There’s been some interesting stuff in the news recently: A guy traded a red paperclip for a house. This is just pure genius. A funny follow-up on what might result if one started with an iPod. Microsoft mulls offering a web-based productivity package. As pointed out on Slashdot, this certainly isn’t conclusive yet, but even so one [...]
Archive for the 'Software' Category
As Nelly would say, hurrr we go. I’ve tested the script several times in the last few days and all the bugs I’ve come across have been quashed, I’m pleased to say. The trickiest one had to do with something caused by that most evil of Clearcase objects, the symlink. Basically, if you have a symlink [...]
Yay, a response from the Subversion dev mailing list! They pointed me here, which is a pretty good description of the format. I’m not sure I understand why they chose to model it on RFC-822, since it’s not a very efficient format, and also because they don’t adhere to it particularly strictly. The key thing [...]
More on Subversion dump files
11Aug06I posted a message to the Subversion dev mailing list last night asking if there’s a formal spec for the dump format. Fingers crossed, I’ll get some answers. In the meanwhile, I’ve been playing around with dumpfiles generated from my test repository to see how the parser responds to variable whitespace etc. My Clearcase-to-SVN script is [...]
Subversion dump files
08Aug06As one of the last things I do at the bank, I’ve been asked to look at how we might import our vob’s substantial history into Subversion, should we decide to move from Clearcase. It’s a bit of a hairy problem, since Clearcase and Subversion have completely different versioning schemes (eg, changesets vs. status for [...]
If you haven’t checked out distcc do so forthwith. It’s a distributed build tool that sits on top of make and makes C++ builds significantly faster. Our Linux build previously took 23 minutes on a dual-processor Linux blade; with distcc on 19 hosts, it now builds in under 2:30. Clearly not a linear improvement, but [...]
RFC: My theme
04Jul06SAA complained a while back that the colours make things hard to read, and I’ve been meaning to fix them ever since. Obviously, that hasn’t happened yet, and it’s very possible I won’t really bother with it till I have time to implement some of the other things I want to do with it. Probably more [...]
Links courtesy of Slashdot: an interview with Marissa Mayer, and an overview of Google’s successes/failures in launching new products in the last few years. This latter article also features quotes by Ms. Mayer. This is the worst interview with a Google employee I have come across so far — Ms. Mayer comes across as naive and [...]
So here’s something that’s been bugging me for a while: the ORM facility that RoR provides is highly touted, particularly with regards to schema migrations, which are basically handled automatically. Clearly, these are great features for a fast-evolving project, but do they promote a more casual attitude towards reliability in open-source projects?I ask this because [...]
Windows Live Mail Beta
22Apr06Yay, the invite for Windows Live Mail (WLM) Beta finally popped up. I knew I was in for some surprises when I couldn’t click the ‘Join Now’ button in Firefox, but nothing prepared me for what I was see… (cue circus music) Signup was as simple as visiting their webpage and agreeing to the EULA. Signing [...]
Pugs…finally!
13Apr06Yay, I’ve finally managed to start playing around with Pugs, the Perl6 interpreter of choice till Parrot is ready. Performance-wise, it’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be. There’s some really good stuff in the examples/ directory to show off Perl6 syntax. I immediately gravitated to the naive_bayesian directory, which shows a [...]
I’ve had opportunity to become quite familiar with Rational Clearcase in the last year-and-a-bit, including advanced features such as the use of metadata. And having witnessed it first-hand, I have to say that Clearcase’s power is unmatched: it’s an extremely well-considered system that will let you do almost anything you want with it. Still, power is [...]
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