The first prerelease of git-annex was made ten years ago. Taking a look back at 0.01, which I think only I ever used, it had the commands add, get, drop, unannex, init, fix, and fromkey. There were 2600 lines of code in all, which has increased 30-fold.

Later that week, 0.02 added the move command. I've been working recently on fixing a tricky problem with resuming interrupted moves. The move command has been surprisingly subtle to get just right, since it turns out to not be as simple as a get followed by a drop -- numcopies checks that would prevent a drop sometimes need to be relaxed to allow a move. Maybe I've finally gotten it perfect now. Probably not.

Mid October. 2020

What a year!!!

More time at home, doing chores, letting go of old hobbies, re-creating others, and some new.

I’ve learned lately. Tooth pain might be a simple fix. The dentist suspects I grind my teeth. $20 and follow the directions and I have a custom protection from grinding. Fits like a glove too.

Danielle makes oatmeal about once a week. I’ve made bacon in the cast iron skillet (least favorite but I get to see my local friendly firefighters when the fire alarm goes off), in the oven, still pretty good, but still provokes the local VFD, and now, an air fryer. Perfect for 2-3 people.

If you stay open to possibilities, listen to your intuition, there are plenty of opportunities to continue to learn, and also put your skills to work to help the community, large and small. I’m focusing on the local community these days. Lately, its a volunteer gig driving folks to their appointments and shopping. I think I’m last on the list of people to call so I might only do this once or twice ever couple of weeks. Nice, appreciative folks. It gives me a chance to run some errands or catch up on the news while waiting.

Letting Go!

I sold my scooters. They weren’t little whiney scooters, these were highway capable 100 mph scooters (if pressed). But I’m done. Too many folks I knew got hurt or had close calls. And I can’t afford to take chances. My Toyota Prius gets just as good mpg and plenty of options for comfort, safety and entertainment.

New Hobbies! I joined the local Maker Space. People with awesome skills from which I can learn. If I don’t have a tool at home for the thing I’m making, they probably do. I’ve taken classes on 3d printing and graphic design. And more woodworking tools than I could ever afford or store. Fun stuff for me.

Change is good. Challenges make us who we are. Hopefully, learning never stops.

How was your year? What have you let go of? What are you doing new and different? What are you learning?

I've spent two days trying to track down a recently introduced memory leak, or leaks. This was unusually hard because all the profiler could tell me is the memory is "PINNED", but not what allocated it or anything else about it.

I probably should have bisected it, rather than staring at the code and randomly reimplementing things I thought could be pinning memory. Oops.

And there is more memory that the profiler doesn't even show being allocated, which got much bigger with a new toolchain, and I have not gotten to the bottom of that yet.

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This work was sponsored by Jake Vosloo and Mark Reidenbach on Patreon.

Three recent todos have needed a way to introspect the matchers built from preferred content expressions and some command-line options, to determine what information they use. So implemented that today.

With that, it was possible to double the seeking speed of git-annex sync --all when include=/exclude= are not used in preferred content. And the seeking speed of commands like git-annex find --copies=2 and --in remote improved by around 20%.

Today's work was sponsored by Jake Vosloo on Patreon.