Personal recordings

Apple keyboard IV

Alex Kiesel — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 11:23:16 +0000

Ok, this is the last chapter from my experiments with Apple keyboards on a Windows PC. With the slim keyboard I never managed to reconfigure the “Fn” key to something useful – but that was just a side effect.

The main problems I had were that the keyboard is too small. I am a developer and heavy shortcut user, so I need to type all kinds of braces, dashes, dots and so on and also use Ctrl-Shift-PgUp and thelike. Using these key combinations is not easily manageable on the Apple keyboard.

The consequence? I have now invested 20 more €uros and bought the Logitech UltraX keyboard – which I have at work, too. This keyboard is much like a laptop keyboard, features a standard PC design and has a very nice layout and key press feedback.

Using git with cygwin on Windows

Alex Kiesel — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 17:30:44 +0000

Despite having circumvented the problems caused by the new Windows Vista UAC – as described in an older blog entry of mine and found all around the internet, git sometimes still has problems.

At work, my team collaborates with SVN and commits to our company svn server. I am using git as an SVN client, because it is more convenient for me; with no problems on my Gentoo (dev) box, but I never managed to check out on my Windows laptop.

Sooner or later, the checkout would fail with an error message like this:

2 [main] git 3624 C:\cygwin\bin\git.exe: *** fatal error - could not
load shell32, Win32 error 487
Hangup

I have had searched for advice on how to fix this and have found the – amongst cygwin developers quite known – /sbin/rebaseall command. This, however, does not work in this case. Upon my last inquiry on that subject, I stumbled about a recent post on the cygwin mailinglist, the problem was found related to checking out symlinks from an svn repository. This information is very important: the repository I am trying to check out makes heavy use of symlinks.

I checked the man pages for git and found there are some settings related to symlinks in general, and cygwin in special:

core.symlinks
With this setting configured to false, symlinks will not be checked out as actual symlink, but as regular files with special content managed by git, then
core.ignoreCygwinFSTricks
With this setting configured to false, filesystem calls will use the cygwin calls, which are slower, but more more reliable in the context of a cygwin program.

You can read the detailled description here. With these settings done, git should be more reliable. Another setting I have found to be useful is the following:

core.filemode
With this set to false, changes to file permissions will not be recorded by git and will not lead to diffs found in files. This has once rescued a checkout of mine which had been corrupted over the time.

Concluding, this is an excerpt from my Windows box’ ~/.gitconfig with the relevant settings:

[core]
 fileMode = false
 ignoreCygwinFSTricks = false
 symlinks = false

Hopefully, all problems are gone now

Learning the E chord

Alex Kiesel — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:03:58 +0000

Now, after some practice, I think switching between A, D and G works quite ok, I’m progressing to the next chapter. This introduces E, which is not hard to hold, but gives me some headaches when switching quickly from D – I guess I need to practice this a bit more.

What’s harder is that I have to play simple bass lines; playing bass lines basically seems to mean to play the most upper string with the thumb first and then the rest – but only those that would be hit normally as well.

Coordinating the left hand to press the correct strings while using your right hand thumb to hit the right string in the right way is too much for me right now; practicing slow first probably will give me the experience, but that’s not for the impatient. But who said I wouldn’t need patience after all…

I glanced a few pages further -next is H7; doesn’t look too simple, though. I’ll stay with this lesson, but am pausing, ’cause my fingertips hurt now.

Learning the basic chords: D, G & A

Alex Kiesel — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 13:12:22 +0000

As every beginner, I have to learn the basics. So far, the book covers the chords D and A – both with three fingers down and a simple version of G where only the small finger presses the high e in the third section – I’ve already seen G is actually a bit more difficult, and at this point I’m glad about this simplification .

The fingertips of my left hand now feels dazed all the day – but that will fade over the time. Next chord to learn is E; it’ll bring me new songs… Let’s go.

Starting all over

Alex Kiesel — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 13:04:13 +0000

I’ve tried to learn playing guitar more than a year ago. I borrowed a classic guitar from my brother, who also started to play, but never really learned it. The guitar was not being used, so I could use it:)

My fate was the same.Now, more than one year after, I’ve again got the guitar in my hands. I had it returned to my brother and again borrowed it. There’s a learning book with it and I’ve put the cd on my iPod, so I can listed to the demonstration songs while playing the songs at the same time.

After a week, when I was playing on the guitar for about half an hour every day, I was fetching the guitar from the case and had to notice the bold E string has ripped off.

I had a day off on Friday and went to the local Rock Shop to buy a new set of guitar strings – around 10€. I spent an hour getting the new strings mounted and around one and a half times as much to tune up the strings. Notice: the new strings expand when there’s tension on the strings and it just takes a minute until the guitar sounds out of tune.

The most important lesson learned here is that a guitar with new strings sounds waaay better than before…

git under Windows Vista

Alex Kiesel — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 11:23:50 +0000

There’s an update for the problem described here. As already suspected, Windows Vista applies some heuristics to mark files, so users need to elevate to administrator to be able to execute those programs.

However, the “heuristics” that are applied seem to be rather simple:

According to a discussion in an MSDN forum, Vista simply takes files containing one of the words “setup”, “install”, “update” and some more as installer files, requiring administrator privileges. Pretty stupid.

A quick check reveals there is truth to this: the git programs which are blocked for me are git-format-patch, git-patch-id, git-update-index, git-update-ref and git-update-server-info…

Ok – then, is there a way to circumvent that behavious? Actually, I don’t need to run them with admin privileges, all I need is Vista not to try to elevate; I tried to create .manifest files for the applications but with no success. MSDN actually claims the directive:

requestedExecutionLevel="asInvoker"

would suffice. In my tests, the security shield icon was removed when I had created the manifest file, but the program still required the admin privs. At one point I finally gave up trying to find the elegant solution and deactivated UAC in Vista. I have to live with a red security icon in the system try now, but git works as expected…

Converting large svn repositories w/ git-svn

Alex Kiesel — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 09:53:00 +0000

On my Gentoo Linux at work, I’ve trying out git in the subversion locally, while committing to an SVN server. I did have issues getting the inital clone done; the repository is around 1 GB svn checkout size and contains ~89’000 revisions.
`git svn clone …` ran up to rev 30k, then stopped and needed to be re-started, continuing at the last imported revision but it would only process some thousand further revs. When it was finally done, it contained only one of the top-level directories of `trunk/`.

I `rm -rf`’ed all and started over. Now I see an endless loop at around rev 20-30k. Searching on google revealed some posts on the git mailinglist; for speed, it seems to be better to continue checking out the svn tree with

git w/ git-svn on Windows Vista

Alex Kiesel — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 13:44:37 +0000

I currently try out git because of its ability to do full version control without access to the server (like when in traveller mode).

While on Gentoo Linux it’s quite easy to get it working, on my laptop’s Windows Vista installation with cygwin, I’ve encountered problems that could yet only be worked around in a bad manner.

First, there are several blog entries out there that explain how to get git on Windows with cygwin, so I won’t covert that. Actually, I got git running on itself, but in subversion client mode (that is: running git as an svn client), I encountered problems.

When doing an initial git svn clone -s git-server directory the checkout first runs for long time and then aborts when it tries to call git repack, also when calling it “by hand”:
Alex@mobile ~/git/xp.public/trunk $ git repack Nothing new to pack. /usr/sbin/git-core//git-repack: line 139: /usr/sbin/git-core/git-update-server-info: Permission denied

Since file permissions look good, I should actually be able to execute that file. However, in Windows Explorer, you can see that you need administrator privileges to execute it:

View in the Explorer

These little icons indicate that you need admin privs to run it, and you can elevate yourself to administator mode, when running through the Explorer, but – of course – out of the cygwin environment, running that program does not really work.

As workaround, you can completely disable Windows User Access Control, but this is discouraged. So, currently, I’m stuck here and will try to continue to resolve this as I really need git mainly on my Windows laptop…

Siege of Bangkok airports

Alex Kiesel — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 17:14:09 +0000

We had just left Bangkok with Thai Airways heading to Surrat Thani, when Bangkok’s international airport has been taken off operation by some protesters. Since there was more than one week ahead before we needed to return there, Marie and me initially had no big concerns due to these events.
In safe distance, in southern Thailand, we followed progress on TV and the Internet. But, when after a whole week, there was no end in sight, we started to think about alternate ways to get back home again.We had followed airlines instructions closely on their websites; mainly we visited www.emirates.de and www.airasia.com to get their latest messages which were not always straight and to the point.

Our original flight schedule was this:

Sat, 6th December 2008: 15.45h – 17.05h: Krabi (KBV) – Bangkok (BKK) w/ AirAsia
Sat, 6th December 2008: 20.25h – 23.55h: Bangkok (BKK) – Dubai (DXB) w/ Emirates EK373
Sat, 7th December 2008: 08.40h – 12.45h: Dubai (DXB) – Frankfurt (FRA) w/ Emirates EK049

On December 2nd, the Thai main court sentenced the ruling party to dissolve, practically ending the airport’s occupation. The protesters went home, but then, the airport needed to be cleaned and searched before being declared safe again. Through this ongoing process, first AirAsia declared on their webite to move their flights back to Suvarnabhumi Airport, while Emirates still stated to have some replacement flights to Utapao, a military airport near Bangkok.
At first glance, that was good news, but given our fligh schedule, we didn’t have time to get from one airport to the other. Luckily, after one more day of waiting (we were not really waiting as the main part of our doing, but hanging around at beaches, so no problem so far), Emirates also declared Suvarnabhumi Airport as safe again and stated to operate to and from there again:

As Bangkok

Apple Keyboard III

Alex Kiesel — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 19:22:33 +0000

Well, it seems, I only write blog entries to try out new keyboards So – I’ve bought yet another Apple keyboard, this time the new thing metal brushed keboard.

This one’s especially nice – somthing I’ve though of the other one as well. First, let me say, it’s a normal USB keyboard and it works out of the box on a Windows machine – the guys from the Apple store weren’t sure about that, though.

I still need to use SharpKeys to remap Alt and Command keys, but that’s ok. One thing, however, is a bit sad: Apple placed a “fn” key right above the delete-key. On Un*x systems, one often uses the key Shift-Ins to copy thing from the clipboard to the current cursor position – the “fn” key is not remappable under Windows, as it seems (I’ve googled for this one but found no solution).

You’d probably need a software upgrade for the keyboard, so it would send the key with an own keycode… But anyway, it still feels great to type on this keyboard, so I can only recommend it.