Ry4an's Unblog

Blacklisting Changesets in Mercurial

Distributed version control systems have revolutionized how software teams work, by making merges no longer scary. Developers can work on a feature in relative isolation, pulling in new changes on their schedule, and providing results back on their (manager's) timeline.

Sometimes, however, a developer working in their own branch can do something really silly, like commit a huge file without realizing it. Only after they push to the central repository does the giant size of the changeset become known. If one catches it quickly, one just removes the changeset and all is will.

If other developers have pulled that giant changeset you're in a slightly harder spot. You can remote it from your repository and ask other developers to do the same, but you can't force them to do so. Unwanted changesets let loose in a development group have a way of getting pushed back into a shared repository again and again.

To ban the pushing of a specific changeset to a Mercurial repository one can use this terse hook in the repository's .hg/hgrc file:

[hooks]
pretxnchangegroup.ban1 = ! hg id -r d2cfe91d2837+ /dev/null 2>&1

Where d2cfe91d2837 is the node id of the forbidden changeset.

That's fine for a single changeset, but if you more than a few to ban this form avoids having a hook per changeset:

[hooks]
pretxnchangegroup.ban = ! hg log --template '{node|short}\n' \
  -r $HG_NODE:tip | grep -q -x -F -f /path/to/banned

where banned /path/to/banned is a file of disallowed changesets like:

acd69df118ab
417f3c27983b
cc4e13c92dfa
6747d4a5c45d

It's probably prohibitively hard to ban changesets in everyone's repositories, but at least you can set up a filter on shared repositories and publicly shame anyone who pushes them.

Switching Blogging Software

This blog started out called the unblog back when blog was a new-ish term and I thought it was silly. I'd been on mailing lists like fork and Kragan Sitaker's tol for years and couldn't see a difference between those and blogs. I set up some mailing list archive software to look like a blog and called it a day.

Years later that platform was aging, and wikis were still a new and exciting concept, so I built a blog around a wiki. The ease of online editing was nice, though readers never took to wiki-as-comments like I hoped. It worked well enough for a good many years, but I kept having a hard time finding my own posts in Google. Various SEO-blocking strategies Google employs that I hope never to have to understand were pushing my entries below total crap.

Now, I've switched to blohg as a blogging platform. It's based on Mercurial my version control system of choice and has a great local-test and push to publish setup. It uses ReStructured-Text which is what wiki text became and reads great as source or renders to HTML. Thanks to Rafael Martins for the great software, templates, and help.

The hardest part of the whole setup was keeping every URL I've ever used internally for this blog still valid. URLs that "go dead" are a huge pet peeve of mine. Major, should-know-better sites do this all the time. The new web team brings up brand new site, and every URL you'd bookmarked either goes to a 404 page or to the main page. URLs are supposed to be durable, and while it's sometimes a lot of work to keep that promise it's worth it.

In migrating this site I took a couple of steps to make sure URLs stayed valid. I wrote a quick script to go through the HTTP access logs site for the last few months, looked for every URL that got a non-404 response, and turned them into web requests and made sure that I had all the redirects in place to make sure the old URLs yielded the same content on the staging site. I did the same essential procedure when I switched from mailing list to wiki so I had to re-aim all those redirects too. Finally, I ran a web spider against the staging site to make sure it had no broken internal links. Which is all to say, if you're careful you can totally redo your site without breaking people's bookmarks and search results -- please let me know if you find a broken one.

Mercurial Remote Test Runner via Push

I heard someone in IRC saying that the mercurial test suite was bogging down theirlaptop, so I set up a quick push-test service for the mercurial crew. If you're in crew and you do a push to ssh://hgtester@ry4an.org:2222/ these steps will be taken:

1. a local clone of the crew repo is updated from intevention.de
2. a new, disposable local clone is created from that crew clone
3. your csets are pushed to that new clone
4. the working directory is updated to 'tip'
5. a build is done
6. the test suite is run
7. the build and results show up in your stdout
8. the new clone (and your pushed csets) are deleted

It's on a reasonably fast, unloaded box so the test suite runs in about 3 mins 30 seconds. Thanks to ThomasAH for providing the crew pubkeys. If you're not in crew and want to use the service please contact me and convince me you're not going to write a test that does a "rm -rf ~", because that would completely work.

Unfortunately, the output is getting buffered somewhere so there's no output after "searching for changes" for almost 4 minutes, but the final output looks as attached.

The machine's RSA host key fingerprint is: ac:81:ac:0b:47:f4:20:a1:4d:7e:6a:c5:62:ba:62:be. (updated 2010/06/07)

The scripts can be viewed here: http://bitbucket.org/Ry4an/hgtester/

If all that was jibberish, we now return you to your regularly scheduled silence.

Remote Repository Creation for Mercurial Over HTTP

I park in the #mercurial IRC channel a lot to answer the easy questions, and on that comes up often is, "How can I create a remote repository over HTTP?". The answer is: "You can't.".

Mercurial allows you to create a repository remotely using ssh with a command line like this:

hg clone localrepo ssh://host//abs/path

but there's no way to do that over HTTP using either hg serve or hgweb behind Apache.

I kept telling people it would be a very easy CGI to write, so a few months back I put my time where my mouth was and did it.:

#!/bin/sh

echo -n -e "Content-Type: text/plain\n\n"

mkdir -p /my/repos/$PATH_INFO
cd /my/repos/$PATH_INFO
hg init

That gets saved in unsafecreate.cgi and pointed to by Apache like this:

ScriptAlias /unsafecreate /path/to/unsafecreate.cgi

and you can remotely invoke it like this:

http://your-poorly-admined-host.com/unsafecreate/path/to/new/repo

That's littered with warning about its lack of safety and bad administrative practices because you're pretty much begging for someone to do this:

http://your-poorly-admined-host.com/unsafecreate/something%3Brm%20-rf%20

Which is not going to be pretty, but on a LAN maybe it's a risk you can live with. Me? I just use ssh.

At the time I first suggested this someone chimed in with a cleaned up version in the original pastie, but it's no safer.

Grand Central Direct Dialer

I'm a huge fan of Grand Central's call screening features. It's irksome, however, that they make it hard to dial outward -- sending your GC number instead of your cell number as the caller id. To do so you need to first add the target number to your address book, and often I'm calling someone I don't intend to call again often.

I started scripting up a way around that when I saw someone named Stewart already had.

I wanted to be able to easily dial outbound from my cellphone, so I created a mobile friendly web form around his script. The script requires info you should never give out (username, password, etc.), so you should really download the script and run it on your own webserver.

It also generates a bookmarklet you can drag to your browser's toolbar that will automatically dial any selected/highlighted phone number from your GC Number.

Comments

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Only to save someone else the time: The iPhone app, Grand Dialer, does the same thing from an iPhone. Everyone says it's excellent.

Sasha Megan Bauer Brase

On July 29th, Kate gave birth to Sasha Megan Bauer Brase. Details and photos are on her site.

Comments

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Is the Jerry Farber piece, an anthem of my youth, not copyrighted? Do you have permission? Where can I reach Farber? -- Some Random Person

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Presumably you're referring to this, though I've no idea why you attached the comment to my daughter's birth announcement. I typed this from a blurry photocopy twenty years ago. If the copyright holder objects, I'll happily remove it.

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Home Carbonator

Last year I read about home carbonation, and looking at the amount of club soda Kate and I buy it made sense. The only unknown was where to put the ugly tank that would be out of sight yet still convenient to use.

Months later coworkers and I were at the Red Stag, which carbonates their own sparkling water, and talked about doing the same at the office. I still didn't act until a friend got a soda club machine as a gift.

This weekend I (or actually Kate since I was running late) went to Northern Brewer and picked up parts K003, KX03, and K026 to build the setup below. It really does work as easy as the first article promises, and the price including the purchase of a tank came to $200 total. So far the best thing we've carbonated was orange juice, but I'm looking to try some fruit purees soon.

Misc. Projects Including A Baby

To look at this long neglected unblog one would thing I've stopped doing things, but quite the contrary there's been so very much doing of things that there's been no time for posting. In no particular order we have:

• Installed a home security system -- No particular need, but I've always enjoyed alarms and now our home has an RSS feed
• Installed an electric garage door opener -- No more brushing off the car in the morning after a snow. Granted it's still powered by an extension cord running from the basement, but hey so goes it.
• Installed nifty iButton electronic locks -- Now the same key opens every door to which I've got access including the Swarmcast offices.
• Un-finshed the basement -- wool insulation and moisture: a winning combination. The project included a fun trip to the city trash transfer station.
• Remodeled the kitchen -- I did almost no actual labor on this excepting some tile installation with Kate, the adding of rolley shelves in the pantry, and having to eat out for four straight months.

Add to those minor projects some time spent on general upkeep of an 85 year old home, scouts and a decidedly non-zero number of hours spent at work, and it becomes clear that what Kate and I need is a baby.

Kate's due on July 28th, and we're very excited.

Comments

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Mazel tov on the baby news!

I happy to see that people from past who I have not kept up with in such a long time are living enjoyable and exciting lives!

-Mark Reck

You know how I have a strong distaste for breeding, and the products of breeding, but I suppose my stance has softened a little since several friends have produced, as far as I can tell, all together not terrible offspring. It's fun to prod at their ill proportioned chubby bodies for a while at least. So now I may offer my sincere congratulations on the upcoming baby. -Grrrk

Autobahn Accelerator for iTunes

My company, Swarmcast, announced one of our first public releases today. Previously we've been primary selling to content providers, but now we're putting out a user facing free release. If you download our Autobahn Accelerator for iTunes you'll find your purchases from the iTunes music store come down three to ten times faster than they did before. We'll be adding support for lots of other sites (you tube, etc.) in upcoming weeks.

Sadly we've got a MacOS version done, but the installation was deemed too clumsy for the polished Mac experience, so we'll have to wait a few weeks to get that out. Windows only for now (says this Linux user).

Customer Service Call Log

Between telecom troubles, warranty repairs, botched on line orders, and marriage related changes in insurance, mortgage, and bank accounts I've spent a lot of time on the phone with customer service representatives lately. Few issues get resolved in a single call and even fewer without a transfer to another office.

I put together a sheet to keep track of who I spoke to, when, how to get back to them, and what they promised me. Now I grab one whenever I'm about to dial a 1-800 number to talk to the almost-friendly, nearly-helpful people on the other end. Besides the convenience of being able to say "On January 21st at 3pm Janice, CSR number JA5692, told me she'd ship the replacement FedEx overnight," representatives seem on their best behavior when you start out every interaction asking for their name and customer representative number.

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• funny
• java
• people
• python
• mongodb
• scala
• perl
• meta
• mercurial
• home
• security
• ideas-built
• ideas-unbuilt
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