fredrikholmstrom.com

A man flying in a hot air balloon suddenly realizes he’s lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts to get directions, “Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?”

The man below says: “Yes, you’re in a hot air balloon, hovering 30 feet above this field.”

“You must work in Information Technology,” says the balloonist.

“I do” replies the man. “How did you know?”

“Well,” says the balloonist, “everything you have told me is technically correct, but It’s of no use to anyone.”

The man below replies, “You must work in management.”

“I do” replies the balloonist, “But how’d you know?”

“Well”, says the man, “you don’t know where you are, or where you’re going, you expect me to be able to help. You’re in the same position you were before we met, but now it’s my fault.”

“Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day. Teach that person to use the Internet and they won’t bother you for weeks”

I’ve been using Dia for ages, but it always had this annoying “feature” that the drawing controls and the drawing window would be in two different GUI windows, here’s a pic:
In theory this sounds great as you can move the windows around separately, in practice it sucks. They finally adopted a tabbed approach with everything in the same window:
And there was much rejoicing.

1. Walk out.
2. Go up to a person that looks busy.
3. Talk to the person, and follow him/her.
4. If the person walks through a door that can be locked, make sure you get your foot in.
5. Continue talking to the person.
6. If the police shows up, follow them instead.
7. Talk to the police.
8. Follow the police.
9. If the police walks through a door that can be locked, make sure you get your foot in.
10. If you get locked into a room, wait.
11. Go to 1.

I’m listening to stackoverflow podcast #52 and Joel Spolsky just gave the best explanation of the difference between the Subversion / CVS generation of version control and the new Mercurial / Git / Distributed Version Control, the important part is bolded.

So this is why everybody is abandoning those version control systems that are of the Subversion generation and they’re moving to Mercurial and Git, and, to a lesser extent, the other distributed systems. There’s something that took me a while to understand about Mercurial, but fundamentally Mercurial is – Mercurial thinks of the world as a list of changes, and Subversion thinks of the world as a list of different versions of all your files. And so for Subversion to figure out where you are on a branch to do the merge, all it can do really is do a diff and say ‘well, I don’t know what happened, but the following things – we’re different from you guys in the following ways’, whereas Mercurial has this sort of added info of all the steps that were taken and all the transformations that were done, so it basically has more information to use in the merge and making the merge successful.

So my last host crashed, after about two months of trying to get my posts back I managed to get *some* of them back at least, but the ones requiring files and images from the old host are useless since I couldn’t save any of the uploaded content.

I also changed my domain since I got my first+lastname under .com after about two years of waiting. Anyway, I’ll pick up blogging soon again.