book page 8 - Dave's Blog

Vishu and Patent Cube

2007 Nov 28, 5:07Vishu, my ex-office-mate, has left Washington and Microsoft for California and Facebook. Vishu and I shared an office for a while and I really enjoyed it. We were able to distract one another from, and help each other with work. We'd often bounce ideas off of one another, work related or otherwise. For one such idea I recently received a Microsoft patent cube, a small marble cube inscribed with my and my invention's name. There are some photos of other people's patent cubes on flickr. Vishu would have received one for this idea too since we developed the idea and wrote the document about it together, but they wait a long time to send you the cube and he was gone a few weeks before they sent it (don't worry, he got the credit and other rewards though).

A week or two after I got my cube Vishu was visiting the Microsoft campus just before moving his family down with him to California. A bunch of us joined him for lunch that day and it sounds like he's enjoying his new job already. Have fun Vishu!microsoft facebook vishu cube patent nontechnical

Awesome Movies Unknown to Me

2007 Aug 12, 2:50Thanks to Netflix I've been able to enjoy several movies that I'd never heard of.



Brick is a classic PI film set in a modern high school. Its fun figuring out which high school students correspond to which film noir archetypes.

Primer is a sci-fi movie but it doesn't focus on action or effects. Its like watching an excellent Twilight Zone episode. I hate to describe this any further for fear of giving something away.

The Amazing Screw-On Head is an animated version of the one shot comic. It feels like the 1800s precursor to the The Venture Bros. and stars Screw-On Head, a steam-punk robot head thing and Abe Lincoln's top spy for occult matters.

The Quiet Earth is the movie version of the book about a man who awakes one day to find himself alone(... or is he?) It was made in the 80s and in Australia but don't hold that against it.scifi primer movie amazing screw-on head personal netflix brick the quiet earth

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