January 4, 2008 – 6:23 pm
(Regarding this thread.)
Get the book, and don’t go past Chapters 1 and 2 at first (technically, you may want to hit the first part of Chapter 5 long enough to convince yourself that you should use fsfs as the repository backend format). Gloss over anything involving resolving conflicts, merges, branches or anything else involving multiple people.
Get a SVN GUI. I’d guess RapidSVN and SCPlugin for Finder would be the first choices.
Once you’re done for the day, rsync or copy your repository off to another disk or system.
Consider setting up ViewVC if you want pretty graphs and charts of what changed when. It’s not the only option in that field, though.
I understand your pain. I do version control in fits and starts on two major areas of work: the configuration management directory tree for my servers, and for LaTeX templates for my university’s thesis/dissertation formats. Nobody else has write access to these areas, but knowing I can go back and track changes on a basis as fine-grained as my commit schedule is nice. I haven’t really used it all on any other areas of work. And getting others to use it on multi-developer code projects has been like pulling teeth. I’m about ready to swear off supporting any code that can’t be tracked, but I doubt I’ll be able to.
December 30, 2007 – 10:57 pm
Whoo, I’m on links #8 and #9 if you search Google for Mike Renfro. Not this site, mind you, but a couple of others I either maintain or would otherwise lead people toward my current sites. Granted, it’s not a terribly common name, but on quick perusal of the first few pages of results, there’s:
- the former NFL wide receiver from the 1970’s and 1980’s
- me
- a graphic designer (definitely not me: I don’t do art, and I think web pages should contain text)
- a bunch of people listed on LinkedIn who don’t show up on Google
- a Bassmaster competitor from Indiana
We’ll see if anything changes now that I’ve submitted this site to Google. (2008/01/03: #6 and #8 now. I desperately need a better hobby. 2008/07/19: #4 and #5. Still need a better hobby.)
Granted, there’s already a Wordpress adaptation of Andreas Viklund’s Andreas02 theme, but I wanted to try to adapt it to the sandbox as well. So any visual unpleasantness you see in the next few hours or days is probably due to that work.
Update (9:31 PM): looks like I’m more or less done, except that the navitabs at the top of the logo look horrible in IE7. Since it’s a modification to sandbox, you can find most everything I did in the linked style.css, but there are a few things I had to edit in other places to have the “blog” page be the list of posts, the Wordpress home page be a static page, and have the navitabs highlight accordingly. I’ll collect up the full set of changes later and post them.
December 22, 2007 – 2:48 pm
Yesterday, our Asus EEE PC 8G came in. Wow. The original idea was to spend most of the evening/weekend reinstalling it with Windows XP so the wife’s got something to write reports and run SPSS on when she heads back to school in spring. But honestly, we’re keeping Windows off of it for now. The included Asus-modified Xandros (which is itself a modified Debian) OS appears to be pretty bulletproof. It’s already got Firefox, Adobe Reader, and OpenOffice on it, which she was going to need anyway. After a bit of fiddling around, I got GNU R loaded on it, so that should suffice for some of the SPSS needs (the rest can be handled in a university lab).
The good: $500 base price for a laptop with 1GB RAM, a 900MHz Celeron CPU, and 8GB of solid-state disk. Plug in a flash drive, it works. Plug in a USB keyboard, it works. Hook it up to the wireless network, notice after several hours that you’re entering a WEP key as a WPA key, and it works. Connected to a printer shared from my Windows desktop, it works. 2 lb weight, no moving parts. It’s not ruggedized per se, but there’s just not a whole lot to break. Tiny:
The not as good: for me, at least, the keyboard is too small. And the Adobe Reader print dialog is taller than 480 pixels, making it difficult to find the actual Print button at the bottom.
November 11, 2007 – 4:26 pm
Perhaps someone can explain this:
Ok. I understand the symbols for hunting, fishing, and general nature-stalking with binoculars. But what could the question mark indicate?
Since I didn’t want to junk up my work blog with things unrelated to actual work I do there, here we are. Things I’d probably talk about:
- Family stuff
- The cats
- World of Warcraft
- Funny stuff
- Political or other things not suited for an institutional-looking blog.
Code test:
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## This program computes the average of a set of experimental data
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## values.
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total = 0.0
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count = 0
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x = input("")
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while x!=0.0:
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total = total + x
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count = count + 1
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x = input("")
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average = total/float(count)
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print "THE AVERAGE IS %6.2f" % (average)
Math:
