I have a Patreon page

I created a Patreon page just before leaving for vacation on 2 Aug. The background to this is that while I’m now getting some regular bucks for working on NTPsec, it’s not a lot. Royalties from my books have been dwindling and my wife Cathy isn’t making all that much from legal contract gigs that… Continue reading I have a Patreon page

The Great Beast has met its match

When I built the Great Beast of Malvern, it was intended for surgery on large repositories. The specific aim in view was to support converting the NetBSD CVS to git, but that project is stalled because the political process around NetBSD’s decision about when to move seems to have seized up. I’ve got the hardware… Continue reading The Great Beast has met its match

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On having good form

Sometimes, the best encouragement you can get in a martial-arts class is silence. Once a month my school, which normally teaches a combination of wing chun kung fu and Philippine blade/stick fighting, gets a visit from Sifu Jerry Devone, who teaches pure traditional Wing Chun at a level a bit higher than our Sifu Dale… Continue reading On having good form

Yes, NTPsec is real and I am involved

A couple of stories by Charles Babcock and (my coincidentally old friend) Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols have mentioned the existence of an ‘NTPsec’ project being funded by the Core Infrastructure Initiative as an alternative and perhaps eventual replacement for the reference implementation of Network Time Protocol maintained by Harlan Stenn and the Network Time Foundation. I… Continue reading Yes, NTPsec is real and I am involved

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Categorized as Software

Productive yak shaving

So here’s how my day went…. I started off trying to convert a legacy manual page to asciidoc. Found that pandoc (which could be the target of a whole separate rant, because it totally sucks at translating anything with tables in it) won’t do that. @PUSH… But it will convert DocBook to asciidoc. OK, so… Continue reading Productive yak shaving

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git-weave, a tool for synthesizing repositories from fossil tarballs

Welcome to my first new-project release of the year, git-weave. It’s a polished and documented version of the script I used to reconstruct the early history of INTERCAL five years ago – see Risk, Verification, and the INTERCAL Reconstruction Massacree for the details on that one. git-weave can be used to explode a git repository… Continue reading git-weave, a tool for synthesizing repositories from fossil tarballs

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How to spot a high-quality repository conversion

In my last post, I inveighed against using git-svn to do whole-repository conversions from Subversion to git (as opposed to its intended use, which is working a Subversion repository live through a git remote). Now comes the word that hundreds of projects a week seem to be fleeing SourceForge because of their evil we’ll-hijack-your-repo-and-crapwarify-your installer… Continue reading How to spot a high-quality repository conversion

Don’t do svn-to-git repository conversions with git-svn!

This is a public-service warning. It has come to my attention that some help pages on the web are still recommending git-svn as a conversion tool for migrating Subversion repositories to git. DO NOT DO THIS. You may damage your history badly if you do. Reminder: I am speaking as an expert, having done numerous… Continue reading Don’t do svn-to-git repository conversions with git-svn!

Zeno tarpits

There’s a deeply annoying class of phenomena which, if you write code for any length of time, you will inevitably encounter. I have found it to be particularly prevalent in transformations to clean up or canonicalize large, complex data sets; repository export tools hit variants of it all the time, and so does my doclifter… Continue reading Zeno tarpits

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Sometimes progress diminishes

It’s not news to long-time followers of this blog that I love listening to virtuoso guitarists. Once, long ago in the 1980s I went to see a guitarist named Michael Hedges who astonished the crap out of me. The guy made sounds come out of a wooden flattop that were like nothing else on Earth.… Continue reading Sometimes progress diminishes

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Friends of Armed & Dangerous party

It’s Penguicon 2015 at the Westin in Southfield, Michigan, and time for the 2015 Friends of Armed & Dangerous party. 9PM tonight, room 314. Nuclear ghost-pepper brownies will be featured.

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Penguicon 2015!

I’ve been sent my panel schedule for Penguicon 2015. Building the “Great Beast of Malvern” – Saturday 5:00 pm One of us needed a new computer. One of us kicked off the campaign to fund it. One of us assembled the massive system. One of us installed the software. We were never all in the… Continue reading Penguicon 2015!

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shipper 1.7 is released

I’ve released shipper 1.7. The main new feature in this release id that it now knows how to play nice with repository collections managed by gitolite and browseable through gitweb, like this one.

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