Abhi Yerra

Long have I searched for the perfect document management system. That one jewel that would save me from the tortures of managing notes and thoughts side by side with my writing. A tool that’d let me manage many things and be as simple as a text file.

At long last, have I (re)found such a system. Maybe I didn’t get it the first time, maybe I didn’t know it would be so wonderful, but I have (re)discovered LaTeX and I love it!

Update: I was trying to figure out why it was that I liked LaTeX so much and it hit me that a system like LaTeX deals with text as if it were code. Where as WYSIWYG hide away many of the hard details of what a document looks like, it also adds much complexity. We are given way more information than is needed at any given time. However, I do agree that LaTeX was made to write longer texts.

I updated my design for my OCF website. I wanted to explore a different approach than my previous design. That is I wanted to get to the core of what I want to do. I want people to come to this blog, I want people to look at my photos, I want people to be able to access my resume, and I want people to email me. That’s it! Four simple things.

I know I could add a lot more, but by keeping it simple I get to the core of what matters.

#61 Bicycles « Stuff White People Like
5 craiggers

What’s the deal with bike helmets? Is it acceptable to wear one? I see a lot of white people who ride fixed gear bikes with skateboard helmets, but just as many people who ride those bikes without. Are there guidelines that outline the acceptable combinations of helmet style to bike style?

Also, what is the most acceptable way to avoid getting my pant leg caught in the chain?

Does comedy really induce questions about reality? Here the situation is that we are on a humorous blog in which a person asks about an actual question about reality. Is it then that things like Jon Stewart an Stephen Colbert are valid forms in which to ask questions?

I find it funny that in this site there are about 3 groups of people. The first are the people who agree completely with what the writer says, the second group is people who form questions based on the issues raised in the post, the third smaller group is the dissidents who actually talk from the other side of the picture. I assume a lot of the latter group stop reading early, or don’t really care much.

I’ve been content with Mercurial as it’s fast and lets you do development and for the most part keeps out of your way. It has few dependences and is a great DVCS. However, the problem I am finding with Mercurial and one of the great benefit’s of DVCS is branching and Mercurial, I think, gets its branching legacy from CVS/Subversion.

To branch in Mercurial you basically clone the repository into a new repository and work in the new repository. For example, say you have repository A. Branching it involves running cloning A into B. You make your changes in B and merge them back into A when you are ready. This works but it sucks especially for Rails development which I do.

The way one usually does Rails development is you have a checkout of a repo and you run a development server and work on those changes. However, when you want to branch in Mercurial you have to go to the new directory and start a new server instance and develop, merge, stop the server, start new server, etc. For some of you this may be fine, but for me it is a pain in the ass!

This is one of the things I like about git all the branches are within the same directory tree so you don’t need to do all those change directories. You can basically branch within the same tree and work with that. No need to clone all these repos to different directories.

Now the things I dislike about git is that it’s written in C! When I went to install it on Debian it had n+1 different packages it had to install! Though, I am biased toward scripting languages I personally think it would have been easier to port the app in the long run.

However, another feature that I love about git is git-svn. It make branched development so easy as the branches are local so best of both worlds. This is especially since I work with a lot of subversion code bases. If I need to make different patches it makes it simpler to do so, especially when requirements change unexpectedly and you want to start a new branch without checking out the trunk again.

So I’m going to play with git for a bit longer, but overall for now I like it. The documentation has clearly improved since I last looked at it.