I have been a big fan of the Mercurial version control system since migrating the Chord project from CVS almost two years ago. Mercurial offers a comfortable command-line experience, good performance and a module based architecture for expansion. Since graduating, I have had to interface with Subversion and Perforce servers at work and [...]
Sometimes, simple shell scripts can save a lot of time. Recently, I noticed myself waiting for various unit tests to complete by surfing the web: a surefire way to be distracted for more than the time it takes for the tests to complete (or fail). Enter the following script, which I call notify:
#!/bin/sh “$@” status=$? xmessage [...]
If you are in a small business that needs the occasional picture—for record-keeping, documenting events, or including in promotional material—having a digital camera on hand is definitely useful. A friend recently wrote:
We want something that isn’t too complex, but takes decent shots for print and web. Possibly with a good zoom [...]
Twitter provides RSS/Atom feeds of your posts; with these feeds, your posts can be easily tracked in news readers like Google Reader, monitored in aggregators like FriendFeed or SocialThing!, and cross-posted into other blog services such as Tumblr. This idea works fine, except for the fact that Twitter has been co-opted to be not only an ambient intimacy [...]
Public wireless networks can be scary; you never know who might be sniffing your traffic, recording your GMail authentication cookies, or worse. Ideally, all of your net activity should be end-to-end authenticated and encrypted. Fortunately, since this is not always feasible, ssh makes it easy to use an untrusted network by routing your traffic through a trusted end-point. All you need is an ssh [...]
Twitter is the hot messaging platform of choice for many discerning technologists and early adopters. (If you don’t know what Twitter is, check out the CommonCraft intro video for a quick overview.) In short, Twitter provides laconic insight into what people are doing, with a diversity of client interfaces to satisfy (almost) every need. While Twitter is nominally for providing [...]
During the course of a given week, I answer a lot of technical questions. They range from the friend asking, “What laptop should I buy?” to strangers with very specific questions about the source code used in my research. I rather enjoy solving technical questions and taking a line from Jon Udell’s “Too busy to blog?” post, I’m [...]
When switching to a new version control system, it is important to be able to bring along all the past history of a project. There are several tools capable of converting a CVS repository to Mercurial; I have considered cvs20hg, tailor and Mercurial’s own convert-repo. While these all do the conversion, careful testing of the results is necessary. [...]
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