Archive for September, 2007
Tough Question
My girlfriend just asked me what just might be the hardest question I’ve heard all semester;
What do I like better, The Simpsons or beer?
Really liking this git thing
I’ve been a very big proponent of Subversion so far, especially as a tool for collaborating on coding homework. However, I’ve recently been trying out Linus’s git. It’s very nice so far, and really seems to be catching on. Some good points:
- Fast as all hell (much faster than Bazaar, although I haven’t given that the proper attention)
- No need for a central server; hell, no need for an internet connection at all, everything can be done over USB keys or whatnot
- No real need to configure any special server; just install git on it
- Very nice alternative to configuring write-control for all of the users
- Very easy branching and merging, finally! SVN really shows its weakness here
One thing I couldn’t find out how to do is limiting read-access to git repositories without special server configuration. It would be nice if git had support for .htpasswd-compatible authentication, those are pretty easy to use.
Exception handling, decorators, and python
Lately I’ve been working on a project that has me using DBus a lot. After trying to figure out how to work DBus with C, and seeing how easy it is to do in Python, we figured we’d try to use embedded Python to do this. Fortunately, it’s very simple to use – especially thanks to this guide.
Now, we couldn’t have the Python code throwing exceptions outwards, so we had each function return, along with its actual return value (if any), a numeric code identifying the error. Unfortunately, this made the code get really big, really fast – especially once DBus exceptions are thrown into the mix. But once I learned how to use decorators, I accomplished something like this diff:
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Two reasons Apple suck
First of all, new iPods won’t work on Linux. Now, while it’s very obvious that the idea is to block competition against other music vendors, that makes it even less legitimate. Good thing we’re starting to see some very nice cheap players out there – I’ve been rather impressed with the Meizu M6 MiniPlayer.
Secondly, they didn’t think of this: Indexed search within the “Open” dialog. It’s in Ubuntu Gutsy, and really makes desktop search (implemented with Tracker in gutsy) worthwhile. Especially when attaching files in GMail 
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