Neat RSS Feed

sean m. burke has set up an rss feed that tracks the latest rfc's that have been released by the rfc editors.

neat!

Subversion, meet Perl

so apparently people on the perl 5 porters list are starting to toss around the idea of switching from perforce to svn for their repository. to let people play around with that, Andreas Koenig and Rafael Garcia-Suarez have written the Perl::Repository::APC package, which contains scripts to convert the 'All Perl Changes' set of patches into a Subversion repository that holds Perl's revision history.

This is just so damn cool. It's very nice seeing people start to use our work in real applications. (Not that this is the first time that has happened, but it's still nice.)

Writing

so it's amazing how a fairly simple idea for an article turns into page after page of writing once you actually start working on it. i'm just barely getting into the interesting parts, and i'm already hitting my word count. i'm sure i'll be able to streamline things when i go back and edit things, but still, this is turning out to be much longer than i'd anticipated. perhaps i will have to try chromatic's advice about pulling the example code out into a separate page, and linking to it from the article.

Stuff To Think About

chromatic has an interesting entry in his weblog.

it is remarkable how much of my day to day work (and play!) is based on open source software in one way or another. i like to think that i've done my part (and will continue to do more) to give something back, but i know that i, and others around me, could always do more.

stuff to think about.

family employment

so apparently my sister did actually manage to get a job.

or at least she managed to con some company into sticking her name on their website. i'm not sure which ;-)

TAOUP

so i've been reading ESR's The Art Of Unix Programming, and it's pretty interesting, once you get past all the ESRisms.

first off, he continues to push the idea that fetchmail is like the archtypical unix progam, when honestly, it's a minor utility that very few people would even have heard of if he hadn't used it as an example in 'The Cathedral And The Bazaar'.

second, he's very close to the "All The World's A Linux Box" mentality in a lot of places. i mean GCC is fantastically cool and everything, but the statement that "on modern Unixes, the C compiler itself is almost invariably open-source" is just not true. if your definition of "Modern Unixes" means: Linux, the *BSD's, and OS X (plus a few others), then sure, but Solaris, HPUX, Irix, Digital Unix, and the other heavy hitters out there certainly have their own compilers that are closed source and quite expensive.

third, i love the fact that he uses 'Freenet' as an example of a program where java was a good language choice. personally, i never managed to get it to run at all due to JVM issues, and i know i'm not the only one. i've heard several intelligent arguments of why the choice of java actually kept Freenet from becoming widely adopted.

in any event though, the book deserves a read through, as he's right about a lot of things, just take it with a grain of salt.

Rock On!

you know, i should stop being surprised about how cool o'reilly is. i mean i should have expected them to have a web page listing all their animals, right?

It's Over

so training ended today.

i am /so/ glad i don't have to go back to that room tomorrow. i mean i enjoy training, and i shouldn't really complain since the section i was running only lasted 3 days as opposed to the full week the other groups had, but the whole thing is just so exhausting, and i'm really looking forward to getting back to real work.

Fun With Rendezvous

apparently apple noticed that the mod_rendezvous everyone was talking about was actually a pile of crap, and wrote their own. it shipped with the 10.2.4 update, and seems to work quite well. my laptop's web sites now show up nicely in safari.

more info (found via Brian Jepson's Blog).

oh, btw, this is a great example of how apple should have shipped it sooner, so they could have snagged the mod_rendezvous name, instead of losing the namespace land grab and getting stuck with mod_rendezvous_apple, which is much less cool sounding.

Progress

so i got a little work done today on subversion's cancelation support. i've become more and more convinced that this is going to be a pain in the ass, but it's something that has to be done, so i should probably stop bitching about it and just do it already.

anyway, i can now do a repos-repos diff and cancel it part way through via control-c, and it seems to work just fine, so i can at least feel like i've accomplished something.

now i just need to decide if the technique i'm using for this is going to be 'the right one', and if so, start applying it to the rest of the tree, since there are like a million other places that need the same kind of attention as repos-repos diffs.

Huh, I Really Should Have Known All That...

so the reason i like reading stuff written by mjd is that i always learn something new, even when the topic is something that i already (at least theoretically) understand. he's just that good.

(for the curious, the talk that prompted this post was internals of familiar unix commands, which was quite informative.)

Yeah, It Sucked But Was It This Bad?

so i read paul graham's latest paper today, and i'm trying to decide what to think about it. on one hand, i have a great deal of really horrible memories of junior high and high school, and there are a lot of things he says that ring very true. on the other, i don't recall ever hitting the depths he seems to feel were common among the 'nerds' he knew (and i most certainly was a nerd in high school, that's not even a question).

in any event, it's well worth the read, as it raises a lot of interesting questions. i don't know if he finds the right answers, but just asking the questions can be worthwhile in and of itself.

Look! Ben's Famous!

you know, i always thought o'reilly had better taste, but apparently not. ;-)

(amusingly, it appears that they did not fix the typo that i pointed out to ben in the copy he gave me to read. i guess nobody's perfect.)

NetNewsWire 1.0

everyone's favorite rss aggregator for os x just hit 1.0, so for those of you who have a mac, go buy a license, cause it's just too damn cool not to, and those of you who don't have a mac, go buy a mac, then go buy a license, cause it's just too damn cool not to!

Digest::MD5 and Index Rebuilds

so i've been having a problem with MT for a while, where it wouldn't rebuild the index page when a comment was added, and thus the comment counts would never get updated correctly. i never was able to figure out why, and i know other people who have had the same problem...

well, to make a long story short, i finally got motivated and looked around the MT message boards and found this thread. it turns out that it's a bug in the code that determines if the index has actually changed, and it only happens if you don't have Digest::MD5 installed.

Laundry

so i've never been real big on doing laundry.

in my last apartment, despite the fact that i had a washer and dryer less than 20 feet from my bed, i would still put it off until i was down to the absolute last pair of underwear and/or socks (depending on what was running out first).

that said, the fact that i have to go all the way down to the basement to do laundry here is really annoying. one more thing to add to the list of things to look for in a new apartment when i get fed up and move.

for the curious, the list stands at:

• washer and dryer that don't require going down to the basement
• a kitchen that isn't completely cut off from the rest of the apartment. the one i have now feels like a cave or something, the one in my previous apartment was much nicer.
• air conditioning, and heat that i get to control. not having control over the temperature sucks.
• the light switch for the bathroom should be inside the bathroom, not outside. it's a silly little thing, but i keep forgetting where it is and apparently no amount of time here will break me of this habit.

i'm sure there are other little things i'm forgetting, but i've gotta go down to the basement to retrieve my socks, so it'll have to wait until later...

NetFlix

so i'd just like to say that netflix is just the coolest thing ever. i signed up on friday, and i got my first movie in the mail yesterday.

of course, it helps that they seem to have a distribution house in stamford...

but still, the entire idea of their business is just incredibly cool, and i can't believe i didn't sign up sooner.

Neat Photography

i was browsing around o'reilly's oscon 2002 pages, looking for something, and i ended up here.

i just hope that someday i can take pictures halfway near as cool as those ones.

of course, i also hope that someday i'll have done something cool enough to be one of the people in those pictures...

Jury Duty

so i just got picked for jury duty on march 27th, which i wasn't really expecting. of course in retrospect, i suppose i should have been, since i've never been called, and it had to happen sooner or later.

amusingly, the address i have to show up at is 123 Hoyt Street, which is directly across the street from my apartment. at least i won't have trouble finding parking...

META

it looks like the place i get my virtual freebsd server from will be rebooting it on thursday night for some preventive maintenance and a kernel patch, so if you can't connect for a little while that night, that's why.

Spur Of The Moment...

so i just submitted a proposal for a talk about subversion to the o'reilly open source convention, which is taking place this july in portland. i'm not especially excited about going to portland, but a number of subversion hackers are going to be there, and i owe a number of them a beer or ten, so i figure this would be a good excuse to go repay some debts ;-)

i'm not exactly sure what i'll do if they say yes (which seems unlikely, as my abstract was pretty lame), but hey, i'll jump off that bridge if/when i come to it.

Apparently Airlines Can't Make The Law After All

so i ran across this article on a couple of people's weblogs, and now i'm just itching to fly somewhere so i can try it out.

anyone want to take a trip?