blog.merge!

In 2009, this wasteland will become, er, a wasteland.

Plenty of programming posts to come in 2009, but they'll all be over at the original blog, which you can filter to just the techie stuff if you don't care about what cute thing the baby did last week.

Why?  Because maintaining two blogs is just silly.  Because code samples are hard to format just right on Blogger.  Because doing all the writing in a personal domain gives it a bigger sense of occasion.

Old posts will be left here as a testament to the folly of speaking rashly.

Happy 2009!

There's a bit in the bucket, dear ELIZA

True story. It's something o'clock in the morning, and by all rights I should be in bed, but I've been vacuumed into the Intermonster. A post about Mercurial hosting catches my eye.  "Hmm, kind of like FreeHg, eh?" Click. Thirty seconds later, I'm signed up and am migrating projects over.  Then, sleep.



Fast forward to daylight. As if it were Christmas Day, I have to tiptoe downstairs and see if that source-sharing website I'd tried in the wee hours was just a dream, or if Santa had really left it there in my bookmarks.



Yup, it's real.

Bitbucket takes a lot of cues from the deservedly popular GitHub, both in its feature set and in the general look of its site. But calling it a "GitHub for Mercurial people" shortchanges both sites.



GitHub was the first mover, has an enthusiastic critical mass of a user base, and provides more information for the casual passer-by. Bitbucket is simpler (it eschews the head-scratching "Network Graph" feature) and uses my favorite revision control system. It shares a lot of GitHub's social networking features (wikis, "following" your friends, etc.), though only time will tell whether or not those will be as important to the fabric of the Bitbucket site as they are to the "MySpace for hackers."



I'd like to see Bitbucket provide more documentation, project visibility, and searching right there on the front page, the way GitHub does. And the ability to use more than one SSH key, rather than having to push the same private key to all my development boxes and do config-file situps, would be nice. Jesper, the creator, is pretty responsive in the forums. I wouldn't be shocked to see a few of these wishes become reality.

Oh, and, er... one more thing. They support patch queues. Right there in the UI.  Ten pounds of awesome in a five-pound sack. Can't wait to try out that part of the site.

Here it comes... FOSCON 2008!

It's that time of year again.  Time for those who couldn't make it to OSCON -- or those who want to see their favorite speakers in a more chaotic setting -- to come join us at FOSCON 2008, Portland's free Ruby-flavored software alterna-conference.

This year, in addition to the lightning talks we usually serve up, the conference will feature a live coding "cook-off" among Ruby on Rails, Symfony, Seaside, and... Drupal?  I'm as surprised as you are!  Come see who'll win the right to be the evening's Iron Software Chef!



6 - 9 PM, Wednesday, July 23, 2008, CubeSpace.