Sunday, October 07, 2007

Childrens Do Learn


  • Does anyone know an easy way to display the most recent diff of a file in CVS? Right now, I'll go to work on some text file in a CVS distribution on which many people are working. Very often, the first thing I want is to view what they've done recently. What I end up doing is:

    cvs update -Rd

    cvs log text.txt | more

    cvs diff -r 1.33 -r 1.32 text.txt | more

    where the most recent version of text.txt is 1.33. But it seems there must be an easier way than having to determine what the most recent version is. Any help?
  • I know mushrooms are fungi (``A mushroom walks into a bar...''), and not plants. But does that necessarily mean they are not vegetables?
  • Have you seen the latest spy shots of the new Toyota Prius? What's that...you don't trust those darn batteries, then how 'bout the new Honda Fit?
  • Where do you go for all your missile defense news? If any of you have any remaining faith that such a system will protect, you might want to head over to Wired and on to the referenced Rolling Stone article.
  • Why is it that the longer I go without posting, it seems the harder it is to actually post? Do I have a subconscious desire to make the period in between my posts scale as a power law? Or am I into "long tails"?
  • Yesterday I ran into a big problem. Something wasn't going right in that the same thing, done twice, got me two different results. It put me in a bad mood. So today the problem is still there, so why do I feel better? Why am I about to go see what I've got on Tivo? Because I've "bracketed" the problem. The non-repeatability is repeatable and hence, with enough work, I'll figure out what's going wrong. I'm not sure the most efficient way, so I'll let things stew a bit while watching Mythbusters and it should come to me.

2 comments:

CarlBrannen said...

The fact that repeatable problems are manageable is something that I appreciate well.

The worst problems in the supercomputer industry were ones which were fixed by the act of opening up the cabinets so one could apply a logic analyzer.

But even those can be fixed if they happen often enough. The really bad bugs are the ones that happen rarely.

Anonymous said...

Where do you go for all your missile defense news?

I hope you don't get the rest of your important news/technical information from the Cracker Jack box that is Rolling Stone. Then again, that article is better than what that MIT crackpot Postol tried to pull over last week.

Used to be you felt you could trust a statement from someone at MIT because they were interested in knowledge and truth (at least you thought so), now, all of academia is held suspect as people ask, "what's their personal agenda?".

Maybe it has always been so and the public only now has become as wary as it should? Or maybe it's just gotten worse and the stakes are higher. Either way, it will always be hard to remove the corrupting human element from scientific inquiry, should be no surprise.