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Archives for October, 2008

Mirroring an SVN repository

One advantage of a distributed version control system such as Mercurial is that any clone of a project is complete. The clone contains the entire history of the project. That makes backing up a repository trivial.
Not so for a centralized vcs such as Subversion. If you check out a copy of a project, you [...]

Dumb luck and disk drives

The CEO of the company I work for mentioned that she was having problem with a USB drive containing a bunch of her data. I offered take a look. Sure enough, her Mac could not see the drive. Worse, while spinning up the drive made a lot of odd, periodic noises that did not inspire [...]

An email tip

Many email clients share a user interface mis-feature. The user starts to compose an email, and the first thing the client does is put the user in the input area for the to: field. The user dutifully fills in the addressee, and most of the time things work out fine. Once in a while, the [...]

Installing antialiased Leo on Ubuntu

A little over a month ago I wrote about my off and on efforts to get the Leo text editor running under linux with decent looking antialiased fonts. At long last I have succeeded. Not through any heroic efforts on my part, but by waiting for python and tcltk to finally provide the needed font [...]