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Nine years ago. I break up with the first girlfriend I had after I moved to California. As Sunnyvale is a wretched place to live, particularly if you’re in your early twenties, newly single, and full of piss, I up and move to San Francisco. I teach myself to navigate by driving through the city in the night-time fog. For company, I acquire two kittens, the wide-eyed runts of a semi-feral litter. (To this day, Oedipus and Electra skitter and scramble whenever a human approaches, only deigning to approach when we’re sitting or lying down.) ...

A snapshot of what it’s like with a wife on bed rest: Son ambles in at six thirty. “Let’s watch Spider-Man!” Decides my slothful motions are not indicative of Spider-Man watching; visits wife. Get up. Find son and wife curled up, asleep. Damn, that’s cute. Make breakfasts for family. Fuss over wife. Go upstairs and work, because it’s Bay Area rush hour; there’s no point in getting in the car. Ninety minutes later, decide that traffic flow could conceivably be bearable. Receive surprise quickie neck massage from Jamey, who’s visiting as company for Shannon. Give profuse thanks. Fuss over wife. Into car. Work like dog. Discover that someone else’s code I’m supposed to be “finishing off” is not only incomprehensible, but gets wrong answers that vary wildly on every. Single. Frigging. Run. Leave early. Now have to make dinner every day. Home after five. Fuss over wife. Stress causing sleep loss causing migraine. Poor unfortunate fucking woman, as if bed rest weren’t enough. Dinner on table before six, cleaned up by six fifteen. How did an indolent geek turn into this model of domestic efficiency? Take son grocery shopping. No, he can’t have the sugar bombs. No, the candy nukes are right out. No, nobody makes gooey silicone Spider-Man toys, as has been the case at each inquiry, every day of the past several months. Return home many dollars poorer, but with fresh cherries and plums. Joy! Plop son into bath. Put son to bed. Tell incoherent bedtime story involving Spider-Man and sundry maleficent cartoon characters. Fuss over wife. Put out recycling. Curse idiot who mixed plastic and paper, forcing messy sorting. Conclude that idiot was most probably self. Launder. Fold. Decide that perhaps a beer may be in order. It transpires that the Bud languishing at the back of the fridge passed away almost a year ago, unnoticed. Do the decent thing; flush the bugger down the sink. ...

Until now, Mercurial only supported tunnelling over an ssh connection when pushing changes to a remote repository. Matt just committed some changes that lets all commands that talk to other repositories work over ssh tunnels.

I implemented a locate command that finds files in a repository by pattern. Here’s a simple example: $ hg locate '*.c' mercurial/bdiff.c mercurial/mpatch.c

I have started doing regular automated builds of Mercurial, and packaging up the results for Fedora Core 2 and 3. These builds are performed four times a day, and the results are available here. Due to the vagaries of my local setup, I have i386 packages available for FC2 and FC3, and x86_64 for FC3 only. The easiest way to install them is using the yum package manager. On FC2 systems, add the following to your /etc/yum.conf file. On FC3 systems, add it to a new file named /etc/yum.repos.d/mercurial.repo. ...

Goffredo Baroncelli has contributed a patch to add RSS 2.0 support to Mercurial’s HTTP serving capabilities. This means that you can subscribe to a Mercurial repository using the RSS feed reader of your choice, and be notified when someone publishes new changes.

I have implemented a revert command that lets you undo uncommitted modifications.

Since I started looking at Mercurial a few days ago, I’ve been hacking quite heavily on it. I’ll try to make some time to write about it here, but much of what I’ve been doing is documented on the Mercurial wiki that I’ve put together.

Courtesy of the Effect Measure public health blog, this gem from Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot: There is something stunningly narrow about how the Anthropic Principle is phrased. Yes, only certain laws and constants of nature are consistent with our kind of life. But essentially the same laws and constants are required to make a rock. So why not talk about a Universe designed so rocks could one day come to be, and strong and weak Lithic Principles? If stones could philosophize, I imagine Lithic Principles would be at the intellectual frontiers. ...

And it is Mercurial. I have used BitKeeper for several years, and it is quite simply a fantastic piece of software. But for non-commercial projects, at least if I want to collaborate with other people, it is no longer an option. BitMover will make the “free” version of BK unavailable from July 1. The result is that many people are now casting about for BK replacements. Here is my brief, skewed summary of the free distributed revision control world. ...