Прекрасное Далеко....

Other journals here: tyggerdev for DW development stuff.

I'm not hugely active here yet, still transitioning from LJ.

I'm a geek in a few spheres - currently mostly programming and circus. I'm a rigger, coder, tinkerer, fabricator.

Ok - a couple of surveys about skillsharing, making, etc. Start with the top one, and now, do feel free to signal boost this!
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/L6BRB25
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/L63ZL88

Why is this shit not easy yet? Are we not living in the future?

I have a linux box, with a large hard drive and some stored video files (avi and mpeg). I have a Mac OSX box, with VLC. I have the videos on a shared drive, mounted on the OSX box via samba. I also have a web server on the linux box, with access to the video files.

If I play them via samba, vlc stutters and apparently fails to buffer. If I play them via http, VLC plays them fine, but loses the ability to seek within the video, and if I pause for too long, apparently loses the file altogether and crashes.

W, seriously, TF? How hard is it in this day and age to say "Here is a file. Yes, it's on the other end of a wireless link, but don't let that freak you out".

I'm about to look into having a streaming VLC server on the linux box, but seriously, thats' a stupid amount of effort to go to just to play a video. Is there anything obvious I'm missing? Any magic VLC switch that says "Treat this as a 'local' file, but give me a bit of buffering"?

ETA: GIYF! Apparently, hidden away in the preferences, is an option for increasing the buffer on "local" files - the Mac/Samba is apparently a common issue, and tweaking that has fixed it. Huzzah!

So, 8 weeks on, another comp. I'm a little disappointed, but hey, all improvement is good. I had 2 goals going into this - to bench 100 kg, and to total 380, which is the minimum total to qualify as a D grade raw powerlifter.

I benched 90 pretty easily, but totally failed 95, twice, even though I made 92.5 easily last comp. I have a couple of theories about this - one is that the rock climbing I'd been doing before the first comp was actually good for me - I cut it out 3 weeks before the comp this time in case it compromised my training, but next time, fuck it. So more climbing and more trapeze.

The squat was my biggest improvement - 135 kg, up from 110. To be honest, I should have made 120 last time, but I didn't, so I get to claim 25 kg improvement this time.

Deadlift: 165 up from 160. Failed on 175, but came damn close! I was worried about the dead, it didn't seem to have improved much, but I think I would have made 170.

There's clearly some strategy in choosing attempt weights that I'm not across yet - I tend to start with the heaviest I think I can lift, and then increase optimistically. If I'd settled for 130 in the squat, would I have made 175 in the dead? Who knows. If I'd settled for 170 in the dead, my total would have been 5 kg higher, but I would have wondered about 175.

Anyway. That's a total of 390 kg, 10 kg over my goal and 27.5 over my last total. It was all from the squat, but I'll take that, thanks :)

I do have to say, I am unconvinced by my coach's approach to programming. So I have my copy of NROL and SS out, and I'll work something out for myself next cycle, I think. And go back on the protein powder and creatine - I got pretty slack with the protein this time around. My squat results suggest that wasn't actually the problem, but we'll see :)

For some reason, recently, I found myself upgrading the Xubuntu install on the main workstation I brought back from China. And all sorts of stuff changed, and the avr-gcc binutils broke (and arduino development is the main thing I use it for now), and generally it sucked. So I put crunchbang ( http://crunchbanglinux.org/ ) on the old Throbbing Beast I still have lying around, which I bought nearly 9 years ago. And immediately I'm just as productive as ever. I should probably upgrade the RAM - it's currently running 1 gig of DDR. But that's about it. Everything else Just Works. I spent the requisite few hours customising - there's no handy XFCE GUI for mapping the logitech keyboard media keys to volume/mp3 player, etc, so I had to actually manually edit the Openbox configs. But Xmodmap already had the keycodes correctly mapped, so at least I only needed to map XF86AudioVolumeDown to the correct amixer command. Conky is rocking my socks, and I've barely even started playing with it. And it's shiny fast, even on 9 year old hardware. It doesn't handle flash videos so well, although YouTube is watchable, but that's about it.

Just goes to show, really. I should probably acknowledge that when I bought the Throbbing Beast it was state-of-the-art - acknowledged overclocker's dream in many ways. I personally bought it second hand, but I ran into the guy I bought it from the other day, and he asked if I still used it. It's kinda nice to be able to say yes, and that it's actually still doing everything I need to do as well as I need it done. I Am Pleased.

Today, I competed in a powerlifting comp for the first time. Pretty small one, maybe 20 lifters, but an official sanctioned event, with drug testers and everything. In fact, one of the ladies lifting set a couple of Australian records in her class. I set no Australian records today. But since it was my first comp, everything I lifted was a personal best!

Squat: 110 kg. Failed on 120, quite spectacularly, but hey, if you make the last lift easily, you probably weren’t trying hard enough....

Bench Press: 92.5 kg. Which is 1 kg more than my weight at weigh-in.

Deadlift: 160 kg.

Rawr. My wife is particularly pleased with the one-piece spandex suit....

So. I have been constantly sniffling since about April. At some point, I will get along to see a doctor, who will probably say "Yes, your house is full of mold since they ripped the floors up, and you're allergic to it, move out." and charge me for the privilege, but in the meantime....

One of my friends, who is not actually that much of a fucking hippy, despite being a yoga teacher, says a friend of hers, who possibly is a fucking hippy, was saying that chronic allergies and especially hayfever can be alleviated by eating honey produced by local bees. It's probably even worse than fucking hippies, it's probably downright homeopathy, but what the hell, it's probably worth a try. I've found Rooftop honey, which is definitely fucking hippy, but I'm not sure that a) I want to pay $15 for 450 grams of honey, or b) Heidelberg and Donvale are quite local enough. While I realise that there are unlikely to be cheap bees in, say, Fitzroy, can anyone recommend another source of "local honey" in Melbourne.

So I now have 2 or 3 machines I use for tinkering with the little projects I have, and I'd like to keep the code synched. There are many tools for this, of course, and I'm not wanting to start a religious war about which tool I should use, but rather seeking advice on how to use them best :)

Assume, for the sake of argument, that I have access to git and/or subversion. Assume, for the sake of argument, that I have a ~/Code directory, which has, of course, a Python directory and a Perl directory, which then contain project directories and library directories.

Assuming for the moment that I don't care so much about synching "broken" code - in that I want to be able to half-finish something on the desktop, commit it to the repo, and check it out on the laptop to keep tinkering - as much as I care about the latest version, is my best strategy to commit ~/Code en masse and then just update en masse?

Or should I commit each project individually to the repo, so I can branch later if need be?

Where can I buy a Little Miss Trouble tshirt in Melbourne? Online is ok, if it will get here in about 2 weeks...