Brilliant.

Coming from subversion and cvs, something struck me as odd: if you do git commit, it will only commit the changes that you have just added or removed - anything else needs to be explicitly added to the working index, even if you have added it before. Bit of a pain if you simply want to commit everything.

Digging around the git docs, there’s an option you can pass so that it will just commit all files you have previously told it about: git commit -a. There’s also an option invoked by git commit –interactive that causes it to ask you for each file if you want it to go on the current commit or not.

As to why that is:

What git add does is to move the current version of the named file to a special staging area, holding files that are ready to be committed. And what git commit (without other arguments) will do is to take the index and make a new revision out of what the index contains. git commit -a is just a convenience which adds all modified files to the index, and then commits the result.

How does this affect you? The first thing to remember is this one: only run git add on new files just before committing. Otherwise, you’ll commit the wrong contents of the file.

It takes a bit getting used to, but it’s a lovely tool so far. If you’re thinking about using it yourself, start by reading Git Magic, and then after the first three chapters move to Using git without feeling stupid and its part 2.

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation.

So begins Clay Shirky’s article on how media is changing, and how some people just don’t get the reasons for the change. It’s not just your standard how-is-tv-like-booze piece - instead it goes deeper into not only how this cognitive surplus is being applied, but why it’s just an infinitesimal piece of what could be used, and where do people find the time.

There’s an anecdote near the end that I just hope is true.

Write a ring benchmark. Create N processes in a ring. Send a message round the ring M times so that a total of N * M messages get sent. Time how long this takes for different values of N and M.

Here is my solution:

-module(ringproblem).
-export([start/2, ring/1, rpc/2, benchmark/3]).

% Spawns a function and registers it as an atom.
start(AnAtom, Fun) ->
    Pid = spawn(Fun),
    register(AnAtom, Pid).

%% This loop receives a parameter that's either the next Pid on the chain,
%% or null if this is the last process on the chain.  It then passes the
%% message to the next process. Once the cycle has been completed, it
%% calls back the original caller to let it know.
loop(F) ->
    receive
	{ From, 0, Counter, Message } ->
	    F ! die, % tell the next process to die
	    From ! { ended, Counter },
	    io:format("Cycle for ~p ended.~n", [Message]);
	{ From, Number, Counter, Message } ->
	    case F of
		void ->
		    firstProcess ! { From, Number - 1, Counter + 1, Message };
		_Other ->
		    F ! { From, Number, Counter + 1, Message }
	    end,
	    loop(F);
	die ->
	    case F of
		void ->
		    io:format("Last process died");
		_Other ->
		    F ! die,
		    void
	    end;
	Other ->
	    io:format("I don't know what to do with ~p.~n",[Other]),
	    loop(F)
    end.

%% Sets up a ring of at least 2 elements by recursively building it back
ring(Elements) when Elements >= 2 ->
    Pid = spawn(fun() -> loop(void) end),
    ring(Elements - 1, Pid).

%% If we have no more elements, this is the first process. Register it.
ring(0, Pid) ->
   register(firstProcess, Pid);
%% otherwise walk back
ring(N, Pid) ->
    PrevPid = spawn(fun() -> loop(Pid) end),
    ring(N-1, PrevPid).

%% Do a RPC call to the first process, which should have been registered, and
%% wait until we receive a message telling us that the cycle is done.
rpc(Times, Request) ->
    statistics(runtime),
    statistics(wall_clock),
    firstProcess ! { self(), Times, 0, Request },
    receive
	{ ended, Counter } ->
	    {_, Time1} = statistics(runtime),
	    {_, Time2} = statistics(wall_clock),
	    U1 = Time1 * 1000,
	    U2 = Time2 * 1000,
	    io:format("Ring time for ~p calls = ~p (~p) microseconds~n",  [Counter, U1, U2])
    end.

benchmark(Elements, Times, Request) ->
    ring(Elements),
    rpc(Times, Request).

You would run it like this:


Eshell V5.6.2 (abort with ^G)
1> c(ringproblem).
{ok,ringproblem}
2> ringproblem:benchmark(1000, 3000, "Round and Round").
Cycle for "Round and Round" ended.
Ring time for 3000000 calls = 8360000 (8416000) microseconds
ok
3>


And eventually, possibly a couple seconds later, you’ll get a notification that the last process has died.

Here’s the trailer.

This might be related to the other Leopard problem I’d mentioned. If you’re having Thunderbird problems, I suggest you start by killing the cache.

One of the books I’ve recently gone through is The Medici Effect, also available as free PDF from the author’s site.

I’m glad I managed to fight the impulse to pass on it - the oh-so-clever title and Tony Robbins-like site were a bad augury - by figuring out hell, I can dump it any time if it sucks. It’s a very quick read on creativity, full of interesting anecdotes, interviews and stories from inventors, enterpreneurs and innovators. It can easily summed up as it’s damn near impossible to be creative if you focus too much only one thing, expect immediate success or don’t take any risks. It’s a simple piece of advice that you probably already knew, but which the myriad of examples will help you grok.

After downgrading to (the also free) VMware server 1.0.4, the virtual servers have been working like a swiss watch for a couple weeks.

It’s very readable, and I’m all for anything that promotes adapting quickly to changing times, but at least on the technical side of things it all too often gets the details dead wrong. The errors go from saying Half-Life is a mod of Warcraft, to confusing Stallman’s free-as-in-beer with free-as-in-freedom in an analogy (and ignoring the more important one), to saying that Linus Torvalds founded a company named Linux (ironically ignoring the fact that great things can and do come from outside corporate structure). It gets so many things wrong on the areas I have good knowledge of, that I have to wonder how many of the stories on graffiti or hip-hop are wrong too.

I was suspicious that a book with a title closer to Who Moved My Cheese or The monk who sold his Ferrari would be more style than substance, and it’s unfortunate to have those suspicions confirmed. You’re better off reading Larry Lessig’s Free Culture. On a good example of practicing what you preach, Lessig’s book is available for you to read and distribute online.

Mason’s answer? He lets you remix his logo.

• Back up everything first. Use an external disk, DVD or something equally accessible.
• If you’re using FileVault, turn it off before the upgrade - it’ll save you at least a couple hours. You can turn it back on after the upgrade so that its format is updated.
• If you’re using PHP or MySQL, read this page. You’ll also need to execute the instructions I outlined some time back if you’re using FileVault.
• Get OpaqueMenuBar to remove the annoying menu transparency that makes it unreadable. Why did Apple decided people would just love it and did not include a configuration option is beyond me.
• Be prepared for random applications to stop working.

In my case Thunderbird died. These were the symptoms:

• An IMAP account wouldn’t list any folders but the inbox, and wouldn’t display its contents.
• Thunderbird was continually into “accessing messages” mode, and the Stop button did not work.
• The application had to be closed via Force Quit on the Activity Monitor.

I removed Thunderbird, reinstalled, opened the application. It worked. Restored the configuration and messages from backup, it died again. Tested several approaches. At first I thought the problem was IMAP, because usually the moment I added that account things froze. In the end, the approach that worked is akin to voodoo, so I’ll just list the explicit order in which I did things.

1. Remove the ~/Library/Thunderbird directory
2. Start Thunderbird
3. Restore the Local Folders to directory ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/xyz.default/Mail/Local Folders
4. Create your first account, in my case strangevistas.net
5. Close Thunderbird
6. Find the profile directory for the account, for example ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/xyz.default/Mail/strangevistas.net
7. Copy the files you had backed up for that specific directory
8. Start Thunderbird, test. If it works, backup your current ~/Library/Thunderbird and repeat for the next account.
9. For IMAP accounts you won’t need to copy the folders, only the file msgFilterRules.dat from the account’s directory
10. Install and configure enigmal.
11. Restore the ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/xyz.default/pgprules.xml file if you had any custom rules.

I don’t recommend upgrading to Leopard unless you have some time to kill, literally need one of its new features (like BootCamp), or really, truly hate yourself. I strongly advise against leaving your Random Inexperienced User alone with it. Apple came pretty close to pulling a Vista with this one.

Being a paranoid with a nice strong distrust of other people’s ability to do their jobs properly, I decided to verify. I sent Harold, my bike messenger, over to the Registro Civil to get me a certification of marital status. After standing in line for 1/2 an hour to pay 50 colones worth of stamps, plus 2 hours on the main line for certifications, a civil servant told him that he couldn’t issue it, because my status was in process. He wouldn’t disclose any information, since Harold wasn’t me.

We were both rather surprised at this, since I’ve been divorced for three years, and have the Registro-stamped paperwork. Harold himself delivered it back then, and requested a certification just to make sure. I call my attorney to ask him if he knows anything about it, and now it’s three of us who are confused.

Cue Ricardo standing in line for over two hours to talk to someone, while reading The Machinery of Freedom, which I had brought along as a prank from my subconscious. When I get to a human, he insists my status is “in process”. He checks a lot of personal information to make sure I’m me, and then repeats himself.

“Yup, you’re in process.”
“Why?”
“I can’t tell you”
“But I’m me. You just saw my ID.”
“Yeah, I know. But I can’t tell you.”
“I just answered all your questions.”
“The system won’t show it. You need to go to a different window.” He scribbles a number on a piece of paper. “Show them this, ask them what the problem is. The line is back there.”
“Can’t you check?”
“Nope. Separate system.”

I leave, since I’m not only about to shoot somebody but have a meeting that I’m late for, and return two days later carrying a Call of Cthulhu book this time. Visions of a shoggoth gurgling through the throngs of people dance in my head. After a long wait, the gentleman at the second line is more helpful. Sitting behind some thick plate glass, he insists the other guy’s system is wrong and shows me the screen: there, in big bold letters, it states I’m DIVORCED. I already knew this, I say, and I have the paperwork to prove it. He suggests I go back to the other line and talk to the first guy again.

I try to strangle him through the glass.

Seeing that I’m serious about this, he takes the piece of paper and disappears for 20 or so minutes. When he returns, the piece of paper with the number in it has a lot more information, all unintelligible by laymen.

“Take this”, he says, “and go to Document Delivery.” Seeing me reaching through the small window again, he is quick to mollify me. “It’ll be quick, there is never anyone there. Tell them you have a ticket stuck in 2A but I can’t see what it is from our system. He should explain.”

Lacking any other recourse I go to Document Delivery, where surprisingly there is no line - only a public official speaking to his wife on the phone. He promptly hangs up (promptly in this case being anything under two weeks), and checks on the third system yet what my status is.

“So you have a ticket?”
“So they keep telling me”, you bunch of useless fucks, the director’s commentary track adds.
“When did you register the divorce?”
“Three years ago”
“Three months ago?”
“Three years ago. And change.”
“Well, let’s see…”. He loads up my profile. “Yes, you married Hellen Carrillo, then divorced her. Let’s see this ticket… Ah, here it is. You married her again.”

He says something after but I don’t really hear it, with all the voices in my head screaming at the same time. I manage to beat the reptilian brain into submission and ask him to repeat.

“The paperwork is missing. That’s why you’re in process.”
“Of course it is. I haven’t even seen her since.”
“Since what?”
“Since I registered the divorce.”
“Ah”, he smiles, understanding, “It’s one of those. A basura. Don’t worry, it’s quite common”.

He proceeds to explain that the system throws up these little garbages all the time, so they’ll just clean it up. Not right now, of course, but until after they’ve done a proper study to see if it’s truly a basura, and not just that I remarried three years ago, within days of my divorce, and forgot to file the documentation.

You know, since I was too giddy in the second honeymoon.

And so I run through the gauntlet again. I had to send my bike messenger several times to check out on the status of the clean up - he started asking people whom he spoke to for their name and ID, because the issue wasn’t being fixed - but I’m finally back to divorced.

For now, of course, until the Registro’s system decides to change my mind for me.

Scenario: Johnny falls while running during recess and scrapes his knee. He is found crying by his teacher, Heather. Heather hugs him to comfort him.

1967 - In a short time, Johnny feels better and goes on playing.

2007 - Heather is accused of being a sexual predator and loses her job. She faces three years in state prison. Johnny undergoes five years of therapy.

A few days later he published a message he got about the post, a rather depressing note from a high school teacher. The teacher in question said,

I am a (male) high school teacher and I have a daughter. If I see a child or (worse) a pre-teen crying on the beach I change my direction and put as much distance as possible between us. It’s too dangerous even to take a picture, imagine TOUCHING them!

Even more heartbreaking was a friend’s comment about an article he remembered reading some time ago, about a man in the U.K. who saw a 4-year-old crying in a park but did not help because he was scared to be arrested as a pedophile - the child was later found dead.

But what really made my blood boil an article I saw on the New York Times article, about how
the original Sesame Street episodes are now advertised as intended for grown ups only.

Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

Looking back, I can’t even imagine a kid-oriented show nowadays like The Muppet Show putting on a sketch with Roger Moore about all the evil muppets ineptly trying to murder him, or Alice Cooper offering Kermit a contract to sell his soul to the devil. Those were the shows I grew up with, shows that had imagination, where doing something offbeat was not extraordinary, but just business as usual. The shows that gave me a sense of wonder, and taught me that everything was valid.

Popular culture has been castrated.

Not all change is bad, of course. We’ve made advances in this time. Science has progressed significantly, and will continue to do so now that Sony sucks at putting out games and PlayStation3s everywhere are massively increasing the number of Folding@Home operations. It doesn’t escape me that you’re reading this on a medium that wasn’t accessible to most people 15 years ago.

But for me some things are fundamental, and cultural progress is one of them. North America has always had the great advantage of sheer mass: on such a large body of people, the strangest, most interesting things keep popping up. And yes, that’s how I define progress in culture - anything new, anything different that inspires people to experiment: I will not become a vegan decaf skin-brander like you, but I am glad your crazy movement sprung up. This trend risks being squashed by the homogenization of culture that’s going on in the U.S.

In short, I worried that I wouldn’t see the next Darkest of the Hillside Thickets appear (yes, they’re Canadian, but Canada is playing catch-up with the U.S. on so many things already).

My first consolation was that we have the Internet now. Soon bandwidth large enough for good quality video streaming will be commonplace, and applications such as Miro will make television and the FCC irrelevant once and for all.

And then I ran into this brilliant TED Talk conference with Larry Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons, about read/write culture and how extremism in the part of the copyright owners has engendered extremism on those who would use the content.

Near the end he makes a very lucid point: this age of prohibitions has had the effect of ordinary people knowingly living their life against the law, knowing that they’ve been branded criminals. While I’m sure that this (as he calls it) corrosive reality will have the effect of making some people feel more at home with real crimes, it will eventually end up with more and more regular folks seeing governmental and institutional impositions as irrelevant.

As an Ars Digita article mentions, referring to a study by an Utah professor who calculated he accumulates about $12.45 million dollars a day on copyright liability:

What better way could there be to create a nation of constant lawbreakers than to instill in that nation a contempt for its own laws? And what better way to instill contempt than to hand out rights so broad that most Americans simply find them absurd?

The more you tighten your grasp, the more star systems will slip through your fingers, to get really geeky.

That’s something to be hopeful about.

Kindle gives you access to an experimental and free service called Kindle NowNow, which is a search engine powered by actual humans. You send any question, and a human being will research it for you, then send the best three answers, usually, Amazon says, within five minutes.

Couldn’t help but think of A Deepness in the Sky and the Focused humans working behind the scenes to add human interpretations to things as mundane as searching for a topic.

Here’s the MacWorld article.

• Image loading
• Image saving
• Cropping
• Masking
• Scaling

The latest version of the documentation will remain at the Grails wiki. You probably should also read my post on JAI and masking operations if you intend to use it to mask images.