rand(Andy Trommer)

Pics from the UNTHSC Casino Night held at the Fort Worth Zoo are below.

We had an excellent time blowing our fake cash on roulette.  Why roulette?  Because it was freaking impossible to find an open seat at the Blackjack tables, and the guy running Craps couldn’t count a 7 or an 11, making the game rather fruitless.

After gambling it all on red, we decided to leave.  Of course, we couldn’t just walk out of the Zoo.  No, we had to wait 20 minutes to ride the kiddie train back to the entrance.  We rode a fancified (stretch, according to Donald) golf cart on our way into the park.  This was far too uncool for us to use to exit the park, though.

After getting off the fridged train, we attempted to leave.  We potentially may have dropped a torch on the ground, and possibly might have set off an alarm in the Primate house (note to Fort Worth Zoo, don’t leave buildings unattended with a bunch of eager grad students around), but we survived and made it back to the car without any casualties.

After bumming around a bit at Ten, we wandered back to Ethan and Donald’s to watch portions of Dark Knight.

I’m now quite tired and ready for sleep to eat pizza and then sleep.  Yay pizza.  Basically anything cheese related == goodness in my mind.

Recently, the eXPlainPMT project migrated from svn to git, hosted over at github.com.  This gave me a great opportunity to quickly learn git, especially considering that I had commits I wanted to apply.  GitHub is a great service – free OSS hosting, hosted forks, and a really useful visualization that shows the full history of forks with status messages.  The only piece I miss from Google Code (besides a painfully easy SVN setup) is the issue log.  However, they do expose commit hooks which Google didn’t, so there’s some integration with other online issue tracking tools.

First, about git.  There are infinitely better resources to look to on what git is and why it exists.  With that said, I’ll just quicky say that git rocks for OSS development.  When I was flying back from DC, I giggled like a Miley Cyrus fan when I did my first disconnected commit.  My mind is still trapped in centralized repository thinking, but this has always been my greatest complaint against them: offline commits.  Now it’s so trivially easy I can’t go back.  The other wonderful thing is that a checkout of the repository is the whole repo.  That means I can view the full history locally without hitting the server.  It also means that commits back to the parent repository (or a remote push in git-speak) are really quick.  Also, branching is really really cheap.

Now for the ugly: git is horrible in Windows.  I mean, god-awful.  “But Andy, why would you use Windows? OMG M$ 5uxorz!!!!11111elevendyone”  Because we have Windows laptops at work, and I need to be able to commit to the project while at work.  Git has a ways to go here to be as simple as SVN to install, and it would be cool to see some IDE integration, although it’s certainly not a requirement.

When I say it’s bad, the main reason is that there isn’t, at this point, a truely native build.  I’m using msysGit and PuTTY.  Throw into the mix our corporate proxy at work, and the pain goes up exponentially.  However, it’s not a lost cause.  Using instructions gathered from a ton of places, I have it up and running.  Finally.

1. Get git!
   1. Follow the steps from github to get the binaries and generate your key
2. Get PuTTY
   1. Go ahead and get the Windows installer version from here.
3. Configure PuTTY
   1. First, we need to take the private key from step 1 and make it available to PuTTY
      1. Open PuTTYgen
      2. Click on Load
      3. Change the “Files of Type” dropdown to “All Files”
      4. Choose your private key file you created in step 1
      5. Enter your passphrase
      6. Go to File>Save Private Key and put it somewhere safe
   2. Next, we need to set up PuTTY to connect to github (or where ever)
      1. Create a new session called “github.com” with the host name set to “github.com”
      2. Set Connection>Proxy to whatever your corporate proxy settings should be
      3. Ensure that Connection>SSH>Auth has the “Attempt Authentication using Pageant” checked
      4. Go back to Session and save the session
      5. Click Open and make sure you get a login prompt.  If you do, close out.  If not, check your proxy settings.
   3. Now we need to give Pageant our key
      1. Open Pageant
      2. Click “Add Key”, navigate to your new PuTTY private key, and click OK.
      3. Enter your passphrase
4. Perform a clone
   1. Using either Git Bash or Git GUI, clone a public repository from github.com (eXPlainPMT is a great place to start!)
   2. If you get errors about an invalid host or invalid passphrase, Pageant can’t find the session we created in step 3.2

Most of these directions are modified from what I found at CodeSlower and github guides.

Tags: dc, eXPlainPMT, git, github, proxy, svn

Lately, Angela and I have been toying around with the idea of going back to school.  It seems like a good time to do it, but it leads to more questions than we have time to answer – namely, what to get our masters in, and where to do it.

We don’t have any intention of moving or changing our work situations, which unfortunately severely limits what programs we can take part in.

At work, we got to skip out have an offsite meeting Friday with a vendor at Tour 18.  Very nice course, even though I had some healthy challenges getting a small white ball to travel not only in the right direction but with the right distance.

Cathy came down to join us Saturday, and she’ll be here for just about 2 weeks.  It’s always fun having her around.  We went out that evening, and had Ethan and Donald over to our place Sunday night for games and adult beverages.  Angela, of course, documented the whole affair.

New MacBook and the old PowerBook

I also was a lucky boy and got a new laptop to replace my aging and very broken 12″ Powerbook.  Apple has a back to school special going on so we decided on a new white MacBook.  Nothing fancy, but it’s such a nice change over the Powerbook.  Just the fact that the battery works (and works well) is a huge improvement, let alone the zippiness.  And just in case anyone is wondering, yes, of course this is a “family” laptop.  Why, Angela even has her own account on it (although she has yet to touch it).

Today was a successful exercise in relaxation.  Not so much for those folks in LA with Gustav bearing down.  Looks like we might see some rain later in the week, but nothing like what New Orleans saw.  My Dad pointed me to Storm Pulse, a very functional storm tracking page with a clean UI.

This week promises to be hectic as we’re doing some transition activities in the team as well as coming up on some major deadlines for deciding the direction of one of the projects I’m on.  Angela gets to go back to a “normal” 8-hour day week AND she gets Friday off.  Hope she manages to survive!

Tags: college, macbook, powerbook, weather