Well the answer is that a proper clone will fetch all changes that were ever made in the project’s history, and you are receiving all of that into your clone.

While this is okay with new projects you’re butting into, it might take a ridiculous amount of time when you’re cloning something that’s been for a long time and has ALL its history intact (for reasons best known by their true developers )

If your contribution is going to be a simple quick-patch-and-go-smile (which is perfectly fine, if you ask me – all form of contributions are great!) you should use this lesser known option of git-clone called depth.

Use a clone command as so, for example:

# Use the -depth=n option with a small number, to fetch only those many changes
# counting backwards from HEAD.
git clone git://github.com/QwertyManiac/avroutils.git --depth=1

This will fetch only the HEAD of the repository as part of the objects download. Your download size and time would be greatly reduced thus.

Do note, however, that you may not be able to clone from this copy, nor pull or push from/to it. These form of clones are called ‘shallow clones’. Read more upon it here if you may want to.

Samsung Galaxy S

I got myself a Samsung Galaxy S, after hearing much from Sandeep and Kalpik about it. Its pretty amazing, to have jumped from the still-functional Nokia 6681 I purchased about 5 years ago to one of the best smartphones today. Both amazing and wildly confusing when it comes to tuning it up. Were I not a Linux user, I wouldn’t really care about configuring things I have. That aside, the phone has a nice GUI and the bundled Swype input method makes the jump really easy. Looking to dive into its internals in a few days

Android on skates - what does this mean to you?

Saying no to Apples with an open fly.

In times of such crisis, I usually pour out concerns onto a channel where Kalpik usually resides. He has this weird knack of directly, and more likely indirectly point me to my solution. And he did it again.

Apparently, a few months ago, in some desperate need of better browsing while running bittorrent downloads/uploads I looked up some ‘better’ QoS serving script at LARTC and had applied it down into the roots of my ArchLinux installation manually. I had completely forgotten about that!

Now this script has a DOWNLINK amount one usually sets in it to get it to work properly. And I’d set mine to what was available to me back then – 256 kbit per second. And since then, I’d always been seeing a steady stream of 30-32 kBps in all my downloads on Linux (it capping the rest out?), wondering when I’d get that double offer my ISP had given to all of its unlimited-plan users.

I’m still hunting for that file and the caller for the same script; but in the meantime (read: grep time) I’ve removed linux-atm and iproute2 packages of ArchLinux which were needed to facilitate the script (These came back as a flash to me) and (thanks to Kalpik again for hinting “What tc?”) I’m seeing the same download rates on Linux as on Windows. No funny limiting is occurring in the middle anymore. Phew.

Having got myself a copy of Blizzard’s latest shiny release, an iteration of the ever legendary StarCraft, the StarCraft II, I didn’t waste much time getting down to installing it onto my not-yet-aging rig. I run Windows 7 64-bit on it and its pretty nice as long as am not doing anything but running a browser on it.

So the installation begins and there’s a cool story being narrated along as it does. As with all progress bars on Windows, it crashes at one point telling me that its not gonna obey my command due to some crappy message like this:

Couldn’t decompress Ogg data. If this problem persists, please contact Blizzard Technical Support. (InstallerDecompressOgg)

(Hey, they’re using Ogg – sweet!).

Now I try to do the thing I always do when my installation from an external media fails. I copy all the files off the disc and run it from my local hard disk drive, expecting it to go smooth. But it doesn’t. I scream out in frustration as its not a visible corruption since the points of failure are between 8% and 13% (randomly).

I decide to tear my hair out on not being able to play the next best game to Barman: Arkham Asylum; but before I tried to do that I hit upon a solution quite accidentally (as is all I ever do on a Windows OS).

I minimized the installer; and it installed.

Yes you read that right; even me. I blinked at the growing numbers on the progress bar when I checked it at random points. It installed successfully and even updated the game copy automatically to the latest and the greatest Blizzard had up for offering.

I played it for a while and then got back to the desktop, removed the game, reinstalled it with the installer not minimized – hit the same error again. Retry with a minimize – it works like a charm.

I’m guessing the issue is with the installer-time narration of a wonderful story by a wonderful voice. Upon minimizing the installer window the audio playing the narration and the BGM stops and the error does not come up. Very very odd.

You always gotta try Windows to get scared back into using Linux.

Single assignment is like algebra.

When I went to school, my math teacher said, “If there’s an X in several different parts in the same equation, then all the Xs mean the same thing.” That’s how we can solve equations: if we know that X+Y=10 and X-Y=2, then X will be 6 and Y will be 4 in both equations.

But when I learned my first programming language, we were shown stuff like this:
X = X + 1

Everyone protested, saying “you can’t do that!”. But the teacher said we were wrong, and we had to unlearn what we learned in math class. X isn’t a math variable: it’s like a pigeon hole/little box…

In Erlang, variables are just like they are in math. When you associate a value with a variable, you’re making an assertion – a statement of fact. This variable has that value. And that’s that.

– Joe Armstrong, in his book Programming Erlang.