Software

I've been using Arch/tla/baz for quite awhile now; I switched from Subversion awhile back. But they've got a bunch of things that annoy me. Offline working is clumsy. Performace is bad, and to make it even approach decent, you have to dedicate a huge amount of space to a revision library cache. Commands, even with baz, are clumsy and require an inordinate amount of typing. It's still better than CVS and SVN, with its merging and all, but still -- it's been annoying.

Enter darcs. I've been keeping an eye on it for awhile, and it looks like it's become quite stable, useful, and fast recently. I tried it out awhile back, and it wasn't really "there" yet. I tried it out again this week, and must say that darcs is great. I'm converting all my Arch and Subversion stuff to Darcs.

The thing that really impressed me is this Darcs mirror of the Linux kernel Bitkeeper repository. Darcs is fast over this, far nicer than Arch was (I did a similar project in Arch awhile back), and it uses less than 1GB of disk space for a complete mirror.

Oh, and I wrote a 100-line Haskell program to convert Arch stuff to Darcs: arch2darcs. You can see an example of a converted repository at here. There's also a program called Tailor (I didn't write this one) that does a bidirectional sync between Darcs and CVS or Subversion. Sweet.

I'm happily converting the rest of my Arch and SVN stuff to Darcs today. Woohoo.

Now this is absolutely hilarious. A randomly-generated computer science paper has been accepted to a conference. Not just that, but the grad students behind the program that generated it are raising money so they can attend and deliver a randomly-generated talk.

Read the paper and you'll probably burst out laughing.

If you don't know much about computer science, it may look shockingly real.

metaperl reviews Haskell: The Craft of Functional Programming.

Terah and Cliff have a little discussion about the mild breeze in Kansas.

Stupid news graphic of the week, seen on NBC:

"Death of a Pope" (in large, flashy letters)

Makes it sound like some cheap movie.

This makes for very interesting reading. Today, from Wikipedia, I read about:

• All about the office of the Pope, including the Catholic doctrine that the Pope is the head of the global Christian church (whatever the faith), that he is considered the successor to the office first held by Peter (apostolic succession doctrine).


• A list of the Popes dating to the first century


• The Coptic Church, which legend says was created by Mark in Egypt, and has their own Pope (along with the Eastern Orthodox Church)


• The Holy Roman Empire, an odd political organization in Europe