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Experienced Rookie Looking to Give Advice

May 18th, 2012 by jessi

This weekend will be our second, full weekend show camp where we learn as much as we can in two days. I knew going in that this wouldn’t be as intense as junior corps but it would still be hard work. In junior corps, you learn the bulk of your show in about two weeks. [...]

Modernizing Drum Corps: Kindle Dot Book

May 14th, 2012 by justin

The last time I marched drum corps if I wanted to call someone, I had to wait in line for a payphone. Payphone?!? What’s that? And remember calling cards? They were all just part of the 90′s. Back then I tried to modernize my Drum Corps experience by bringing a laptop on tour, sending emails through a modem (wha?!?).

So I thought I should try to enhance my current drum corps experience with some newfangled geekery.

Pyware Personal Drill Book

Drill charts traditionally are complete pictures where you have to locate your spot. I now get a Personal Drill Book PDF care of Pyware, tailored to my spot, that looks like this:

It’s pretty amazing: shows where you came from, where you’re going to, how many counts the move is, etc. Rather than printing and cutting this, or manually transposing the coordinates into a traditional dot book, I thought I’d try to load these images on to my Kindle. The e-ink doesn’t take any power to run, and I can annotate notes on each page.

GIMP Plugin to cut the images

To get it ready for the Kindle I wrote a Python filter for the GIMP. You can check it out here: https://github.com/jrfoell/dot-book It’s ironic that I was making fun of Python, and now I’m using it.

The py-dot-book.py file should go in your $HOME/.gimp-2.6/plug-ins/ folder. Windows users may have to jump through some hoops to get Python scripts working in GIMP for Windows.

Import PDF into GIMP

The idea is to put each image (normally four to a page in the PDF) to one-per-page on the Kindle, and do so in order, and in a semi-automated way.

Open your Personal Drill Book PDF in GIMP and have it import the pages as layers.

Optionally rotate the image 90 degrees clockwise. The Kindle firmware version 5.1.0 and above has a landscape mode which will do the rotation for you. Add two grid-lines (click in the ruler area, then drag onto the image area): one vertical and one horizontal, splitting the image into four even quadrants.

You can optionally crop the whole thing to reduce the outer margins if you’d like.

“Dot Book” filter

Under Filter → Web you should have a “Dot Book…” menu item. If you’ve got the image divided into 4 using grid-lines, it will split the images, re-size them, and put them in a single HTML file suitable for import into calibre. The plug-in has modes for landscape and portrait modes. If you don’t have this feature on your e-reader, set landscape to “No” and adjust the width and height restrictions accordingly – and remember to rotate your image before running the Dot Book filter.

I use calibre to convert my dot-book.html file to a .mobi file for the Kindle. I don’t do much in calibre, except to set the margins to zero while converting it. The GIMP output HTML is specifically geared to be input into calibre, so it should be able to format nicely for any e-reader – although you probably want to experiment with the image sizes.

Theory → Practice

21st Century Dot Book:

While you’re at it, put your music on there to have as a reference:

I put my Kindle in a travel passport & money holder during practice. My only beef with the setup at the moment is with the Kindle Touch itself. The touch screen is an infrared (IR) type, rather than a capacitance type like an iPhone/iPad. This means that anything that touches the screen can turn the pages. So you can flip through pages with your gloves on, but it also means that it will probably change pages unintentionally while it’s going in & out of the case. Turning it off will prevent this, but the whole point was to have your charts readily available. Also I have not come up with a solution for rainy days. Putting it in a ziplock bag sort of works, but page changes will occur at random as well. Maybe a regular Kindle would be better suited, but I hate to think about typing in notes without a touchscreen or a keyboard.

The Kindle Keyboard, the OG – Original Gangsta of Kindles might be the best tool for this job.

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Culturally Influenced

May 2nd, 2012 by jessi

Justin and I are very proud parents. People are constantly commenting on what a good boy Jules is, so well behaved and of course, cute. Yes, he has manners. Yes, he’s polite and sweet. But let me tell you about his sassy side. When he’s not in the mood for me to be home from [...]

Moving a large SVN repository over a bad connection

April 30th, 2012 by justin

I had a client who contracted a Chinese firm to do some development for them. When they came to me, they cited the language barrier as one of the reasons they were having a hard time getting their ideas into production. SUPPLIES! Translation: Surprise (but not a surprise to me). So the first order of business was moving their code repository stateside.

The normal way: svnadmin dump

Conventional logic lead me to starting with: svnadmin dump

What happened was svnadmin dump would get partly through it’s export and the connection would inevitably drop. This left me with a partial dump that was really of no value.

Given the size of the repository (huge) and the quality of the link to the repository (terrible), it was time to find another solution. I still wanted revision history to be retained, so instead of using svnadmin dump, I decided to try svnsync

The foolproof way: svnsync

svnsync requires a second repository to sync to. No problem, just set up a local repository:

$ cd /tmp
$ svnadmin create local.repos
$ echo '#!/bin/sh' > local.repos/hooks/pre-revprop-change
$ chmod +x local.repos/hooks/pre-revprop-change
$ svnsync init file:///tmp/local.repos http://remote.repository.bfe/repository_root
$ svnsync sync file:///tmp/local.repos

I don’t know why svnadmin create doesn’t give you a base (empty) pre-revprop-change, but it doesn’t, so lines 3 & 4 above are needed.

synsync sync is where the magic happens. It syncs the entire repository one commit at a time. So if (and when) it fails, you can simply re-run that last svnsync sync command again, and it will resume where it left off.

Once that’s done we have to take some extra steps to be able to switch/relocate any checkouts to the new repository URL. Otherwise subversion is going to complain about the repository UUIDs not matching:

svn: The repository at '...' has uuid '5242f4d0-6d7c-4812-b150-1df843629073', but the WC has 'add5d305-2225-4d42-af3e-22d1851a68c1'

So we need to reset some of the properties on the local copy of the repository. The easiest way to do this is to checkout the repository locally and run a few commands for it:

$ svn checkout file:///tmp/local.repos local.checkout
$ svn proplist --revprop -r0 local.checkout
Unversioned properties on revision 0:
  svn:sync-from-uuid
  svn:sync-last-merged-rev
  svn:date
  svn:sync-from-url
$ svn propdel svn:sync-from-uuid --revprop -r0 local.checkout
$ svn propdel svn:sync-last-merged-rev --revprop -r0 local.checkout
$ svn propdel svn:sync-from-url --revprop -r0 local.checkout

The revprop changes are not versioned changes, so they take effect immediately – there’s no need to commit them. Now we need to set the UUID of the local repository to that of the old remote repository.

$ svn info http://remote.repository.bfe/repository_root
...
Repository UUID: add5d305-2225-4d42-af3e-22d1851a68c1
...
$ svnadmin setuuid local.repos add5d305-2225-4d42-af3e-22d1851a68c1

The repository is now ready for svnadmin dump (again)

With the repository fully copied, and the UUID sorted, you can move it to it’s final destination. If it’s ultimately going to a hosted repository (like repositoryhosting.com) you can dump the local repository to use for importing at the new host:

svnadmin dump local.repos > local_svn_dump

Once your repository is at it’s new location, you can switch any checkouts so they’re pointing to the new location:

svn switch --relocate http://remote.repository.bfe/repository_root http://new.repository.us/svn_root

It should be noted that as of svn version 1.7 svn switch --relocate has been deprecated in favor of svn relocate

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MBI and Me

April 25th, 2012 by jessi

When we first moved to Minnesota, we kicked around the idea of marching in Minnesota Brass, a senior Drum and Bugle Corps located in Minneapolis. We were childless, had the time and missed marching. But then we had Jules and the idea was pushed aside. Fast forward 3 years – we now have a toddler [...]

Free Subversion and Emacs books for Kindle

April 16th, 2012 by justin

Jessi got me a Kindle Touch for my birthday and of course I have been geeking out, looking for free/cheap content to put on it, so I can put it through the paces. I thought I’d share a couple freebies.

According the GNU Free Documentation License and Creative Commons Attribution licenses for the GNU Emacs Manual and Version Control with Subversion (respectively), I’m within my right to reformat – in this case from HTML to mobipocket e-book format – and redistribute these works free of charge:

GNU Emacs manual – Richard M. Stallman

Version Control with Subversion – Ben Collins-Sussman,_Brian W. Fitzpatrick

If Emacs or SVN seem too old school or “so last year” for you (again, respectively), I recommend getting the very professionally done – and also free – Pro Git book.

Converting HTML to an e-book using calibre

Converting a single-page HTML file to mobipocket format proved to be very easy. I used calibre – highly recommended, especially since it runs on all platforms and isn’t java*.

* I am not promoting Python or its hippie ways, but calibre seems like a great use of the language to reach the broadest audience.

The only extra thing I had to do during conversion was remove the full urls from the anchor tags. For example links like:
<a href="http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn-book.html#svn.foreword">Foreword</a>

needed to be changed to:
<a href="#svn.foreword">Foreword</a>

Or else when selecting “Forward” the Kindle would close the book and launch the browser to bring up that page. Calibre provides a simple search and replace step as part of the conversion.

The Kindle Itself

The Kindle Touch’s interface does leave something to be desired, although I’m hopeful it will improve with software updates. It is great for reading books, especially if they are “professionally” formatted by a “real” publisher. On free books (like the ones I’ve provided or public domain books from Project Gutenberg), I’ve found sometimes navigating from the table of contents to a chapter will sometimes land you past the point where you actually wanted to go. Sites like feedbooks often have reformatted versions of the public domain books found at Project Gutenberg that may or may not work better on your device.

The Kindle Touch really falls on its face worst when using the web browser. While the browser is listed as an “experimental” feature, when using it I pine for the page up/down buttons as sliding the viewport (ala iPad) is very clunky. I’ve found the best way to move around in the browser is to double-tap the bottom of the screen if you want to page down, although it really just re-centers the viewport. Effectively it’s like a half-page-down.

Also while the ads don’t interfere with reading, they bothered me when the Kindle was just sitting there. Its e-ink staring at me in its powerless state, exhibiting some douchey lady with expensive sunglasses trying to sell me a spa package. I wanted to be greeted by Jules Verne! Rather than going my usual route of jailbreaking the device to skirt the ads, I bought my way out of it through Amazon. Then my screen-savers changed from ads to an ironic collection of images evoking typesetting.

It’s ironic because on the Kindle you have a grand total of three (3) fonts to choose from, and the 4th generation Kindles have disabled 3rd party software (such as calibre) from being able to add/set a user font. While I understand it might be retro-grouchy to expect the Kindle to render such nuances as hanging punctuation, it would be nice if the Kindle provided some facility for publishers to at least temporarily impose their font on us (until we override it in the settings menu).

For anyone curious enough to want to know how to convince WordPress that e-books are not a threat to national security, see this.

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Overnight Website Challenge: Personal Rules

April 2nd, 2012 by justin

As a 4-year veteran to the Overnight Website Challenge, I’d like to share some of my personal rules. I’m not going to tell you what platform to use, what revision control is best — well, actually I will, but at a later date. We’re here to discuss one thing: sleep, and lack-thereof.

Something new to me is that you can apparently “bank” sleep ahead of time. I didn’t know this and will be adding it to my routine next year, since I usually stay up late a few nights beforehand prepping hardware & software. In the past, the event prep. has made me very anxious come Friday night. I’ve more than once had a sleepless night contemplating trivia such as user accounts and PHP libraries which were already configured. This brings me to my first point:

Get to bed early on Friday

If you’ve found yourself up late the night before, take a sleeping pill like Unisom or some other sleep aid from the pharmacy. Don’t take it right when you go to bed, take it 2 hours before you want to fall asleep. Otherwise you’ll be laying in bed for 2 hours before it kicks in, and you’ll also be very drowsy the next morning while it’s still wearing off.

During the challenge, no matter how much sleep I’m running on from Friday, I follow this rule:

Avoid caffeine until early Sunday

Free caffeinated beverages are in abundance at the Overnight Website Challenge. Do yourself a favor and lay off of them, at least until the wee hours of Sunday morning.

Personally, besides hyping me up, caffeine makes me jittery and unfocused, as if my ADHD went into overdrive. If you really feel the prospect of free Red Bull is fleeting, then grab a couple and keep them in a cooler by your team. This isn’t Vegas folks, you don’t want to overdo it like this guy did:

5PM: too early

Done and done

I strive to stave off any desire for caffeine until most of the heavy lifting (development-wise) is done. For me this is 4-6AM or even longer if I can hold out. Also after about 4AM you’re probably doing menial tasks that won’t be derailed by some stimulants. Plus, that cup of AeroPress coffee will taste better and be more effective right before breakfast, judging, and the final awards.

The challenge is actually much longer than 24 hours. You have 24 hours to work, but factoring in awake time before you arrived, during judging & awards, and after you go home — it’s more like the 36 Hour Website Challenge. You’re going to want to prepare yourself for the long haul. That’s why the last rule is critical if you want to have a productive work day on Monday:

Get 15 hours of sleep

I’ve found that this is the amount of sleep I need to have a useful day on Monday. To time it right, I also suggest forcing yourself to stay up to a set time so you can reset your internal clock. If I go to bed at 4PM Sunday, I’ll assuredly wake up at 7AM Monday. Even if you do take Monday off of work, I suggest doing some timing just to help reset to a normal schedule. If you go to bed right when you get home at noon, I suspect you’re going to be up at 3AM, wondering why the hell you thought you could go to work after all this.

Until next year… good luck, and for God’s sake get some rest!

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Jules in Bullet Points

March 13th, 2012 by jessi

I’ve been terrible about documenting what Jules is up to since the end of his monthly posts. So here’s a post dedicated just to him and what he’s up to. -When he’s supposed to be sleeping, he’s usually singing the ABC song, Peanut Butter Jelly Time, and has a conversation with Lamby. If you ask [...]