"Another Difficulty for a Microsoft-Yahoo Marriage: Recruiting"
-- an interesting NYT article about how big companies become an increasingly less popular workplace for young engineering talent, in favor of smaller companies, where they have more impact and some of which have the potential of making them rich if they take off.
(Thanks for the link, Paul)
The version control system Subversion comes with a handy function to copy or move an already versioned file from one place in the repository to another: The command svn move.
This is particularly good (and superior over, for example, CVS which is unable to do so) because the version history of the file is kept, and also the copy on the server is done lazily, meaning just because the file was copied there won't be a second physical copy created on the server (yet, until you write to it).
A drawback of the command, though, is that it is only possible to move one single file or directory at a time. If you have a lot of files to be moved, this can get very tedious.
However, if the files you want to cover have something to be distinguished by, you may try the following (which I blog here mainly so I can get back later when I have forgotten the syntax again ;) ):
find . -name "06*" -maxdepth 1 -exec svn mv "{}" 2006/ \;
Note that I am filtering by name here (everything starting with 06), with a maximum tree depth of 1 (to avoid pulling in the .svn folder) and I am moving the respective files into the (recently created) subfolder 2006/. Also note that the the -exec flag of the find command wants to be terminated by a semicolon, but since that is a reserved character for the Bash shell, you need to escape it. This is something I trip over every time.
Anyway, I hope this helps.
Dear readers!
I wish you a merry Christmas and a good and successful year 2008. I hope you had fun reading my blog this year and thank you all for your helpful comments and constructive input. I hope you'll still bear with me for a long time to come!
Now get back to your Christmas feasts but make sure to not drink and sing (instead, always choose a designated singer!), or you may end up like this guy: ;-)
(The song being so graciously interpreted here, by the way, is a German Christmas song that goes "silent, silent, silent, because the child wants to sleep...")
Yesterday, Apple released a system update that is supposed to fix the severe "keyboard unresponsive" bug in OS X Leopard:
With hardly 800K in size, the patch is a lightweight that could have a big influence. If that's not the right place to use the word of the year, where else: W00t.
I just installed it and so far, the keyboard works fine, but of course I haven't sent the box to sleep yet, so by now I can't tell yet if the patch actually fixed the bug. Of course, the reboot the update asked for promptly resulted in a kernel panic (great start), but luckily, another reboot went through without problems.
If you like, please let me know in the comments if the patch worked for you or not. Good luck!
(Thanks Justin, Jean Pierre and Marc, who all told me about the update being available.)
Douglas Karr at the Marketing Technology blog has an interesting post about the web servers the election candidates for the U.S. in 2008 run.
Hillary runs Windows 2003, for example, while Guiliani trusts his website to a CentOS+Apache install. An exception seem to be Barrack Obama and C. Todd, who are the only ones to run FreeBSD on their webservers.
The percentage difference between Linux/Apache (48%) and Windows/IIS (43%), seems to reflect the Internet not too badly (which is about 50% Apache vs. 35% IIS), but when you look at the two parties, there is a much more clear bias:
It’s fascinating to me that the Dems are predominantly Open Source… except for Hillary Clinton and the Republicans are predominantly Microsoft with the exception of Ron Paul, Jim Gilmore, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney.
I wonder what makes Republican candidates go so strongly for closed source products, but I'll leave this up to your speculations ;) .
When I look at the hosting companies, I don't recognize many names -- only one came to sight: Republican candidate Jim Gilmore gets his Linux box from 1&1 Internet, Inc., a subsidiary of 1 und 1, one of Germany's largest internet companies who have big facilities in my university town Karlsruhe. /me waves from here.
Will this knowledge influence where the average geek's makes their cross on the ballot? Probably (or rather, hopefully) not. Yet it is interesting to see what technologies the candidates trust into. Now I'd only like to find out which browser they are using. But this will likely remain unresolved forever...
Johnny Lee from CMU shows off a low-cost digital whiteboard built from a WiiMote and a pen with an infrared tip.
I so want this (hint, hint, readers looking for a Christmas present ;) ). Also, if I was still on-site, I'd absolutely volunteer to build one of these for Mozilla :)
(Thanks for the Link, Kai!)
It seems to me like some people have a little too much time at their hands: I recently notice a bunch of hand-crafted spam coming in to my blog, mainly as comments to the famous (infamous?) cake article.
The comments look something like this:
Some hand-crafted wordpress spam, notice how the comment makes sense but the supplied URL is quite apparently promoting spam content.
Interestingly, most of these comments actually link to pages that promote some sort of shady pyramid scheme. Looks like these people desperately surf the web searching for well-visited blog posts and drop spam in there -- by hand.
Yet, even if they manage to get through comment moderation, they are not likely to squeeze any "search engine juice" out of it, since Wordpress marks commenters' homepage links as nofollow by default.
And though I would like to tell them they can save their keystrokes and that they are wasting their time (and, more importantly, mine too), I can probably drop that, since chances are, none of these people will ever actually read the blogs they are spamming...
Today I sent a support request to the computer pool admins at my university's CS school, so they upgrade Firefox to version 2 any time soon. The Fedora Core instances on these boxes are still on Fx 1.5.12.
I mean, it's only been out for a year and Firefox 1.5's lifetime has ended for half a year now, so that sounds like it's about time for an update.
Interestingly though, the Fedora Project seems to keep version 1.5 until they can switch to 3.0 (therefore completely skipping Firefox 2). And unless I am mistaken, the pool computers still run FC 6. So my request may not be successful after all. But unless Fedora backports security patches to the 1.5 branch (which may arguably be more work than just switching to Firefox 2?) I strongly oppose keeping unsupported software versions for any significant time. Especially in a university setting with hundreds of users happily surfing the web on a daily basis. And especially for a web browser, which by definition constantly gets its hands dirty with possibly harmful code.
Let's see what they say -- I sure hope it'll be more useful than your average "just boot into Windows, then"...
Update: Just about half a second after I blogged this, the pool people answered that Fedora still backports patches into Firefox 1.5, and soon (that is, once Fedora drops support for version 6), the pool computers will get an upgrade to FC 8, which will also contain Firefox 2 then.
Excellent.
Yesterday, I registered with LinkedIn and sent out a few invitations to people I know who also have an account.
Sadly enough, LinkedIn didn't like my name, Frédéric, quite as much as I do, so the invitation emails ended up being signed like this:
I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. -Frédéric
I reported the bug and hope they fix it soon. For now, I replaced my "é"s by regular "e"s but of course they are only half as nice :)
Sorry for the inconvenience to everyone who though "who the heck is that?" when receiving my email.
(Thanks to Brandon and morgamic who told me about the problem.)
What do Firefoxes snack on? Cookies, of course. So somebody went ahead and baked these Firefox cookies:
Yummy!
But, even though Firefox is clearly a web browser from outer space, let's still not assume these were space cookies ;).
(Thanks for the link, Jean Pierre!)
