Daily Archives: June 1, 2005

Thank you, darcs

Software

Here’s a use case for Darcs.

All the blogs hosted here run Drupal. I have a whole slew of add-on modules, themese, and a few patches. It’s a pain to manage them all, so after moving to Drupal 4.6.0, I decided to store my Drupal tree in Darcs.

Drupal 4.6.1 just came out. I used darcs_load_dirs to load it into my upstream repository, then darcs pull to pull it into my main tree.

It worked perfectly, first time. Very, very nice.

Now maybe in this particular case, Arch could have done as well, but I sure was impressed at how easy darcs made it all.

24-hour news == crap

Society

Today, CNN turns 25. To that I say: bah. CNN was once useful.

As we were traveling last week, we spent time in different waiting rooms. One had Fox news on; another, CNN. I had never really seen Fox broadcasts, and haven’t watched much CNN in the past 5 years either. The lack of any kind of actual news on Fox was terrible, and CNN was almost as bad too.

Here are the big stories of the time, in the eyes of Fox and CNN:

  • A child managed to climb into a stuffed-toy machine
  • A tree climber rescued a cat
  • What Michael Jackson wore to court

Fox, for some stupid reason, broadcast in front of a live audience. So, on Fox, we also got to hear what the audience thought of stuffed-toy machines, cat rescues, and Michael Jackson. Let me tell you, it was nothing newsworthy. Fox also seemed to try to turn these non-stories into national partisan debates at every opportunity.

Here are some of the stories of the time that we heard nothing about:

  • Changing 200 years of Senate rules (the filibuster issue) (CNN gave this about 30 seconds out of an hour)
  • The upcoming votes on the EU constitution
  • The trouble facing the ruling party in Germany
  • The UK elections
  • Continuing genocide in Sudan

Thank you ever so much, CNN, for inspiring two other 24-hour non-news channels. And it is truly fascinating how you have been doggedly trying to remove any actual news from your channel as well.

Maybe in 25 years, you’ll call it the Cable Tabloid Network. It would be more true.