Entries from Raj Shekhar

Question: If Jesus Christ comes back, will he enjoy Family Guy? Answer: No

Linux User Group, Bangalore have a meetup at the ThoughtWorks office on Saturday 21st February 2009, 4:30 PM onwards. The details of the meeting are here. There are 2 talks lined up- "Introduction to the Android Platform" and "Device Mapper - How it works and why you should be using it". And there will be a key signing party as well.

Go, check it out and help revive the LUG meetings at Bangalore.

This tip saved a lot of pain.

If the application you're switching to has windows that are minimized, you can unminimize them by holding the option key, then letting go of the Cmd key.

Thanks to Lig for tagging me. 7 things you may or may not know about me:

• I started a company, along with my friends, after I passed out of college. We just made one sale. Our project was made using mysql-3.x and VB. The implications here are - I have worked on VB, I know how to make mysql & VB work together and I know how to generate nice reports with the VB report generator.
• I have worked in Goa. In my opinion, Goa is the best place in India that I have ever stayed in.
• I used to own a Bullet 350 CC motorcycle. It is a great piece of machinery and in fact, it is the only vehicle which I DON'T consider to be a part of the "Get-me-from-point-A-to-B" class
• spo0nman referred my name to Yahoo! and he gave me the boost of confidence when I was unsure if I am good enough to be even interviewed by them.
• When I joined Yahoo!, I had to move from Delhi to Bangalore. However, the truck transporting my household stuff was burnt on its way to Bangalore. I had to start with a clean slate.
• I had to clear many hurdles to get married. It was a constant 2 year struggle with my family, my wife's family and random circumstances. However, the end result was well worth the struggle.
• I sometimes cry at movies and I find those sort of movies emotionally draining.

knowing you can still understand output from diff, even though it has been months you touched any code.

I tried installing linux on my SO's (significant other) laptop today. WHAT IS WRONG WITH UBUNTU!! It takes ages to load up and the install process is resource intensive enough to make the laptop totally unresponsive. Finally installed Fedora and I am not happy with it. I will install debian for her, once I find out where to get blank CD here.

I saw this mail in one of the mailing lists I am on and thought it might be useful to a wider audience. This reply was given by Ben Finney

   I have some ambitious plans for enhancing the module, but I feel
   that it won't be practical to do it in the current conditions. I
   tried to soft-talk the maintainer into giving me repository access,
   but then the conversation got diverted into applying my latest
   patch, which he said he'd like to perform the next day. He didn't
   and it's been at least two weeks since then.

Since you talk about asking for “commit access”, I presume it's in an old-school centralised-only VCS. I'll assume Subversion.

What are your thoughts about a situation like this?

Use a distributed VCS to track your changes. I prefer Bazaar, so I'll discuss that below.

• Use Debian GNU/Linux, ‘lenny’ or later.
• Install the necessary packages: $ sudo aptitude install bzr bzrtools bzr-svn svn
• Get a local Bazaar checkout of the upstream Subversion branch so you can track upstream's changes discretely and easily: $ bzr checkout svn+ssh://vcs.example.org/foo/trunk/ foo.trunk/
• Bazaar uses the ‘bzr-svn’ plugin to work with Subversion repositories. It has its foibles, especially with writing to Subversion repositories; but for tracking an upstream Subversion repository against your Bazaar-managed branches, it's excellent.
• Branch from upstream so you can track your changes: $ bzr branch foo.trunk/ foo.interesting-new-feature/
• Work on your interesting new feature, committing often:

    $ cd foo.interesting-new-feature/
    $ emacs spam.py  # hack hack hack
    $ make test  # or however you run your full test suite
    $ bzr commit --message "One-line description"

• When upstream has new revisions in their repository, update your checkout:

    $ cd foo.trunk/
    $ bzr update

• When you want to send a patch of your current work against upstream, generate a Bazaar “merge directive” (a patch bundle):

    $ cd foo.interesting-new-feature/
    $ bzr send --output ../foo.interesting-new-feature.patch --no-bundle

• This makes a patch against the parent of the current branch (by default, since no other branch is specified), which is the ?foo.trunk/? branch you originally branched from. The --no-bundle option turns off the ?patch bundle? blob, which would be useful to a Bazaar-using remote user to merge the resulting patch and have identical revisions to you. Since you'll be sending it to a Subversion user, that blob won't be useful to them so we disable it.
• Send the ‘foo.interesting-new-feature.patch’ file to upstream attached to an email message that explains what the changes are.

The Bazaar documentation, both online at <http://bazaar-vcs.org/> and in the bzr help foo commands, is comprehensive and should fill the many gaps I've no doubt left from the above explanation.