Caius Theory

When you upgrade to Mac OS 10.5.6, Mail.app might start crashing a few seconds after starting due to the GPG Bundle.

The solution is to grab the updated version of the GPG bundle – GPGMail_d55_Leopard.dmg

Theres a meme going round the blogosphere/twitterverse recently, so I figured I'd jump on it because there aren't any pictures of me on this blog yet. And there aren't that many in my flickr photostream either actually.

Fullsize Picture

Instructions

1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair… just take a picture.
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
4. Post these instructions with your picture.

I decided to install ubuntu onto my iMac G3450Mhz G3, 768mb ram, 20GB Hard Drive to play around with. Only problem was it would boot so far, then just stop at a black screen. In googling the fix, the blog post that contains the fix is slightly outdated and 100% 404.

Here is the fix, updated for Ubuntu 6.10 Desktop PPC:

1. When the screen goes black, drop to the console

   Control - Option - F2
   

   (if you need to log in use the name ubuntu to log in.)

   $ sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf
   

2. Change the frequencies in monitor section as follows:

   Section “Monitor”
       Identifier “Generic Monitor”
       Option “DPMS”
       HorizSync 60-60
       VertRefresh 43-117
   EndSection
   

3. After the changes then type control-o, return (to accept the filename), then control-x (save and exit nano)

4. Restart X by running the following:

   sudo killall gdm && sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start
   

Much like Rahoul's post on knowing you're on the right path, I had that moment this morning whilst we were discussing a future feature for our control panel.

john: will I be able to superpoke our customers?
john: is that in the spec?
Jeremy: "John made server10 a zombie"
Caius: "server10 zombified server9"
Jeremy: "David has poked server19 19234 times"
john: server16 messaged David "My disk is filling up and I have files I need to put somewhere, please help!"
Caius: "Rahoul ended his friendship with server15"
David: "server02 is now married to server05"
Rahoul: server10 has sent you 12 videos of a fat man eating a cake
David: server11 joined the group "KVM ftw"
Caius: "server16 threw a sheep at server15"
john: server03 joined the group "Centos sucks!"
Caius: "server15 sent an emergency broadcast: physical movement detected"
john: storage03 has logged off
Caius: "x13 flew to the moon 0 times"
john: disk5 in storage02 is now a zombie
Jeremy: disk4 in storage02 is now a zombie
Jeremy: disk3 in storage02 is now a zombie
Jeremy: disk2 in storage02 is now a zombie
john: storage02 was sold on ebay by Jeremy
Caius: "john was sold on brightbox marketplace by storage5"

(In case you don't know, I work for Brightbox.)

Usually for me this happens when I have an existing project and I setup a github repo for it. As part of the setup for the github project, it gives you the commands to run to add the github repo as a remote to my local git repo.

cd existing_git_repo
git remote add origin git@github.com:caius/foo.git
git push origin master

The problem then is you've added the remote account, but the local master branch isn't tracking the remote master branch, so when you try and just git pull it will fail with a message telling you to set the remote refs up.

Julius:foo(master) caius$ git pull
You asked me to pull without telling me which branch you
want to merge with, and 'branch.master.merge' in
your configuration file does not tell me either. Please
name which branch you want to merge on the command line and
try again (e.g. 'git pull ').
See git-pull(1) for details on the refspec.

If you often merge with the same branch, you may want to
configure the following variables in your configuration
file:

branch.master.remote = <nickname>
branch.master.merge = <remote-ref>
remote.<nickname>.url = <url>
remote.<nickname>.fetch = <refspec>

See git-config(1) for details.

The answer is to do what it says funnily enough, and add the remote refs tracking to the config file. The easiest way I've found of doing this is to edit .git/config and add the following at the bottom of it.

[branch "master"]
    remote = origin
    merge = refs/heads/master

Remember to change the branch or remote names if you need to.

Once you've added that to the config you can run git pull on the master branch and it'll do the usual automagical thing and pull the remote master branch changes into the local one!

Updated 2008-11-09

See Ciarán's comment below for an all-inclusive command to do the above.