Wed, 27 Feb 2008

Geek girls and Tim Bunce

Tonight I had the unexpected pleasure of meeting up with Tim Bunce in Dublin. Tim is well known in the Perl community and I had the opportunity to thank him for his work on the DBI and DBD Oracle libraries for Perl, which got me out of more than one scrape in a previous job.

Some vast bulk of the female engineers, technicians, geeks and nerds are being hosted by Microsoft this evening in Odessa, as the first Irish 'Geekgirl' dinner. This appears to be an excuse for the underrepresented gender in the areas of science and engineering to get together and network (in the social sense, rather than the Ethernet sense...) Perhaps it's no bad thing... thus far I've heard that the food is excellent, but the night is early yet. Verdict tomorrow.
posted at: 21:15 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Sun, 10 Feb 2008

eeePC

Glen brought both an OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) laptop and an eeePC to the ILUG (Irish Linux User Group) PotD (Pint of the Day) last night. I really like the eeePC and will be taking a look at the old bank balance to see if I can afford one. Even though the keyboard is small, it's still possible to type at a reasonable rate, and the three issues that I have interest in are being worked on: a larger screen (without increasing the form factor size of the overall unit), longer battery life, and a larger internal capacity (the 8GB model is supposedly due out in March some time.)

All in all, a good time was had by everyone at The Long Stone, and I've no doubt the next PotD (Pint of the Day) will be announced shortly.

posted at: 15:38 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 06 Feb 2008

Subversion Comparisons

I've recently started moving years worth of material from CVS version control to Subversion (svn). I very much like the idea that I can set up and share a repository securely over SSH, using svn+ssh:// type URLs. I also really like the idea that it keeps track of local changesets - ideal for someone like myself who tends to work on a laptop on trains and buses, away from useful internet connectivity. Until recently though, I hadn't stumbled upon two commands that are incredibly useful to me, for comparing a local checkout against what's last been committed on the server.

svn status [filename]: This gives the status of a local checked out file, as against when it was originally checked out to that local machine. No connection to the SVN server required.
svn status -u [filename]: This compares the status of a local checked out file, as against the currently committed version in the repository. svn status -uv gives more information on committed revision numbers. This requires a connection to the SVN server.
svn diff [filename]: This compares the local files against the revision at which they were locally checked out. No connection to the SVN server is required. While this is useful while working locally, I often want to diff files against the latest version in the respository - particularly when I know someone else might be editing and committing the same file ... or more likely it's me editing and committing the same file from a different computer.
svn diff -r COMMITTED [filename]
svn diff -r HEAD [filename]: This compares the local files against the last committed version / the head node in the respository. It requires a connection to the SVN server.

posted at: 10:12 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 05 Feb 2008

Kev's Famous

The US Presidential candidate election is hotting up, with today being Super Tuesday. Democrats Abroad gathered in O'Neill's to cast their votes with the result that Kev appeared on RTE news. I was so impressed I had to meet him in his local to watch the repeat at 11pm ;-)

Kev's looking for Obama to represent the Democrats in the upcoming election. After spending the day in a pub, not drinking any of the four pints donated by photographers so they could make him look 'Oirish', he deserves to get his wish...
posted at: 23:56 | path: | permanent link to this entry