Programming on The Total Token Vortex

Migrating to Hugo (from Blogger)

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:40 -0400

Ooof, that was rough. Blogger underwent many migrations since I used it last, and whatever migration tooling people have come up with in the intervening years, all are now broken, unsurprisingly. After much Gemini poking, back-and-forth, we arrived at this, which “works” (reads atom.feed):

Getting the pretty 'tree' for 'git log'

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 17:09:00 +0000

See: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1057564/pretty-git-branch-graphs

In short, can use this one-liner:

git log –all –decorate –oneline –graph

You can also make this into its own ‘git’ command (‘git adog’) using:

git config –global alias.adog “log –all –decorate –oneline –graph”

The many merge options for 'git pull'

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 17:03:00 +0000

Ran into this (massive hint printout from git when attempting pull)

Hint: You have divergent branches and need to specify how to reconcile them.
Hint: You can do so by running one of the following commands sometime before
Hint: your next pull:
Hint: 
Hint: git config pull.rebase false # merge
Hint: git config pull.rebase true # rebase
Hint: git config pull.ff only # fast-forward only
Hint: 
Hint: You can replace "git config" with "git config --global" to set a default
Hint: preference for all repositories. You can also pass --rebase, --no-rebase,
Hint: or --ff-only on the command line to override the configured default per
Hint: invocation.
Git failed with a fatal error.
Git failed with a fatal error.
Need to specify how to reconcile divergent branches.

And then thankfully came across this VERY informative StackOverflow post:

cloning a github repo

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 00:41:00 +0000

Steps needed to download my repo from github to a new computer:

install git
generate SSH key
ssh-keygen -t rsa -C “your_email@youremail.com”
add public key to github keys associated with my identity
have ssh-agent forget identies
ssh-add -d
now reread new ones
ssh-add
verify ssh setup is working (see http://help.github.com/ssh-issues/)
ssh -vT git@github.com
clone repo
git clone git://github.com/maciekk/emacs.git

Note that did not have to do a “git init” or “git remote add”.

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 23:09:00 +0000

Steps needed to download my repo from github to new computer:

install git
ssh keygen
add public key to github keys associated with my identity
ssh-add -d (have ssh-agent forget identies)
ssh-add (now reread new ones)
ssh -vT git@github.com to verify ssh setup is working
git clo

Claude (migration note): Empty or missing title. Filename is a numeric post ID (likely a Blogger import artifact). Missing title and truncated content (ends mid-sentence) — strong candidate for deletion.

'hot pixels' in digital cameras

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 21:39:00 +0000

After playing around with my new Nikon D90, I noticed that some of my dark pictures have a red spot near upper right corner. It turns out this is a “hot pixel”. Further research led me to the following interesting pages:

research notes from DSLR hunt

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:53:00 +0000

Camera reviews at dpreview.com:

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikond80/
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikond90/
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos450d/ (Canon EOS Rebel XSi)

Lens reviews:

http://www.the-digital-picture.com/Reviews/Canon-EF-S-17-85mm-f-4-5.6-IS-USM-Lens-Review.aspx
http://www.photozone.de/canon-eos/181-canon-ef-s-18-55mm-f35-56-is-test-report--review
http://www.slrgear.com/reviews/showproduct.php/product/355/cat/all (Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 Di II …)
http://www.slrgear.com/reviews/showproduct.php/product/349/cat/31 (Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4.5 DC Macro)
http://www.slrgear.com/reviews/showproduct.php/product/136/cat/11 (Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM)
http://www.the-digital-picture.com/Reviews/Tamron-17-50mm-f-2.8-XR-Di-II-Lens-Review.aspx (Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8)

Shopping links:

bash scripting docs

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:40:00 +0000

Windows STOP messages

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 21:28:00 +0000

I just had Windows reboot out of the blue (no BSOD, just as if I pressed RESET). Looking at the system event log it seems Windows ran into trouble: Event Type: Information Event Source: Save Dump Event Category: None Event ID: 1001 Date: 12/11/2007 Time: 3:19:32 PM User: N/A Computer: SKYNET Description: The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x100000d1 (0x00000000, 0x00000002, 0x00000001, 0xba940dc2). A dump was saved in: C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini111207-01.dmp. For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp. A useful website detailing the STOP codes: http://aumha.org/a/stop.htm Also of interest is the KB article on dealing with the minidumps: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315263

Java links

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 18:07:00 +0000

Java 6

OpenGL in Java

the water charlatans

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 15:49:00 +0000

This post is a cautionary tale, and a snapshot of all the relevant information I gathered in the process. It so happened that one day I get a phone call from a company “that deals with water quality”, and they claim that Cathy has done a survey with them, and has won some prize worth over $xxx (as a “thank you”). They wanted to know whether they can swing by sometime, drop it off, and do a free water test for us. As Cathy wasn’t home, I couldn’t check with her whether this was legitimate, so I said, what the hey, come on over. I was interested in the water test because I was wondering earlier whether we were suffering from excessive hardness of water here, but that’s another story. 6:30pm, the representative shows up. Sets up in the kitchen a row of plastic drinking cups, as if preparing for an elaborate shell game. Each cup is made to hold water from various sources (distilled, tap, Brita filtered, and various bottled waters in our house). He pulls out an upright binder with what seems like “informational material”. Oh oh, red flags start going off in my head! First test is using a TDS (Total Dissolved Solids) meter. Distilled water obviously gets a very low reading. Tap water is higher. The readings for bottled water shoot up to 265. The “gentleman” claims that this reflects the amount of junk and pollutants in the water. In actuality, this is totally misleading. See here for a full skinny on TDS measurement. It’s a bit of a misnomer, all it really does is detect charged ions in water, most of which are from the (benign, or even beneficial) hard water salts dissolved in the water (Calcium, etc.) The 265 p.p.m. figure for the bottled water was meant to impress and frighten us, but inspecting the label for the bottled waters in fact explicitly states that the expected mineral content in the waters is about 290 p.p.m., so if anything, the TDS reading for these waters was in fact a tad low. I had a pretty strong sinking feeling at this point, that we’ve been conned into a sales pitch. The final touch was when the guy pulled out a precipitator test device for next round of testing. I’ve heard of these being used for scaremongering, and a quick check on the Net (I excused myself to grab my tea from upstairs) revealed to be the case, and also turned up this interesting tidbit (government forbade this particular company to do chlorine testing without getting certified; I presume they were scaring residents with yet more deceptive tests). Anyhow, in short, the company was Glacier Water Treatment Systems of Newmarket, Ontario. They sell water distillers for homes. Links explaining the bogus nature of the precipitator test:

modifying the 'look-in' buttons in standard file dialog

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 03:34:00 +0000

Standard file dialogs under Windows (2000 and higher?) have a set of five big buttons down the left side which you can click to be directly taken to the corresponding directories. It’s called the “Places bar”, and the buttons might be called “look-in” buttons. I went in search of how to modify them, as the default set was uterly useless to me. Here are interesting things I found:

alternatives to 'aglorithmic.sty'

Tue, 05 Jul 2005 03:04:00 +0000

The TeX FAQ lists alternatives; see here I think what I’ve been looking for is algorithmicx.sty, since it provides “procedure” and “function” blocks. newalg.sty looks good too.

Claude (migration note): Filename renamed from alternatives-to-aglorithmic-sty to alternatives-to-algorithmic-sty (typo/encoding fix).