Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Eye of the Storm

"Eye of the Storm" (John Ringo) - This is a Posleen spin-off.  I never read the Posleen books, because the library doesn't have the first one.  When did libraries stop carrying old books?  It's sad that you can't get anything more than ~10 years old at the library.

I really appreciate Ringo's sense of humor.  He's clearly setting up some sort of anime parallel, but I don't know enough anime to be sure if it is exactly the same as one of them, or just flavored for them all.  The mil-sf portions are good, as always, and he throws in a good twist at the end.  Hopefully the library has the next one, as it is a cliff-hanger...

Thursday, September 08, 2011

Version Control By Example

"Version Control By Example" (Eric Sink) - I got this book for free (thanks Reddit!)

I admit I was skeptical at first.  The book includes discussion of a new DVCS (Veracity).  The DVCS environment is already very crowded (git, hg, bzr, bk, fossil, darcs).

The version control by example part is straight forward and pretty well done.  There is one example which is repeated four times (svn, git, hg, veracity).  But the author's humor resonated with me, and I found myself looking for the slight changes (which were always funny).  It makes for a fast read.

The two big players right now are git and hg.  I like git, but I will be the first to admit it is special.  It makes a lot of sense to a hacker, and very little sense to anyone else (especially those who are used to svn).  git really needs a front-end with a command set oriented towards people used to svn.

As I've mentioned, I hate hg.  I shouldn't, but using it everyday in a fashion it's not really designed for makes me blame it.  About once a week (twice this week), it just flakes out and refuses to work with any command (even hg log).  Then I have to find the documentation on how to fix it, and I lose a half hour.

Fossil has some people excited because it integrates a few developer tools (wiki and bug tracking, IIRC).  Veracity is similar, it has a distributed/versioned database which is used to implement these sorts of things (and user permissions).

As Sink points out, what good is it to commit code offline, if you can't update the documentation and the bug database?

I still have worries that veracity (vv) is oriented towards the svn/hg mindset (immutable history).  If it can support all the flows from git, I could make the switch...

Sunday, September 04, 2011

Some Golden Harbor

"Some Golden Harbor" (David Drake) - This is actually an older book in the Lt. (now Commander) Leary series. It's interesting to read about the effects of some stressful event first, then go back and read it as it happens afterward.