1 Oct 2005 ncm   » (Master)

I've taken the plunge, using Monotone 0.22 in daily work. I maintain two directory trees, one for CVS updates, and another for my own work. Whenever I update from CVS in the one, I commit the changes to that branch, "propagate" them from there to the head of my working branch (merging as needed), and then update my working tree from that. I only need to do that (1) to produce a patch to send or to check into CVS, to make sure I haven't broken somebody else's stuff, or (2) when I want to use what somebody else wrote recently. In the meantime I check in my own stuff whenever the mood strikes, generally at mealtimes.

Another good picture, and a rhetorical question: for those of you with metalwork experience, does that look to you more like a sloppy welding job, or geography (ok, areography)? I found it interesting that the amount of energy released in an ordinary terrestrial lightning bolt, if not mostly-consumed heating air and rain on the way down ("boom!") would suffice to excavate an 85-foot crater. Of course ad-hoc crater-excavation techniques might not be very efficient; but even at 1%, to find hilltops and fields perforated with dozens of 8-foot craters after each thunderstorm would be spooky. (Thank you, air.)

I was surprised to find that the only persuasive evidence I'd encountered that the cosmic red-shift really is recessional (supernova type 1a decay curves) turns out to be cooked: it only implies recession if you start by assuming it implies recession.

wingo: We must be at an exceedingly refined stage of Free Software development when the software developer's itch derives from embarrassment over his housemates' impressions of Free consumer-appliance emulations.

jds: That was the most poignant and funny posting I've read since whytheluckystiff's guide to Ruby.

robsta: Mozilla is a poster child for misuse of C++. As a rule, three levels of inheritance suggests chaos; five levels, exposed, proves it definitively. A little inheritance goes a long way. Most of what people use all that "O-O gook" (as Stepanov calls it) for is more cleanly, safely, and less intrusively done with templates. That the Mozilla people are still afraid of them says way more about them than about the language. (That goes double for exceptions, BTW, but only in C++. Without destructors, exceptions make the problem worse.)

wlach: Automatically-generated usage messages stink. Any program worth writing at all is worth a thoughtfully organized and presented usage message.

robocoder: Danger! Danger! Linksys routers absolutely stink if you need connections to last more than ~12 hours. The only exceptions are the ones you can reflash with third-party Linux (WRT54Gx, for various x), and then only after you do.

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