perf page 5 - Dave's Blog

FoaF on my Homepage

2007 Oct 14, 3:12I've updated my homepage by moving stuff about me onto a separate About page. Creating the About page was the perfect opportunity to get FoaF, a machine readable way of describing yourself and your friends, off my to do list. I have a base FoaF file to which I add friends, projects, and accounts from delicious using an XSLT. This produces the FoaF XML resource on which I use another XSLT to convert into HTML and produce the About page.

I should also mention a few FoaF pages I found useful in doing this:

• FOAF Vocabulary Specification - The standard on which I based my XSLT to add in info from delicious.
• FoaF Explorer - Turns any RDF XML FOAF resource into a webpage with links to the other people, projects, etc mentioned in the FOAF file.
• FoaF-a-Matic - I used this to produce my base FoaF file.
• RDF Validator - This is the closest thing I could find for validation. It does RDF in general but unfortunately not FoaF specifically. I found two links to sites that are down or dead that claimed to do what I actually wanted.

technical xml foaf personal xslt xsl homepage

Canadian Wedding

2007 Jul 15, 5:08This previous weekend Sarah and I went to Canada for my friends Palak and Meghal's wedding. Our five day stay took us on the route from Toronto, to Burlington (for the wedding), and then Niagra.

In Toronto we visited the CN Tower, the ROM, and the Bata Shoe Museum. We generally acted like tourists walking around taking photos of things, putting on sun block, and not saying 'eh'. But we could have been worse like the drunk American college students in front of us in line for the CN Tower asking the guide if the CN Tower is taller than the Stratosphere in Las Vegas. We stumbled upon the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibit which was really interesting. Sarah in particular recalls the cute stuffed animal monsters.

After Toronto we drove to Burlington where Palak and Meghal's wedding would take place. We got up early and made it on time to the wedding which was lovely. I hadn't attended an Indian wedding previously so it was a new experience for me. During the ceremony the child in front of me kept peeking over her parent's shoulder and staring at me. It lasted all day with a break after lunch during which we drove around and experienced small town Ontario. After the break cousins performed dances for Palak and Meghal and then we all danced the night away until the wee hours.

In Niagra we stayed in a hotel room with a falls view which was lovely. We went on the Maid of the Mist tour that takes tourists right up to the falls in a boat and drenches them. We also went on the Behind the Falls tour which was not as fun. In both we are given rain coats which are essentially glorified plstic trash bags. For dinner we ate in the hotel restaurant which had a lovely view of the falls. At night the falls are lit up in various colors with gigantic lights.niagra wedding personal toronto nontechnical

Backup Notes

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

Weekend Humor

2007 Mar 13, 8:16Over the weekend I went with Jon and Sarah to see Zach Galifianakis perform at The Moore who was awesome of course. I hadn't been to The Moore before but it was very cool. The space is very vertical with two levels of balconies making it seem small in the other dimensions. We were on the middle level so when Zach climbed off the stage to talk to the audience we couldn't see him.

Before the show we ate at The Steelhead Diner. I enjoyed my chicken sandwhich but the place seemed a little full of itself with salt and pepper that had been infused with this and that. At any rate it had a nice atmosphere and good food which I suppose is the point.

The opening act for Zach was another comedian whose name I don't recall. He was pretty funny but seemed to do just a tad too much pandering to the Seattle audience. "The administration should do something different than what they're doing currently!" *Audience Cheers* is sort of equivalent to "Its great to be here in... Seattle!" *Audience Cheers*.personal seattle nontechnical

OpenID Stolen Thoughts

2007 Mar 13, 7:57I had a few thoughts after reading about OpenID. However, after doing only a very small amount of digging I can see these aren't new thoughts.

Anonymous OpenID

Have an OpenID that anyone can use because it performs no authorization. You'd specify a URI like http://deletethis.net/anonymousopenid/yournamehere and you'd immediately get an anonymous OpenID associated with that URI. This has already been implemented by Jayant Gandhi.

Group OpenID

Have an OpenID that consists of a group of member OpenIDs. To login as the Group OpenID you need to login with any of the member OpenIDs. This is discussed more by Dmitry Shechtman on his blog.

OpenID Normalization

I find that I already have a couple of OpenIDs without even trying due to AOL giving out OpenIDs. I'd like for all of my OpenIDs to point to one canonical OpenID. It looks like this may already be possible by the OpenID specification.

I guess I'm a little late to the scene.technical stolen-thoughts openid