Installing Debian With gPXE and netboot.me
WezM.net was down again this weekend. The cause this time was the the large storms in Melbourne flooding the office where the computer that hosts this site lives. The computer escaped the water but the network and Internet connection did not.
The office is located 60km from home so fixing problems like these have to wait until office hours, hence the extended downtime. This is the second time in an many weeks that I’ve run into this problem so I’ve decided to move WezM.net to my Mini ITX server, which is more accessible out of hours as its at home.
git’s Object Store Efficiency
Hubert Feyrer posted, Musing about git’s object store efficiency yesterday. In it he compared the apparent efficiency of git’s object store to CVS’s stacked patches. His methodology was to checkout all 963 versions of the NetBSD i386 GENERIC kernel configuration file and then sum up the space used. He comes to the following conclusion:
the git model requires about 37 times the space that CVS does
and:
that’s not counting the overhead of 962 inodes and the related directory bookkeeping
He finishes off with an acknowledgement that git has data packing features:
I know that git offers some more efficient storage methods via “pack” files, but investigating those is left as an exercise to the reader.
I generally enjoy Hubert’s posts but as a daily user of git this one didn’t sit right with me. I thought I’d take up the aforementioned exercise.
iPad and the Future of Computing
The iPad is the console of computers
— mmustapic
The iPad announcement last week created a cacophony of commentary ranging from, “Meh, its just a big iPod touch”, to, “Wow, we’re witnessing the future of computing”. On announcement day I was firmly in the former camp. There appeared to be nothing new aside from the larger screen and a custom Apple SoC inside.
Since then I’ve read a lot of smart commentary on the iPad, which has swayed my opinion quite a bit.
Clone git Repo on Non-Standard Port
I use an SSH tunnel to access my computer at work from home. On occasion I want to clone a git repo that is on the remote server. To do so its necessary to specify the port, which doesn’t work with the conventional clone syntax.
E.g. git clone hostname:path/to/repo. The solution is to be a little more specific:
git clone ssh://localhost:2222/~username/path/to/repo
Updated Applications
Over a year ago in Update Expectations I noted three Mac applications that I had bought, which had seen little or no attention since their release. Today I noticed that one of these apps had seen a major new release. The application in question is AppZapper. The changelog on i use this notes the following:
- Free for all 1.x customers!
- Completely rewritten from the ground up for Snow Leopard
- Faster, smarter, easier to use zapping
- New ‘Hit List’ feature lets you browse and filter all of your apps
- New ‘My Apps’ feature lets you store license info for purchased applications
- Many overall improvements
This is great news. Although it would have been nice to see some evidence the application was still alive in the 3 years between updates.
Also worth noting is another app that I mentioned in the original post, Xtorrent has also seen some recent activity with the release of Xtorrent 2 in beta. I wonder if we’ll ever see any of those amazing new features promised for Disco.