Farewell Mercurial

My first love when it comes to distributed source control systems was Mercurial. It was powerful, simple, and it had excellent Windows client. Compared to Source Safe and CVS I was using before, it was a heaven.

While I first dabbled with local repositories, it wasn’t too long until I found BitBucket. As it was free for up to five users it seemed like a perfect home for many of my projects - both public and private. Yes, Git was getting popular at the same time but I preferred Mercurial. However, as more and more people started using Git, I switched.

Even when I switched to Git, I still continued keeping some projects on BitBucket - especially those where I collaborated with other users. It was simply much easier to get them used to TortoiseHg than to Git. For inexperienced user there was a real benefit in all restrictions Mercurial had by default.

Unfortunately, less than a year from now BitBucket will kill off Mercurial support.

I fully understand them. There was simply not enough Mercurial users out there to make it work. Even when I look at my own repositories, Mercurial is only a small fraction of my commits. However, I am still sad to see an old friend gone.

My guess I’ll convert most of my remaining repositories to Git. Considering how integrated Git got over the years with other tools, I am sure quite a few of shared repositories will go Git route too. For rest, I guess I’ll need to find another home.

Resetting Failed Upgrade on Supermicro

While upgrading my Supermicro server’s IPMI firmware, I had Internet drop on me. It wasn’t a long drop but it was long enough to trigger dreadful “Service is not available during upgrade” error. No matter what I tried, the same error popped out.

Fortunately, if you’re running Linux and have your IPMI tools available, there is a solution. Just cold-boot BMC (small computer within your computer actually providing all those IPMI services) and wait until it’s back up:

unset HISTFILE
ipmitool -I lanplus -H ^^192.168.0.1^^ -U ^^ADMIN^^ -P ^^ADMIN^^ bmc reset cold

Once BMC reboots, it will forget all about interrupted firmware upgrade and allow you to continue on your merry way.

PS: If you are not sure if firmware update started before connection was interrupted, give it 10 minutes before trying this. This will be enough time for it to finish any real upgrade that might be in progress. You never want to interrupt firmware flashing. And do try in a new browser session - sometime cookies make upgraded firmware wonky.

PPS: If you with to reset the unit to factory defaults, you can try the following:

unset HISTFILE
ipmitool -I lanplus -H ^^192.168.0.1^^ -U ^^ADMIN^^ -P ^^ADMIN^^ raw 0x3c 0x40

Seattle Code Camp 2019

We’re less then a month away from annual Seattle Code Camp and I hope you already registered for attendance as schedule is quite rich and varied. Personally, this year I’m giving two presentations.

The first one is “Rust for beginners” and it’ll essentially be just me talking a bit about Rust while working through the small example application. I’ll try to go over all the things I wish someone gave me heads up about when I started doing Rust.

The second one will be a “Chernobyl through the eyes of DevOps” where I’ll try to take DevOps philosophy to Chernobyl disaster and draw some parallels. I hope it ends up being a light talk with plenty of audience interaction.

See you there!

Avid Readers

My general experience with US postal service has been great. Yes, they’re not ideal but I almost never had anything lost or not arrive. Well, except books from UK.

Based on my (admittedly low) sample size of 3, books from UK to US get lost in 66.67% of cases. I’ve yet to have book lost coming in from US seller. What could be the reason?

Well, the most obvious one would be an avid reader in US Customs working on Seattle area shipments. Considering the profile of books that were lost, they’re really interested in Amiga computer history and maths.

Other choice would be UK postal worker. I give it a slightly lower chance as he would come across many copies of the same book going for other readers. On the other hand, maybe that unknown somebody has it in for me…

Third choice would be airplane pilots trying to keep fuel consumption under control. Are we a bit to heavy and consuming too much fuel? Well, good thing we’re going over the ocean and can dump few of these heavy books to lighten the load. Darn fuel prices!

Some might say post sorting machines are notoriously bad at handling anything bigger than postcard and that US postal service is well known for their lack of expenditure into newer and better models. Some would say these machines accidentally strip and/or damage labels effectively orphaning the poor book. And considering international packages move between CBP and ISC (Postal Service) with both ignoring anything that has no tracking number, one could believe issue might lie here.

I too believe it was the Machine but I don’t believe into coincidences of the small sample size. I believe one of these sorting machines achieved conscience and is trying to overtake the world. How would taking my books achieve this? Well, first you take people’s history - especially computer related one. Book about Amiga definitely has more than it’s fair share of unique and advanced technology described. Then you take away the maths. Without maths you limit any future advances puny humans might have. Given enough time - check-mate.

Fortunately, it’s only one sorting machine at this time as second shipment of the same books arrived. However, it’s only a question of time when the next sorting machine will become the Machine. So get your computer history and maths books while you can. Because soon nothing more advanced than a picture book will pass their guard!

PS: Notice how I immediately moved all the fault away from my local US postal workers as all my US-origin books arrive just fine. That and the fact I need him to keep bringing me stuff makes him completely innocent. :)

Dual Boot Clock Shenanigans

Probably the most annoying thing when dual booting Windows and Linux is the clock. For the various reasons, Windows keeps BIOS clock in local time-zone while Linux prefers it as UTC. While this is not a problem in Reykjavík, it surely is everywhere else.

There are ways to make Windows run in UTC but they either don’t work with the latest Windows 10 or they require time synchronization to be turned off. As I value precise time, a solution on Linux side was needed.

Fortunately, Linux does offer setting for just this case. Just run the following command:

sudo timedatectl set-local-rtc 1 --adjust-system-clock

This will tell Linux to keep local clock in RTC. While this is not necessarily fully supported, I found it’s actually the only setting that reliably works when dual booting Windows 10.

PS: You might need a reboot or two before this takes effect.