The Brad Hole

you spend all day at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.

We went down to Tucson this weekend for the 19th Annual Tucson Beer Festival. It was, as always, great fun. It's essentially an all-you-can-drink, all-you-can-eat for 4 hours type of affair. In years past, the free food selection has been hit-or-miss. This year was a hit: free Krispy Kreme donuts, free hot dogs, free buffalo wings from Hooters, free pizza from Pizza Hut, free pork sandwiches from (I believe) 2 different places. We gambled that the food would be a miss, and so ate at an excellent Greek restaurant beforehand (Athens on 4th St.) No regrets, but we'll probably plan differently for next year.

On Sunday, we took a day trip to the aforementioned museum. It was slightly warmer than I would have liked, but on the whole enjoyable. I was a little concerned that it would be incredibly boring, and there were parts that definitely pushed it, like displays on cactus and soil, snakes and spiders. But there was a lot of semi-large wildlife like bobcats, bighorn sheep, javelinas, ocelots (coming soon to the Mac!) and the ever-amusing otters and beavers. I found the simulated "underground cave exploration" part to be the most interesting, and it had the side-effect of being relatively cool in temperature.

However, I didn't plan for the sun and managed to walk away with a little sunburn on the back of my neck, making me a redneck.

As we were leaving Tucson, we stopped to eat some pretty authentic Mexican food at Casa Molina. I didn't enter the restrooms, but I'm told that they're pretty authentic to what you'd find in Mexico - and that's probably not meant as a compliment. ;-) Still, the food was excellent and I highly recommend it if you're in Tucson and craving Mexican. Be warned - the portions are huge.

Posted by bradman at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Back in Austin, Beth and I frequented this most excellent Vietnamese place right off 183 by McNeil, and it was one of the things we missed when we moved to Phoenix.

However, when we moved recently, our luck changed for the better. Not too far from our new house, on the SW corner of Bell Rd and 43rd Ave., there's this Vietnamese restaurant named "Avina's". It's in a strip center that has seen better days, back in the corner, so it's somewhat hard to find. But that's just appearances - the food there is quite good, and I no longer miss the Vietnamese place we went to in Austin.

We went there tonight for the second time and noticed that they had a website address on their menu. When we got home, I paid it a visit and discovered a truly amazing story (PDF link) about the owners of the restaurant. Stories like this are both inspiring and shocking at the same time. I'll never be able to look at this restaurant in the same way again, that's for sure. Given the quality of the food and the hard work that has got them this far, I'll be more than glad to patronize these folks time and again.

As a side note, I think we were served tonight by the Avina for whom the restaurant is named, although I can't be sure.

Posted by bradman at 12:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I bought a Mac mini right after the last speed bump in July and moved my day-to-day stuff over to it. It's been a fantastic Mac for me, and I don't regret buying it for one second.

I've been around Apple long enough to follow the rumors about new hardware and know that the best time to buy without feeling like you were ripped off is immediately after new hardware is released. There's usually anywhere from a 6-12 month gap between model revisions, so it's useful to track the rumors and try to get the best bang for your buck.

So I noticed with some chagrin that it is rumored today that new Mac minis are slated to come out any day now, only 2 months after the last update.

Posted by bradman at 02:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I believe I finally managed to get Subversion up and running on the Mac mini, but it wasn't without some pain. I nuked everything to do with DarwinPorts and started fresh. This seems to have given me a version of Apache2 that didn't have the nasty 64k webdav bug with 10.4.

Once I got that sorted out, I had to dump my Subversion repository from the G5 and then load it back up on a clean repository on the mini. This is where things got weird. At some point, I had checked in an invisible icon file to the SVN repository - on purpose no less. The trouble, as I discovered after I made the check-in, is that the invisible icon files have a 0x0d character as the last character of their name - this is apparently by design from Apple.

Subversion (at least version 1.1.x) allowed me to check a file in with this name, but once in the repository, really didn't like it. I got all kinds of strange unrelated errors trying to work in the repository immediately afterwards. I figured it out and deleted the Icon file from the repository (after a bit of wrangling - it's not easy to work with filenames that have a carriage return as their last character) and went along my way. In fact, I had completely forgotten about this trouble file until today.

I used Subversion 1.2.3 to dump my old repository and then re-load it on the new Mac. Here's the rub - the svnadmin tool that comes with 1.2.3 will dump everything from that repository just fine, but it refuses to deal with any filenames that have control characters in their name when it came time to load stuff back in, like my troublesome Icon file. So svnadmin would create a dump file with my old problem filename and then be unable to read it back in. I'd qualify this as a bug - it should either force you to rename the file at dump time, allow you to skip it when reloading the repo or some combo of the two. Instead, it creates a dumpfile that is essentially broken.

Well, the repository dumps that svnadmin creates are really just big honkin' text files. As it turns out, the MacMAME repository, when dumped, was a 1.8 gig text file. Some googling revealed that the solution to my problem was simply to remove the file from the dumpfile, so I figured I'd just fire up a decent text editor and have at it.

It seems not many text editors can cope with 1.8G text files. TextWrangler and BBEdit gave an error -108 (which is an old-school MacOS out of memory error) despite claiming to be able to work with text files up to 2G in size. Uh-oh. TextEdit just beach-balled for several minutes before I lost patience. CodeWarrior gave up almost immediately. Normally it'll load up large files pretty quickly, but I must've passed some internal limit. I downloaded a bunch of other text editors off the 'net, but they all pretty much choked. I tried my favorite command-line editor (pico) but it eventually failed with a "malloc" error. At this point, I started to get a little frustrated.

The Subversion docs said that you could dump the repository in binary format to keep the dump file size down. I figured this might solve my name problem if the binary dump somehow changed the way it dealt with filenames. No such luck - same error. I then read online that there was a Subversion tool - svndumpfilter - which would strip files whose name matched a certain filter out of the dump file. This sounded exactly like what I needed! Incredibly enough, svndumpfilter barfed because the version # of the dump file was 3 and it wanted 2, even though it was built and distributed as part of Subversion 1.2.3. This caused me to swear out loud *and* extend a certain finger at the screen.

After some brain-wracking, I remembered that crusty old HexEdit would edit extremely large files pretty quickly, so I fired it up. I was able to hex-edit the troublesome control character out of the dump file, and finally load it into svn. Success!

Ironically, even though HexEdit saved my bacon, I've been actively looking for a more Mac-like hex editor for a while now. And I'll have to add a decent text editor to that list too. :-)

Posted by bradman at 12:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's been a while, so let me briefly bring things up-to-date.

Our AC difficulties are solved for now. Arizona Refrigeration Services called us the morning of our appointment to verify, showed up 2 hours later, cleaned the coils in 45 minutes and charged us $115. Our electric bill for the month of August was $220. Shazam!

In a week and a half, we'll take our annual trip down to Tucson for the Tucson Beer Festival. It's been great the past 2 years, and I have high hopes for getting drunk cheaply again this year. The weather here the past week in Phoenix has been absolutely delightful - highs in the low 90s and lows in the low 70s. It's essentially like Spring part 2. I sense a Violently Competitive Croquet party in the near future.

In mid-October, we'll be taking a trip to San Francisco and Napa valley with Paul and Maureen. That should be a lot of fun, but it seems that once again any chance of visiting the Winchester Mystery House are out the door. One of these days...

As for work, now that Tiger Woods has shipped, I've been working on 2 unannounced projects. I don't follow the licensing/legal stuff too closely, but I think they'll be announced before too terribly long. Glenda says that the main holdup to announcing them has to do with clearing the contracts through the various layers of lawyers for all parties involved. I have a suspicion that one of the 2 projects will catch some people off-guard - it certainly floored me when I found out. (And no, it's not a shooter, first-person or otherwise.) I'll have more to say about them once they're public.

The Mac mini I got a month ago to replace my G4 has worked out great. It's whisper quiet (as opposed to the jet enigne of the G4 tower) and it takes up so little room. I still need to set up Apache2 and a subversion server on it for MacMAME. My first attempt ended in dismal failure. I tried to build it off darwinports using the settings that have been reported to work with 10.4, but I must've screwed something up since it still had the 64k timeout problems.

Switching gears again, I downloaded Eclipse 3.1 earlier today and installed the CDT toolkit, as I've heard that this is becoming a pretty powerful development environment for C/C++. While it may be, I can't seem to get it to work right - clicking on the "X" to close the sub-windows does nothing, and I get weird errors when quitting. I haven't had time to google for answers yet though, and I know next-to-nothing about Eclipse. I was kinda hoping that it'd "just work" :) I'll probably dig around over the weekend and see if I can figure out how to get it to work, and see if the OSX version is "fully baked" or just a work in progress.

Posted by bradman at 10:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)