I was out of town two of the Fridays this month, so I was only able to get two talks in: Clojure core.async - Continuing in my fascination with Clojure, I picked this talk to explore the non-Java techniques for handling concurrency. I’m familiar with CSP from my Go experience, and it was interesting to hear Clojure’s take on the same foundation. Clojure also implements a macro that turns the spaghetti code that is callbacks into a sequential function that still operates asynchronously.

I’ve been experimenting with Clojure lately. A few of my coworkers had begun the discovery process as well, so I suggested that we have a weekly show-and-tell, because a little accountability and audience can turn wishes into action. Naturally, I looked around for plug-ins that would be of use in my editor of choice. Here’s what I have installed: vim-clojure-static - Syntax highlighting and indentation vim-fireplace - Slick repl integration and hot code reload rainbow_parentheses.

In the course of my work and my online reading and research, I often come across videos of talks that I want to watch. I rarely take the time to watch those videos, mostly because of the time commitment; I usually only have a few minutes to spare. Lately, I’ve done something to change that. I’m taking a little bit of time out of my Friday schedule each week to watch a talk that looks interesting.

When I originally set up Octopress, I set it up on my Mac laptop using rvm, as recommended at the time. It worked very well for me until just a few minutes after my last post, when I decided to sync with the upstream changes. After merging in the changes, I tried to generate my blog again, just to make sure everything worked. Well, it didn’t, and things went downhill from there.

Last time I posted about git-annex, I introduced it and described the basics of my set up. Over the past year, I’ve added quite a bit of data to my main git-annex. It manages just over 100G of data for me across 9 repositories. Here’s a few bits of information that may be useful to others considering git-annex (or who are already knee deep in). Archive, not backup # The website for git-annex explicitly states that it is not a backup system.

It’s been over two years since I wrote remotecopy and I still use it every day. The most recently added feature is the -c option, which will remove the trailing newline from the copied data if it only contains one line. I found myself writing little scripts that would only output one line with the intent of using that output to build a command line on a different system, and the extra newline at the end often messed up the new command.

Since I work on remote systems all the time, I use SCP repeatedly to transfer files around. One of the more cumbersome tasks is specifying the remote file or directory location. So I wrote a helper script to make it easier. It’s called scptarget, and it generates targets for SCP, either the source or the destination. For instance, if I want to copy a file down from a remote server, I run scptarget like this and copy the output:

Launch # A little over thirteen years ago, I embarked on a cross-country trip with one of my college buddies. I’ll elaborate more on the trip in another post, but the pertinent part of that story is that we happened to be in Florida in late May, 2000. We’d originally planned to see certain sights along the way, but by the time we reached the east coast we had grown quite good at adding extra stops to the itinerary.

My Situation # I have backups. Many backups. Too many backups. I use time machine to back up my macs, but that only covers the systems that I currently run. I have archives of older systems, some for nostalgic reasons, some for reference. I also have a decent set of digital artifacts (pictures, videos and documents) that I’d rather not lose. So I keep backups. Unfortunately, I’m not very organized.

I recently split dfm out into its own git repository. This should make it easier to add new features and grow the test suite without cluttering up the original dotfiles repository. I’ll sync dfm over at regular intervals, so anyone who wants to keep up to date by merging with master will be ok. I also just finished up a major new feature: dfm can now import files. So instead of: