Admin: Getting a picture again

It turned out to be much more difficult than I expected to get my picture back on the blog profile. It's done now, but it wasn't straightforward. I had to dig through HTML source and find the 'true' URL for the image stored on Flickr. Flickr uses JavaScript to obfuscate (perhaps unintentionally) the image so Blogger doesn't like it. You have to dig and find the 'normal' .jpg URL.

Admin: Trying to get a picture again

BrianSmiling.jpg
Originally uploaded by icebrg.

I lost my picture. So I'm trying to use Flickr to get a photo online that I can use in my blogger profile.

A Belated Mother's Day Offering

I am only mediocre when it comes to being a good person. I don't think I'm a bad person, and I think I've never done anything particularly terrible, but since even sociopaths feel that way I know that's no compass for moral values. My wife, on the other hand, is an amazingly good person. How she manages to see through the frustration and temptations of life on a day-to-day basis I find unfathomable. She knows she's not perfect, which I am constantly forgetting, and still manages to see the best in others, despite the pell-mell pace of our lives and the concerted efforts of fools to find her last nerve.

That doesn't mean she fails to spot the fools; she just manages to view them as human despite their (sometimes considerable) flaws, while I tend to write them off and continue my blissful and fruitless search for moral fortitude in the modern world. And I know that she would credit much of her world view to her upbringing, in particular to her mother.

I have to agree with her. My mother-in-law is one of the most nurturing, kind-hearted people I know. She has a bedrock of morals that amazes me, and I'm rather too jaded to be easily amazed (okay, 'cynical' is more appropriate, since I'm not nearly experienced enough to call myself jaded). I know it's my duty as son-in-law to hate her, and while I might have been inclined to skip it just because I'm contrary, I didn't need to.

I know I'm incredibly lucky to have fooled my wife into marrying me, and just as lucky to have a mother-in-law I love and who I believe loves me in spite of myself. I suspect I'll not live up to the love and devotion of either of them, but they inspire me to be the person they see in me.

Tinkering: Bash and Subversion 2

It turns out that just doing -W with the names of the options to svn ends up disabling the normal file name completion. This is rather painful when you want to do things like type 'svn add ' and hit tab to get a list of files you might want to add to the repository. To fix this, you have to specify the -f option after the -W option, like this:

complete -W 'add blame praise annotate cat checkout co cleanup commit ci 
copy delete del remove rm diff di export help h import info list ls log merge 
mkdir move mv rename ren propdel pdel pd propedit pedit pe propget pget 
pg proplist plist pl propset pset ps resolved revert status stat st switch sw
update up' -f svn

This turns file/directory completion back on, which is good, but leaves all the svn commands (like help, diff, etc.) still in the list of completions even after you've provided a command to svn, which is bad. If anyone knows how to make bash only list file/directory completions when I've already specified the command for svn to use, I'd love to know.

One other handy thing in bash is the FIGNORE environment variable. This variable is a colon-separated list of names to ignore. So, setting it to ignore the .svn directory is as simple as:

export FIGNORE='.svn'

Of course, if you already have things in FIGNORE (e.g. the .ssh directory, the CVS directory, etc.), you will need to append .svn to the list.

I'm really looking forward to full integration of Subversion with IDEA, but even after that comes about, some things are just easier on the command line and this makes them even easier.

Tinkering: Bash and Subversion

Bash has a very handy and (as far as I'm concerned) obscure feature that allows you to specify completion words for commands. This is useful for providing some brief feedback when typing a command line. For example, you can specify the completions for the 'svn' command like this:

complete -W 'add blame praise annotate cat checkout co cleanup commit ci 
copy delete del remove rm diff di export help h import info list ls log merge 
mkdir move mv rename ren propdel pdel pd propedit pedit pe propget pget 
pg proplist plist pl propset pset ps resolved revert status stat st switch sw
update up' svn

This is great when you type 'svn' and then hit the TAB key to get a list of possible completions.

I wish you could specify completions for secondary commands. This would allow me to specify the options for the 'svn commit' versus 'svn diff' versus every other svn command. I hope I've just missed how to do this (despite trying some of the more obvious possibilities). If so, please let me know how it works.