John Goerzen recently posted about Git, Mercurial and Bzr that I found interesting, especially since I used to be in the hg camp, but have been gradually using git more and more, even to the point making minor improvements to the git documentation and writing the git mergetool, since being able to automatically fire up a graphical merge tool was one of the features which I missed from hg. So while I haven’t yet converted the primary SCM repository for e2fsprogs to use git (yet), I’ve reached an opposite concolusion from John, and yet, I can’t really argue with his observations.

I’ve been experimenting with this for a while, but last night’s attempt at cooking a roast sous vide was definitely a success. First, I took the roast and let it dry-age in the fridge for about 3 days, covered with a plastic microwave cooking cover that had holes conveniently punched around the sides to let steam (or in this use, the water vapor) escape. Once it had been dry-aged ala Alton Brown, I placed it in the FoodSaver bag and vacuum sealed it.

So more information emerges… According to this FAQ, the trick which Novell/Microsoft used to sidestep the section 7 of the GPLv2 was that covenant not to sue was not given to Novell, but rather directly to Novell’s customers. Very clever…. of course, that means that if you are a Novell customer, and you rely on this pledge (which hasn’t triggered yet since Microsoft hasn’t sued anyone over any patents which MS might (or might not) have covering Linux), then you won’t be able to share Linux with any of your friends; once it happened, you would be violating the GPL if you did so.

“Lord, enlighten thou our enemies. Sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions, and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers. We are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom: their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength.” I found the following quote from an article eulogizing Milton Friedman to be really thought-provoking. Originally written by John Stuart Mill, a 19th century philosopher and economist, it was used in the Salon article to point out how even left-of-center economists owed Milton Friedman a debt of gratitude.

“The man who sees absolutes, where all other men see nuances and shades of meaning, is either a prophet, or a quack.

Donald H. Rumsfeld is not a prophet.”

A very powerful signoff from Keith Olbermann, host of NBC “Countdown”. Read the transcript here, or watch the video in wmv or qt format.

This morning, having gotten up early, I found a great systematic deconstruction of the “Left Behind Series, courtesy of a pointer from . Definitely a good read (it’s in blog order, though, so you have to start from the end of the page and work backwards), and it’s kinda cool to find that there are folks who self-identify as being Evangelical Christians who aren’t at all impressed with LaHaye and Jenkin’s Left Behind series.

The following exchange between a CentOS developer and the City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma (City Motto: “The Place where People Grow — Friendly!”) is just too funny for words.

I have a random idea for a potentially interesting group vacation. Anyone interested in going to see some polar bears in the wild before they become extinct? I’m thinking this might be something that might be worth planning for next year, perhaps. Not a huge rush; it will be a few short decades before the ice cap permanently disappears, but it seems like it would be a nice thing to do while it’s still possible to see them in natural surroundings.

Yes! It is occasionally satisfying to be able to make a difference. I don’t know what Diane Duane would have decided to do if I hadn’t made my offer (I was the “mystery mailer”), but it is definitely a nice feeling to know that I had a hand in making it possible for a piece of art to enter the world. It would be really cool if this posting helps to encourage more people to help sponsor (or subscribe) to this book, and to become sponsors and patrons of the art and artists that they love in general.

I’ve recently taken the Kerberos V5 profile library, which I had originally written ten years ago (!!!) to parse /etc/krb5.conf, and taken the version from krb5 1.4.2, and simplified the heck out of it (took out locking for multi-threading support, the ability to modify config files from the program, etc.) and boiled it into a single C source file, so that e2fsck could have its own fast, simple, and lightweight configuration file.