ai page 53 - Dave's Blog

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

Office with a View

2007 Jul 14, 3:12I've been at Microsoft three years as of last Thursday. It makes me feel old but on the bright side I've upgraded offices. I now have an office with a window. Its actually a coincidence that I got this office at the time of my Microsoft anniversary but I like to pretend. I've had a single office for only four or five months now so its a nice surprise that I'm moving into a single window office so soon.

Of course this move means I'll be leaving some things behind. For instance the hanging dry erase pen holder that I created out of office supplies I will leave attached to my old white board. My new office has fancy whiteboards with trays built-in (sooo fancy) so I know the person coming into my old office will make better use of my hanging dry erase pen holder then I would. I explained to him that the rubber bands need to be replaced every eight months or so and not to exceed the maximum weight restrictions.

Additionally, the office art masterpiece I created I will also leave behind. When Bill Gates was featured on the cover of Diversity Inc. for his amazing philanthropic acts many of us got copies in our mailboxes. I collected mine and some from the recycling bins and put up five of the covers on the wall. Eventually others added to it which was my intent, but I only started this when I eventually checked my mailbox a week or so after the magazine arrived so there weren't as many covers left with which to work. At any rate I ended up with eleven on the wall. I'll leave the interpretation of the artwork up to the viewer.microsoft personal office 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

Chicken Roundup

2007 Jul 11, 3:52I realized that I have short list of chicken related things I find humorous and they're all available for the linking to via youtube.

Chicken: The Powerpoint Presentation. This is a power point presentation of a research paper written in the language chicken. (video)

Bluth Family Chicken Dances. From the show Arrested Development many Bluth family members had their own chicken dance. (video)

Peter Fights the Giant Chicken. A man sized chicken fights Peter from Family Guy for multiple minutes in several episodes mimicking famous action sequences. I must admire the writers dedication to the gag. (video1, video2)

roundup video personal chicken humor nontechnical

Second Life Translator

2007 Jul 4, 10:58Hackdiary
I really enjoy reading Matt Biddulph's blog hackdiary. An entry some time ago talked about his Second Life flickr screen which is a screen in Second Life that displays images from flickr.com based on viewers suggested tags. I'm a novice to the Second Life scripting API and so it was from this blog post I became aware of the llHTTPRequest. This is like the XMLHttpRequest for Second Life code in that it lets you make HTTP requests. I decided that I too could do something cool with this.

Translator
I decided to make a translator object that a Second Life user would wear that would translate anything said near them. The details aren't too surprising: The translator object keeps an owner modifiable list of translation instructions each consisting of who to listen to, the language they speak, who to tell the translation to, and into what language to translate. When the translator hears someone, it runs through its list of translation instructions and when it finds a match for the speaker uses the llHTTPRequest to send off what was said to Google translate. When the result comes back the translator simply says the response.

Issues
Unfortunately, the llHTTPRequest limits the response size to 2K and no translation site I can find has the translated text in the first 2K. There's a flag HTTP_BODY_MAXLENGTH provided but it defaults to 2K and you can't change its value. So I decided to setup a PHP script on my site to act as a translating proxy and parse the translated text out of the HTML response from Google translate. Through experimentation I found that their site can take parameters text and langpair queries in the query like so: http://translate.google.com/translate_t?text=car%20moi%20m%C3%AAme%20j%27en%20rit&langpair=fr|en. On the topic of non US-ASCII characters (which is important for a translator) I found that llHTTPRequest encodes non US-ASCII characters as percent-encoded UTF-8 when constructing the request URI. However, when Google translate takes parameters off the URI it only seems to interpret it as percent-encoded UTF-8 when the user-agent is IE's. So after changing my PHP script to use IE7's user-agent non US-ASCII character input worked.

In Use
Actually using it in practice is rather difficult. Between typos, slang, abbreviations, and the current state of the free online translators its very difficult to carry on a conversation. Additionally, I don't really like talking to random people on Second Life anyway. So... not too useful.personal translate second-life technical translator sl code google php llhttprequest

Ozzie

2007 Jun 25, 3:13I keep seeing 'Ozzie' on emails and such now due mainly to Ray Ozzie who is now the Chief Software Architect at Microsoft and his brother Jack Ozzie. Whenever I see his name I think of Ozzie from Chrono Trigger. He was one third of a trio of villains, the other two being Flea and Slash. I feel like I should be thinking of the Ozzy for which this Ozzie was named but I really don't.

My next thought on Ozzie is the Scottish guy who went to my high school. He'd shout 'Ozzie! Ozzie! Ozzie!' to which listeners were compelled to respond 'Oi! Oi! Oi!'. The wikipedia article on the chant has some thoughts on the origins but I suppose at Microsoft it could take on entirely new meaning. I really hope I'm someday in a meeting with Ray or Jack Ozzie and have the opportunity...ozzy personal ozzie random nontechnical

BBQ x 2

2007 Jun 11, 3:36This past weekend I was invited to two BBQs. Consequently, the weather took a break from the heat to drizzle.

The first was a lunch BBQ in celebration of Sarah's mom getting her Masters degree. Sarah and I went to her sister's house on the East-side where we had traditional foods you might associate with a BBQ including some enjoyable sausage. There was a bit of Wii to be had and Sarah's mom killed at bowling. Sarah seemed a bit dismayed at this. I guess Sarah didn't expect it since she's had more experience compared to her mom who was playing for the first time.

For dinner we drove over to Seattle to have a BBQ at Jeannie's house. Jeannie's family and my family became friends through our church when I was born and Jeannie even babysat me. The second bit about the babysitting is how Jeannie would introduce me at the BBQ. I met her boyfriend who seems like a cool guy. He works for Microsoft as a consultant and has traveled to various countries for his job. Guests had been instructed to bring side dishes and so there was quite a spread which was eclectic as well. We brought red potatoes, humus, and pita bread. As it turns out, one of the other guests had produced humus in bulk as a supplier and apparently had a grudge against the big humus chains. We played it cool and she didn't say anything so we can only assume she didn't know it was us. Jeannie was a great hostess and I had a fun time.bbq washington personal nontechnical