Monday, September 28, 2009

Eclipse galileo software update is ****ing slow!

Why does the latest version of Eclipse (Galileo) take so long to install software updates?

It seriously takes 5-6 minutes to install a package that has already been downloaded! There is no disk I/O, and only about 10% CPU utilization! What the **** is it doing?

OK, it's not actually 5-6 minutes, but it sure ain't fast.

TortoiseSVN weirdness

I had tremendous difficulties today trying to connect to a svn+ssh repository on a Solaris server using TortoiseSVN on a Windows client. I kept getting error messages of the form "network connection closed unexpectedly" with no explanation. Fortunately, I was able to find a workaround (see below).

I think the problem was bash on the server: every non-interactive ssh login was printing error messages to stderr, and for whatever reason TortoisePlink (the ssh client included with Tortoise) could not deal with these. I am not absolutely certain that this explanation is correct, but here is my reasoning, based on trying various combinations of svn and ssh clients on Windows:
  1. cygwin svn / cygwin ssh: worked fine (the error messages were visible, but ignored, and the svn operation worked)
  2. collabnet svn / TortoisePlink: "network connection closed unexpectedly"
  3. collabnet svn / cygwin ssh: worked fine!
I worked around the problem by changing my login shell to /bin/tcsh on the Solaris machine: that made the error messages go away, I guess because bash is installed incorrectly on that machine.

Once I changed my login shell to eliminate the error messages, the latest version of Tortoise (1.6.5) was able to connect to a remote svn+ssh repository.

Now, if I could somehow get back the hours I spent figuring this out... :-)

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Dick Morris on YCP

There is an interesting post on Dick Morris's blog about York College of Pennsylvania, and how YCP has kept costs down while maintaining educational quality:

http://www.dickmorris.com/blog/why-is-college-so-expensive/

I think his general point---that most colleges and universities spend huge amounts of $$$ on things that contribute nothing to the education that students receive, and that these costs are ultimately borne by students---is well taken.

Sunday, September 6, 2009

74hc163 symbol/device for Eagle CAD

The 74xx-us library for Eagle CAD does not include support for the 74xx163 counter IC. I made a small library which includes it. The library is here:

http://faculty.ycp.edu/~dhovemey/DHH-74hc163.lbr

Only the DIL16 package (a.k.a. DIP or PDIP) is supported. I have not tried creating a board using the library, so caveat emptor.