I have spent much of this evening (and, well, this morning) trying to convert a private Subversion repository into a public Bazaar repository hosted on Launchpad. This should be easy, and in a way it is, but there are a few pitfalls and alternatives which I thought I'd write up to save someone else the bother of figuring this out for themselves.

bzr-svn

This is a Bazaar plugin which provides (semi-)native access to Subversion repositories from the usual bzr tool. I don't really need its myriad features for treating a Subversion repository as a Bazaar repository or vice versa, etc., but it also provides a command "bzr svn-import" which would appear to do exactly what I want. However...

• bzr-svn directly copies Subversion's author field to Bazaar's committer field. There is nothing wrong with this per se, except that it's not neat: Subversion authors are usually just UNIX usernames, whereas Bazaar's committers usually consist of a full name and email address. Launchpad, for example, will fail to associate commits which were converted in this way with a Launchpad account. I eventually fudged my way around this by dumping the Subversion repository (svnadmin dump), editing the dump file by hand to have Bazaar-style authors (fiddly — it's not designed to be human-editable!), and importing into Bazaar from that — but since the issue below was later deemed a show-stopper this effort was wasted. :-(
• bzr-svn writes an unusual sort of repository — specifically, one with rich-root data. Again, not really a problem per se; this behaves as a normal repository to a sufficiently-recent bzr (in fact it's also faster, apparently) and is at some point going to become the default. However the particular format bzr svn-import chooses to write (in my setup at least — bzr-svn 0.5.3 on Bazaar 1.13.1) cannot be read by versions of Bazaar prior to 1.9. For comparison, the version of Bazaar in Ubuntu 8.04.2 ("Hardy Heron") is 1.3.1. I consider this unacceptable; I'd like my repository to work for people who have a version of Bazaar older than a few months. It turns out also that whilst Bazaar can convert between some versions, it can't convert this particular repository format to one readable by version 1.3.1.

So, I went looking for alternatives.

svn2bzr

At first glance, this shortish Python script seems like a poor imitation of bzr-svn with little to recommend it over the more official-looking plugin. However, svn2bzr has a trick up its sleeve: it can remap authors in a simple but effective manner.

It did turn out rather buggy, though; I hit two coding errors which prevented my use of the script until I figured out what the author was trying to achieve and made a few small changes. If you want my fixed version, it's available in a Bazaar repository (of course ;-) ) which will hopefully be merged upstream at some point. No guarantees that I've fixed the bugs correctly, as I wasn't at all familiar with the code, but it seems to have worked fine for me.

As users of the SRCF are no doubt aware, the SRCF strives to be at the forefront of technological developments on the Internet. It is therefore with great pleasure that we announce today support for a new, cutting-edge distributed hierarchical document search and retrieval protocol: Gopher.

gopher://gopher.srcf.ucam.org/

Enjoy browsing Gopherspace!

I present Gigabyte EnergySaver as bundled with my new motherboard.

Disabled:

Enabled:

Fail.

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mood

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content

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Yesterday was my project's 2008 showcase day, to which we invited anyone who's interested (mostly senior people from industry, and sponsors) in order to show them that we haven't been wasting our funding for the past two years. I would have been dreading this for months, except that I was far too busy panicking about other deadlines to panic about this one in particular for more than a couple of days in total. This also meant that I started the day woefully unprepared and expecting everything to go horribly wrong, and also got little more than two hours' sleep the night before.

My personal contribution to the day (other than a bit of local organisation due to it being held in the building in which I work — or rather disorganisation, since I accidentally abandoned the group from UCL in that building on Thursday whilst I went to the pub since I thought they had already gone home) was a 15-minute talk on my work, followed by a 15-minute demo (repeated four times to different groups of attendees) of my prototype implementation.

The order of the first few talks was:

• The Chair of the School of Technology and Head of Photonics Research, University of Cambridge
• The Vice-president (R&D) of O2 / Telefonica Europe
• The Head of the Ultra-fast Photonics and Optical Networks Group, UCL
• The Chair in Communication Networks and Systems and Director of the Institute of Integrated Information Systems, University of Leeds
• Me, with my BA

So, no pressure or anything!

I've never enjoyed public speaking. The last time I spoke to a group of over 20 people (in the very same room as my talk yesterday, ominously), the stress caused me to become ill for a week. However, this time my talk went surprisingly well; I was congratulated afterwards as presenting one of the most interesting of the talks. Having someone senior in a company involved in the project exclaim "Wow, this is amazing!" half way through was certainly a confidence booster. :-) (And it made my project leader like me, as this exclamation was made within earshot of someone senior in the research council sponsoring us!) I got several people asking interesting questions and just one doubting my justification (unsurprising, perhaps, as the doubter was representing a company which has committed itself to a massive deployment of MPLS, a technology which I imply has major problems).

The demo also went surprisingly well, considering that when I had set it up the previous evening I realised as I was plugging in the monitor that I had forgotten to write any code to display useful data on said monitor. The display code ended up being a combination of Python and standard UNIX utilities, hacked together in 15 minutes, but which nevertheless displayed the information needed (the internal state databases of three prototype switches).

By far the best achievement of the day, however, was observing that the serious-looking fliers distributed to attendees listed one of the major outcomes of our project as "MOOSE". :-)

(Edited post hoc because what I wrote on returning from the showcase day was not entirely coherent...)

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confused

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I just bought a new laptop (actually the same model as my old laptop — HP 2510p — for reasons which make sense only to myself). On first allowing it to boot, the factory installation underwent the following steps:

1. Boot Windows XP and start the usual first-run wizard (slightly customised such that it forgets to offer you the chance to create a non-Administrator account?!).
2. Reboot into the recovery partition (running a stripped-down copy of XP, presumably WinPE) and start the setup program for the recovery partition software, with no options presented to the user but a few "Next" buttons to click.
3. Reboot back into XP proper, and prompt me to log in as Administrator, whereupon the (again optionless) installation wizard for the "factory-installed software" starts. This takes some time and is not cancellable; all I could do was watch in despair as my nice new laptop filled itself with 31 GB of crap.
4. When I finally got to use my computer, the system tray looked like this:
   
   ...and so I went about removing some of the more pointless installed things, such as HP 3D DriveGuard which is installed despite my laptop having a solid-state hard drive which does not support or require this.

I really cannot see why this stuff could not have been installed in the factory. Or if they must make the user sit through the installation, some option to exclude unwanted stuff would be nice.

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irate

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I upgraded my home server, callisto, to Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) prerelease yesterday, and in the process caused my copy of the MoinMoin wiki engine to be upgraded from version 1.5.8 to version 1.7.1. Now, I've been recommending MoinMoin for a long time as a sane, well-written piece of wiki software which is packaged sensibly in Debian and Ubuntu such that each individual wiki just needs a small CGI script (consisting of a few lines of Python) to instantiate the centrally installed copy of MoinMoin with a local configuration file. I've even gone so far as to write a handy script on the SRCF for our users to set up a wiki that they will never need to maintain again, as upgrading to a new version just requires the sysadmins to install a new version of the package centrally.

Except upgrading past version 1.6.0 is nothing like that simple. A few bits of housekeeping are required to upgrade individual wikis:

• A configuration file change, because the configuration files are actually Python code to instantiate and populate a configuration class, and the default configuration class has been renamed;
• A new CGI wrapper script, again because a few classes got renamed; shame this was previously considered to be the part of a MoinMoin installation which never needed changing;
• ...And the trifling matter of changing every wiki page on the system because the markup syntax changed.

Allow me to repeat this. There have been backwards-incompatible changes to the markup language used to write wiki pages, between minor versions. Such little things as hyperlinks are now written differently, and there is (as far as I can tell) no provision for parsing the old-style markup. This seems absolutely absurd to me; imagine if OpenOffice.org were to decide that the next minor release would come with a new file format and no provision for reading the old one. Madness.

A set of upgrade scripts are provided, but they only handle the required page edits, require considerable manual work before and during use, and leave the user to diagnose a variety of unhandled error conditions by googling cryptic backtraces. [Edit: And there are required edits that the script manages to miss, too, as its parser is incomplete.] Upgrading my small personal wiki, which is running a plain and largely-uncustomised copy of MoinMoin in a centrally-configured "wiki farm" setup, took several attempts and a lot of guesswork as to what was required next. It also insisted upon renaming some pages, which I consider to be a cardinal sin. I am not looking forward to upgrading the 15-20 diversely-configured and likely highly-customised wikis on the SRCF.

The SRCF wiki script has proven popular with users and sysadmins alike, and it's a shame that it's just caused us a vast amount of work. Needless to say, the script as it stands is now deprecated, but I would like to reinstate it with a different wiki engine that won't drop us in a pit of spikes in a year's time. Does anyone have a recommendation of a sane wiki engine which fulfils the SRCF's criteria?

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discontent

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• A candidate whose party is filling the centre of Cambridge with duplicate coffee shops, fashion outlets and yet more cars (Lib Dem)
• A candidate who has so far maintained the status quo in the ward, which in many respects is not a good thing (Labour)
• An unrealistically idealistic, out-of-touch and somewhat illiterate candidate: "Moter-way building should stop." (Green)
• A candidate whose party is in favour of closure of the Hills Road bridge for the best part of a year for the installation of a project of dubious utility to local residents, and also in favour of the badly-thought-out congestion charge (Conservative)

the liquid in the battery is rodent, and it is harm to your skin and eyes

This meme from gerald_duck.

Places I stayed overnight in 2007:

• Early Febuary: Luxor, Egypt (1 week, with Jen). Best holiday ever; Egypt is an amazing place. I'm sure this will be the main enduring good memory of the year, possibly the decade.
• Early April: Isle of Mull (1 week, with extended family). Acquired large scar on knee by unimpressively falling over.
• Late April: Coventry (2 nights, one of which was with Jen). Presented a poster on my research, and explored the countryside with Jen.
• Late May: St Johann, Austria (1 week, with my mother). Pleasant last-minute holiday.
• Early July: Cleveleys, Lancashire (1 night). Visiting my grandfather shortly before he died :-(.
• Mid-September: Crestatx, Majorca (1 week, with family). Holiday in the middle of a month of doing far too much.
• Late September: Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium (4 nights, with Jen). Shadow TPC meeting, extended into a mini-holiday.
• Early October: Blackpool (1 night, with Jen). Apparently Jen didn't consider me to be her boyfriend by this time, although she put on the act for my grandmother and me.
• Late December: Denholme, West Yorkshire (13 nights, 12 of which were in the year in question). Christmas and New Year with family.

There were also several day trips to London, for work and for fun, and a rather long day trip to Lancashire to attend my grandfather's funeral as a coffin-bearer (which I almost missed due to epic Virgin Trains fail).

Goodness, that's quite a lot. I feel like I need a year to relax ;-)