Notes In The Margin

We had planned to have our baby at home, but this morning my Beloved's water broke, so we're at St. Joe East, in the new Women's Hospital, to have Elise Marguerite.

Everything is perfectly fine, we're just here because it's just 35 weeks, and the midwife won't do it before 36 weeks.

Updates as we go along.

I participate in a dozen different "daily" websites. And by "participate", I mean that I get a daily reminder and wish fervently that I had time to actually do something about it.

There's 750words.com which taunts me with my inability to write something every day. I signed up for the June challenge - write 750 words every day in June. I missed June 1, and so the incentive has largely evaporated.

There's http://dailyshoot.com/ which gives me great ideas for photos I'll never take, and shows me photos by hundreds of other photographers that I'll never be able to measure up to, due at least in part to their willingness to spend thousands of dollars on a hobby that is, to me, well, just a hobby.

There's http://www.dailymugshot.com/ which is a neat idea, but usually by the time I remember to do it, my laptop is already "docked" and connected to the large screen, and so the laptop camera is no longer accessible. So I get maybe 2 photos a week on that site. It's fascinating to watch your face change over the course of a few months. Fascinating, and a little eerie. Am I really getting old that fast?

There are a plethora of daily/weekly/whatever poetry sites or general writing sites that give a prompt and encourage you to write something based on that prompt. I even run one of these sites - http://weekendwordsmith.blogspot.com/ - and haven't posted anything to it in months.

Most mornings I have two hours between getting up and going to work. I get up that early because we have to get our son to the bus stop. Today, however, is the last day of school, and I'll probably not be getting up quite that early during the summer. But even then, that time seems to vanish into nothing. That nothing consists largely of reading the news, blogs, twitter, facebook, and other things that I could probably do just fine without. And a lot of email. Email is the largest time-sink in my life. I get hundreds of email messages a day. And that's way down from the thousands of messages a day I used to get. I've jettisoned dozens of mailing lists that I never so much as looked at. I've retained only the ones that I thing that I really should be on - mostly relating to various aspects of the Apache Software Foundation - and I still can't read even as much as a quarter of the email that I receive. I frankly don't know how anybody manages to read all the traffic on the the board and members and incubator mailing lists, much less respond to so much of it. Do they not have jobs? Do they never sleep?

Then there are the more passive daily things. Word of the day. The other word of the day. Yet another word of the day. The day's comic strips. The day's FailBlog, The daily Sci Fi at http://www.365tomorrows.com/ and the daily (or twice-daily, or thrice-daily) posting at http://www.wired.com/geekdad/.

And by the time 9 rolls around, I've accomplished nothing of consequence. I've consumed another two hours of drivel, and produced nothing.

I've really got to stop this.

Of course, what I've done in writing this is probably grossly counter-productive - I've introduced you, my loyal reader, to more sites that will suck your time away. On the other hand, I wrote it on the 750 Words website, so I at least wrote my 750 words for today.

This summer, I intend to cut back on my input, and increase my output. I'm going to drop some of the sites that I try frantically to follow, but don't get much out of, and devote more time to producing - whether that's finally writing the novel I've been working on for five years, or finishing the project to rewrite the mod_rewrite documentation, or get around to writing my book on Open Source documentation, I've got to stop wasting quite so much time drinking in worthless drivel - or even valuable drivel - and more time creating.

If I might be forgiven for quoting something from one of my own poems - completely out of context, I might add:

All we can do to combat this idiocy
is to create as much beauty
as we possibly can in the brief moment we are here,

So, in the hour I have before work, I need to try to write something worthwhile, even if nobody ever reads it.

In response to Until I Can by my beautiful, and very pregnant, Beloved. (Go read that first.)

Until you can, and thereafter

May 27, 2010

I've gotten used to him
unfinished
with his hat labeled "Brown" and  "Dark Brown" in pencil.
I think of myself that way, sometimes,
wearing a hat marked to fill in later,
and a face contently hiding in the shadows
beneath the broad brown-not-brown brim.

Is he asleep?
He smiles enigmatically,
dares you to guess.

I'm sure you'll finish some day,
but until you can,
I kind of like him this way.

And, even when you can,
I think this is how I'll remember him.

I've been hearing about Git for several years now. As far as I could tell from the hype, it solved a number of problems that I didn't have, and introduced a very odd view of community.

I find the religious fervor surrounding Git and Bzr to be very unconvincing. In fact, the more rabid the supporters are, the more they push me away from using it, because the arguments surround this passion, rather than being based in solid technical reasons. "It's better because it's better, and because svn is stupid" seems to be the summary of most of what I hear.

So I decided, finally, to actually give it a try so that I could have an opinion based on fact rather than on hype.

Offline commits are clearly a cool thing, for the very rare occasion when I am working on code and don't have a network connection. But they also encourage people to work at great lengths in a vacuum, without community feedback, and then commit a great wodge of code all at once, resulting in unreviewed commits. This is clearly (to me, anyways) a Bad Thing.

Indeed, most of the features that are hyped as The Reason To Use Git fall into two categories for me. 1) Things that solve a problem I don't have. 2) Things that seem clearly a bad idea.

1) Cheap branches. Subversion has cheap branches. When pushed, the Git folks say, yeah, you're right, but CVS doesn't. ... CVS. Well, ok.

2) Fork and hack without all that overhead of connecting with the community. This seems short sighted. Or perhaps it was just very poorly stated. Having a situation where people can hack on the code without participating in the community seems to be clearly a bad idea. Open Source without community is not something that appeals to me, at all.

3) No central repository. Well, in addition to not being true (every project that I've heard of does in fact have one master repository that everyone syncs to) this seems to be a bad thing. It seems to promote disunity. And it solves a problem that I don't feel I have. Major architecture changes can happen in branches in svn. Minor features can happen in branches. Fiddling about can happen in branches. All of these should be working towards a product. If a major change becomes the community-accepted product, then folks switch to that branch as the new trunk. This is all possible, and done every day, with svn. But the everybody-is-trunk thing that gets talked about doesn't seem to actually happen in the real world.

4) Offline commits. Yes. This is a cool idea, and I look forward to having this feature in the next version of svn. However, it's not something that compels me to switch to git.

5) Every command does one tiny thing, by design. This makes me CRAZY. Committing a change to the repository - the one up on the network, not my local working copy - takes three commands: git add, git commit, git push. Yes, I'm aware that I'm using the terms differently than Git does. That bugs me, too. Redefining vocabulary as a means to set yourself apart from the herd is just infuriating. Yes, I'm aware that the first two commands can be combined (git commit -a) but I've also received very contradictory advice as to whether I should do this, ranging from "Always do this, it's the only way" to "Never, ever do this. It's dangerous."

For the record, yes, I have used Git. In fact, I started a new project using Git, mostly because I want/need to learn about Git, but also because I was starting to get sold on the hype. So I'm not operating entirely in ignorance. I expect I'll get more familiar with it, but so far it's been an unpleasant experience.