So, you’ve adopted git. Or maybe Mercurial. And you’ve started to use it. The problem is, every other commit reads some variant of, “Merged with stable,” “merged with base,” or some such. These commits convey no useful information, yet completely clutter your commit history. How do you make your history more useful? The answer lies in rebasing. Rebasing is a technique made popular by git where you rewrite your not-yet-pushed patches so that they apply against the current remote tip, rather than…

NOTE: You almost certainly don’t want to do anything in this article. I wrote this in 2008; Mercurial has improved a lot since then. While everything’s still accurate (as far as I know), using MQ is pain-ridden and unnecessary. Instead, you should use histedit (which is bundled with Mercurial) or the evolve extension (which is not yet, but may be soon). Either will get you to the same place, but they’re both easier, safer, and more powerful than MQ—a rare triple. That said, if you’re curious…

I love meetings. That’s a pretty heretical statement. I suspect most diehard bureaucrats just tolerate meetings, and Joel—who I might emphasize has more than a passing relationship with Team Copilot—has spoken rather strongly against them in the past. Hell, I grew up hating meetings, and I’d be lying if I said that part of why I loved the idea of working at Fog Creek wasn’t that the company has traditionally had a strong anti-meeting culture. That’s not to say Fog Creek doesn’t ever have…

While I’ve gotten pretty good at deploying Squeak and Seaside behind Apache, I remember that the first time I tried it, I got horribly confused and frustrated by the lack of any simple, easy-to-follow guide. Well, if your virtual host runs a Debian-based distro, now you’ve got one: Peter Osburg has provided a step-by-step guide to deploying Seaside apps behind Apache using reverse proxies. The directions should be mostly applicable to other Linux distributions as well.

When 280slides was released several months ago, it was notable in several ways. It looked like a native OS X app despite running in the browser, yet remained relatively responsive, worked quite well across browsers, and gracefully fell back to Flash when running on browsers from the Pacific northwest. The designers said that their secret sauce was Objective-J—an Objective-C–like language that compiled to JavaScript—and Cappuccino, a Cocoa-like framework that let them treat a web browswer as…

In my earlier review, I compared WALL•E—at least the first half—to a silent film. (True, the sentences, “Directive?”, “WALL•E,” “EVE,” and “Classified!” are indeed spoken, but since that’s it, I’m willing to fudge a little.) Silent films were, of course, not actually silent; a pianist—or, for larger locales, an organist, or even an entire orchestra—provided music to accompany the visuals. I had hoped that WALL•E would honor that tradition by having an outstanding soundtrack. I was not…

I was more excited about the arrival of WALL•E than I have been about any movie in a very long time. WALL•E would be one of the last Pixar films with minimal Disney influence, promised to make us fall in love with a pair of robots, and, I hoped, would give the Pixar a chance to redeem itself from Cars (also known as “Doc Hollywood with less nudity and more automobiles”). Besides, the trailer for this post-apocalyptic G-rated adventure used part of the soundtrack from Brazil. What wasn’t there…

Bell Canada is currently engaged in a lovely kerfuffle with the CRTC (Canada’s rough equivalent of the FTC) for throttling BitTorrent traffic. The CRTC recently ordered Bell Canada to release its bandwidth numbers, and Bell Canada, after some protestations, complied. The little teensy problem with their data, as Ars Technica points out, is that the numbers indicate that any problems Bell Canada is experiencing have nothing whatsoever to do with BitTorrent, and can be trivially and cheaply…

It may not enable time travel, but the flux capacitor, in a literal sense, is here. Called a memristor, the device provides similar functionality to a transistor, but at vastly higher efficiencies, an should allow for much smaller, more efficient computers in the future.

Sun has just announced that they will begin close-sourcing MySQL. For years, I’ve avoided MySQL due to a mixture of paranoia (I’ve had extremely bad experiences with MyISAM-backed data stores) and disdain for their shoddy standards compliance (which has bitten me before in nontrivial ways). Now I can also avoid them for not being open-source. My standardization on PostgreSQL for this website feels more rational by the minute. Update: The originally linked article wasn’t quite correct. MySQL…