Helping All, One Keystroke at a Time

There comes a point in every git users life where you need to delete a remote repository. This involves some head scratching at the beginning but I just found a great article on how to do it (http://github.com/guides/remove-a-remote-branch).

All you need is a little

git push <remote_repo> :heads/<branch>

and that remote repository will disappear.

http://cheat.errtheblog.com/s/git

A seriously pimped out guide to using GIT. If you ever want to impress your (computer science) friends with your distributed source code management skills, then I suggest you consult this guide. It has a short description of all the most common commands, as well as a default gitconfig file that will “chrome the shit out of your source code management tools” (real quote from Linus). I post that very gitconfig file here in hopes that you too will find it useful.

  [color]
    ui = auto
  [color "branch"]
    current = yellow reverse
    local = yellow
    remote = green
  [color "diff"]
    meta = yellow bold
    frag = magenta bold
    old = red bold
    new = green bold
  [color "status"]
    added = yellow
    changed = green
    untracked = cyan
  [color]
    ui = true
  [color "diff"]
    whitespace = red reverse
  [core]
    whitespace=fix,-indent-with-non-tab,trailing-space,cr-at-eol

I was trying to integrate some Google Calendar stuff into a web site I have been working on lately, and using the official Google documentation completely failed me. I had to visit some other google sites to get a working example of the boilerplate code that I need.

I guess I should just quit my grovelling and thank them for this service.

Acid 3 is an exhaustive and rigorous test of a web browsers compliance to the official HTML standard. All web browsers that call themselves web browsers should try their best to adhere to the HTML standard, otherwise there is just a mass proprietary cock swinging catastrophe on everyone’s hands.

This quote taken from this article explains everything fully. Note that Google chrome scores 100/100 and Firefox scores 92/100.

Microsoft, developers of the Internet Explorer browser, said that Acid3 does not map to the goal of Internet Explorer 8 and that IE8 would improve only some of the standards being tested by Acid3.^[24] IE8 scores 20/100, which is still much worse than all relevant competitors in their versions from the test’s release, and has some problems with rendering the Acid3 test page.

I had a Windows 7 virtual machine laying around and so I decided to run the test for myself. The results are absolutely abysmal.

A whopping 13/100. Good effort M$.

If you have Gentoo and are having trouble compiling your sparc toolchain using crossdev, look at this bug here. Continue on if you want to know a little more about cross compiling.

The other day I was trying to cross compile a gcc sparc toolchain. I’m taking a class right now that we have to write sparc assembly programs and I just logged onto the sparc computer science machine at the university and it uses packages that are older than my grandmother. Some inital poking around reveal bash-3.0 and gcc-3.4. Fucking arcane! How am I supposed to do anything useful with that? Actually, vim is installed on the machine but has no syntax highlighting, which of couse makes using vim completely unbearable. That’s a lie too, I could use vim no problem I’m just too conditioned/pampered by syntax highlighting that I can’t not have it. It’s one of those little things that makes development safer, faster and easier.

So anyways, getting back to the point, I needed a way to compile and test my sparc assembly from a convenient machine. Having gentoo on my laptop gave me a cross compile toolkit called crossdev. Simply tell crossdev which target archetecture that you want to cross compile to in one easy command and bam! 3 hours later a fancy new cross compile target is finished. This includes binutils, and a full C/C++ compiler, along with the option to make some other extras like an ADA compiler or the GDB. This is extremely handy and there are many cross compile targets available. I have generally got the impression over the years that making a cross compilation toolkit was amazingly hard, up there with trying to get your patch for Linux in mainline , but this was so painless that I now see those claims of difficulty as hollow and unfounded. Right tool for the job, right?

I know this may be a bit dated for christmas, but I forgot about this little gem in my 63 draft blogs I have going at the moment. A quick trip back to the site (http://standforchristmas.com/) brings back emotions and feelings that I had when I first visited many evening ago. The purpose of this site is to rate different retailers on their `Christmas Friendliness`. If staff and decorations are indeed Christmas oriented, the store gets a high rating. A comment system is also available where people contributing to the site can write a short anecdote about their visit, maybe justifying their rating.

When I critically think about what this site is doing, it seems to have a pure Christian motive. Nobody on standforchristmas even considers for a moment that not all customers celebrate the same Christmas they do, or even acknowledge that people who have different cultural backgrounds from themselves have every right to this time of year without being bombarded by Christian-mas adverts and consumerism.

This shows a level of ignorance that I had hoped was in human history, and I just want to say to the rest of the world that on behalf of North America I am sorry, and that some of use over here are actually trying to make some ground on cultural tolerance but our efforts are counteracted by the millions of white mass media zombie civilians.

I was chilling hard on the Gentoo website the other day and came accross this amazing ressource.

Taken from http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/vi-guide.xml

Just getting some of my financial woes in order.

Now this is the Living Bible:
His name is Tom He has wild hair, wears a T-shirt with holes in it,
jeans, and no shoes.. This was literally his wardrobe for his entire
four years of college.

He is brilliant. Kind of profound and very, very bright.  He became a
Christian while attending college.

Across the street from the campus is a well-dressed, very conservative
church. They want to develop a ministry to the students but are not
sure how to go about it.

One day Tom  decides to go there. He walks in with no shoes, jeans, his
T-shirt, and wild hair. The service has already started and so Tom
starts down the aisle looking for a seat.

The church is completely packed and he can’t find a seat. By now,
people are really looking a bit uncomfortable, but no one says
anything.

Tom gets closer and closer and closer to the pulpit, and when he
realizes there are no seats, he just squats down right on the carpet.

By now the people are really uptight, and the tension in the air is
thick.

About this time, the minister realizes that from way at the back of the
church, a deacon is slowly making his way toward Tom .

Now the deacon is in his eighties, has silver-gray hair, and a
three-piece suit.. A godly man, very elegant, very dignified, very
courtly. He walks with a cane and, as he starts walking toward this
boy, everyone is saying to themselves that you can’t blame him for what he’s going to do.

How can you expect a man of his age and of his background to understand some college kid on the floor?

It takes a long time for the man to reach the boy.

The church is utterly silent except for the clicking of the man’s cane.
All eyes are focused on him. You can’t even hear anyone breathing. The minister can’t even preach the sermon until the deacon does what he has to do.

And now they see this elderly man drop his cane on the floor. With
great difficulty, he lowers himself and sits down next to Tom  and
worships with him so he won’t be alone.

Everyone chokes up with emotion.

When the minister gains control, he says,
‘What I’m about to preach, you will never remember. What you have just seen, you will never forget.’

‘Be careful how you live. You may be the only Bible some people will
ever read!’

I asked the Lord to bless you
As I prayed for you today.
To guide you and protect you
As you go along your way….
His love is always with you,
His promises are true,
And when we give Him all our cares,
You know He will see us through.

Only if you feel led to, pass this to
People you want God to Bless.
I just did

A few days ago I finally got the new nouveau driver working on my laptop’s Gentoo installation. I have the nVidia 8600GT chipset in my macbook pro 4,1 and this driver works almost flawlessly for everything except 3D. There are some artifacts every once and a while, and thumbnailing results in scrambled thumbnails in KDE but these are small glitches that I can live with. It is really nice after 10+ years of using the binary nvidia driver (I think I have always owned at least 1 computer with nvidia hardware) I can finally free myself from its closed source hell.

Just thought I would log my success for anyone else who is thinking about using this driver.