Dennis Ritchie day

Tim O’Reilly proposes that we designate the 30th of October as “Dennis Ritchie day”. That works for me. Pass it on. Since my readers are probably wondering: Yes, I knew Dennis slightly. He contributed to The Art Of Unix Programming and was very supportive of the project. He was indeed as pleasant and gracious as… Continue reading Dennis Ritchie day

RFC: Action stamps

This is a request for comment on a convention for uniquely identifying user actions on the Internet. The motivating context was identifying commit changesets in version-control systems in a way independent of the specific VCS. It is anticipated that this format will have uses in recording many other similar sorts of transactions, including actions on… Continue reading RFC: Action stamps

Repositories in Translation

I’ve been doing a lot of repository conversions recently, lifting ancient project histories from Subversion or even CVS into modern distributed version control systems. I’ve written about the technical problems with these conversions elsewhere but they also raise issues that are almost philosophical – and not unlike, actually, the challenges natural-language translators face moving a… Continue reading Repositories in Translation

The Smartphone Wars: Sprint Doubles Down on Dumb

One of my regular commenters points out an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal, Sprint Could Yet Strike Out With iPhone. “SPQR” interprets it as follows: The article states that Sprint’s cost to run the iPhone is $15.5 billion over four years. Unclear to me what that “cost” means from the article. The iPhone… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: Sprint Doubles Down on Dumb

A DVCS migration howto

This is a consequence of my recent adventures in repository conversion – a detailed discussion of how to do a high-quality lift of a CVS or Subversion repo to DVCS-land, how to make both git and hg users happy, and what sorts of good practices to teach to keep things tidy.

Return of the reposturgeon!

reposurgeon 1.2 is shipped. This is the repository editor I wrote about back in 2010; description here, architectural lessons here. I did a conversion of the repo for the Roundup issue tracker, which had a messy history. It started out as CVS, got up-converted to Subversion, and I grabbed it with git-svn. Cleaning up the… Continue reading Return of the reposturgeon!

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Categorized as General

You can tank me later

I have interesting friends. Two of them, who shall remain nameless because it is possible they have let slip to me information that is technically classified, recently told me the best GPSD deployment story since the robot submarine. So, Friend A says “Hey, Eric, did you know GPSD is used in the on-board nav system… Continue reading You can tank me later

The Smartphone Wars: How are the mighty fallen

HP replaces the hapless Leo Apotheker in a manner not very well calculated to reassure anyone that HP has a bright future. Granted, Apotheker’s performance – typified by the now-it’s-dead-oh-maybe-not fumbling around the TouchPad – was dismal. But the new CEO’s first move was to reassure everyone that Apotheker’s cunning plan to turn HP into… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: How are the mighty fallen