John Beales

I received the book Food Matters by Mark Bittman for Christmas this year, and although at the time I was reading The World is Flat I took a break to read Food Matters. The book really struck a chord with both Joanie and I, so much so that we’ve changed the way we eat, and I started keeping a journal, of my experiences eating like food matters. As of this past weekend, that journal is online, as the new blog Choices That Matter.

Food Matters has a basic message: If we eat less meat and more plants we will live healthier lives and help the planet. We eat way more meat and animal products than we really should, and the production of those products uses a vast amount of our natural resources that could otherwise be used to feed people in hungrier parts of the world or simply not used, reducing our impact on the earth.

Mark takes us through how we, as a North American society, became incredible overeaters and how we’ve been led to believe that we need to eat a lot more than we really do, and he gives us an eye-opeing look at how the food pyramid was built.

Half of the book is recipes, so Food Matters is a short and easy read. In fact, when I was finished reading it, I was surprised that it had ended and left wanting more. Maybe he’ll write a follow-up. I satisfied my hunger for more by reading through all of the recipes in the book.

If you want to lower your environmental impact, loose weight, save money, or do all of the above, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Food Matters and applying its principles to your life.

Note: Most of this entry was written at the end of January, when I finished reading Food Matters. However, I wanted to wait until I had Choices That Matter online before posting.

Want to read it yourself? Get it from one of these places and I’ll receive a small kickback:

Amazon.com (USA) Amazon.ca (Canada) Amazon.co.uk (UK)

A month ago I wrote about setting up an in-house subversion server on the cheap. After a month of using my setup it’s been pretty successful, and I’ve learned even more about subversion.

One of the things I had to do was set up a post-commit hook to publish changes to a webserver.  The site I did this for is still in development, and every commit needed to be pushed to the webserver for testing.  I did this using rsync, (or, since the SVN server is in Windows, cwRsync), and it’s a pretty basic rsync/openSSH setup, but that’s for another day.

What I am talking about today is actually creating the hook script.  What a pain in the ass.  It’s not actually hard to create the script and run it.  On Windows you just write a batch file, debug it, call it post_commit.bat, and drop it in the hooks folder of the repository you want to use.  Sounds simple, doesn’t it?  Why then, when you commit a revision, does Subversion hang, and the script not execute?  Because subversion runs hooks in a near-null environment. This means that nothing is set.  In Windows, not PATH variable.  In everything, pretty much no environment variables of any kind.  So, when you tested your script yourself it ran great because it had lots of support, but now Subversion is running it entirely alone.  Poor, lonely script.

It gets even more frustrating.  Since Subversion is running the script, there’s nothing being printed to the screen to tell you what’s going on, so debugging is like shooting bugs in the dark.

There are a couple of things you can do, however, to make your script work.  First, use an absolute, full, path for everything.  For Windows this means start with the drive letter.  For *nix this means start with a slash.  If that doesn’t work, there’s a trick that allows you to see what’s going on.  You can log the hook’s output to a file.  This way you can find out what’s going on, read the errors, and fix them.  Thanks to Dan Switzer for posting about it. His blog showed up in a Google search and ended my frustration.  In my case, it was some more environment that had to be set up for cwrsync to work properly.

Despite my several green-themed posts I just recently watched An Inconvenient Truth, and was amazed. I really hadn’t realized how much had changed in the past century, it’s incredible.

Now, Al Gore has a new slideshow that he’s presenting, and it’s pretty darn good. Here is the video from Ted:

Found via Earth2Tech.