someone was looking for a gitolite equivalent "with an interface". I first told him gitolite has a great interface; it's called "vim".
Then someone else said "but it's not pointy-clicky".
I told the original guy maybe he should use an ipad ;-)
I can just imagine vi on an ipad. Definition of hell I suppose (and yes, I know for most people the hell is the vi; for me it's the ipad!)
For a long while now, I've been ranting at kids (and many adults, sadly) who type "u" for "you", "gr8" for "great", "dat" for "that" (I mean really, how much did you save there?), and so on. I sometimes ask them: does your computer come with just a phone keypad? (And some of them even understand the joke!)
But a few days ago I saw this pathetic display of illiteracy move to a new dimension.
I heard a barely-teen kid say O-M-G in speech. I mean "Oh", "Em", "Geee" -- spoken out as 3 individual letters.
To all the people who lament the demise of Hindi, Telugu, and other mother languages, may I suggest that death by disuse is more dignified than this death by misuse?
When people like Miguel Icaza start praising the deal, you know it's time to say goodbye to one of your favourite (till last week) companies.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/71380
Apparently he said "the Microsoft/Nokia partnership will save Nokia and increase the relevance of Microsoft's fledgling mobile operating system."
He didn't say "saved from whom" but I presume he means Apple and Android.
Personally, I was very much looking forward to MeeGo, which was looking to be a much more full featured Linux than Android (for hackers who hate Java, Android is just an appliance).
Oh well... I guess I'll stick to my plain (not even a camera or bluetooth) cell phone, and use a laptop/netbook if I really need something smarter.
There was a fire at Bombay House last night which claimed 3 lives.
Very sad.
But here's what's even more sad: someone apparently asked "I wonder if there were any records lost in the fire".
I don't think what was implied is actually true. The sad part is that before Radia no one would even have *thought* of that when it comes to the Tatas.
Of course, with Reliance, this will never happen. They don't even keep records I am sure ;-)
http://lwn.net/Articles/414051/
A long-ish article about a talk that Michael Meeks gave about Libre Office, in which you find this gem (the emphasis is mine, not in the original):
OpenOffice.org has a somewhat checkered history when it comes to revision control. CVS was used for some years, resulting in a fair amount of pain; simply tagging a release would take about two hours to run. Still, they lived with CVS for some time until OpenOffice.org launched into a study to determine which alternative revision control system would be best to move to. The study came back recommending Git, but that wasn't what the managers wanted to hear, so they moved to Subversion instead - losing most of the project's history in the process. Later, a move to Mercurial was done, losing history again. The result is a code base littered with commented-out code; nobody ever felt confident actually deleting anything because they never knew if they would be able to get it back. Many code changes are essentially changelogged within the code itself as well. Now LibreOffice is using Git and a determined effort is being made to clean that stuff up.
Well, yesterday I attended my first ever Christian wedding. I guess it wasn't a true Christian wedding; the bride (Indian) and groom (Canadian, or Quebecois, as he would remind me) were members of a church called "the international church of christ".
Anyway, I took an instant dislike to the person who was officiating in the wedding. He talked patronisingly of India traditionally having many barriers against inter-caste, inter-language, and inter-state weddings, etc., and patted himself and his church on the back that this wedding was therefore unique or at least very special.
Of course, he conveniently left out "inter-religion". Probably because his church expressly prohibits it ;-)
Anyway, I'd say http://carm.org/what-international-church-christ (esp the last 2 paras) is more accurate than Wikipedia's wimpy "it is difficult to make any generalizations about the organization collectively". Google around for more if you're curious. Add the word "banned" to see even more interesting results.
Well... all good things must come to an end, and so -- very regretfully, I should add -- I parted ways with Mandriva. I'd been a Mandrake user since '99 or so, and a die hard fan and evangelist since not long after.
Today I switched my work(horse) desktop from MDV to Fedora. The upgrade went amazingly smoothly, partly because ever since I started using git, almost everything I have except "documents" is in git; all I really did was restore my repos, my mail, and a "workdata" directory that contained all the ODT/ODP/ODS junk. A few commands here and there and it's all set. Pidgin, FF, TB, all setup exactly as they were before.
So.... why?
Well, it's not just that Fedora is using gitolite, it's also that Linux itself has come far enough in the usability department (much more thanks to Fedora than people realise due to Ubuntu's machinations of the press) that a "developer's" distro can probably be used by the neophyte now.
My focus has always been to help completely non-techie users switch to Linux, and Mandriva was just perfect. For a looooong time. But some issues linger...
(1) Every time I install MDV, I have to go to urpmi.zarb.org and setup the repos for plf to get libdvdcss and other goodies. With Fedora and livecd-creator, I just create a custom spin that already contains all of that and I carry that around. Done.
(2) MDV's repos for India suck. Actually, I take that back -- something that doesn't exist can't suck :-) And I hate the bloody Chinese mirror that MDV always ends up picking from geolocation.
[And I'd hate it even if the Chinese weren't trying to hack everyone on the planet. Fedora people: please give us a choice to exclude certain locations if we wish to. Or make gpg-signature checking mandatory if the packages are coming from certain locations. (And yes, I know "locations" is hard to pin down easily)]
(3) Curiously, 2 of my "non-technical" users have the Tata Photon or equivalent USB modem. And MDV's network control center just does *not* like that card. wvdial works fine, so it wouldn't be so bad if MDV supplied wvdial on the liveCD, but they don't. Catch-22, in the worst case.
someone on #git posted a link to a neat little website with a bunch of
git tips. One of them was
http://ryanflorence.com/git-hosting-solutions/ , which uses the phrase
"stay off my master branch, off-shore dude!" as an example of
gitolite's main feature (per branch permissions).
I'm sure he didn't know that gitolite is *written* by an "offshore dude" ;-)
http://www.thevarguy.com/2010/11/15/tensions-between-ubuntu-fedora-mount-over-new-website/
what's with this fad of putting "open" in front of everything to do with the FOSS world? Openssl, openssh -- fine. Openoffice I can understand.
Openrespect? Is there also closed respect somewhere then?
And whatever the hell it means, I find the concept totally hilarious, and I can't see *any* possible use for such a fruitless exercise. It almost sounds like a Government project of some kind -- like Tom Lehrer's "National Brotherhood Week".
Anyway, for the record, I've been increasingly getting pissed off by Mark Shuttleworth and his gang. Installing mono by default is a big no-no for me. That's almost black-list worthy in itself -- wilfully enabling Microsoft's future lawsuits. [And if you have kept up with news in the FOSS world in general for the past few years and still believe MS will not -- ever -- sue the open source community, or a major player, over Mono, well... I *respect*fully call you a moron. A blind, deaf, and illiterate moron, actually. I think that was respectful enough ;-)]
And then there is their copyright policy for contributions -- horrible; it's like MySQL all over again...
So... with great *respect*, Mark: let me say you're a freeloader off of other FOSS projects. Or, in Hindi (English cannot convey respect the way Indian languages can): Mark-ji, aap chor hain. Choron key badshah hain. Aapki chori ki jitni taareef ke jaye, utni kam hai!
Let me break the respectful words down to explain. A "-ji" suffix is loosely like "-san" in Japanese, for those who know that. It denotes respect -- taking the name without a "-ji" attached (or equivalent in other languages) is... not disrespectful, but a sign of familiarity. The "aap" is the respectful version of "tum", which is "you". All Indian languages have respectful variants of the second and third person pronouns.
Chor is thief. Hain means "are", but again, the respectful variety. Without respect, that sentence would be "tum chor ho".
Choron key badshah is "king of thieves". The next sentence basically says "however much praise I heap on your thievery, it falls short" or something like that.
Phew... I think that's enough respect for one day.
