Name: Joey Hess
Member since: 2000-03-06 23:42:41
Last Login: 2007-08-10 02:38:55
Homepage: http://kitenet.net/~joey
thought for the day
Nobody I know knows how to cut a watermelon.
I've seen it done by experts once: A family attacked one, sitting on a picnic table. In their hands, it became a wholly different fruit than our stodgy sliced seedless. They had a small knife. Chainsaws would not have made it more exciting.
I saw it done, but I don't know how.
good long day
Went swimming in the Clinch river (the real one) @ the River Farm. Failed to find sinking creek's spring. Installed debian on Anna's new laptop, which went swimmingly though the wireless is a bit odd. Best pasta in recent memory. In bed @ Yurt.
graphical annotate
I'm envisioning a graphical app that displays a file. Like a pager, the up and down arrows move through the file. But the left and right arrows move through time. As each successive change to the file is displayed, the committer's name appears in a column to the left of the lines changed in that commit. Hover the mouse over it to see the commit message. Names of old committers will fade out as time advances, but still be visible for a while. (A menu option will disable the fade out entirely.)
A nice bonus feature would be to allow opening multiple windows, with multiple files from the same repo. Moving back and forward in time would affect them all at once.
A nice, but getting harder feature would be to have a horizontal timeline at the bottom, including branches, so you could click on a specific branch to visit it. (Without this, when passing a fork or merge point, it would have to choose a branch heuristically?)
A tricky subtle feature would be to attempt to keep the current code block centered in the display as lines are added/removed from the file, adjusting scroll bar position to compensate.
There seems to be a gannotate for bzr, that may do something like this.
Offline so I can't try it.
Google-and-caffine-fed update: bzr gannotate is closest to what I envisoned, though without a few of the bonuses (fade-out, smart scrolling, multiple files). qgit's "tree view" includes the same functionality, but the interface isn't as nice.
awesome
After many years with ion, I've switched to using the Awesome window manager. This took three tries; the latest try seems to have stuck.
I wish I had a good analogy to explain to my nontechnical readers what changing to a new window manager is about.
One way to think about it is that it's like driving a car down the road, and suddenly swapping the steering wheel and brakes out for a tiller and gear shifter. And having to downshift for braking until you learn that the brakes moved to the turn indicator lever. By trial and error.
But that's really only part of it. Another way to look at it is adopting a new philosophy. Or, in some cases a cult. (In some cases, with crazy cult leaders.) Whether they use Windows or a Mac, or Linux, most computer users are members of a big established religion, with some implicit assumptions, like "thy windows shall be overlapping, like papers on the desktop, and thou shalt move them with thy mouse".
So, changing to a new window manager is a process of being dumped into a different environment, where nothing works like you've come to expect, and trying to construct a mental model that you can use to make sense of it. But it's also a process of modifying that environment to behave the way you like.
And when done whole-heartedly, this doesn't just mean trying to make it like the environment you were used to before. It means trying to absorb the underlying philosopy of the window manager, and think up new ways of doing things, inspired by that philosopy, and modify the environment to allow doing those things.
So ideally, "I switched to a new window manager" doesh't mean "my screen has some different widgets on it now". It means "I'm looking at the screen with new eyes."
11 Jul 2008 (updated 11 Jul 2008 at 22:04 UTC) »
music videos
code_swarm videos are lots of fun. The ultimate geek music video.
Here's one where I make a cameo appearance as the great disruptor: Debian Perl Group code_swarm
And this one features me and a band of defenders holding the line against the ravaging wiki hordes: ikiwiki code_swarm ;-)
Looking forward to: d-i and git
(Oh and also to a video editor for linux that doesn't suck. Not holding my breath; kino is actually tolerable if it could only read more formats than dv.)
Syndicated 2008-07-11 14:04:33 (Updated 2008-07-11 22:04:32) from see shy jo
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