Very interesting…over the past month, it dawned on me that distance of 500 miles came up a number of times. For example, my commute to work is 500 miles/week. Another example is the distance between Long Island and Ottawa is just under 500 miles. There are others but they are somewhat boring :) The Ottawa number is not something completely random…you see, I’m heading to the airport in little over an hour to fly to Ottawa for the Ottawa Linux Symposium 2007! OLS 2007, here I come!
Yesterday, I got my first check from IBM. As I expected, the check is quite plain — it just has the words “IBM Corporation” using the same font as the rest of the text, no special IBM logo or anything. Few months ago, I saw a check from Google that a friend had, and it was just as plain. Either way, I’m semi-rich now…well, I’m just not as poor as I was before. :)
You may have heard me say that Firefox sucks. Well it does, but today, I accidentally found something that makes it suck less than what I thought.
Go to some page with text, and press the slash key and type something! Very nice. I like my applications to understand slash as "search" (vim, less, etc.). Now, if only it did regular expressions ;)
This is a part 2 of my adventures of making version systems go boom.
As I described before, I need to version some reasonably large files. After trying Mercurial and Git, I decided to go with git as it presented me with fewer problems.
To make matters worse than before, I now need to version 3 files which are about 2.7GB in size each. I tried to git-add the directory, but I got this wonderful message:
$ git-add dir/ The following paths are ignored by one of your .gitignore files: dir/ (directory) Use -f if you really want to add them. $ git-add -f dir/ fatal: dir/: can only add regular files or symbolic links
Wha?
Really painful. Time to experiment, but first I run git-status to see what other files I have not committed yet, and I see everything listed except the directory!…So, I moved one of the files to the top directory of the repo, ran git-status — the file did not show up — but tried to add it anyway:
$ git-add file fatal: pathspec 'file' did not match any files
Ok, this time around, I at least get an error message which I’ve seen before. It is still wrong, but oh well. Thankfully, the program that uses these files has be made in such a way that it can handle filesystems which don’t support files larger than 2GB. I regenerate the file, now I have 2 files, the first one 2GB and the other 667MB. git-status displays both — great! git-add on the smaller file works flawlessly, but…you guessed it! Adding the larger file dies? Which error message?
fatal: Out of memory, malloc failed
Yep, great. My laptop’s 1GB of RAM just isn’t good enough, eh? I’m not quite sure what I’ll do, I’ll probably scp everything over to a box with 2+GB RAM, and commit things there. This really sucks :-/
Update: I asked around on IRC (#git) where I got a few pointers and the code confirms things…it would seem that git-hash-object tries to mmap the entire file. This explains the out of memory error. The other problem is the fact that the file size is stored in an unsigned long variable, which is 32-bits on my laptop. Oh well, so much for files over 4GB. I think, but I’m not sure - I’m too lazy to check — the stat structure may return a signed int which would limit things to 2GB — which is what I see.
Tomorrow, I start my summer internship. Yay! Most of you probably already know, but my internship is at IBM Research. Should be fun :) Stay tuned for a lot of “I can’t talk about what I work on” :-P. I think it is pretty obvious that I’ll be doing something that interests me → programming :)
So, about a week ago, Chris (if he wants to identify himself, he can :) ) gave me an Elite Serpent Guard action figure. Right from the beginning, I knew what had to be done… Today, I had a little bit of time, so I went outside and had fun. Some inspiration came from a post by Nur Hussein. So, if I “waste” more time on this, I blame him :)
Anyway, here are the photos, along with my witty commentary which is supposed to make this into a story of some sort. (I didn’t really post process them, so they could look better.)
“How dare you call the Gua’uld false gods!”
“blip, blip, blip…”
…an hour later…
“Whoever did this will die by my hands!”
I have no idea what’s going on here…perhaps some meditation near a nice, green, lake….
“Hrm, where did my Al’kesh go?”
On my way back inside, I found something that looked interesting. Perhaps this is the lost Al’kesh :)
So, there was a pretty nice thunderstorm around here (Stony Brook). I couldn’t help myself, but run outside with my camera and start taking photos of the lightning. Out of 148 photos I took, I decided that about 18 were usable (really only about 10 are, but I decided to keep some of the not perfect ones as well).
Here’s what they look like (I didn’t do any post-processing, so they look kind of crumy) — click for larger versions:
Yeah, it started pouring about half way through, so I got closer to the building. Oh, and the only reason why I stopped so early was my camera battery — it died on me.
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