As you might know, I am having driving lessons since a few months. My instructor strongly advised me to take care of my theory certificate as soon as possible, because that would help in my normal driving lessons. So, even though I have only had ten-ish driving lessons, I had my first try on a theory exam this afternoon.

I had a high goal to meet: When Brenda took here theory exam, she passed with 0 wrong answers. So, my mission was simple yet not so easy: To pass with -1 wrong answers.

I arrived there 45 minutes early (which is quite unusual for me, but everyone kept saying that I should be really, really on time), so I did some more exam practicing while I waited. Interestingly enough, there were absolutely no bicycle parking places at the exam center. I usually hate places that take care of cars only, but I found in particularly peculiar for a place where almost all visitors will not have a driving license (by definition).

Anyway, I tried my best to answer the questions correctly and not accidentally get caught cheating. It's not that I was actually cheating, but the women that sat next to me was totally nervous and sounded a bit desperate, she asked me for an answer for one of the practice questions. I managed to look straight ahead and smile at the surveillant often enough to get to the end of the exam.

After the exam, after a stupid ten minute waiting period (after all, they could have shown me my results immediately after the last question on the tiny display on the answering terminal), the surveillant passed me my results sheet. She confused me by telling me I failed, which turned out to be a mistake on her parted. I had passed the exam with exactly 0 wrong answers, meaning I had indeed failed to improve on Brenda's result. Turns out it is actually impossible to have -1 wrong answers, even though I made up an extra question myself at the end of the exam...

I'm using subversion to manage code for Brevidius, the company I work for. In the code, I use doxygen to document the code. Because I do not care to regenerate the documentation after every change I make, I use subversion's post-commit hook to regenerate the documentation on every commit.

Because the generation of documentation takes long, I added a & to the call to doxygen-post-commit-hook in my post-commit file. This was supposed to put the doxygen generation in the background, so my svn client wouldn't take so long for every commit. This didn't work at all.

The command was properly backgrounded (any commands I put after the call to doxygen-post-commit-hook were executed quickly), but ps aux --forest showed that although doxygen-post-commit-hook was indeed no longer a child process of post-commit, post-commit was now a defunct process.

It turns out that just backgrounding the command is not enough, one should also redirect inputs and outputs (perhaps not all three, but that works at least). So, calling doxygen-post-commit-hook is now:

/home/data/svn-hook-scripts/doxygen-post-commit-hook "$REPOS" "$REV"
    "classbased cms/Doxyfile" "/var/www/doxygen/Brevidius" < /dev/null >
    /dev/null 2> /dev/null &

This issue is also referenced in an subversion mailing list, though not directly.

For those who are interested, here is the doxygen-post-commit-hook too.

#!/bin/sh

# Arguments are REPOS, REV, DOXYFILE, OUTPUT_DIR, in that order. DOXYFILE is
# the path inside the repository (no leading /).

REPOS=$1
REV=$2
DOXYFILE=$3
OUTPUT_DIR=$4

TMPDIR=/tmp/doxygen
EMPTYFILE=$TMPDIR/empty

svn export file://$REPOS -r $REV $TMPDIR
echo > $EMPTYFILE

cd "`dirname "$TMPDIR/$DOXYFILE"`"

echo -e \
"CASE_SENSE_NAMES=YES\nOUTPUT_DIRECTORY=$OUTPUT_DIR\nHTML_HEADER=$EMPTYFILE\nHTML_FOOTER=$EMPTYFILE" \
| cat `basename "$DOXYFILE"` - | doxygen -

rm -r $TMPDIR

Last weekend I returned from my bicylcling vacation through the northern part of the Netherlands together with Brenda. She put up a nice report about our tour, with nice pictures. The tour took us through Overijssel, a bit of Germany, Groningen and even a small part of Friesland! We encountered a lot of nice water, bridges and even a few locks. In Dokkumer Nieuwe Zijlen we also saw Teerling, one of Euros' sailing ships.

Also last weekend, we celebrated Brenda's birthday, at her place in Enschede. Most of the visitors were her family, mixed in with my mother, stepfather and brother. Not a combination that happens often (or at all, before), but it went pretty well.