In Which We Worry and Complain Out Loud in Our Outside Voice
I’ve been struggling a little with Arrow recently, trying to make progress. Since the chunk storage layer is nearly complete, the next part is the file metadata layer, which we will use to store the actual information about files backed up.
The chunk store in arrow is essentially a content-addressable hash table. This means that it maps a hash to a block of data, and the hash is the concatenation of a simple checksum (which is a well-known rolling checksum) and an MD5 digest of the block. These checksums are used in the file layer to figure out the contents of files, and find blocks of data that are redundant across files or file versions.
I’m working on a project for my Master’s degree — or at least, I’ve been procrastinating and batting around ideas for the past quarter, and now I’m trying to get something finished.
My plan right now was suggested by my advisor, and it fit really nicely with my experience to date.
Kinesis has updated the Freestyle keyboard for the Macintosh. I got one, as a thank-you gift.
The original Freestyle works just fine on the Mac, but it suffers from the common problem that generic keyboards suffer from on the Mac — the meta keys are wrong, and special function keys map to things like cut and paste on Windows, which mean little on the Mac.
This update moves the control, alt, and command keys into the right places, colors the keyboard white (it’s not that white is the Mac aesthetic, but still, why does all computer equipment look like 90’s stereo equipment?), assigns the correct functions to the special keys on the left (cut, copy, paste, movement, etc.), and assigns the function keys Mac-style special functions, like brightness control, expose, dashboard, music and volume controls, show desktop, and show dock. There’s a “Fn” key that changes the meaning of these keys back to F1 through F12, and it’s nice because it’s modal: on other Mac keyboards you have to hold down the function key, but here you can toggle it on and off. Fn+Escape is assigned to Force Quit, a nice touch.
The feel of the keyboard is the same, but the keys sound a little quieter, and they don’t seem to need quite as much force to type on, though this could just be a revision they’ve made generally. The keyboard feels as solid as the original.
I like it. It’s a nice touch when companies cater to Mac users specifically, abandoning the old, silly keyboard layouts that have been in use since the DOS era (I mean, come on; Print Screen? Scroll Lock?).
Updated universal git package for Mac OS X:
(I made the mpkg on Leopard, but compiled the code on Tiger. This should work on both, but I haven’t tried the installer on Tiger. I’ve also tried to include libexpat, and thus git-http-push support. Let me know if there are any issues)
Update: I’ve rebuilt the package, which should install all the git builtin programs (which are exactly the same as the main git binary, but with a different name) as hard links, not as independent programs. This will take up less space on your hard disk, but the installer is the same size (!). If this doesn’t work for you, use the non-hard-linky installer.
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