A fond farewell to “narco analysis”
If you want to use Veritaserum, you know where to find Azkaban.
The Advisory Boar
By Abhijit Menon-Sen <ams@toroid.org>Managing release branches: git merge vs. p4 integrate
Git prefers to merge topic branches forwards, where Perforce integrates changes into back branches. Life becomes easier if you can work with each program's preferred model.
Suspicious and claustrophobic
Whenever I hear someone say This room is so claustrophobic!
, I
have to bite my tongue and remind myself that there is no simple way in
English to distinguish between "suffering from claustrophobia" and
"inducing claustrophobia".
Another word that suffers from the same problem (ambiguity, that is, not a fear of closed spaces) is "suspicious".
"He looks suspicious"… but do I suspect him, or does he suspect me?
Delivering mail to Hotmail
I just helped a friend move mail service for a few domains from his old server to a new one running Postfix, Archiveopteryx, and Roundcube. The move went well, but for one thing: mail sent through the new server to Hotmail was accepted, but never delivered to the recipient's inbox, no matter how permissive the anti spam settings. (Mail sent to GMail and Yahoo worked fine.)
Secret Squirrels
Baby squirrels looking adorably sinister as they take up positions around a telephone pole:
Now, where can I find a Morocco Mole?
Using Git with a central repository
This tutorial explains how to share a Git repository among developers. It is meant for small teams who are adopting Git for the first time, and want to get started quickly with a familiar setup before exploring Git's many new possibilities.
If you follow this route, you will end up with a single centrally-hosted repository that everyone in your group can use to publish their own work and fetch whatever others have published. People used to a centralised VCS will find this model easy to adjust to, but of course, each user's "working copy" will itself be a fully-fledged Git repository, and many new workflows are available to users as they learn more.
#ifdef considered harmful
Speaking of portability, here's a link to Henry Spencer and Geoff Collyer's classic 1992 USENIX paper #ifdef Considered Harmful, or Portability Experience With C News.
We believe that a C programmer's impulse to use #ifdef in an attempt at portability is usually a mistake. Portability is generally the result of advance planning rather than trench warfare involving #ifdef.
It's been eighteen years since its publication, but not enough people have read that paper yet.
libjpeg-turbo is very fast
I recently discovered
libjpeg-turbo, a
drop-in replacement for the venerable libjpeg.so.62 that
uses SIMD instructions to achieve 2–4x the performance of the old
library.
Git disaster recovery
I typed git commit and git push, and a few seconds later, the mains power died.
Mirroring GMail mailboxes with IMAP
An IMAP downloader that handles various gmail-specific quirks.