Communications of the ACM

I joined the ACM about a year and a half ago, and they started sending me their equivalent of the IEEE Spectrum–called Communications of the ACM. For anyone that knows me, I’ve been quite vocal about the clear problem regarding multithreaded programming, and many of the issues that come with it. One area in particular is that the threading model is really the assembly language of concurrency and parallelism. It’s far too low low-level to constantly be thinking about. We need higher level constructions, but anything we do with the current languages is really insufficient. I’ve long felt the best way to approach this problem is from a language perspective, where the model can be completely different (Erlang, Scala, and Clojure are all examples of what can be done).

bzr-svn, round 2

In a previous post, I spoke at length how to get started using bzr-svn as a client against a Subversion repository. After another 8 months of using it, I have a few more thoughts I’d like to share.

A word of warning: much of this is about the negatives of using Bazaar against a Subversion repository. I’d like to be clear on a couple of points.

The issues raised are born out of the differences between Bazaar and Subversion. Bazaar is not Subversion. Bazaar made different choices about it’s model for version control, and bzr-svn does it’s best to bridge the gap.

I’d also like to take a moment, and say that these issues in no way reflects on bzr-svn’s author, Jelmer Vernooij. Jelmer has been extremely responsive to my inquires, quick to react to any branches I’ve proposed, and generous with his time and knowledge. I personally believe Jelmer is a fantastic programmer, and his prolific contributions to many open source projects is nothing less than astounding–I really don’t know how he finds the time.

Connecting to a safe@office vpn on a Mac...

Let me start off by saying that I started using a Mac several years ago because I finally reached a tipping point. I knew I wanted to get more into photography and have access to things like Lightroom and Photoshop. I was also getting tired of administering my box (although I’m happy that Ubuntu is largely making that practice disappear for the average user). I want to write code, do photography, and still participate in the business world without worrying about whether my OpenOffice document is going to render correctly.

Knswledgable?

C’mon on Apple! Really? Knswledgable?

bzr-keychain

I’ve been meaning to look at this, but haven’t had the time until recently. bzr-keychain provides the ability to save your credentials into Mac OS X’s keychain. The trick is getting it in there in the first place.