Preamble

This article is two things:

1. A description of one way to use version control with a Django project
2. An introduction to using the darcs distributed version control system in particular

First, though, a mini-sermon which someday will be a post in the You Really Should series: You really should use version control. Most of you probably do. But if you’re among those not using version control to manage your software projects, start now! Learn a good version control system and start using it on just one project. You’ll work so much more productively and confidently that you’ll want to use version control everywhere. If you’re just getting started, learn Subversion – it is more or less the standard at this point, and employers and other programmers will assume you know it.

One of my neglected side projects, purportal.com, features a “Scammy spam library” where I share the text of scam emails I’ve been collecting. Today it reached the 1000-specimen milestone, so I wrote a little script to count word frequencies. The raw list reads like some of the less coherent messages itself:

account email our please ebay me paypal information bank any address through contact security am money funds us million…

I posted a bit more on the purportal.com news page.

Just got back from my second meeting with the Western Mass. Developers Group. Being the only programmer in my workplace (and having been essentially solo in almost all of my software endeavors), it’s really refreshing for me to talk with other actual working programmers. Plus, we understand each other’s jokes.

Some topics of discussion (unordered):

• FizzBuzz and code golfing
• RPG and punch-cards
• Can you name a program that Eric Raymond wrote besides fetchmail? (Answer: bogofilter)
• $4,000 DST-change patches
• Distributed version control (gratuitous mentions of darcs from me)
• The fundamental turn toward concurrency in software: threat or menace or non-event?
• Amazon EC2 (sounds very cool; evangelized by Chas)
• Things to hate about Python
• Things to hate about Ruby
• Enumeration of lots of OS X stuff that’s written in C++, not Objective-C
• Windows Vista on a MacBook ("…I was expecting more!")
• Lisp as secret weapon, a la Paul Graham (sub-question: can you name a program Paul Graham wrote besides Viaweb?)
• The TextMate book
• Fun with Reddit (“Check out this 40-line Haskell program that translates Ruby on Rails code into Erlang!”)

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Charles commented on Fri Mar 9 05:56:03 2007:

I couldn’t stop myself.

1. W3C Relaunches HTML Activity
2. The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group Notices W3C Relaunching HTML Activity, Seems Pleased

An energy conservation law from 2005 makes Daylight Savings Time (quaint US custom) begin earlier this year – this coming Sunday, to be exact. It’s supposed to be saving us energy, but I’m not sure if the upgrade costs were factored in. Anyway, I have a couple FreeBSD servers that needed the update. Went like this:

sudo portinstall misc/zoneinfo
sudo tzsetup

It took three times longer to find this information (buried at the bottom of this notice) than it did to implement the fix.

With everybody and their brother trying for the past couple years to bust into the the online calendar market, how is it that calendar.com is sitting there with one of those stupid fake-search-engine advertising pages?

Way back in the ’90s, Skip Montanaro of Music-Cal fame put it to good use. Digging through the archive.org history it looks like he may have sold it to mail.com.

I had to do a whois to see that mail.com still owned it. What the hell happened to that company? Sitting on calendar.com for the past two years is an astounding move. Or, rather, lack thereof.