Most of the time the connection has been unreliable with only short periods of decent operation. Mid-week it seemed to be usable, but during weekend it would become annoyingly slow with lots of time-outs and most of DNS lookups not responding.

The Virgin Media service status page was all green, of course. The Virgin Media service status line (0800 561 0061) confirmed it should be all working perfect in my area, of course.

It was not my first time experiencing problems with the Virgin Media broadband. Although, I usually am very patient and easy, but this time it was a bit too much and for a bit too long. So, I poked the Virgin Media support on Twitter. I knew what kind of answer I will receive and I knew it right. Nevertheless, I decided to wait for better times to come and the Virgin Media crossed their fingers for me. (Hmm, perhaps that’s why they don’t answer client’s calls – they keep their fingers constantly crossed on behalf of good service – obviously, it must make it hard to pick up the phone.)

I apologies the Virgin Media team their fingers would probably have gone numb, but it didn’t help anyway.

I am an obedient client and I didn’t want to give any excuses to the Virgin Media. So, I complied and tried to reach the handy support of my broadband provider. Yes, “Oh no!!”

That was on Wednesday, February 27. I thought, let’s give them a few more days. You know, their fingers may be still numb and I perfectly now how difficult it is to make a move with sore muscles, so they may need a bit longish warm-up to get on the problems. So, I decided to wait.

Today, March 3, facing no improvement in the low quality of service provided by the Virgin Media, the assertive part of my brain responsible for the awareness of personal rights started humming Marley’s Get up, stand up, stand up for your right”.

First, I conducted the standard Virgin Media’s pilot client checklist procedure:

1. restart computer
2. reset router
3. make a (proper) coffee and wait
4. check the service status website
5. call service status line
6. if nothing changes, call the Virgin Media tech support

So, I dialled 150 and jumped to the point number 3 from the checklist…

(Un)Fortunately, the Virgin Media support line answered so quickly, that I didn’t have a chance to take photo of my phone with waiting time displayed as more than 31 minutes. Anyhow, I eventually heard the sensuous female voice of the Virgin Media consultant flowing, I sensed, from the local customer service offices 5000 miles away where the level of background noise would never pass the Health & Safety audit in UK.

Despite the all possible sources of the Virgin Media service status being green and happy, the lady quickly with great honesty confirmed: “Yes, you are right, there is something wrong in your area, because we’ve received lots of reports from clients”.

Fair enough, it may take a while indeed to transfer the status updates from locally remote offices 5K miles away. Besides, be honest and no-bullshit company is one of the good business practices.

The lady followed with additional information, that computer says the estimated date of bringing the service back to shape is the 8th of March, 2012. (Today, is the 3rd of March, 2012.)

I politely asked, if I will be granted a reasonable discount on my bill for the fact that for around three weeks I am not provided with 30Mbps broadband service, which I pay for, but with 0.5Mbps or none service. The lady suggested to call the customer service back after the 8th of March and see what’s the situation.

I agreed I will be more than happy to speak to her again, but will I have to wait half an hour again, I asked.

“Yes. I understand, but I can not do anything about. I see on my screen now, we are receiving a lot of calls from clients with problems now. I can’t do anything.

Be honest and no-bullshit company. Remember?

I imagine, if Sir Richard Branson had been receiving services of such a great quality from another company not for three weeks, but for three hours, he would buy that company and shut it down before the ink on his signature on the acquire agreement dries.

Thanks to Virgin Media for the break in the broadband service, so I have this opportunity to sit down, have a coffee (or two), and write something new for my blog. Keep up the good work.

By the way, nice job with the new offer sent to clients at near end of current contracts. First letter included offer for existing clients to switch from 30Mbps to 60Mbps, and because you care you will switch it auto-magically. Yea! I don’t have to do anything and I will have better. “Now, how cool is that!”. Then, second letter arrived in which you increased my monthly bill. You realise you could go green save some trees sending both in one envelope together, don’t you. Uncool!

That’s right, be honest and no-bullshit company.

• Route: #1
• Distance: 8.1 km
• Time: 22 min
• Conditions: prime, cycling under the raising sun, +5C seems to fit into the perfect temperature range for cycling in a city.

I’m testing against “known good” components – the next release branch.

How to run tests of current development line of a library (a Boost library, e.g. Boost.Geometry) against Boost release branch? Assuming all the library development happens in Boost trunk, let’s say in ${DEV}/boost/_svn/trunk where ${DEV} is your base workshop location, do this:

• Checkout Boost release branch

  mkdir -p ${DEV}/boost/_svn/branches/release
  cd ${DEV}/boost/_svn/branches/release
  svn co https://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/branches/release/ .
  

• Stay in ${DEV}/boost/_svn/branches/release
• Build and install Boost.Build v2 from the release branch:

  cd tools/build/v2
  # On Windows, run bootstrap.bat
  ./bootstrap.sh
  # On Windows, I use C:\usr as prefix for my Boost installation
  ./b2 --prefix=/usr/local install
  # Note, this command will also install b2 utility in ${prefix}/bin
  

• Switch Boost.Geometry directories to trunk:

  svn switch https://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/trunk/boost/geometry boost/geometry
  svn switch https://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/trunk/libs/geometry libs/geometry
  

• Run tests and generate full log in file:

  export BGLOG=boost-geometry-test.log
  date > $BGLOG & b2 >> $BGLOG 2<&1 & date >> $BGLOG
  
  # On Windows, I run this with logging this way:
  set BGLOG=%CD%\boost-geometry-test.log
  dateu.exe > %BGLOG% & b2 >> %BGLOG% 2<&1 & dateu.exe >> %BGLOG%
  

  Note, the dateu.exe is renamed Unix utility date.exe installed from GnuWin32 packages. I just like it.

Inspect the log file for test failures, for example by quick check of number of passed tests:

$ grep "\*passed\*" boost-geometry-test.log | wc -l
111

That’s it.

Try this out – it will help a lot.

• Route: #1
• Distance: 8.1 km
• Time:25 min
• Conditions: first minute in the sun, then dramatic change “When the wind blows and the rain feels cold”…and thing layer of ice is forming on my ankles and lower legs, but thankfully with no head in snow; it lasted for the first 3km and was enough to soak me well. Next, cycling in light rain. My shoes had been wet for the rest of the day. Tip: always have spare trousers and socks backed up in your office (t-shirts are obvious).

New year, new challenges, new ideas. My new idea is to start logging cycling commuter chronicles and perhaps similar log for climbing, and running too if my weak strong will allows. Apparently, I have too much time up on my sleeves. Anyway, I’m going to post rather short log messages than detailed blog posts (if Twitter allowed ~300 characters, I’d probably use Twitter).

I have been cycling to work since I got my first bicycle here in London. A lazy weekend during spring 2010, I made a trip to Brick Lane where I spent 90 quid, and a lot more hopes I hadn’t been buying from a thieve, to get my very first fixi. (If anyone in London used to have bright green fixi (though I bought it as black) with white handlebars and black saddle (photo) and it was stolen, then let me know :-) .) I got my bicycle and started regular commute from N1 to WC2R.

Long story short, whenever I have to struggle through the crowds to get into the lifts in Covent Garden Underground Station, I honestly suffer. Cycling is simply great. The only disadvantage is that I no longer have 40 minutes per day to read a book.

Kudos to folks from CycleStreets for the great service useful in optimising cycling routes.

Tip: every time you approach a minicab, imagine you are cycling on streets of one of the large cities in the far east and apply no trust rule whatsoever.

The new list is available at geometry at lists dot boost dot org. It is also mirrored at Nabble as Boost.Geometry.

The old ggl at lists dot osgeo dot org will be wiped out soon.

If anyone experiences any problems with the new geometry at lists.boost.org, please contact me directly.

Big thanks to the OSGeo Foundation for hosting the ggl mailing list and thanks to Boost admins for help with the new server.

Lately, I have found a tool written in Ruby by Eloy Durán. It is git-svn-mirror – a command-line tool that automates the task of creating a Git mirror for a SVN repository, and keeping it up-to-date. I installed Eloy’s tool from Ruby gems and played with it for a while. I really liked it.

I skimmed the Ruby code of git-svn-mirror and found out it makes use of bare repositories in Git. A Git bare repository stores just the contents of the .git directory, without any files checked out around it. Long story short, this script does almost exactly what I need and if there is something it does not do, then I can add it.

I have never written a single line of code in Ruby and I don’t feel like I need to learn it now. So, I decided to port git-svn-mirror to Python. I have just pushed pygit-svn-mirror 0.1 based on git-svn-mirror 0.1 to the repository at GitHub. I have tried to follow command line interface and overall code structure of the original version in Ruby. I have also preserved the original license and Eloy’s copyright.

There is README.md file included with detailed guide on how to use the pygit-svn-mirror. Basically, there are two commands: init and update. For each command, --help option will display required and supported arguments.

For example, creating mirror of Subversion repository of PROJ.4 project at GitHub involves the following commands:

mkdir /path/to/proj4/mirror
cd /path/to/proj4/mirror
git-svn-mirror.py init \
  --from=https://svn.osgeo.org/metacrs/proj/ \
  --to=git@github.com:<USRNAME>/proj.4.git

and to update the mirror from its workbench directory:

cd /path/to/proj4/mirror
git-svn-mirror.py update

or from any folder but with workbench location pointed explicitly:

git-svn-mirror.py update -w /path/to/proj4/mirror

Feedback, bug reports and patches highly appreciated.

Finally, big thanks to Eloy Durán for the original git-svn-mirror written in Ruby.

Today, Pantera noticed mloskot account has been released – someone apparently has got fed up with twitting :) – so I have switched back to my old account name.

It seems Twitter is pretty clever and preserves all my following/followers and status settings. Sweet.

I have very little experience with Boost.Build v2 internals, so the patch may need further improvements. It works in my environment on Windows 7 (64-bit) with Visual Studio 2010 Express Edition installed alongside the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview.

If you want to use Visual Studio 11 as Boost.Build toolset, just put the following entry in your user-config.jam file:

using msvc : 11.0 ;

To verify if the toolset is recognised correctly, use b2 debugging options:

b2 --debug-configuration --debug-building --debug-generator buffer.cpp
notice: found boost-build.jam at D:/dev/boost/_svn/trunk/boost-build.jam
notice: loading Boost.Build from D:/dev/boost/_svn/trunk/tools/build/v2
notice: Searching C:\Windows C:\Users\mloskot C:\Users\mloskot D:\dev\boost\_svn\trunk\tools/build/v2 D:/dev/boost/_svn/trunk/tools/build/v2/kernel D:/dev/
boost/_svn/trunk/tools/build/v2/util D:/dev/boost/_svn/trunk/tools/build/v2/build D:/dev/boost/_svn/trunk/tools/build/v2/tools D:/dev/boost/_svn/trunk/tool
s/build/v2/contrib D:/dev/boost/_svn/trunk/tools/build/v2/. for site-config configuration file site-config.jam .
notice: Loading site-config configuration file site-config.jam from D:/dev/boost/_svn/trunk/tools/build/v2/site-config.jam .
notice: Searching C:\Users\mloskot C:\Users\mloskot D:\dev\boost\_svn\trunk\tools/build/v2 D:/dev/boost/_svn/trunk/tools/build/v2/kernel D:/dev/boost/_svn/
trunk/tools/build/v2/util D:/dev/boost/_svn/trunk/tools/build/v2/build D:/dev/boost/_svn/trunk/tools/build/v2/tools D:/dev/boost/_svn/trunk/tools/build/v2/
contrib D:/dev/boost/_svn/trunk/tools/build/v2/. for user-config configuration file user-config.jam .
notice: Loading user-config configuration file user-config.jam from C:/Users/mloskot/user-config.jam .
notice: [msvc-cfg] msvc-11.0 detected, command: 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\VC\bin\cl.exe'
notice: [msvc-cfg] msvc-10.0 detected, command: 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\bin\cl.exe'
notice: [msvc-cfg] msvc-10.0express detected, command: 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VC\bin\cl.exe'
notice: will use 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\VC\bin\cl.exe' for msvc, condition <toolset>msvc-11.0
notice: [msvc-cfg] condition: '<toolset>msvc-11.0/<architecture>/<address-model>', setup: 'call "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\VC\vcv
arsall.bat" x86 >nul
...

and look for the following message reported:

notice: will use 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\VC\bin\cl.exe' for msvc, condition <toolset>msvc-11.0