Category: Rambling

Mercurial and 404

I just started working with Mercurial source control at my new job. So far so good. I moved from developing on my Mac to working on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. I installed the default instance of Mercurial and got the out of the box version 1.4 ( or there abouts ). As I tried to clone a repo that cloned just fine on the Mac I kept on getting this error:

abort: HTTP Error 404: Not Found

I searched around a bit ( I still can’t bring myself to use the verb Googled as I was a loyal Yahoo for 11 years ) and wasn’t able to find anything that directly solved my problem. I compared the version I had running on Mac which was ~2.0. I started to wonder if the version skew was the culprit. I up’d my Ubuntu version using the instructions here:

  • sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mercurial-ppa/releases
  • sudo apt-get update
  • sudo apt-get install mercurial

I tried again and Viola… it worked. Hope this helps others.

Stupid AT&T … or stupid me?

I’m on the phone right now with AT&T help. We’ll see how well they can do to help me with my problem. The problem is the connection is really slow. I might not have even thought this was an issue and just something with my distance from the CO. The only problem is that this all started when I switched modems and started using the shitty one they sent me.

I switched since my neighbor downstairs that I share with was killing the connection. I thought switching to the original equipment and my fancy new router would be better. I moved to the speedstream 4100 modem with the Netgear WGT624 router.

Here they are…… ( Sun 5:08 ) …  we’ll see how things go….

Back — ( Mon 10am )

Wooo hooo.  Speed was 250K -> 350K.  Now I’m up to 1.2 mbps.  I knew there had to be more speed in the connection.  I was on the phone with various techs for about 2 hours.  It ended up being worth it.  When I finally got to the right people at AT&T they fixed the line in about 15 mins.  Their tests said my line could support up to 7 mpbs.  Not sure if I’ll go that high, but its nice to know.  I may move up to the 3mbps package since I’m thinking of trying to get rid of Comcast.

On Age

My grandmother was recently diagnosed with lung cancer. She’s getting up there in age and has decided that the cost of surgery or Chemo would affect her life more than the cancer will. I applaud her decision but I still feel bad. It was weird since my second thought after realizing that she was going to be alright was … what about me?

I felt like a real shit heel. Then I realized (or hoped) this is probably a common reaction. I realized that Grandma is doing the right thing for her and the rest of us. As she begins to decline modern medicine will make her have a pain free or mostly pain free accent to whereever we go. For the rest of us we see this from the outside. We have to see her get weak. We remember her as she was when she was healthy and vital.

What would you do?