The GitTorrent Commit Reel

The commit reel is defined in section 5 of the GitTorrent RFC. It is defined as an uncompressed stream of objects, sorted in a particular way. In practice, it is only the commit objects that are sorted, and all of the dependent objects for those commits are placed with the commit which first introduces them. So, you start with a repository: You sort the objects so that they are in reverse date order (tie breaking is still required over git rev-list --date-order, as well as fetching their types and sizes, to produce the commit reel index.

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Improving Google Navigate's Pronounciation of Māori Words

Google Navigate is pronouncing Māori words poorly, which is a shame because it’s a phonetic language with few exceptions. I’d like to contribute some notes for recognising and joining sounds from an English voice syllable bank, to try to make as few errors as possible. Recognition A Māori word will match the following regular expression (Unicode quirks notwithstanding): (([hkmnprtw]|ng|wh)?([aeiou][aeiou]?|[āēīōū])-?)+ The presence of any letters not on this list means it’s not a Māori word.

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GitTorrent: a synthesis of past efforts

If you read this list post (gmane archive), then you will probably see not much new here. I include it as a back-drop for the subsequent articles. GitTorrent concept: torrent the pack files The idea of applying the straight BitTorrent protocol to the pack files was the starting point for GitTorrent. However, this turns out not to be useful, as the pack files are not determinisitic. It is only under a very strict set of precarious circumstances that any two nodes computing a pack for a git set of git objects will produce the same binary content.

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Letter to the court

This is my communication with my case manager at the Ministry of Justice: The correspondance from Referee Smallbone writes: The claim is dismissed. The applicant did not appear. The respondent did appear. _Reasons_ The Tribunal presented its findings following the hearing on 13th December 2010. There has been no new evidence presented today that would change the decision and find in the applicant's favour. The case was adjourned at Vodafone’s request.

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Court Ruling

I got the final ruling from the court in the post today, co-inciding with a concise Consumer Magazine article about my case. As I didn’t appear on time to the court case, Vodafone did not need to explain their communications. The Judge ignored the merits of the case as they stood at the end of the previous half of the hearing, and dismissed the claim. I guess that’s how the game works.

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A little note on a geologist's global warming claim

Ok, so I was taking an astronomy tour with this really nice old guy in Kaotunu, near Whitianga in the Coromandel. He’s got a sweet telescope set up for observing the night sky and for a cheap $40 each, me and my girlfriend got a nice tour of various sky features, including nebulae, carbon stars, star-forming clusters and more. It was a really lovely evening and we all had a lovely discussion over tea and cake.

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A couple of recent observations

My previous posts were written right after the court case; now, I have the benefit of some hindsight as well as some interesting interactions with people who work at Vodafone. The first is that despite Vodafone’s claims in court, they have been working towards notifications, now apparently sent out at 5MB and 8MB of usage. In court, the Vodafone rep claimed that “customers did not want that”. Apparently, this has recently gone to production, in the last 2-3 weeks.

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ikiwiki

This blog software is awesome, I welcome my new cult overload. Here is how I did it; apt-get install ikiwiki git-core nginx Then make a new user and path for the wiki owner useradd ikiwiki mkdir /var/www/blog adduser ikiwiki chown ikiwiki /var/www/blog Set up the user for SSH login mkdir ~ikiwiki/.ssh ssh-add -L > ~ikiwiki/.ssh/authorized_keys chown -R ikiwiki ~ikiwiki/.ssh chown -R og-rwX ~ikiwiki/.ssh Then you can ssh to the ikiwiki user on your server host and run the basic setup.

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Vilain v Vodafone NZ Ltd : preliminary ruling

Short summary: I tried to use a “bad” section of the Fair Trading Act, the judge just didn’t buy my argument ($1300 now owing I guess), and adjourned on one point (worth $850) pending explanation from Vodafone. Though, it wasn’t entirely bad; the message telling me that I was using my data bundle is a bit hard to argue against. Irritating thought is that despite Vodafone having had much time to note and prepare a response to that part, the judge allowed that the case be adjourned, perhaps to February, when the Vodafone representative claimed that he hadn’t seen that bit before and needed to check up on it.

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Vilain v Vodafone NZ Ltd

Long delay between updates intentional, for ironic effect. Tomorrow, I have a court case with Vodafone NZ Ltd, over an extortionate roaming data bill. Sure, sure, it’s not like this is anything new or special, people have known about this for a long time. “highway robbery” writes one well-known industry commentator, showing that the mark-up is of the order of 100,000%. Yes, one-hundred, thousand percent. “Legal Theft”, brands another. There are frequently stories in the papers, such as:

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