Machine Check Exception

Two awesome tools I’ve been playing with lately:

• SVK — A perl layer on top of the subversion libraries that make it into a distributed source control system. It keeps entire source repositories cached locally. Then you can branch them in your local repository, make changes, commit them locally, all without touching the remote repository. When you are ready, you can merge them back onto the mainline and svk will push them upstream to the server. Most imporantly, the merge command (actually “smerge” instead of “merge”) doesn’t make you remember which changes you’ve already merged. Just run it, and the new stuff gets copied. Once you understand how it works, it’s so obvious, you don’t know why the subversions devs didn’t just do this in the first place. (SVK can even let you branch CVS repositories, though it can’t push changes upstream to CVS yet.)

  Check out the tutorial for a nice overview: perl.com: Distributed Version Control with svk

• Django — The python blogs have been going bonkers since this new web framework was announced a month ago. Some are claiming it’s python’s answer to Ruby on Rails, but I don’t know Ruby and haven’t used Rails, so I can’t comment there. I just finished the first django tutorial, and I’m just stunned. I haven’t made a single web page yet, but the data model is a work of python art. Maybe I’m more appreciative because I wrote a much more limited data model in the spring as part of a software prototype I was working on. I was pretty pleased with it, but it looks like a Model T made out of soda cans compared to the django database API. It doesn’t matter if the actual web part sucks, I’m sold…