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.