a blodg

so, some fun and kerfuffle with firefox shortcuts and svn today! blodgett have made two happy discoveries which it record here for the future oh-so-interested parties.

1) since version 1.6 (now celebrated its 2nd birthtag, much like blodgett), subversion’s web interface properly support viewing old repository versions by appending “?r=[old-revision]” to URL, where [old-revision] are the version you want to see.

(supports also the peg argument for convoluted file histories, see here http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn.advanced.pegrevs.html and here http://subversion.apache.org/docs/release-notes/1.6.html#historical-uris for detail)

2) blodgett, being ever lazy, wished to use nifty firefox keyword bookmark/shortcut to access this. unfortunately svn web client not handle neatly the url “[repo]/?r=”, but “[repo]/?” work fine. so blodgett’s shortcut need to pass whole revision string “r=[n]”. blodgett’s accustomed method for this is to put “%s” into bookmarked url where shortcut text goes, but this makes firefox url-encode shortcut string, so equals sign “=” get converted to “%3D”. this definitely not desired outcome, as svn want “r=34”, not “r%3D34”. understandable.

happily this eventuality are accounted for here: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches#Creating_bookmarks_with_keywords. simply use “%S” in bookmark url for unescaped/unencoded shortcut text.

summary:
blodgett’s bookmarked svn url are now “[repo address]/?%S”, with shortcut keyword “svn”. if blodgett type “svn”, it gets latest repository revision for browsing. if blodgett type “svn r=34” it get repository as at revision 34 for browsing. neat and tidy!

blodgett was having an irritating problem, could not watch dvds: preamble-y things would play, but xine etc. couldn’t access anything from title menu onwards. it would say

the source can’t be read. maybe you don’t have enough rights for this, or source doesn’t contain data

all libdvd* stuff up to date, but it would say

libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_1.VOB at 0x00004436
libdvdread: Error cracking CSS key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_1.VOB (0x00004436)!!

after some searching, blodgett discovered this sometimes happens with region problem. setting regions in xine settings not help at all, so blodgett install package regionset. it said

regionset version 0.1 — reads/sets region code on DVD drives
Current Region Code settings:
RPC Phase: II
type: NONE
vendor resets available: 4
user controlled changes resets available: 5
drive plays discs from region(s):, mask=0xFF

after changing region to ‘2’, it says:

regionset version 0.1 — reads/sets region code on DVD drives
Current Region Code settings:
RPC Phase: II
type: SET
vendor resets available: 4
user controlled changes resets available: 4
drive plays discs from region(s): 2, mask=0xFD

important parts: ‘type’ line now say “SET”, and last line now list region 2 instead of empty list of no regions! also number of available resets gone down, but this ok.

blodgett had to delete /home/blodgett/.dvdcss directory to remove old broken dvd informations.
and then plays! all mended.