blogs

I’ve moved my blog to a new home: http://mikerowecode.com/

Everything should be automagically redirecting, but if not, please update your bookmarks and feed readers. Yes, faithful readers, I’m talking to both of you! :)

For some months now, I’ve been maintaining a git mirror of the Reviewboard project’s svn repository. The git-svn tool works really well for this, except for one small wrinkle: the reviewboard projects uses svn:external to include an external module, djblets, and git-svn provides no transparent way to support this. ...more...

It’s been a while coming, but here is a quick update on my job search:

Whether it was my [letter to recruiters][1], or just dumb luck, I ended up finding and accepting a pretty good contract job back in November. A product company, smart people, great relaxed environment. More or less everything on my list. Even a kick-ass coffee machine in the office. As expected, it was a smaller “boutique” recruiter that came through.

I’ve had a happy and productive couple of months.

Then this week, the company was bought by Microsoft and my contract terminated ...more...

There is a very handy usage widget for iiNet available at LemonJar. However, the way it stores its preferences for iiNet account and password means that you can’t run multiple instances of the widget to monitor multiple iiNet accounts.

This patch fixes it so you can:

--- MAIN.js.ORIG    2007-11-08 11:35:07.000000000 +1100
+++ MAIN.js 2007-11-08 11:33:59.000000000 +1100
@@ -144,14 +144,18 @@

 }

+function keyForUsername() { return widget.identifier + "-" + "userName"; }

The entrycache plugin uses the absolute path of a file as the key for caching its date. This is problematic if the file is moved (e.g. your data dir is different locally to on your web server).

This patch normalises the key to remove the “datadir” component. It also cleans up how the cache is written to disk:

diff --git a/entrycache.py b/entrycache.py
index 0cc3196..b46f89d 100644
--- a/entrycache.py
+++ b/entrycache.py
@@ -52,19 +52,18 @@ def cb_filestat(args):
    request = args["request"]
    data = request.getData()
    cache = data["cache"]

The entrycache plugin for pyblosxom is really cool. I only wish I could configure the location of the file it uses to store its cached dates.

So here’s patch:

--- a/entrycache.py
+++ b/entrycache.py
@@ -21,24 +21,31 @@ __url__ = "http://joe.terrarum.net"

 import os.path

+def _get_cache_filename(args):
+   request = args["request"]
+   config = request.getConfiguration()
+        if config.has_key('entrycache_cachefile'):

As I have been twitting recently, git over ssh stopped working for me after the upgrade to Leopard:

$ git pull
percent_expand: NULL replacement
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
Cannot get the repository state from ssh://git.mojain.com/...

A quick google search quickly turned up the answer. The problem was not with git, but with ssh. Spefically, ssh from MacPorts. ...more...

Sure enough, PHP didn’t work after upgrading my mac to Leopard. Easy to fix though:

$ diff -u /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf.ORIG /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf
--- /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf.ORIG    2007-10-29 20:25:54.000000000 +1100
+++ /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf 2007-10-29 20:26:08.000000000 +1100
@@ -111,7 +111,7 @@
 LoadModule alias_module libexec/apache2/mod_alias.so
 LoadModule rewrite_module libexec/apache2/mod_rewrite.so
 LoadModule bonjour_module     libexec/apache2/mod_bonjour.so
-#LoadModule php5_module        libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

My upgrade to Leopard has gone mostly well (if you don’t mind waiting half a day for spotlight to index everything, then another half a day for time machine to do its first back up). But tonight I tried to access my “personal website” via the local Apache server, and got a “Forbidden” message.

It turns out Leopard includes Apache 2.2 (up from the 1.3 in Tiger) and its configuration now lives in

/private/etc/apache2

(not /private/etc/httpd as in Tiger and earlier). However, the upgrade did not bring across my user configuration file (/private/etc/httpd/users/mrowe.conf). ...more...

My job search experiment is sitting at about one and a half for four at the moment.

Of the four recruiters who received my letter, two were small independents and two were larger national companies.

The person I spoke to at one of the larger companies completely failed to get it, and asked the usual “so how many years of websphere experience do you have?” questions. *plonk* ...more...