Version Control and Leadership (by alaric)

For many years now, most of my home directory has been under version control of one form or another. I have a laptop, a desktop machine, and a server I ssh to; keeping stuff in synch between three working environments is very valuable, as is having efficient offsite backups and history.

I started my version control career, like most folks, with CVS - since for a long time CVS was the only open-source version control system in widespread usage.

Then along came Subversion, which was clearly Much Nicer, and I quickly switched my personal version control system over to using it. As a freelance software engineer I use it commercially, and now run a virtualised trac/svn hosting system that lets me easily add new projects, which many projects I'm involved with are hosted on. And my open source projects run on a similar platform.

However, more recently, there's been an explosion of interest in the distributed version control model, with lots of products appearing, such as Darcs, Mercurial, Monotone and Git.

I've been quite interested in the distributed model; sure, Subversion is working well for me, but the distributed model interests me because it's more general. You can set up a central repository and push all your changes to it so it's the central synch point, like a Subversion repository, but you don't have to; you can synch changes between arbitrary copies of your stuff without having to go through a central point. And given two approaches, one of which has a superset of the functionality of the other, I'm naturally drawn towards the superset, even if I only need the features of the subset - because I can't predict what my future needs will be.

Also, these distributed version control systems seemed to have better branch merging than Subversion, which until recently required manual tracking of which changes had been merged into a branch from other branches. And being able to do 'local commits' to a local repository, while working offline on my laptop on a train, then commit them to the server as a batch would be great. Subversion really can't do very much without a network connection to its server at the moment.

Now, I was starting to gravitate towards Mercurial, since it's written in Python and seems quite widely available. But then I saw the following talk by Linus Torvalds on git (which he originally wrote):

Two things struck me.

1. I do like the architecture of git. Subversion stores history as a set of deltas; each version the files have been through are encoded in terms of their differences from the next version, while git just stores multiple as-is snapshots of the state in a content-addressable file system not unlike Venti, which automatically replaces multiple copies of identical data with references to a single copy of it. So it can pull out any version of the files very quickly, and doesn't really have to worry too much about how versions are related; Subversion stores everything as explicit chains of diffs and has to walk those chains to get anywhere. Git makes a note of which revision led to which revision(s) - it can be more than one if there was a branch, and more than one revision can lead to the same revision if there was a merge - but that's just used for working out the common ancestor of two arbitrary revisions in order to merge them; git can efficiently and reliably merge arbitrary points in arbitrary branches by skipping along the links to find the nearest common ancestor, generating diffs from that to the source of the merge, then applying those diffs to the target of the merge. There's none of the complex stuff that Subversion has to do with tracking which changes have been applied and all that. NOTE: I'm talking about "Subversion vs. Git" here since those are the examples of each model I know much about - I'm really comparing the models, not the precise products, here.
2. Linus Torvalds makes an act of calling people who disagree with him "stupid and ugly", and making somewhat grand claims such as stating that centralised version control just can't work, and generally acting as though he's smarter than everyone else. Now, he does that in a tongue in cheek way; I get the impression he's not really a git (even though he claims he named git after himself), although I couldn't be sure unless I met him. Indeed, I used to think he was a bit of a git from reading things he'd said, but seeing him in action on video for the first time made me realise that he seems to be joking after all. BUT, I think this may be part of why he has become famous and well-respected in some circles. There's a few quite cocky people in the software world who push their ideas with arrogance rather than humility, steamrolling their intellectual opponents with insults; Richard Stallman comes to mind as another. Now, people who do this but are notably and demonstrably wrong get 'outed' as a git and lose a lot of respect; but if you're generally right and do this, it seems to lead to you having vehement followers who believe what you say quite uncritically. Which is interesting.

But I still can't choose. I see a lot of git vs. svn vs. hg vs. monotone vs. darcs - most of them complaining about problems with the loser that have been fixed in more recent versions. They're all rapidly moving targets! It looks like the only way to actually choose one is to spend a few months working on a major project with recent versions of each... in parallel. NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!

I dunno. I'm kinda leaning towards moving to git, but I'm worried that this might just be Linus Torvalds' reality distortion field pulling me in. Next I'll be using Linux if I'm not careful...

Workshop shelf (by alaric)

As part of my tireless service to the village of Cranham, I'm now a member of the Cranham Village Hall Committee (and so a trustee of a second charity!)

This has its perks. In particular, when they renovated the hall, a big thick solid shelf was torn out, and I saved it from the skip to put it in my workshop. It's a bit battered, so not very pretty, but as a workshop shelf it'll only get more scarred, so that's fine.

After some trials and tribulations, I managed to mount it on the wall:

Mainly, I had to cut gaps in the brackets to let them fit over the black power conduit (while maintaining their structural integrity), despite the conduit being level with the wall but not level with the shelf, as the line of the blockwork in the wall is not level with respect to gravity. No surprise when you consider that the building had shifted somewhat since it was built.

So, for the record, despite the shelf looking quite wonky, it's level:

I also had the choice of 75mm or 50mm screws. 50mm screws would have only protruded about a centimetre into the wall, which would not bode well, while the 75mm screws had a good centimetre spare, so I cut little blocks of wood and ran 75mm screws through them, then through the brackets, then into the wall. There's something really satisfying about screwing a long, thick (6mm), screw tightly into a fresh, virgin, wall plug.

The 50mm screws were perfect for screwing the horizontals of the brackets to the undersides of the shelf, mind.

Finally, I mounted a strip of angle iron under the shelf, for clipping my set of clamps to:

Much nicer than having them languishing in a bag...

Some brief proposals for how to make the OpenPGP encryption standard more widely used (by alaric)

The OpenPGP standard isn't perfect, but it's good enough - and it's sufficiently widespread (in geek circles) already that it might be possible to push it into widespread usage.

Here are some ideas on things we could do to push it beyond the realm of geeks emailling each other to become a more pervasive security infrastructure.

Read more »

Jean’s Third Birthday Party will be the 30th of August (by sarah)

Jean will be a whole three years old at the end of August so sue to demand we are celebrating it by having a party on Saturday the 30th of August. The party will start at 10 am and go on all day 🙂

There will be the BBQ's out so if you want to bring something to slap on there feel free - we will obviously be having seperate meat and veggi BBQs! There will be cake and I have a few drinkies left over from other events but you'd might want to bring something yourself aswell as budgets are a bit tight as always!

We have floor space and space to camp for those who need it.

If you could let me know wheather you're coming or not that would be helpful too 🙂

For those of you who didn't make it to the last party we have the candy floss machine, chocolate fondue, pop corn maker and the doughnut maker!

Weather and time permitting we'll get the pool out as well so bring a cosy/wetsuit or what ever 🙂

At the moment Jean is keen on Colouring in, trains and being outside for those who tend to ask.

IF anyone wants to know about B'n'B's let me know.

Infected Finger (by sarah)

My Manky finger 🙁

About three weeks ago my nervous habit of worrying the skin around my nails resulted in the area around the cuticul of my fourth finger (the one next to the little one) on my right hand, becoming red and sore - I stopped picking it but it then started to feel really saw and ooze greeny/yellowy/baige stuff. I cleaned it with TCP and washed it alot but a crusty layer appeared around the base of the nail and this would break each time it was prodded and more pussy stuff would come out.

I cleaned it with detol and Al germolined it to high heaven and plastered it as I needed to do gardening and washing up and deal with potty training and the like. I was letting it air over night and it appeared to be getting better - not being so painfull and swollen as a raised lump just under the nail had appeared but this now just looked a bit like a burned area.

Then I was due to go to London for four days and Al dressed the area as the skin had 'pulled' away from the bottom of the nail but it looked like it was getting better. On the way back from London the dressing came off and lo! An apporximatly 2 mm thick line had appeared at the base of the nail - the finger had also started to hurt again the day before but now it felt like I had caught my nail with a hammer at the same time as having a huge splinter in there!

Anyway so today I get to see the dr having phoned up Monday - the Dr was erm thats a nasty infection you need antibiotics - then she asked how long it had been infected over all and I said three weeks - she winced :/

Its most definatly an antibiotics case and I left it far to long to go the drs with it and I am probably going to lose the nail - a new one should grow back and if it becomes too flappy or loose then I might have to go and see the nurses and have them help the situation along.

So I am now on antibiotics which i have to take four times a day :/ It needs to show a stark improvement within the week or I have to go back again. When I went to the drs today there was a red aura around the white - and there appears to be a gap at the bottom of the nail where there is no nail - I don't know how clear that is on the photo!