The Launching Pad

The picture above is from Wednesday, December 21st, 2005. With the winter sun lower and to the southwest, I thought the back-lit take-off zone at Swami's was particularly beautiful. Watching the wave regularly jack up and over the reef is one of the more amazing sights on a large swell day. 

Swami's, Big Wednesday - Dec. 21, 2005

The day after I took the picture below (at D Street), the bulk of northwest swell slammed into North San Diego county. Swami's picks up these winter NW swells exceptionally well, and the reef can hold wave sizes of triple-overhead plus... as the picture above can attest!

D Street in December

December was very good to surfers in North San Diego county. The above picture was taken on December 20, 2005 at D street in Encinitas. An alternate title for the picture I like is, "A Shoulder to Cry For". 

It's Baseball Season Again

... and our brief period of no youth sport practices and games has come to an end. Between the end of soccer (November or so) and the beginning of baseball / softball (February), Theresa and I enjoy a couple of months when we don't need to be somewhere just about every day of the work week plus Saturdays.

But baseball season is now back, and our rest is over! I am managing my son's AA team this year - the Ogden Raptors (that would be the real team web site, not our team web site). Being a manager is a bit of a handful, especially when about half of my team has never played ball before. Ay carumba!

Still, it is my sincere hope that rushing around and keeping up with the kids helps to keep us young. If you have found this to be untrue, please keep it to yourself as it's what I'm going with for the time being.

My oldest (and only) daughter is playing softball again this year, and thankfully my youngest son is too young to play any sports yet. So, we have softball practices on Monday and Wednesday. Then there are the baseball practices on Tuesday and Thursday. Games will be held on Saturdays and at least one game during the week. Oh yeah!

In all seriousness, I really do believe it keeps us (my wife and I) active. We meet lots of new people, and get to know better those we already know. I love working with the kids, almost all of whom are out there just having a good time playing a team sport. And with the cutbacks in physical education I've seen at our elementary school just over the past 5 years, it is a good way to get the kids outside and off their butts.

"Take me out to the ball game.
Take me out with the crowd.
Buy me some peanuts..."

Well, I gotta get ready for practice now! :>

How to Salvage a Subversion Screw-Up

Yesterday, one of the developers at work attempted to add approximately 14,000 files to one of our subversion (aka svn) source control repositories. The svn server itself resides on a linux box, but the interface the developer used was TortoiseSVN, a Windows explorer based interface that is pretty slick.

Anyhow, the attempted addition of 14K files caused TortoiseSVN to choke. Futhermore, actually checking out the repository with all of these files added takes almost an eternity in developer time, and also causes TortoiseSVN to choke.

So, I knew what I had to do - remove the files added in the offending transaction. Now, how do I do that?

After a bit of googling about and reading through the administration chapters of the svn book, I realized that I would have to dump the repository (minus the offending transaction), and then rebuild a new one.

Looking over Trac (our project management app that integrates nicely with svn and provides bug/ticket tracking etc.), I found that revision 688 was the culprint. Thus, after a bit of trial and error, I finally zeroed in on the following comman (executed from the bash shell on the linux box) to dump the repository as desired:

svnadmin dump [repository path] --deltas --revision 1:687 | gzip > ~/dumpfile.gz

Next, I renamed the old repository directory to [repository path].old, and created a new repository to fill back up.

Finally, the step I was waiting for - loading the new repository up with the good transactions:

gunzip -c ~/dumpfile.gz | svnadmin load [repository path]

After a few minutes of churning away, svn finally notified me that revision 687 was committed, and I am now ready to go! Woo-hoo!