Mercurial Summary

I noticed that I wrote quite a few posts regarding Mercurial and they are spread all around blog. This post will give just a quick summary.

Server:

• Basic Linux server setup
• Mercurial over https
• Mercurial over both http and https
• Nicer Mercurial URL
• Mercurial on FreeNAS
• Mercurial on CentOS

Converting:

• Moving parts of existing Mercurial repository to new one
• Converting from SVN to Mercurial
• SVN to Mercurial

Tricks:

• Pushing/updating/commiting multiple repositories with single command
• Rollback in Mercurial
• Mercurial keyring
• VisualHg in Visual Studio 2012
• BOM away

Clients:

• TortoiseHg (the best Windows client).
• VisualHG (the best Visual Studio source control plug-in).
• Mercurial for Ubuntu (PPA package, stable snapshots).
• TortoiseHg for Ubuntu (PPA package, stable snapshots, nautilus extension).

5Nine

I was happy like a little puppy when I read that there is graphical manager for Hyper-V Server running on server itself. For me that was single missing link in my Hyper-V adventures.

First step was to download their free version. As it became usual, I had to create yet another another account and leave my password at yet another site. Well, at least I will get download link after installation and that will be that.

And that was that. Sometime I overreact. :)

Well, it turns out that this is not all. All that you get in mail is link to god-knows-what executable file. I guess after running that download manager you will be presented with additional application that would let you download what you want in just three-four simple steps. And let’s hope that this company is legit and that you don’t download some “toolbar helper” application alongside.

I don’t know about you but I am pretty allergic to this way of treating your potential customers. While I do understand their “need” to collect e-mail addresses of their potential customers so they can (annoy them) better help them in future, I do not understand why they don’t let you download their FREE application without any additional garbage. Which idiot of a manager thought that this was good idea?

I shall just wait for some normal company to come with same solution.

It's Not Natty, It Is Nutty

On my “standard” work day I interact with Unix a lot so it seemed like a logical solution to have Linux on my machine. I used Ubuntu 10.10 and world was beautiful. Yes, some things did bother me but it worked. And after work I could always enjoy Windows 7.

Two days ago I upgraded to newest Ubuntu (11.04, nicknamed Natty). After upgrade boot seemed a little slow so I decided to do what I should have done first time - clean install. I spent one full day on fresh installation of Nutty and here are some problems I had in span of eight hours:

• If your secondary monitor is on left, it is almost impossible to pinpoint single dot at which Unity launcher will appear.
• Turning off auto-hide for Unity launcher causes it to be over all maximized windows and to hide their left side.
• Applications closed without warning and without any form of crash dialog. Since this includes even calculator, I would dare to suggest that new Unity interface is to blame.
• Once system started swapping it took Ctrl+Alt+F1 and top command to find that compiz took whooping 4.5 GB of RAM (out of 6 GB).
• LibreCalc died every five minutes while editing relatively simple document. Recovery worked in almost 50% of cases.
• Laptop could not wake from sleep.
• Network connection was breaking every half an hour or so.
• Booting took ages - easily double the time that 10.10 needed.
• … do notice that there was a lot of smaller problems still …

I started using Linux it in nineteens with Slackware and went through my share of different distributions. I was never completely satisfied and people working with me know that I curse Linux a lot because of small bugs. But this is first time ever that I was actually unable to do my work. At the end I just rebooted into Windows XP (company issued) and did my work there.

My next step will be to take out this Natty piece of shit from laptop and to go back to Ubuntu 10.10.

P.S. I actually liked search interface in Unity. Unfortunately everything else sucks.

Custom Defined Identities

I love identity columns in database. They make great primary key for almost any table. Only situation where I hate them is when I need to import data with foreign keys. You see, you cannot manually define identity column. Or can you?

Let’s imagine SQL Server table (named SomeTable) with two columns. First one will be Id (int, identity and primary key) and second one will be SomeText (nvarchar). Then let’s try to insert some data:

INSERT INTO SomeTable(Id, SomeText) VALUES(1, 'Some text');
Msg 544, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
Cannot insert explicit value for identity column in table 'LookupDiagnosis' when IDENTITY_INSERT is set to OFF.

Like all good error messages, this one already offers solution. We need to manipulate IDENTITY_INSERT option. Let’s try again:

SET IDENTITY_INSERT SomeTable ON
INSERT INTO SomeTable(Id, SomeText) VALUES(1, 'Some text');
SET IDENTITY_INSERT SomeTable OFF

With this little trick importing data with identity columns becomes much easier.

P.S. Just remember that you cannot have IDENTITY_INSERT set on more than one table at a time.

P.P.S. This option is also great for filling gaps left in identity column by deleted rows or canceled transactions.

Moonlight 4

Lately big part of my day is working on Linux. Usually there are no issues. As long as I stick to web applications I am mostly ok.

Here comes the problem. For their PDC conference Microsoft decided to use Silverlight. Since I wanted to check a video or two and Microsoft is proud of Silverlight being supported on every possible platform I thought that everything would work.

Well it doesn’t.

P.S. Should I say that Flash videos work without issues on both Windows and Linux?