Looking for a fresh start...

Laura is gone. Today, she collected some more items, which she had left here for my use, but which, upon me letting her know that I wanted to move towards purging and moving on, she figured she wanted to have, rather than have them just go out into the world.

So now, I'm more ready to have folks come over and pick over my belongings for things they might want. It is my intention to sell nearly everything, and hopefully soon. I'd like to reduce my rent burden significantly, not to mention just freeing myself up to be more mobile - to travel if I want, to live in a house with others around (which I think would be much healthier for me), etc.

It's time to move on. I'll keep the clothes that fit me, some as-yet-undetermined quantity of memories, probably some photography gear (though certainly not all of it, and probably none of the darkroom gear), a computer or two, and hard disks... And hopefully very little else.

If anyone would like to help me with this process, I'd very much appreciate it. I could use help in several areas:

(1) take things off my hands. Come pick through my books and dvds and cds, old legos, tools (from a pipe threader to Ethernet tools, plus a bunch of more mundane stuff), old computer gear, camping gear, eventually furniture... Everything, pretty much. Some items I'll want a decent price for; others, I'll ask you to take with you, whether you want them or not, if only to help me get it to Goodwill/Value Village.

(2) helping me sort and organize. There's a lot of stuff here, and much of it requires me to go through it one last time - to record memories, look for items that belong to others, etc. Even just having people around to talk to as I go through this process would be helpful... Having folks willing to take on a few tasks upon demand would be even better.

So come, help me move on. And perhaps say goodbye, lest I opt to travel when all is done. I think it's time I visit foreign shores, and I don't yet know where I'll go, or whether or when I might return.

[unix geeky] ignoring files at svn add time

Executive summary for the impatient: add everything, then svn revert [-R] what you don't want, then set up svn:ignore properties as per usual.

Random thing that I figured out, after having some unsuccessful google searches. Here's hoping this little tidbit will save someone some time some day.

For those using Subversion and Xcode, this may be particularly relevant. And that'll be my example, though I'm sure there are plenty of other times that this could come up, as well.

When creating a new project (let's call it "Foo") in Xcode, a bunch of stuff is created. for example, when I create a new iPhone application project called Foo, I get the following hierarchy of files:

Foo/Classes/
Foo/Classes/FooAppDelegate.h
Foo/Classes/FooAppDelegate.m
Foo/Foo-Info.plist
Foo/Foo-Info.plist.orig
Foo/Foo.xcodeproj/
Foo/Foo.xcodeproj/TemplateInfo.plist.orig
Foo/Foo.xcodeproj/lindes.mode1v3
Foo/Foo.xcodeproj/lindes.pbxuser
Foo/Foo.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj
Foo/Foo_Prefix.pch
Foo/MainWindow.xib
Foo/build/
Foo/build/Foo.build/
Foo/build/Foo.build/Foo.pbxindex/
Foo/build/Foo.build/Foo.pbxindex/categories.pbxbtree
Foo/build/Foo.build/Foo.pbxindex/cdecls.pbxbtree
Foo/build/Foo.build/Foo.pbxindex/decls.pbxbtree
Foo/build/Foo.build/Foo.pbxindex/files.pbxbtree
Foo/build/Foo.build/Foo.pbxindex/imports.pbxbtree
Foo/build/Foo.build/Foo.pbxindex/pbxindex.header
Foo/build/Foo.build/Foo.pbxindex/protocols.pbxbtree
Foo/build/Foo.build/Foo.pbxindex/refs.pbxbtree
Foo/build/Foo.build/Foo.pbxindex/strings.pbxstrings/
Foo/build/Foo.build/Foo.pbxindex/strings.pbxstrings/control
Foo/build/Foo.build/Foo.pbxindex/strings.pbxstrings/strings
Foo/build/Foo.build/Foo.pbxindex/subclasses.pbxbtree
Foo/build/Foo.build/Foo.pbxindex/symbols0.pbxsymbols
Foo/main.m


Of these, there are a few things I don't want:

1. The entire Foo/build/ hierarchy.
2. the lindes.pbxuser and lindes.mode1v3 files under Foo/Foo.xcodeproj. (I'm actually not 100% sure there's no useful information in these files, but they sure do change a lot, and I think most of the important stuff is in project.pbxproj, so... here's hoping these are safe to ignore. If anyone knows more about that, please feel free to point me at an authoritative reference or give me the skinny in the comments.)

If I do just svn add Foo, though, I get those things. I want to ignore them.

Well, I can do svn propset svn:ignore build Foo after my add, but build has already been added, so it's still going to go into the repository if I don't do something about it. (And then I'd do the same thing (but most likely using svn propedit) for *.pbxuser and *.mode1v3 under the xcodeproj directory.)

So what I was looking for was an option for telling svn add to ignore certain things during the add process. As far as I was able to determine, there is no option to svn add that will do this. But there is a way to get basically what I want! It's called "svn revert". With appropriate options, it will make svn forget you ever added something, without otherwise modifying anything.

Here's an example set of commands that would do the trick:

: $; svn add Foo
: $; cd Foo
: $; svn revert -R build
: $; svn propset svn:ignore build .
: $; cd Foo.xcodeproj
: $; svn revert *.pbxuser *.mode1v3
: $; svn propset svn:ignore "*.pbxuser
*.mode1v3" .
: $; cd ..
: $; svn status


(Couple quick notes: (1) my shell prompt is ': $; ' (and the text actually typed is in bold), (2) in that second svn propset, I actually hit return inside the quotes. In my shell (zsh), I get a second-level prompt of 'dquote> ' when I do this, but I didn't want to confuse the text above with that.)

And that does the trick. If I now do an svn status, I get:

A .
A Foo.xcodeproj
A Foo.xcodeproj/TemplateInfo.plist.orig
A Foo.xcodeproj/project.pbxproj
A main.m
A Foo-Info.plist.orig
A Foo-Info.plist
A Foo_Prefix.pch
A Classes
A Classes/FooAppDelegate.h
A Classes/FooAppDelegate.m
A MainWindow.xib


No "?" lines, no build or its contents, and no pbxuser or mode1v3 files. Perfect!

(Well, OK, it might be useful to do something with TemplateInfo.plist.orig, but... that's something to figure out another day. :-)

Brief update...

Wow, had I really not posted since June 2009 on this blog? Ouch. :-)

Well, a lot has happened since then... which I'll summarize with just a few key points:

(1) I have given up the studio, for various reasons;
(2) I'm currently working primarily on ramping up on iPhone and Mac development -- I'm hoping to have an app or two in the App store in the coming weeks or months, and maybe some Mac stuff, too.
(3) on the Mac side, one of the things I've been doing has been Fractals -- e.g.:



That's it for now. More... sometime. :-)

Studio!!!

I now have a studio, in Pioneer Square. I intend to do several things there:

• Shoot portraits (I'll likely set up some backdrops, get some nice props, etc.)
• Shoot commercial/product work (jewelry, art work, and who knows what else)
• Build things (e.g. light sculptures and tools, for my long exposure work)
• Set up a darkroom, so I can do my own printing
• Do some creative darkroom stuff, once that's set up... including lensless photos, and who knows what all
• Open up on the 1st Thursday of each month for the Pioneer Square Art Walk (I'm at the OK Hotel, 212 Alaskan Way S, Suite 105... come find me!)

If you have any interest in having portraits made of you, or photos taken of your stuff, drop me a line! Otherwise, just drop in some 1st Thursday, and check it out. :-)

Cheers!

A new level of spam insanity....

I had 29,159 messages in a mailbox today. That's e-mail that all got received within a single 24-hour period. Wait, no. Strike that. It was an 8 1/2 hour period. That's 214 megabytes of spam. Almost a quarter gig. That's insanity.

Of these twenty nine thousand messages, fully 28,401 of them were filtered away by my spam filters as "this is definitely spam". Plus 4 more that it marked that way, but with a glitch that caused them not to actually get auto-deleted. Another 528 had a 0.999 or higher rating on the 0-is-non-spam, 1-is-spam scale, which isn't actually "auto-deleted", because I feed those back to my spam filter so they'll be more likely to get a full-on 1 the next time. Thus, I have 226 messages left that I might want to actually at least glance at. That's too much spam to look at, though, so I send straight to the filters another 84 messages that are scored at 0.99-and-up.

Another 94 are marked as "Spam", but with a lower score than that. Taking a quick glance at these (mostly looking at the recipient address, as that's often a good indicator for me, since I have a wildcard recipient setup), I confirm they're all spam and feed them to my filters.

That leaves 48 left marked as "Unsure" (specific scores of these messages ranged from 0.415 (two of these) to 0.849234 -- it's rare that any of my not-actually-spam messages get scored above about 0.53 (and only 9 of the spam messages were below that range), and the highest I've ever gotten was 0.829141).

Frankly, I was able to dispense of the 48 "Unsure" messages with about the same amount of care as the "Spam but below 0.99" ones... not much. Still, it takes me a minute or two to go through that, and that's not even counting the several (15?) minutes it took for my filtering software to score those 29K messages, and my auto-deleter to auto-delete most of them.

Spam needs to stop. I suspect the only way to stop it is with international laws against it. Who do I write to? My congressional representatives? This is insane.

My photos at One Sky this weekend

I'll be having a show of my photographs at an event called "One Sky" this weekend, out on the Pacific coast of Washington.

Details are on the website, and tickets are available through brownpapertickets.

Basically, though, my impression is that it will be vaguely burning-man-ish, only smaller, and probably more eco-oriented. (It specifically talks about trying to increase social consciousness of being environmentally friendly.)

It's a camping event, on private property near the beach (or several beaches)... Should be fun. I expect to head up on Friday, and return on Sunday. It'd be great to see some friends there. :-)

And hopefully I'll make some sales. ;-)

[unix-geeky] : My UNIX shell prompt $;

It occurs to me that this blog could be, among other things, a place to share random unix tips and tricks that I've picked up over the years. Non-geek types are encouraged to go find a photography-related post or something. ;-) For the geek types still reading, here's a little something:

When choosing your prompt for any Bourne Shell derivative (sh, ksh, bash, zsh, and probably others I don't know about -- zsh is my current shell of choice, by the way), I find it handy to have my prompt follow this simple set of rules:

1. the first character is a colon
2. the second character is a space
3. The last non-space character is a semicolon
4. No other semicolons in the line (unless they're immediately followed by another colon and space)

Using the traditional "$" as a starting point, I might then put something like the following in my .profile (or .bash_profile or .zshrc or what have you -- .profile is the traditional Bourne shell location, so that's what I list):

PS1=": $; "

And thus a bit of my shell session might look like:

: $; 
: $; 
: $; date
Thu Mar 13 19:01:28 PDT 2008
: $; pwd
/home/lindes/tmp/sh-demo
: $; ls -CAF
.profile
: $; cat .profile
# this is a fake .profile file
# it would normally have a lot of content.  For now, just this:
PS1=": $; "
export PS1      # possibly redundant
: $; 
: $; 
: $; : $; date
Thu Mar 13 19:04:13 PDT 2008
: $; 

Now, why is this useful? And why does my prompt show up twice before that second call to the date command?

Well, as seasoned readers may already have guessed, there's some magic in this prompt. In Bourne-derived shells (as listed above), ':' is a shell-builtin command which does nothing more than have zero^* as its exit status. Same deal as /bin/true, but in a single character command. And guess what? It takes arguments, and happily ignores them all. And as hopefully most of you (if you've bothered to read this far) already know, a semicolon separates commands. So that second time I ran date above, I did not get a double prompt from my shell, and I did not type my prompt in. No, instead what I did was a copy and pasted that command-line from earlier, by copying the whole line -- including the prompt. And it still worked, and didn't give me anything extraneous.

How cool is that?

Normally, I couldn't copy the whole line and still get desired behavior:

: $; PS1='$ '
$ date
Thu Mar 13 19:16:17 PDT 2008
$ $ date
zsh: command not found: $
$ 

(And it could be much worse than that, depending on what else is in your prompt.)

Starting with a colon and a space, and ending with a semicolon (and, for clarity only, another space), I can copy and paste the whole line.

My normal prompt is a lot longer than just : $; , and includes a bunch of different information that I find useful. Perhaps someday I'll write a blog entry about that. For now, just know that it always starts with a colon and a space, and ends with a semicolon (and a space). And whenever I write documentation which needs to include a shell prompt, the prompt shown will probably always be : $; (or maybe : #; , though that actually has problems of its own. Extra special feel-good (that's all you get) bonus points for those who can say why.)


Happy geeking!

---

Footnotes:

*: Check it out:

: $; grep '\<0\>' /usr/include/sysexits.h
#define EX_OK           0       /* successful termination */

Thus, zero means successful exit.