Sep
27
2011

Anniversary Lunch

(Add / View Comments) (0)Tuesday, September 27, 2011 - 04:31:03 pm
(Posted Under: Tempe Music Scene Tempe Music Scene, Instagram Instagram)
Things are busy as always, and with our schedules it was impossible to make going out to dinner for our anniversary work. Solution? Lunch at Restaurant Mexico. Got to love the 4 minute walk from work on my lunch break.

Instagram Image
Sep
24
2011

Why I Love CVS

It's All About Hack-ability Baby!

(Add / View Comments) (0)Saturday, September 24, 2011 - 02:03:36 pm
(Posted Under: Web Development)
Okay, so it's somewhat because I'm old school too. But it's largely because it's easy to hack a CVS repository to fix something stupid you did.

Case in point - I have a bunch of Photobox changes on a few different branches that I'm merging to trunk. I started doing that today, and once I got done, realized that on the third branch of four that I had merged, I'd omitted a single character that broke everything. Now, I really want that fixed on the source branch, as well as trunk. And for one character, having to do a second merge of that branch would confuse things down the track given the way I do things.

In all my years of using CVS, the extent of my hacking has been as simple as changing commit dates, or here and there modifying commit logs directly in the RCS file. On occasion I think I've screwed around with tags, but that starts to get into scary territory, and I'll generally restore a repository backup and redo whatever needs to be done via CVS in that case.

This has been the first time I've actually screwed around with hacking the contents of a commit. Because, admittedly, that has always looked scary. Making the one character change on trunk (head revision) was a piece of cake. Just make the change, as the head revision was basically the full file. Having that change reflected on the source branch didn't look as easy.

And wasn't, but after Googling the RCS file format, working out the diff syntax (ahhh, so that's what all those aXXX and dXXX's mean!) that RCS uses, and about 20 or so tries I got it working. Simply a case of specifying the right combination of lines to delete and add. CVS/RCS rocks. (Note, this was the only change on the file from the source branch to the HEAD revision, and probably wouldn't have attempted it otherwise).

And of course, my 20 tries to get it right was done on a copy of page.xsl,v. Because CVS is cool like that - if you want to screw around on a repository file, make a copy of it to another filename, hack away like it was actually part of the code base, and if it works, replicate it on the actual repository file that you want to change. If you can't do it, then just blow away the copy you made and everything is as if you didn't start hacking at all. I guess it's worth stating that I'm the only developer who works with these repositories, which is really what facilitates hacking to be feasible. Despite some minor draw backs of the flat files in CVS (the only one of note is the difficulty with renaming files), it's why I love CVS.

Anyways, this is a good reference for doing as such RCS Format - Open Source Development With CVS and was all I needed to work out how to do it. And thus concludes today's recount of hacking CVS repository files.

Oh, and did I mention that I backup all my CVS repositories nightly and before I start hacking? [wink] While the ability to hack CVS repositories is unparallelled, it's really easy to screw things up, and I can't even count the number of times I've borked the repository while trying to hack a fix to something. I never do it without a huge backup safety backup net.

But yeah, I love CVS for this reason.
Sep
03
2011

The Bringer Of Pain To Your Face

(Add / View Comments) (0)PhotosSaturday, September 3, 2011 - 11:25:03 pm
(Posted Under: Tempe Music Scene Tempe Music Scene, Music Music, Live Shows)
Photobox ImageAt 10:05pm tonight we made a quick exit out of Teakwoods, headed back to Tempe for the secret The Stereo show. Can I say that now that it's happened? Surely I can.

Given the time we got back to Tempe, there was concern that we were missing it, however we got their in plenty of time. As a matter of fact, we probably could have hung out at Teakwoods and caught Corey's set. Sorry Glodie. [wink] With that said, I enjoyed getting to see what we did of Big Moxie.

Photobox ImageThe thing about a great show is that it makes all the bullshit associated leading up to seeing it worthwhile. Tonight was no exception - both in terms of the amount of bullshit to deal with, and how worth it was when The Stereo took the stage. They sounded great, and the set list was absolutely awesome. And with guest on stage appearances from Thomas Laufenberg and Jason Sukut, there was absolutely nothing to complain about.

We never made it back to Teakwoods to complete the major trifecta diminished (as coined last night), but both Zubia Brothers and The Stereo made for more fun than you should be allowed to have in one night anyway.
Now Playing: The Replacements - Anywhere Is Better Than Here
Sep
03
2011

VH1 Storytellers?

Zubia Brothers @ Teakwoods

(Add / View Comments) (0)PhotosSaturday, September 3, 2011 - 10:21:28 pm
(Posted Under: Tempe Music Scene Tempe Music Scene, Music Music, Live Shows)
Photobox ImageIt was like VH1 Storytellers tonight at Teakwoods. How totally awesome! Thankfully the Zubia Brothers started at 9, making it possible for us to make it to Phoenix for their show, and then split back to Tempe, working perfectly with the rest of our plans for the night.

Great to hear the stories behind many of the songs, and the set list was pretty incredible, with some stuff that went way back. Too cool.
Sep
01
2011

Slowing Down To Speed Up?

(Add / View Comments) (0)Thursday, September 1, 2011 - 09:25:48 pm
(Posted Under: Tempe Music Scene Tempe Music Scene, Music Music)
Y'know, at least in Arizona, the music scene slows down over summer. I don't know if that's because of the heat or not, but it probably is. Either way, it's a fact.

But this summer seems to be the exception. Looking back on it, as we (thank god) move towards the end of it (in theory anyway), it certainly doesn't feel like it's been true. I can probably count on one hand the number of weekends we haven't had something to do both nights, and even less that we've had a weekend off.

And there have been many conflicts. Running all over town in one night with more than one "must see" show going on. This Saturday is a good example of that happening again. The Zubia Brothers are playing acoustic night at Teakwoods with Glodie and a host of others. You had us at "Zubia Brothers and Glodie". Though, this week I was clued into something else happening in Tempe that night. A "can't miss" show. And the timing of it doesn't look like it's going to be condusive to bar hopping. We'll see how things turn out, but it's pretty amazing to think that it's quite possible that we'll miss this much anticipated Zubia Brothers show. And in the height of summer no less.
Now Playing: The Stereo - Pay No Attention

Switch Styles

About Style Switching.

!Weblog Index

Aug September 2011 Oct
SU MO TU WE TH FR SA
1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Categories

RSS FeedRSS Feed