Yesterday, the main ASF SVN code repository passed the 1 million commit mark.  Shortly thereafter one of the ASF members enquired as to how he could best grab the svn log entries for all of these commits.  As always there were a bunch of useful replies, but they were all set to take quite some time; mainly because if anyone just simply runs

svn log http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf -r1:1000000

It will not only take several hours, it will also cause high levels of load on one of the two geo-balanced SVN servers.  Also, requesting tat many log entries will likely result in your IP address being banned.

So I decided to create the log set locally on one of the SVN servers.  This is now available for download  [http://s.apache.org/1m-svnlog]  [md5] [sha]
This is a 50Mb tar/gz file.  It will uncompress to about 240Mb.   The log ‘only’ contains the log entries from 1 -> 1,000,000  - if you want the rest you can run:

    svn log http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf -r1000001:HEAD

This will give you all the log entries from 1M+1 to current

So, go, get your daily dose of apachecon fun, over at http://us.apachecon.com

They have been backing a campaign to support the heroes of war, namely the servicemen and women who  injured, severely injured and those that have lost their life, in the name of peace.  Now I don’t intend to get into the rights and wrongs of the conflicts in the middle east, but that said the support this national tabloid has put behind the cause to raise both awareness and money to support those who need extra help is astonishing.

I have just seen a TV advert, which at first I assumed to be yet another documentary on the state of the middle east, but to my amazement it was actually a tactful and rather tasteful effort by the folks who are usually adept at not being either of these.

You can see there rather flash driven website here, http://www.thesun.co.uk/heroes/

I for one have supported the campaign for a little while, most certainly not in the forefront of the support category but certainly not from the ever present peanut gallery either.

I suggest any of you to take a look at this, or any of the affiliated content, ignoring as much of the flash content as you possibly can.

After all, the people this campaign supports really are truly brave people.

If you live locally and are looking to join a club, or start playing badminton again have a look or come along.

This website is work of a friend who lives in my village.  She is a personal trainer, and is looking for new clients.

(sorry Shane, not your Cambridge )

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMyNk8J1c8g

Using ls -1td /path/to/files/*/* we get the output of the all content. We then pipe that through head, to essentially count the number of rows we want to show.

Finally we use sed a few times, to remove the file system paths that don’t relate to URL path, add the appropriate html tags, and using backreferences we re-use the matched string.

So what we have ended up with is :

ls -1td /foo/*/* | head -n 3 | sed -r s/[^\e]foo// | sed -r s/\(.*\)/\<li\>\<a\ href=\"\\1\"\>\\1/ | sed -r s/$/\<\\/li\>/ 

So lets break this down.

sed -r s/[^\e]foo//   –  This essentially strips the leading file system path that doesn’t relate to the webpath.

sed -r s/\(.*\)/\<li\>\<a\ href=\"\\1\"\>\\1/   –  This function essentialy takes the entire string, as is from the previous replacment, it then prepends the <li> and <a href> tags.

sed -r s/$/\<\\/li\>/   –  This bit adds the trailing </li> tag.

So we go from

  # ls -1td /foo/*/*

/foo/Audio/Audio_track-1.mp3
/foo/Audio/Audio_track-2.mp3

To

<li><a href=”/Audio/Audio_track-1.mp3″>/Audio/VAudio_track-1.mp3</li>
<li><a href=”/Audio/Audio_track-2.mp3″>/Audio/VAudio_track-2.mp3</li>

This is a little more complex than what I have had to deal with in the past. Granted to some of you this may be a simple task, but us Windows folks do things the hard way. Whilst I am it, I don’t claim that this the best, or most technically accurate way of achieving the required results. It has however taught me several new regex methods, such as back references, and that has to be a good thing, right?

One for the ‘note-to-self’ category

1. Download the latest Flash uninstaller on this page, and place it somewhere on your hard disk (C:\Temp is a good place)
2. Open a command prompt, navigate to the folder where you placed the uninstaller and run it with the “/clean” option, like this: “uninstall_flash_player.exe /clean” (without quotes – thanks Adobe for so clearly documenting any command line options for this tool…NOT !)
3. Click the Details button. If it lists any files as “Delete on reboot”, then reboot now. Otherwise, just carry on.
4. Download the EXE installation package from here
5. Use the Control Panel Add/Remove programs method to install it. This ensures that the Windows install notification API triggers correctly (as opposed to executing change user /install in a command prompt).
6. Use regedit and find the following key: HKCR\CLSID\{D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000} (on 64-bit Windows this one is located under HKCR\Wow6432Node\CLSID\{D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000})
7. Remove any permissions for the Everyone group. click Advanced and tick the box to propagate the permissions to all child objects.
8. Add the Everyone group and give it “Read” permissions on the key. Again, click the Advanced button and propagate the permissions to all child objects.
9. Repeat steps 6 to 8 on the subsequent key, called HKCR\CLSID\{D27CDB70-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000}

I am already addicted, damn you Paul. Essentially it is an online RTS game, where you build up a village, and stockpile produce before using your alliances to raid local villages, and fend off attacks from others. Simple, effective, but fun.

The product is far superior to that of all it’s competitors. 24×7 support, true TLS support, BC capabilities, mail archiving and LDAP support.  The presentation literally blew me away with the features, quality of the product and more simply the speed of the portal.

I am hopeful this will be the end to a few of my bugbears with the current supplier.