Ghost in the Shell
Every now and then you find funny stuff in the trace() logs from the flash player. Usually it’s just frustrated debugging statements, or the occasional one-line “Stop looking at my underwear” statement to fellow developers. But this one takes the cake, an inspired full-on Ghostbusters-themed ASCII invite to apply for a job at blip.tv. Nice.
On the Break
photo by penjamins
This is my breakaway goal from last night’s game, a throwback to early-80s hockey that the Sled Dogs won 9-4. Lots of people getting goals in this one. I centered the first line and we all got at least a goal and an assist. I ended up with a goal and two assists. For the most part the team was in sync — our passes were crisp, people were getting to open ice, and we weren’t running around too much on D.
I’m trying to catch up after a bit of a hiatus here. It’s been a busy last month or so. Jordan and I took a trip out to Chicago and then Colorado Springs. We had a good time seeing friends and family in what is probably our last big trip before our daughter’s scheduled arrival this September. Thanks again to Torry and John for hosting us in Chicago, and Pete and Sarah in Colorado Springs.
The new iPhone is out, and Jordan’s going to try and get one this week. I’m on the hook with Sprint until the end of the month, so the mad rush will have ebbed by then.
Das Keyboard III
Das Keyboard, Take Three. If this had been announced a month ago I might have paused before importing the Filco. It appears to use the blue Cherry keyswitches, which are a bit clickier (and consequently louder) than the brown switches on the Filco. It also has a USB hub, which the Filco lacks. It would be nice to try one, if only to feel (and hear) how it behaves.
More importantly, the new Das comes in two flavors, one of which has the characters printed on the keys. I can appreciate that not having the keys marked would make you a better touch typist if you stuck with it, but I like that they’re finally giving users another option — especially if they’re less concerned with touch-typing elitism and just want a great-feeling keyboard.
As for the Filco, I’ve settled in after a period of adjustment. It’s a bit higher than the Macally Icekey that it replaced, so my hand position had to change slightly. The keys have a very “light” feel — it doesn’t require much pressure to type a character, so I find myself bottoming out less unless I’m really typing fast.
svn:externals and the Versions svn Client
Update 2008-06-16: The latest beta of Versions (1.0b2 (31)) now allows you to set a different program for comparisons. I set mine to Changes, which I find a bit easier to work with than FileMerge.
I recently stumbled upon Matthew Weier O’Phinney’s explanation of svn:externals and how you can use it to mix stuff from multiple repositories in one project. This helped me when I was setting up a new project at work, since we keep a lot of core code in a centralized repository, but of course each project gets its own separate location. Matthew’s explanation should be included in the svn documentation, which (as he points out) lacks a simple example of how to use svn:externals.
The gist is to navigate to the folder into which you want to check out the external library, and then execute:
svn propedit svn:externals .
Within the editor session you need to add one line for every external library. The order goes: name of local folder, path to external library, like so:
extlib http://www.foo.com/path/to/external/libary
After you save and exit, an svn update on the directory will pull the external library into the folder you named in the property declaration.
I ran into one small issue — the propedit command requires that the environment variable SVN_EDITOR is set, otherwise it’ll bail. I added a line to my bash profile (export SVN_EDITOR=/usr/bin/vi) to point it to vi.
Young at Heart
Young at Heart
Been traveling quite a bit lately on the weekends, so I’m just starting to get to the backlog of photos from the last month. Here’s a recent favorite.
