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                   JOURNAL FOR SATURDAY 5TH DECEMBER, 2015
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: The stupid things Diddymus does
   DATE: Sun  6 Dec 00:05:48 GMT 2015

Why is it when you do something stupid you have the "Oh, SHIT!" moment one
millisecond after hitting the return key? Always after, never before... why is
that? I thought I'd mention it after doing something very stupid recently :(

Sunday night, I needed to throw my WolfMUD workspace onto another machine
quickly. I had a lot of recent changes and didn't have the time to properly
commit everything. It was late and I was tired. Anyway I made a tarball of the
workspace and copied it to the other machine[1]:


  tar -Jxvf WolfMUD.txz WolfMUD
  scp WolfMUD.txz Phreaks9:


Monday on Phreaks9 I untared the workspace to do some more coding:


  tar -Jxvf WolfMUD.txz


Hrm, odd... some changes were missing... maybe I untared an old tarball?
Nope. Very stange... so I go and check Phreaks1. Changes are missing there as
well... what the hell!? So I looked at my .bash_history to make sure I had
made the tarball and copied it over properly. Yup, I can see the cd command to
the right directory, the tar of the right directory and the scp of the right
file to Phreaks9. Oh... oh dear... damn...[2]

I should have had a 'c' to create instead of an 'x' to extract:


  tar -Jxvf WolfMUD.txz
        ^
        |
        |____ This little bugger right here!


It just so happened that I already had an existing WolfMUD.txz on Phreaks1
which tar dutifully unpacked... right over all my work and changes :( I then
copied the *old* tarball over to Phreaks9 and unpacked it there as well for
good measure. Doh!

Lessons learned? Commit more often and disseminate changes more often. Have a
backup system which has more than a single copy. In the above tale the Sunday
backup overwrote the previous Saturday backup[3].

Is there a happy ending? Yes. I wrote all of my changes again and moved on. At
the moment I'm half way through committing my changes for the networking code.
I've still to sort out handling messages to observers in multiple locations.

In other news...

The Raspberry Pi Zero has been launched. At £4/$5 even I can afford one. Even
if I can't afford descent backups! The Zero has a single core ARMv6 processor
(ARM1176JZF-S) and 512Mb RAM. This is the same as the Model B I have access to
at work - and WolfMUD runs just fine on that :) Most of my machines I run
headless so I'd just need a MicroSD card - the model B uses normal SD cards.
I'd also need a USB Wifi dongle. The Zero actually has a micro-USB port, so
I'd need a micro-USB 2.0 host male to USB A female OTG adapter and a micro-USB
dongle.

Go 1.5.2 is out. Installed and currently being used for WolfMUD development
without any issues.

Now does anyone have a torch handy? I just need to check down the back of the
sofa...

--
Diddymus

  [1] All of my machines are Phreaks, like me :)

  [2] I'm being polite. The air was blue, paint started blistering, wallpaper
      peeling, young children cried and small animals ran for cover. Fire and
      brimstone was all around...

  [3] At least I run backups! Just need to be able to make more of them :(


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