Ken's Space

Quirky, dark, urban hip, uncanny and nice gangsters... Wait, "nice gangesters"?
　　
　　Yes, Sir Ben Kingsley and Morgan Freeman as mob bosses - Who would've thunk?
　　
　　Gangsters are supposed to be merciless, smart and violent - not the fatherly figure Mr. X-Men or the straight-faced US army general. Put the slick-tongued Mr. Slevin in front of Tony Soprano or Don Corleone, he wouldn't have survived for more than 5 minutes. Or maybe gangsters are nice guys who loves to talk a lot and let people carry big guns into their offices, who knows.
　　
　　But don't get me wrong, I LOVE this movie even though the gangsters are little bit too nice: acting is first rated - Ben Kingsley, Morgan Freeman, Josh Hartnett and even Lucy, everybody delivered tour de force performance. (Bruce Willis? Don't go there... :-) Josh and Lucy had great chemistry hitting off the scene when they first met in the apartment, and Lucy's monologue rocks! "You mean this isn't the first time a crime lord has asked you to kill the gay son of a rival gangster to pay off a debt that belongs to a friend whose place you're staying in as a result of losing your job, your apartment and finding your girlfriend in bed with another guy." - you just gotta love those good screenwrites.
　　
　　OK, so you want to talk about Bruce Willis? My favorite scene of him in the whole god damn movie is when he said this at the end: "I am a world-class assassin, fuckhead." Now that sums up Bruce's entire career - man in trench coat, both hands straight with big guns and an intense look on the face, frozen forever, appropriate in every action movie he's done. In the bonus material he asked Morgan Freeman: "Career advice, do you think I chose the right career?" Freeman laughed, didn't say a thing.

If you're not a South junkie you may not enjoy this movie at all - it was all about the South, the music, the story, the weird yet profound deep south of the Americana. We travel with Jim White, a folk singer, to various small town USA and visited barber shops, fast food joints, trailer parks and... you get it, churches, everywhere we go, we see and hear things so ordinary yet so iconic, mesmerizing and poignant.
　　
　　"I love the small town. It's not even a half-mile across the whole town. Very small. This way over here we have the church. Over here we have a truck stop. Over here we have the juke joint. Back behind me we have the prison. It's your typical Southern town. Some people go to church. Some don't. It's just one of those small towns." — The Mayor, Ferriday, Louisiana
　　
　　Some complain this movie is stereotyped since all it portrays was how poor and strange the South is - get over it, if it's part of the South then why not show it? I am sure there're movies depicting filthy rich white Southerners (maybe a redneck too, like the chimpanzee who's ruling the US of A) that make people think the South is all rosy and elegant and gone-with-the-windish, then so be it. You see only what you choose to see.
　　
　　Love the music and the cinematography in this flick. Heck, you can't get a bad picture of the South.

One of the many issues we ran into with a distributed development team literally across the globe is sluggish connectivity - it was so painful that a mere check-in will cost you the time to prepare and finish an entire cup of cappuccino - good for the coffee lovers but not for geek heads.

So without further ado, here's how we build our in-house federated SVN system.

1 Set up SVN servers on both locations.

2 Dump the entire SVN repository from the primary US server and load it to the remote China server, this ensures a equal starting point. The following steps should be done on both servers:

3 Create a synchronization user account

4 Set up password-less SSH for the aforementioned user.

5. Create two new directories: svnlocalcommit and svnremotecommit under /tmp

6 Edit the post-commit script of SVN to include the following: echo $REV > /tmp/svnlocalcommit/$REV, for every commit, this will create a new file under the directory /tmp/svnlocalcommit

7 Load the following "svnpush.sh" script onto the server's /usr/bin directory:

##################################################
#!/bin/bash

VERSION="$1"
DUMPFILE=svndump$VERSION

# create a dump file
svnadmin dump [svn repo path] -r $VERSION --incremental > $DUMPFILE

# push it to remote SVN server
scp $DUMPFILE <user>@<server>:/tmp

# load commit on remote SVN server
ssh <user>@<server> /usr/bin/load_commit.sh $DUMPFILE
exit

##################################################

8 Load the following "load_commit.sh" onto /usr/bin directory:

##################################################

#!/bin/bash

DUMPFILE="$1"

svnadmin load [svn repo path] < /tmp/svnremotecommit/$DUMPFILE

##################################################

9 Load SvnAgent program as the synchronization user

10. Kick off SvnAgent, you're all set.

So here's how it works:

1. Someone makes a commit, the post-commit script will create an empty file named with the rev # under /tmp/svnlocalcommit directory and return, this will be very fast since it's done locally.
2. SyncAgent scans the svnlocalcommit directory every 5 seconds, once a new file is found it'll invoke the svnpush script
3. The svnpush script dumps the local commit (also to /tmp/svnlocalcommit folder but with a "svndump" prefix)
4. The svnpush script then scp the local dump file to the remote server (under remote server's /tmp/svnremotecommit directory)
5. Once scp is successful, the script then commits the uploaded file remotely and returns
6. The SyncAgent daemon receives the return status from the svnpush script
7. If the status was successful, the SyncAgent removes the empty file from svnlocalcommit and sleeps until next scan
8. If the status returns failure, the SyncAgent goes to sleep and try again next time.

Not that hard isn't it?

This works well when commits are coming from one way at a time mostly - namely, one teams works actively while the other team isn't.

Ah, want a copy of the SvnAgent source code? Email me here: k e n 0 6 2 4 7 0 0 [ a t ] g m a i l . c o m

Now get back to work you slacker!

After my fanscinating Cuba trip, I had to recap some of my previous "Cuban experiences". Among them is watching the Buena Vista Social Club.

I've watched the movie 7 years ago, which seemed like an eon. I had to admit not much of it was left in my memory, except it's about some old singers singing Cuban folk songs. I wasn't even into photography back then, so nothing visual really registered.

Now years had passed, I've learned to look at things differently and learned to embrace other cultures, watching the movie again is like feeling a fresh breeze in a hot summer day. All the familiar streets of La Habana, the Malecon, the beautiful yet run down buildings, the classic cars... and the music. I remembered it clearly like it just happened last night, we were walking on the dark cobble-stones street of Simon Bolivar, searching for live music, and there he is, a tall, slim young man carrying a gitar walking towards Plaza Mayor, where everything happens in the vivid nights of Trinidad. We followed the man into an outdoor bar, sit down at a front row table, and the joyful rythms of Chan Chan started flowing in the air...

Sitting in my living room a few weeks later, I can't help but feeling nostalgic already: watching the Buena Vista Social Club perform the same song in Amsterdam and Carnegie Music Hall, the wave shattering on the bank of Malecon, the serene garden where Manuel "Puntillita" Licea played dominos. And all the artists - humble, honest and optimistic - just like every Cubano we met all over the country...

I am a little sad to learn that some of the artists had passed in the past few years. On the other hand, I am happy that the movie had done justice to their musical talent and given them the credit they've long deserved. To me, the Buena Vista Social Club had become another piece of my memorable Cuban expereiences.

It was one of my smartest decisions made in 2006: didn't purchase a season ski pass for this season. The incredibly warm winter in New England marks a miserable year in every ski resort's year book. As a result, I didn't hit the slopes until the 21st of January, and it's in Colorado!

Been riding in New England all the time, I feel like a frog at the bottom of a well, as the Chinese saying puts it, after I came to the Summit County for the first time: the powder is soft and thick, the trails are wide with lots of variations, the crowd is few, the scenery is beautiful, I already start to miss the breathtaking view at the top of the bowl in Vail, the tricky but thickly powdered tree paths in Breckenridge and the wild and wide rides in Keystone and we still have 2 more days to explore! Life is good and I have no complain.