FOB

I've been looking at GIT and learning what it does, so this 70 minute Youtube video Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git caught my attention:

Linus actually explains in a compressed amount of time why GIT is better than most other SCM (that's "source code management" to him) tools. He thinks they are hopelessly broken. He cites the following reasons:

1. CVS can't merge without much agony.
2. SVN, based on CVS, offers only improved branching, but no improvement where it matters on merge performance and ease.
3. ClearCase is tortuously slow.
4. Perforce and most of the other tools he criticized are centralized, impacting performance and trust.

Linus identifies Bitkeeper, Monotone, and Mercurial as exceptions. (He puts a very positive spin on the parting of the ways with Bitkeeper early on in the talk.)

A confident security analysis of a distributed model for code management may appear counterintuitive, and Linus does not spend any time on actual security issues. What he does talk about is the behavioral aspects: if everyone owns his own repository, and decentralized "pulls" bring data to the experts who are analyzing the code, and if merging tools are very good, then you have a much better system than relying on one location to "protect" data integrity.

Privacy issues are not usually a concern for open source developers, but one can argue that pulling an SVN/CVS repository down to your local hard drive and pushing changes to it back up again is no more secure than providing the same authentication and logged access method to several private GIT development repositories. Politics may vary.

Linus briefly asserts that the notion of SHA1 content hashing is intended for integrity checking. I've been involved with a project where the central code repository was corrupted by a file system bug. Having a way to verify the content over many years as Linus asserts, would have been very helpful to us as we patched the code repository back together again the best we knew how.

Linus has done some amazing work here, and his talk gives us some insight into why GIT is a good thing. But the notion of distributed development and the model Linus has adopted for maintaining Linux is just as powerful. Let other people contribute, while needing no real trust, because the decentralized development model lets a code gatekeeper analyze every line of code, and every byte of every file based on his own experience with it over the duration of the project.

Totem? Talisman? Courier between worlds? Not really, but what she says goes.
 

A friend of mine is thinking about getting his 10 year-old son started with a programming language. I recommended Scheme as a good functional language with decent references (e.g. "The Little Schemer." and "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Languages" -- more for the "teacher" than the student in this case).

This friend has stumbled across MIT's open courseware (6.001) using the Scheme platform. Is he stretching to consider these materials?

Any comments from our esteemed colleagues, steeped in the art of computing pedagogy? More than anything, I'd like to convince my friend that combinatorics is the key to success with programming, but I think getting computers to do anything would be reward in itself for the curious 10 year-old.

Now, when is Nickle coming out with its own intro computing text, presumably Nickles and Dimes?

I'm at a generic hotel where the wireless isn't, but it's free. It's hot outside, even at 9pm. I've been to Peachtree & West Paces Ferry to see some of the historical houses, but I couldn't get a flavor for the real history on short notice. I've also been to a Fry's here.

I also visited Chickamauga battlefield where it was even hotter. A lot of memorials dot the area of the battle's progress; the veterans themselves constructed many of them. There are a variety of cannon on display here, from both sides of the conflict. One is reminded of Stephen Ambrose's Red Badge of Courage when standing before them.

I like Georgia well. It's been a long time since I was here, and I remember it being hot back then, too. Being a damned Yankee, it's taken me a while to realize that I like the south as well or better than most other places in the US. It kind of reminds me of Oregon back in the 1970s when the Californians had only just begun to migrate in and turn the state upside down.

Atlanta itself is a bit like the LA of the south. The traffic here is unbearable, so I wouldn't actually want to commute anywhere near this place.

Lately I've been thinking about Cyberpunk films. I'm specifically wondering why Bart and a number of his friends like film and novel scenarios where the narrative involves virtual reality. In my view, no matter how sophisticated VR actually becomes, it will not be exactly like we feel while we're reading Gibson or watching a "jacked in" scene in The Matrix.

If you have any thoughts on why you like VR-situated fiction, it would be interesting to hear about it.