Bad running experience
May 22, 2005
As usual on Sundays, I went for a run today. The difference was that instead of going out in the afternoon or early evening I went out in the morning, as soon as my breakfast had settled. I thought the early run would do me good, but I turned out to be wrong.
The pain on the insides of my shins is back, and this time it means business. It’s a fairly sharp pain in the bone on the inside of both my shins, focused on a spot about 10 cm above my ancle. I had to slow to a walk a couple of times because of it, and this is really starting to bug me. I might have to stop the running for a while and go for a cycle instead. Woe is me; I hate cycling.
To add insult to injury it seems that all of Stanmore’s dog owners picked today to let loose their pe(s)ts in Bentley woods, a public footpath I normally take instead of just following the road. And only one of the dog-walkers had her dog on a leash. Having once been bitten by a well-trained german shepherd, I am naturally suspicious to (and weary of) dogs, so this is not just a minor annoyance to me.
Ditching GNU Arch (aka “Embracing SVK”)
May 15, 2005
I have mentioned earlier that I try to be pragmatic and use the best tool for the job. When it comes to use of revision control systems I have now finally put my money where my mouth is and ditched GNU Arch for SVK. I have imported all projects previously managed with Arch and Darcs into a Subversion repository that I manage with SVK, and removed my public Arch archives.
To help you understand why I decided to make the switch, here are some of the pros for SVK (in no particular order of importance):
- SVK has a much simpler setup
- SVK has much friendlier command line interface
- SVK doesn’t impose rigid naming conventions for projects and branches
- SVK lets you rename (or even remove) projects and branches
- SVK lets plays well with existing tool; its checkouts have no metadata stored in them, so no work-arounds are required to use find, grep, sed and friends
- SVK has much more powerful partial commit
- SVK lets you branch or tag the entire repository in one operation; extremely handy if you have several interdependent projects in the same archive
- SVK has a blame/praise/annotate command
- SVK lets you get all log messages for all changesets that touched a file or directory easily
Here are the main pros for Arch:
- You can serve a read-only Arch archive (repository) over plain HTTP/FTP; no need for Apache2 & DAV.
- It still has patches by yours truly
It should already be clear that the competition is fairly lopsided. SVK still has a few killer features going for it though:
- The SVK camp isn’t trying to rewrite the world, choosing to build on work by others instead
- CLKAO, SVK’s author, sits next to me at work and is a very pleasant person
Update 2006-11-22: part of that last point is now a lie; clkao has gone off to partner with Bestpractical (the makers of RT) so he can spend more time on making SVK wonderful.
Pineapple smoothie
May 14, 2005
I just made a pineapple smoothie. It was very nice. To make one, you need:
- 1 banana
- 1/2 pineapple
- 1/2 cup of orange juice
Put all of it in a blender, mix for a while and there you have it.
