Building simplicidade.org: notes, projects, and occasional rants

Notes

last update:

Git vs Mercurial

I've been talking about Git in the last posts, and Bär asked if I tried Mercurial. I did try Mercurial, but very superficially. I used it with a project shared with Rui, who uses Mercurial and he seems to be very happy with it. Whatever you choose, I would stick with either Mercurial or Git. CVS is dead, and Subversion is not good enough. And right now, all non-personal projects I work on use Subversion, so I have some experience with it.

hunk-based commit with git-gui

I've being using git as a front-end to Subversion using git-svn (more on this later). A cool feature that you just get for free is hunk-based commit. For those who haven't using Darcs, hunk-based commit allows you to select which parts of the diff you want to include. It allows for a much cleaner commit history. With git, I've started using git-gui to create my commits. It's really useful. Inside, you can select a modified file, and then right-click the hunk you want to stage.

Importing HTML table into numbers?

I'm researching video cameras to buy one for Christmas. One of the requirements is support for iLife, and in particular, iMovie. So I googled to see if I could find a compatibility list, and sure enough, we have technical article 306171. The next step was filtering the table for HDD-based cameras. I copied the HTML table, fire up Numbers, and pasted it, and... WTF?? A single column of data? I fired up Excel and sure enough, pasting a HTML table produces a decent Excel worksheet, one that I can then AutoFilter and work with.

Perl preforce-to-git conversion

Very cool job by Sam, the current status of the Perl preforce-to-git conversion. Preforce was indeed very advanced ten years ago.

The Eagle has landed

PEP was committed to the trunk of ejabberd. Probably the checking I was most anxious to see.

Facebook beacon

This last week, as I read through several posts about the Facebook Beacon, the only one word crossed my mind: lemmings. And I was thinking on the people who own the sites that use the Facebook beacon, because in the end, they are giving their userbase for free to Facebook. I think I'll just sudo sh -c 'echo 127.0.0.1 facebook.com www.facebook.com >> /etc/hosts'. Update: a post by the Facebook CEO.

SRV records and ADSL routers

The last 2 ADSL routers I bought (the most recent 3 months ago) lack support of SRV DNS records. When I get my IP address via DHCP, the router also sets itself as my DNS server. But if I use it, dig srv _xmpp-client._tcp.simplicidade.org gives me zero answers. This, as you might imagine, sucks big time. This is a D-Link router bought in 2007, and basic SRV lookups are still missing in action.

This is good news. Qmail distribution page is already updated. Pity it took so long. 8 or 9 years ago, a public domain version of Qmail would rock. Now, not so much. But even so, it will make things like qmail-ldap project easier to use.

Not work safe

A football match with the players using binoculars. Not work safe because you'll make a fool of yourself laughing out loud. I know I did.