I love watching TV, and hate it. Regular show schedules are horrible, commercial breaks are annoying, and the ability to rewind is very important. I love Hot’s VOD service (and happily pay to watch the shows I enjoy), but my true favorite for getting my entertainment is everyone’s favorite not-a-dumptruck, the internet. In this post, I will describe how I do it.

Everything I describe in this post can be done using miro. It’s a neat piece of software, which lacked polish in version 2.4 (2.5 is out now though), but there are a few things I don’t like about it:

At my workplace, I’ve recently been using git for code review purposes. I work on code in my own git clone, and ask a peer to review it. It works somewhat like this:

1. master branch is same code as currently in upstream.
2. Working to resolve issue #1234 pertaining to “Performance for gizmo”, I work on a branch 1234-gizmo-performance.
3. I mail a peer, John, with this information, as well as my repository location.
4. John adds my repository as a remote, lutzky. Then he branches review1 (or review2 if that is taken, and so on) at lutzky/1234-gizmo-performance.
5. John adds comments with nice big FIXME tags, which are highlighted in any decent editor. He commits this, the commit-message stating that it was code review.
6. John tags his final review commit (or, if he had no comments - lutzky/1234-gizmo-performance) with a reviewed1 (or reviewed2, etc.) annotated tag. Since the annotated tag includes all the necessary information (who tagged, when, and what), the number doesn’t really matter.
7. I merge john/review1, incorporate the changes (or reject them) and remove the comments. If no further review is necessary, I submit this - and once submitted, I merge this back into master.

It’s a nice system. I wonder what other methods there are of doing this.

I had a Game Boy once. I could play it just about anywhere, and battery life - for the time - was great. I lost it at one point, and replaced it with a Game Gear, which sucked the life out of 6 AA batteries rather quickly. The Game Boy Color was actually decent on battery life, but since it didn’t have a backlight, you had to play it at very specific angles.

Ever have a machine you can only ssh into through another machine? It’s a very common situation in the Technion. Here’s one way to get around it: Assume you can directly ssh into alpha, and from alpha you can ssh into beta. Have the following code in your ~/.ssh/config:

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Host beta
        Hostname 1.2.3.4  # IP Address of beta
        ProxyCommand ssh alpha nc -w 1 %h %p

This requires you to have nc (netcat) installed on alpha. Once you do that, you can run ssh beta directly from your own box.