim java script reference 2009 Jan 15, 9:21"My friend Amanda had never seen a whole Star Wars film. When I asked her if she wanted to watch the original trilogy she said that she would, but that she already knew what happens. So I took out my
voice recorder and asked her to start from the top. I then created some very basic animation in Final Cut to go along with her narration."
via:boingboing humor video starwars 2008 Jun 12, 10:45Neat stuff for a Mobile Firefox concept: "A demo of an experimental UI for Mobile Firefox by Aza Raskin, Head of UX for Mozilla Labs. See azarask.in/blog/post/firefox-mobile-concept-video for more
information."
browser interface video firefox mobile ui phone 2008 Mar 17, 1:25
I've switched from using my own home web server of which one of the harddrives died, to using NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, an actual real live web hosting
service. So far I'm very happy with them and they give me almost exactly what I had on my own home server: ssh access, vim, php, java, etc. etc. The only notable things they don't do are (1) cron
jobs which I use currently and (2) SSL which I don't use currently. I can replace my cron job usage and I suppose I'll have to reevaluate my web hosting if I ever need SSL. At the moment many of
the server side things like Vizicious will be unavailable. I'll work on getting those working again at some point.
technical webhosting webserver server homepage 2007 Jul 13, 8:30I bought an external backup drive a few weekends ago. I've previously setup a
Subversion repository so I decided to move everything into the repository and
then back it up. So in went the contents of all of my %USERPROFILE% and ~ directories with a bit of sorting and pruning. Not too much though given its much easier to dump in everything and search for
what I want then to take the time to examine and grade each file. What follows are the notes I took while setting this up. It takes me a bit of time to look up the help on each command so I figure
I'll write it all down here for the benefit of myself and potentially others...
Setting Up the Backup Drive For Linux
I first changed the filesystem on the drive to ext3. I plugged it into my USB2.0 port and ran fdisk:
sudo fdisk /dev/sda
Useful commands I used to do this follow mostly in order:
-
m
-
help
-
p
-
print current partitions
-
d
-
delete current partition
-
n
-
create new partition (I used the defaults)
-
w
-
write changes and exit
Then I formatted for ext3.
sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1
I made it easy to mount:
sudo vim /etc/fstab
# added line to end:
/dev/sda1 /media/backup ext3 rw,user,noauto 0 0
I setup the directory structure on the disk
mount /media/backup
sudo mkdir /media/backup/users
sudo mkdir /media/backup/users/dave
sudo chown dave:dave /media/backup/users/dave
After all that its easy to make a copy of the Subversion repository:
mount /media/backup
cp -Rv /home/dave/svn /media/backup/users/dave/
umount /media/backup
Next on the agenda is to add a cron job to do this regularly.
Subversion Command Reference
On a machine that has local access to the Subversion repository you can check out a specific subdirectory as follows using the file scheme:
svn co file:///home/dave/svn/trunk/web/dave%40deletethis.net/public_html
Note also that although one of my directories is named 'dave@deletethis.net' Subversion requires the '@' to be percent-encoded.
Other useful subversion commands:
-
svn help
-
help
-
svn list file:///home/dave/svn/
-
list all files in root dir of svn depot
-
svn list -R file:///home/dave/svn/
-
list all files in svn depot
-
svn list -R file:///home/dave/svn/ | grep \/$
-
list all directories
-
svn status
-
List status of all files in the working copy directory as in - modified, not in repository, etc
-
svn update
-
Brings the working copy up to date wrt the repository
-
svn commit
-
Commit changes from the working copy to the repository
-
svn add / move / delete
-
Perform the specified action -- occurs immediately
Setting up Windows Client for Auto Auth into SVN
When using an SVN client on Windows via svn+ssh its useful to have the Windows automatically generate connections to the SVN server. I use
putty on my Windows machines so I read the directions on
using public keys with putty.
putty.exe dave@deletethis.net
cd .ssh
vim authorized_keys # leave the putty window open for now
puttygen.exe
Click the 'generate' button
Move the mouse around until finished
Copy text in 'Public key for pasting into OpenSSH authorized_keys file:' to putty window & save & close putty window
Enter Key passphrase & Comment in puttygen
Save the private key somewhere private
pageant.exe
'Add Key' the private key just saved.
Checking out using Tortoise SVN
On one of my Windows machines I've already installed Tortoise SVN. Checking out from my SVN repository was really easy. I just right clicked in Explorer in a directory and selected "SVN Checkout...".
Then in the following dialog I entered the svn URI:
svn+ssh://dave@deletethis.net/home/dave/svn/trunk/web/dave%40deletethis.net/public_html/
Note again that the '@' that is part of the directory name is percent-encoded as '%40' while the '@' in the userinfo is not.
Windows Command Line Check Out
On my media center I didn't want to install Tortoise SVN so rather I used the
command line tool. I setup pageant like before the only
difficulty was getting the SVN command line tool to use putty. With the default configuration you can use the SVN_SSH environment variable to point at a compliant SSH command line tool. The trick is
that its interpreted as a backslash escaped string. So I set mine thusly:
set SVN_SSH=C:\\users\\dave\\bin\\putty\\plink.exe
The escaping solved the vague error I received about not being able to create the tunnel.
backup technical personal windows svn linux subversion 
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