And with yesterday’s announcement of Google App Engine (as well as support for App Engine’s URL fetcher in the GData client posted this morning), I ported my script from a command-line client to a webapp: dave glasser’s exercises. Follow along and make fun of me if I don’t go to the gym enough!

(One little detail is that I’ve written workout-specific description parsers: Gym parses out the length or number of repetitions of various exercises (some of which have multiple phrasings), and Rock Climbing figures out if I’ve gone bouldering or top-roping.)

Future plans:

• actual HTML output
• filtering and statistics based on dates
• make the special parsing be based on data, not hardcoded
• let other people use the tool to view their own exercise calendars

The hosted-WordPress only works on entire domains, so the blog has moved from davidglasser.net/point to http://point.davidglasser.net/. A bit of mod_rewrite fun seems to make my old URLs keep working, at least. Perhaps you need to update your feed subscriptions.

And just for the hell of it, here’s a new theme.

The Installer could not validate the contents of the ‘EpsonPrinterDrivers’ package. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance.

Anyone else seeing this?

I’m seeing this forum thread, but that’s about it. (And that sounds like bad downloads… but this was a disc from Amazon.)

Oh, well, trying again… at least it wasn’t my work computer…

Recently, though, I started taking advantage of another side of Kinesis. Kinesis sells foot pedals which plug into their keyboards; their USB Advantage Pro model comes with one for free, and you can buy more.

As far as I know, most people who use the Kinesis footswitch use it for a modifier key like SHIFT or CTRL, or as an enabler for the embedded numeric keypad, in order to save their hands from painful chording.

Not me. I have my left footswitch set up to type “k” and my right footswitch types a space.

Why? Well, I use Gmail, both for my personal account and for work. I generally read my incoming mail (especially in my work account, where I try to get every thread marked as read) by just clicking on the oldest unread thread, scrolling down in the thread with my spacebar, and going to the next newest thread with the “k” key. I don’t delete or archive, and use labels minimally. Anything that needs a response I either respond to instantly or start (hit “s”) and come back to it later.

So generally, when skimming my email, I’m just hitting “k” and “space”. And I can do it with my feet. That’s right: I can skim through my entire inbox while drinking coffee, or leaning back with my hands behind my head. And it’s as good as it can get for my wrists: complete abstinence.

(One little note: I’ve turned off key repeat for k and space in X Windows, so that I can just leave my foot down instead of quickly tapping, by inserting /usr/bin/xset -r 45; /usr/bin/xset -r 65 into my .xsession. I found those numbers by looking at the keycode field in xev.)

• the server code to simulate svn co -N from old clients works
• the client code to ignore extra server output from old servers with svn co –depth=files works.

We can test old-client/new-server behavior over ra_svn like so (testing the DAV ra methods is a little more involved):

1.4.x-checkout$ svnserve-trunk -d -r `pwd`/subversion/tests/cmdline &
1.4.x-checkout$ make svncheck

Currently, the 1.4.x branch code passes these tests against the current trunk over all RA backends!

The situation isn’t quite as rosy for new-client/old-server; that’s because the current trunk tests expect the server they are run against to support all trunk features. To make it work at all, you need to explicitly tell the test suite that the server is 1.4.x (among other things, this makes the test suite svnadmin create repositories with the –pre-1.5-compatible option):

trunk-checkout$ svnserve-1.4.x -d -r `pwd`/subversion/tests/cmdline &
trunk-checkout$ make svncheck SERVER_MINOR_VERSION=4

Unfortunately these tests don’t yet all pass; there may be some actual compatibility bugs hidden there, but they also expect features that require a trunk server to work. My next plan for working on Subversion (which is now part of my day job!) is to figure out which failing tests should just be skipped against old servers and tweak the test list to skip them; I’ve already done that for the commit tests which use the new –with-revprop option to commit commands; in the test_list at the bottom, you can see a bunch of lines like:

SkipUnless(mkdir_with_revprop, server_has_revprop_commit),

These use the value of the server minor version specified on the command line to skip tests that shouldn’t work with old servers.

The currently failing tests are:

FAIL:  prop_tests.py 7: commit with conflicting dirprops
FAIL:  log_tests.py 16: test sensitive log on a single revision
FAIL:  log_tests.py 18: test 'svn log -g' on a non-branching revision
FAIL:  merge_tests.py 45: target inherits mergeinfo from nearest ancestor
FAIL:  merge_tests.py 48: merge works when target has copied children
FAIL:  merge_tests.py 50: merge to path with switched children
FAIL:  merge_tests.py 52: mergeinfo can have empty rev ranges
FAIL:  merge_tests.py 66: merge -rold(before rename):head renamed dir
FAIL:  blame_tests.py 10: test 'svn blame -g'
FAIL:  blame_tests.py 11: don't look for merged files out of range
FAIL:  blame_tests.py 13: blame target not in HEAD
FAIL:  authz_tests.py 10: test authz for aliases
FAIL:  authz_tests.py 13: authz issue #2712
FAIL:  depth_tests.py 4: update depth-empty wc shouldn't receive file mod
FAIL:  depth_tests.py 5: update depth-immediates wc gets top file mod only
FAIL:  depth_tests.py 10: bring a dir into a depth-immediates working copy
FAIL:  depth_tests.py 12: depth-empty working copy ignores a deletion
FAIL:  depth_tests.py 13: depth-immediates working copy ignores a deletion
FAIL:  depth_tests.py 15: gradually update an empty wc to depth=infinity
FAIL:  depth_tests.py 19: diff at various depths in non-infinity wc
FAIL:  depth_tests.py 21: depth-1 working copy receives a new directory
FAIL:  depth_tests.py 23: upgrade a depth=empty wc from above

Today I complete my five years at MIT; tomorrow I fly out west. After a week at Burning Man and a week renovating my new warehouse living space, I will start at Google in the build tools group, working full time on Subversion. After a year of needing to treat Subversion as a guilty distraction from research, I am incredibly excited about making it my full-time job.

I presented about amock at group meeting today; here are the amock PAG talk.

After being frustrated by this for years, I finally came up with a solution: use a user style sheet to keep underlines on for all links.

First, install the Firefox extension Stylish. (There are ways to use user style sheets without Stylish on Firefox, and on other browsers, but Stylish gives a nice user interface for managing them.) Restart; there’ll be a new icon in the status bar at the bottom of your browser window. Select “Manage Styles…” from the menu that pops up from it, and write a new style containing

:link, :visited { text-decoration: underline ! important }

Reload the page, and voila: all links are underlined!

(While all I did was install an extension somebody else wrote and copy-and-paste a line from this list of useful user styles, I was surprised to not find anything about this when Googling various phrases involving “colorblind”, “color blind”, “colourblind”, “colour blind”, etc. Hopefully this post can help future color-deficient folks solve this problem.)