I have only checked out a couple of tools, but I find them mostly not working very well with WordPress.com. The only one that has worked at all is QTM, so far.

BloGTK

This is the recommended tool for Linux, according to the WordPress site. It won’t install in Oneiric. I expect I could make it work if I fiddled with some settings for apt-get, maybe. But the author is not working on it, so no real desire to try.

gnome-blog

Broken. Intended for Gnome 2. One of the libraries is not compatible with Gnome 3: “python-gnomeapplet”. Maybe there is no concept of applet in Gnome 3?

Drivel

I tried it. Editing a new post worked. There were error messages connecting to WordPress.com. I was not able to post the blog because it could not get permission to write.

QTM

This one was able to post a message, but left the message in the “draft” state on WordPress.com. That may be my fault – there is a “draft/publish” drop down on the app.

Because it was “posted”, it put the file into some sort of archive state, so that the next time I went to edit, I had to fiddle around to be able to see it. Finished editing the post on WordPress.com.

Other options

There is at least one plugin for FireFox for editing blogs. But I was looking for tools for Gnome so I can try out Gnome 3, so I haven’t tried it yet.

We have all seen that before…

High tech. Gotta love it!

I am still working at Wind River, in the same position.

Installing Mint

I have to get some DVD’s – they want to put a GB in the installer. Fortunately there is a CD version without Office software and without codecs. Somepages indicate there are Windows installers, but I didn’t find one. It would be nice to have one for my work computer.

Installing Cinnamon

Installing Cinnamon was easy. Select Cinnamon in Synaptic and install it. Err, no, not in the list of selected items when I tried to choose at login time. Select cinnamon-session and install that (the notes said to do that). And now I am in Cinnamon.

Actually, I liked “Nate”, Mint’s Gnome 2 interface, a bit better. I liked having the menu as one of the choices when you select the thingy in the top left corner. In Cinnamon, the menu is in the bottom left.

Cinnamon Menu

In the Cinnamon menu, there are three columns. The left column is favorites, with some stuff you can’t get rid of like shutdown and lock screen. When the mouse is over an item, the bottom of the menu block, on the right (as far away from the favorites as possible) is the name and one line description of that application.

It actually makes sense to be on the bottom right, you should soon know what your favorites are, and the right column is the apps of the highlighted category in the middle column.

Faves can be removed using the right click menu. Also, you can right-click on a program to add it to favorites.

Firefox mysterious disappearing menus

By default, the Firefox menu system is missing. It turns out that Ubuntu disappeared it by installing a plugin that moved it to the Unity menu location, which is presumably some Mac-like common menu location.

So I could not use Firefox menus to get at the Addon Manager to kill the creepy addon.

I used a command line parameter to get at it, which I got from some web page I can’t find now. However, you can type “about:addons” in the address bar to get there.

The Guilty Addon is called “Global Menu Bar Integration”, and you can’t uninstall it, you can only disable it.

Broadcom Drivers

My laptop has Broadcom wifi, 4318 style. On all the other Ubuntu versions I have installed, I had to install the right thing, run the right script and then maybe remove the right lines from a config file.

This time, I was able to search in Synaptic for “Broadcom”, and install the package b43-fwcutter, and it worked! Wow!

The first try was on a plug that was too small. What are 3/32″ plugs for anyway?

BZ Flag server v2.0.x will be provided on the local LAN.
There will be some other games for kids, and mine will be there.
There will be some software demos, at least one for ‘R’.

Q-bars on business cards take up too much space and are too ugly. However, allowing people to grab your info from your card into their smart phone’s contact info directly – that’s powerful!

If I keep it, it will soon move to the back.

Git was invented by Linus Torvalds to use with the Linux kernel. There were performance and political, aka licensing, issues with the previous version control system that the kernel used.

Selected Features, from Wikipedia

• Strong support for non-linear development
• Distributed development
• Efficient handling of large projects
• Pluggable merge strategies
• Toolkit-based design

Description

Git is a distributed system, modeled on a file system with built in versioning. Linus wrote it for speed in the use-cases he cared about with the kernel:

• Patches supplied by email or grab from other user’s repositories
• Pick and choose among patches provided
• Merging many patches per day
• All users comfortable with the command line

I have used it for about a year, and found it very useful, with a few caveats. I use it at home a lot. It allows me to propagate data between systems very quickly, so I use it as backup for my own work at home. I started with a single repository containing several small unrelated projects and non-software files, such as my career-tools folder which contains resumes, personal cards, graphics and sample letters. I learned the hard way that putting it on a USB key requires keeping free space on the stick greater than the total size of the repository. I haven’t gotten around to breaking it up into a couple dozen separate repositories, but I will. Also, I learned that a 600MB repo takes a long boring while to update on really slow media such as a USB stick.

When using Git, you grab a copy of the whole repository on your local machine. That’s what makes it a “distributed” version control system. You “commit” your changes to your copy of the repository. To share them with others, you then “push” them to a central repository when you are ready, or ask others to “pull” from your repository. This basically means committing all changes twice: locally, then centrally.

At work I used Git with a small team of three people. I learned that, like using a stick-shift transmission, Git requires a commitment to learning that is higher than on an automatic transmission.

Some people use manual transmissions inefficiently and in ways that I cringe at, shifting too often or not often enough, not matching revs, and have no idea how or when to double clutch. Modern car transmissions are designed to survive this treatment. Keep those people away from trucks.

Git is like a manual transmission. You should commit to learning more about it than you think you need to know. There is always more to learn. Also, you can use “work flows” with it that are difficult to do with Subversion or most other VCS’s.

The Linux kernel team has thousands of developers who contribute to it, hundreds who contribute frequently, from sites around the world. Their work flow might not work in a centralized repository. A simplified version of their work flow (assuming the change is perfect) goes like this. You grab a copy of the latest “blessed” kernel code from the canonical git repository on GitHub, make changes, test them, and then tell the person in charge of that part of the kernel. This person grabs the code from your GitHub copy of the kernel repository, or receives it from you by email, examines it, tests it, merges it with other changes in the same part of the code and submits it upstream to one of Linus’s main “lieutenants”. This gatekeeper will similarly examine it, merge it with other changes, test it, and promote it to Linus who may choose to accept it.

This work flow is very different from a “small” environment where, of maybe a hundred developers on a project, 5 or 20 are working on one part of a project and have that part of the code to themselves. Git works with these teams as well. It is fast and supports complex merges.

Git also supports different work flows that you may not be used to. For instance, I knew a team that used git internally, and then submitted changes centrally to the corporate Subversion repository. This had several advantages. The team leader could filter submissions from new employees. They could do local commits to their own repository frequently, say at 5 minute intervals on a temporary branch, share with their team mates on a common branch when a small change was ready, and not be delayed by the slow submit time to the Subversion server in England. Changes could be “summarized” in the corporate Subversion repository, so that all those unfinished changes in the 5 minute commits were not seen, and failed, by the Continuous Integration server.

Git also supports using a central repository that people can push their changes to. This is a repository that has no “working copy”, just the repository database.

“Tags” and “branches” are a local idea in git. This means you have to push your tags manually so that other people can see them. Also, if you don’t explicitly copy  your branch to the server, git will happily push your changes but you will not be able to find them easily as they are not on a branch on the central repository.

How to lose your changes in git: Create a new branch locally, make changes, push them to the server that does not have that branch, and delete that branch locally, forgetting to merge to a main branch. That’s a bit like trying to shift down from third to second on an uphill, taking too long and then stalling because the truck is going too slow for second gear when you finally complete the shift. In this case, my co-worker recovered because he found the commit ID on a scrollback log in the terminal window where he did the commit.

Git works best when someone on your team is an expert and everyone takes time to learn more than the minimum.

Main Git web pages

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)
• http://git-scm.com/
• http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/
• http://unspecified.wordpress.com/2010/03/26/why-git-aint-better-than-x/

GUI tools for Git

There are now GUI tools for Windows, and plugins for many IDE’s.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)#External_links

The Subversion project was initiated by CollabNet in 2000. The goal was to create a new version control system to replace CVS, with some bugs fixed and some features added.

Selected Features (from Wikipedia)

• The system maintains versioning for directories, renames, and file metadata (but not for timestamps). Users can move and/or copy entire directory-trees very quickly, while retaining full revision history.
• Versioning of symbolic links.
• Native support for binary files, with space-efficient binary-diff storage.
• Branching as a cheap operation, independent of file size (though Subversion itself does not distinguish between a branch and a directory)
• Natively client–server, layered library design.
• Client/server protocol sends diffs in both directions.
• Costs proportional to change size, not to data size.
• Path-based authorization.
• Language bindings for C#, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, and Java.

Description

Subversion is a centralized system. This is good for a centralized situation. Build teams and product leaders are confident that your code is available as soon as you check it in.

It can scale well. If one server is not powerful enough or if you have developers on multiple continents, you can have a central read/write server with multiple quasi-read-write servers. They send the “write” messages back to the central server. This is fine for most deployments because there are many more read than write transactions.

Before this server architecture was available, I once set up a deployment with one server in England, where part of the development was done, and another server in Canada, where the main team was. The code was split by project into approximately 20 repositories. Each repository was read-only in one site and read/write in the other. Nightly cron jobs synchronized the read-only repositories before the nightly builds.

Support for Subversion

• has attracted numerous GUI interfaces
• runs on many OSes
• integrated into many IDE’s and editors

Main Subversion web pages

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Subversion
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_Versions_System
• http://svnbook.red-bean.com/ – “Version Control with Subversion” – best source for users and administrators!

GUI tools for Subversion

There are several GUI tools for interfacing with Subversion, including one for the iPhone, and integration for most IDE’s. See:

• http://open-tube.com/7-subversion-and-svn-clients-gui-for-the-popular-subversion-and-svn-source-repository

Apparently Redis is the newest. It allows you to store key-value pairs, lists, sets, and even perform set operations, and have them go to disk or expire. I think Jonathan did the show and tell? There are client libraries for a bunch of languages.

Notes:

• I didn’t stay for the code wars after.
• The pizza was great.
• That’s a weird tap in the kitchen – twist for temperature setting, “push” to turn it on – that’s push toward the wall, not “push in”. Andrew and I had to ask.
• Nice to see some mixing between Ottawa groups – Andrew, Michael, Adrian, maybe more.
• Ottawa indie game group, “The Dirty Rectangles” was mentioned – http://www.dirty-rectangles.com/
• International Game Developers Associations (IGDA) was mentioned: http://www.igda.org/ottawa

About the Meeting Space

It’s The Code Factory. It works well for small groups up to 30 people, and has room for larger groups, up to 80 people in theory.

About the Group

Attendees

Yeah, there were just 9 of us. Most were developers. Several are new to Android and Apps. No women this time. Mature, err “experienced” group, probably two under 30.

Group interaction

We had a great time! Banter and side tracks were fun and valuable. There is a mail list and the web site has recent posts.

About the meeting

Presenters

Chris presented a report on the Android Developers Convention, AnDevCon The First. Gee, that sounds formal. Actually we sidetracked him and asked questions while he tried to get through his list of seminars and classes. It seems to have been targeted at people new to Android.

Times

Some people were there when I arrived at 6:25pm. I think it actually started about 6:40pm. We left just before 8:00pm.

After the meeting gathering

My favourite size for an after-meeting pub discussion is now 5 people, as that was how many of us were at the Royal Oak. Informative, relevant. entertaining discussion and jive continued down the street and into the bar. We left just before 10:00pm.

Cost? My half-Guinness and dessert came to $13 with tax.