You might notice from my past few posts that I’m basically going through my entire stack of tools and re-evaluating everything. This time it’s version control. A little history I’ve mostly used SVN, and before that, CVS. I’ve tinkered with some of the more heavyweight ones like ClearCase, TrueChange, and Visual SourceSafe as part of [...]
Eric F. Savage
Good stuff, updated weekly(ish)
Why don’t websites have credits?
Posted March 10th, 2011
Engineers of any discipline are largely an anonymous bunch. You don’t know who designed the fuel pump in your car, I’d even wager it would be extremely difficult for you find out if you wanted to. You don’t know who wrote the code for the OS X Dock or Windows Start bar or who wrote [...]
Linux for Desktop, finally?
Posted March 1st, 2011
I love linux for servers, and I like the idea of using an open source desktop, but it’s never worked out between us. Once a year or so, I go grab the friendliest desktop distro and play with it until it breaks or I find out that some key piece of software is missing or [...]
Logging Like it’s 2002
Posted January 21st, 2011
I’ve been going through my old code, looking for stuff that might be worth sharing. At the same time, I’ve been maven-izing my builds, and decided I should revisit each dependency, as some of this code is so old the dependencies are very out of date and/or included in the JDK now. Which brings me [...]
Scripting Language
Posted January 19th, 2011
On a mailing list I’m on, a few very smart, very experienced programmers were discussing the term “scripting language”. I had nothing of non-semantic value to add to the conversation, but I’ve heard this debate enough times that I figured I’d put my stock response here. To the question “is X a scripting language?” the [...]
The Where and When of Music
Posted November 12th, 2010
The idea that music can bring you back to a time and place is not a novel idea. There are songs you hear that make you remember the first time you heard them, or a specific event like a wedding, but I think there’s an even more powerful level.
Earlier to Bed, Earlier to Rise
Posted October 16th, 2010
About 6 months ago I shifted my schedule by 4 hours, literally overnight. Whatever I was up against, whether it was insomnia, sleep addiction, Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, or just being a night-owl, it was getting worse. Also, the summer was coming, I had a shiny new grill, and I wanted to get home early [...]
Today I Learned: Wood Finishing
Posted October 15th, 2010
I took a beginner wood finishing class at Woodcraft last night, and was very happy with it. It was taught by Gary Wood, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone that is intimidated by the craft of finishing, as I was. Some highlights: Put simply, dye is a color liquid, while stain is a suspension [...]
The 3 Ingredients Necessary to Make a Really Good Developer
Posted October 14th, 2010
I’ve been asked many times “how do you become a developer?” and I now have a decent partial answer.
Blogging will resume…now
Posted October 14th, 2010
To say I’ve been slacking on blogging would be an understatement, but I’m back on the horse. It’s been a busy year, we sold StyleFeeder and now work for Time, went through the adventure of purchasing a house, stopped exercising then started again, and a number of other things.