Graduate Student Life Is So Hard

This weekend was just miserable.  On Saturday morning I barely managed to roll out of bed, just to have the bright sunshine outside scorch my poor eyeballs.  After recovering my site I had to slip into my SCUBA thermals at go to ten-mile point, where I jumped into the frigid north pacific because the tides were just right (current table).  As you may expect from a lousy site like ten-mile the dive was just dreadful and I barely escaped from the dreadful critters lurking in the ocean down there! On top of that all the cheerful folks from the UVic SCUBA club had the audacity to praise all the "life" they found in the ocean.  After finally hauling my under-appreciated bum out of the water we decided to go to Smugglers cove for a beer.  If you know me at all you probably figured out how much I dislike alcohol in general and beer specifically ...

As if all that wasn't enough I just had to run into the folks from the AquaSoc at UBC who had just returned from that windswept waste known as Race Rocks.  They twisted my arm into going out to ten mile again with the the next day, why I agreed to that I still don't know.  But let me return to things at hand:  after all that diving that dreadful rogue Ian called me up and forced me to go for a sail in Cadboro Bay.  Again I had to deal with the sun burning my retinas and the freezing wind chilling me to the core.

In conclusion I hope I convinced you how life as a grad student out here is just not worth it, why am I even bothering to tell people about all this ;-)

Now, taking off my cynicism hat, it's too bad that the UBC folks caught a bad day out at race, I hope that the diving at ten-mile made up for it at least!

Reverting With git Subversion Style

I was already familiar how to reset the entire head of my git repositories to a desired state, but what if I needed to revert the changes in one specific file which I had managed to bugger up while keeping all my other changes.  The only reason this was hard because my brain is still slightly working in subversion language:

git checkout filename

so just check out the version of the file you want.  This will land you in trouble if you have a banch with the same name as the file, in which case you can do:

git checkout -- filename

January 2012 GRC Meeting

Since I am active around UVic as the CUPE (local 4163 comp 1) Exec and GSS Rep I figured I may as well cross post the updates from those activities to my blog.  Yeehaw!  Now I will be ignored by that many more people!  Anyway here is my latest GSS update:


Are you interested in running the GSS for 2012-2013?  The nominations  for the executives are open (also it pays better than a TA and looks great on a CV).  Maybe you want to learn more about how the University is governed?  In that case run for the University Senate or Board of Governors (I can get you some more information about the application process if you are interested but the deadline is tomorrow!).


Are you about to graduate and are wondering how to deal with the real or academic world out there?  You may be interested in pathways to success a two day seminar (next one is over spring break) on how to find and score a job.


Finally did any of you apply for (and possibly get) a GSS travel grant?  Could anything be changed to make the grants better?  Was there anything particularly awesome about the grant?


If you made it this far you must really be interested in the GSS so let me tell you that we are also working together with UBC and SFU to get the provincial government to create a BC provincial graduate student fellowship program.  We formed a committee with members from the other universities, I'll keep you posted :)


Last but not least: Sarah is considering taking over for me as the Astro & Physics GSS Rep, so the next email of this sort may be coming from her.  The GSS Rep is dead.  Long live the GSS Rep!

Autotools

If you want to get started using autotools for you build environment may I suggest this excellent article?

Indexing Non-Standard Include Paths In Eclipse

If you are using software packages such as ROOT which tend to be installed in non-standard paths but still want your Eclipse IDE to index them (for handy code completion features and the like) here is how to do it.  Unfortunately I have not found a way to include these globally (please comment if you have such a solution) but for each project separately.  Right click on your project, hit Properties and select Paths and Symbols under C/C++ General (for C/C++ code).  In the Includes tab add the extra path for the appropriate language.

Git: New Repository From A Subdirectory

Suppose I have this repository layout to start with

XYZ/
    .git/
    XY1/
    ABC/
    XY2/

And I want a new repository for ABS only, here is the excellent answer from over at stack overflow.

You want to clone your repository and then use git filter-branch to mark everything but the subdirectory you want in your new repo to be garbage-collected. To clone your local repository:

 $ git clone --no-hardlinks /XYZ /ABC

The --no-hardlinks switch makes git use real file copies instead of hardlinking when cloning a local repository. The garbage collection and pruning actions will only work on blobs (file contents), not links.

Then just filter-branch and reset to exclude the other files, so they can be pruned:

 $ git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter ABC HEAD -- --all

Then delete the backup reflogs so the space can be truly reclaimed (although now the operation is destructive). The -- --all keeps the project branches and tags included in the the new repo.

 $ git reset --hard
 $ rm -rf .git/refs/original/
 $ git reflog expire --expire=now --all
 $ git gc --aggressive --prune=now

and now you have a local git repository of the ABC sub-directory with all its history preserved.

Diving the GB Church and Arbutus Island

In September during the club days at UVic i joined the SCUBA and the Starcraft club.  While I have done precisely fuck all about playing Starcraft the over the last month I have been rather active with the SCUBA club.  As a dive master and having recently acquired a truck I am now doing a lot of the driving gear about for the club.  I have also been helping with the classes (Open Water etc taught by the SCUBA instructors there) and teaching some drysuit orientations.  It's been great fun and I have met many great folks out there.

Last week I was rewarded for my efforts in shuffling about gear with a charter out of Sidney.  First off let me thank the great folks from the Ogden Point dive centre for taking us out.  I went for two dives with my friend Alisa (who taught me almost all I know about diving!).  We explore the wreck of the GB Church, doing a little swim through of the bridge and finding the Octo hanging out under the bow.  After that we headed to Arbutus island where we proceeded to find ten (yes TEN!) Octos.  What an awesome day of diving.  And to proove that I am not just making all of this up, Alisa took some video while we were down there, check it out:



GB Church Artifical Reef and Arbutus Island from Alisa Preston on Vimeo.

As you may have guessed, we do like Octopus.