On Monday, I was exposed to US-style motivational speaking and team building. There was an element of forced enthusiasm in the team building company employees. Overall it was okay, but frustrating at times.
At the end they taught us to punch through flaming boards of wood. I was only on fire for a little while.
One of the things we’ve been working on for Launchpad is good integration with Bazaar. Launchpad provides a way to register or host Bazaar branches, and nominate a Bazaar branch as representing a particular product series.
For each registered branch, there is a branch information page. This leads to a bit of confusion since Bazaar uses URLs to identify branches, so people try running bzr branch on a branch information page. We also get people trying to branch the product or product series pages.
There were two ways we could address this problem: (1) do more to encourage people not to do this, or (2) make bzr branch do what the user meant it to do. The second option is the more user friendly, so that’s what we chose. This just left the problem of how to implement it efficiently.
The obvious way to get this to work is with a simple HTTP redirect for files under the .bzr/ directory. Unfortunately this would result in Bazaar hitting the Launchpad webapp for every file in the branch which is not desirable (each request results in a number of database accesses, which would add unnecessary load to the system). There is a Bazaar bug about improving this so that it would use the new location after the first redirect. This bug was the main reason for not implementing the feature previously.
While playing around with things a bit, I realised that Bazaar already had the features needed to implement the redirects and they have been there since 0.8.
In Bazaar 0.8, the concept of a lightweight checkout was introduced. This is just a working tree plus a reference to a branch stored elsewhere. You can perform most operations on the branch from the checkout directory that you can do from the real branch directory. So what happens if you publish the “branch reference” part of a lightweight checkout on the web? It turns out that they work fine, so that’s what I used for launchpad.net.
So with the change in place, the following commands will all give you a copy of the Bazaar webserve plugin:
bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~bzr/bzr-webserve/webserve-dev bzr branch https://launchpad.net/people/bzr/+branch/bzr-webserve/webserve-dev bzr branch https://launchpad.net/products/bzr-webserve/trunk bzr branch https://launchpad.net/products/bzr-webserve
Furthermore, they will all record the http://bazaar.launchpad.net/ URL as the parent branch, so future bzr pull commands will go directly to the branch.
So it seems that Lenovo has decided to join in on this battery recall fad. It turns out that the main battery in my X60s is one of the explosive Sony variety (the extended life battery isn’t though). I rang them up to organise the replacement, which will be arriving in 5 weeks.
Even though he hasn’t asked for it yet, I sent the details to Richard Hughes. It looks like the battery model numbers are exposed through HAL, so gnome-power-manager should be able to detect the bad batteries.
If you have an affected Thinkpad, check your batteries.
Saw this interesting sculpture while cycling through East Perth:
Of course, it can only be appreciated when standing in a particular location (Here is what it looks like from another angle). I wonder how many people pass it and don’t realise what it is or how you are meant to look at it?
Update: the sculpture can be seen on Google Maps in the centre of the round about. You can clearly see the arms of the triangle going off in different directions.
| John Howard: | You know what really aggravazes me? It’s them immigants. They wants all the benefits of living in |
|---|---|
| Kim Beazley: | Hey, those are exactly my sentimonies. |
I wonder if this is just setting the stage for the next federal election?
