Westbury Court Gardens

I have to admit that I find it hard to get as excited about this visit as Joanna did. She went there with Christopher today (while I was hard at work for Queen and Country). There was a garden with some old trees, some not so old trees, a rectangular pond, some ducks, and a lot of grass. Had to be there, I guess.

Raspberries

Some might say that Richard Branson is good at making raspberries - at conventions, or politicians, or competitors, or even dress sense. But as regular readers will know, I signed up to Virgin Wines a little while ago. I think cases come every two months or so, although I declined a recent offering, so I've just taken delivery of my second batch. It gives me a chance to waffle about some that I've tried recently.

There have been lots that I haven't recorded, so although I may have been lazy in my writing-up, I haven't been quite so lazy in the actual tasting.

The first that stands out in recent memory is the 2005 Peter Lehmann "The 1885 Shiraz". It had, compared to all the recent French vins, a most intense plummy flavour, with some liquorice, and a very long, lingering finish. Despite this length, the wine seemed to disappear remarkably quickly.

The next one that deserves purchasing again was a Casillero del Diablo Reserva Privada. I can't remember the year. It didn't have the intensity and length of the Peter Lehmann, nor so much of the fruit, but the liquorice was even more dominant. Casillero del Diablo seems to be the Jacob's Creek of Chilean wine - available everywhere. The regular ones are generally acceptable, but the reserve ones in each case seem to be worth paying for.

Today, we tried the 2007 Meillade from Chateauneuf du Pape. Mr Branson vicariously alleges (through his VW staff) that this is a sexy Australian-style full-and-fruity red. Must be one of those sensitive new age types of sexy, or perhaps waifish, rather than full-bodied & voluptuous. There's barely any depth, and the only fruit is raspberry. I would have been hard pressed to call it a Shiraz (or Syrah) - it tastes more like a light & berry-ful Pinot Noir. But, having said all that, it's not objectionable. Just like red cordial isn't objectionable, maybe...

Getting started with Git on Windows

Although I'm familiar with and like subversion, I need to find a distributed source code management system, and spent some time looking into them, particularly using the info in the wikipedia article. The three most interesting systems seem to be git, bazaar, and mercurial. I decided that git would be the most mature, as it is used for managing the linux kernel development.

I had a few issues getting started, so I thought I'd describe them here in case it helps anyone else.

I decided to download the 1.5.5 preview from Google Code. The installation was very simple, so time to start working through the tutorial-ish manual.

The first step was to clone an existing repository. I decided that I'd want the eclipse plugin, so I chose egit. After trying a few variations of the checkout command, I decided that my proxy/firewall was a problem, and looked into how to get around this problem. It was unlikely that my proxy would allow the git:// protocol, so I looked into using http.

In the Git Bash, I tried using
$ git config --global http.proxy proxyname:port
but it didn't work. So I tried
$ git config --global http.proxy http://proxyname:port
that didn't work. I tried
$ export http_proxy=http://proxyname:port

and this time it (the clone operation) did work. The clone command that I used was
$ git clone http://repo.or.cz/r/egit.git egit

Note the "/r/" in the URL there. The egit page has slightly different paths:
http://repo.or.cz/w/egit.git - the home page
git://repo.or.cz/egit.git - the git: URL
http://repo.or.cz/r/egit.git - the http: download URL
I don't know if that's a standard feature of these systems, but it did slow me down!

Then, I went on to the second subsection of the manual, "How to check out a different version of the project". The command
$ git checkout -b new v0.2
failed with:
error: Entry 'org.spearce.egit-feature/.settings/org.eclipse.core.runtime.prefs' not uptodate. Cannot merge.

After some searching, I found roughly what this message means. Noticing a suggestion elsewhere in the manual advice to try gitk, I discovered that there were "Local uncommitted changes, not checked into index" as suggested by the error. But I hadn't made any changes. I remembered the Important Compatibility Notice from the installation procedure warning me of an autocrlf issue that had changed recently. The diff aspect of gitk didn't really demonstrate whether this was the issue, but I tried removing the repository, setting core.autocrlf false, and then cloning it again. This time, gitk didn't identify any local uncommitted changes, and creating a new branch worked.

It's a bit hard to work out how the config business works. At the moment, if I try to find out all the config settings, I get a list that includes two values of core.autocrlf:
$ git config -l
core.symlinks=false
core.autocrlf=true
color.diff=auto
pack.packsizelimit=2g
gui.recentrepo=C:/Documents and Settings/jyesberg/...
http.proxy=http://proxyname:80
core.autocrlf=false
core.repositoryformatversion=0
core.filemode=false
core.bare=false
core.logallrefupdates=true
core.symlinks=false
remote.origin.url=http://repo.or.cz/r/egit.git
remote.origin.fetch=+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
branch.master.remote=origin
branch.master.merge=refs/heads/master

I tried the following commands to remove the first line, but none seemed to work:
$ git config --global core.autocrlf false
$ git config core.autocrlf false
$ git config --unset-all core.autocrlf
The final command removed the second variable, but not this sticky first one. But perhaps the first one isn't being used. I decided to edit (with vi) the global config file (.gitconfig) directly in case it was a safer option. To be sure that I was in the right directory, I started a new Git Bash (from the Start menu). That first value is still there, but seems not to be a problem.

I thought it would be nice to make some mods to the manual to provide this advice, and (after guidance from the mailing list) it seems I need to git git. Unfortunately, although
$ git clone http://www.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
always seems to start, and go through dozens of gets and walks, it always seems to fail, either by freezing or with an error message:
error: Unable to find 1f405709e7341c27e20c0159fb7c17efbf85975c under http://www. kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
Cannot obtain needed blob 1f405709e7341c27e20c0159fb7c17efbf85975c
I'm not sure how to get past this barrier - maybe I'll get some help from the list.

Update:
From my home computer, I was able to git git with http, so perhaps it had been the work proxy that had been causing (or contributing to) the problem. Out of interest, I also tried using the git protocol, and it was at least twice as fast (approx 2 mins instead of 5 mins) although I wasn't timing carefully.

Trooping of the Colour

As representatives of a foreign government, we were advised that there was a good chance of any application to a Royal Event being successful. Joanna applied for a ticket to the Trooping of the Colour rehearsal, and was duly rewarded.

She and Helen left on Friday afternoon to catch a train to Paddington. There was a little messing around when the train was cancelled, but no real problem. They found themselves at their hotel in St James Park that evening.

On Saturday, they walked through the park to Horseguards, and watched the rehearsal. She was impressed with the precision of the drill, and the different uniforms - even some golden armour. Afterwards, lunch was at Downing St (not inside). The afternoon walk took them past Buckingham Palace, Constitution Hill, Wellington Arch, and then Wellington's Apsley House. Then along Knightsbridge, through Harrods, to the Natural History & Science museums, before catching the tube back to the hotel, where there was a pub dinner. Afterwards, another walk past Westminster Abbey & Palace, a look at the London Eye, and back home.

Sunday was a day for visiting the Zoo. Tube to Baker St, & a walk through Regent's Park (carefully noting the impressive roses in the Queen Mary's Gardens). All the animals except the penguins & butterflies were asleep or otherwise invisible, but the bouncy castle and carousel were fun. Then the waterbus on Regent's Canal down to Little Venice, right next to Paddington Station, where the train was waiting to take them home.

News from Moorlands Road during the weekend included Christopher's swimming experience (he actually liked it this time - even being thrown in!) and Stephanie's & Dad's bike path trip to the shops.

Canterbury Tale

I went (with 3 colleagues from work) to visit the PERMIS team at University of Kent at Canterbury. Although it was a long drive each way, the visit was very interesting and I'm optimistic that it could be the beginning of some very exciting work. We had a very pleasant dinner at Cafe de China, which I'd recommend to any visitors to the city.

I also squeezed in a quick visit to the Cathedral before Friday's meeting, but I don't think I can cross it off my list since there was no Choir at 8am.