cameronyule.com

Some great news coming from the Subversion developers recently, announcing that merge tracking will be included in the upcoming 1.5 release. From the announcement;

Merge-tracking is when your version control system keeps track of how lines of development (branches) diverge and re-form together.

…

While Subversion 1.5 doesn’t make merging as easy as a system like Git or Mercurial, it certainly solves common points of pain. 

It’s no surprise that they mention Git, as it’s starting to gain some serious traction (notably within the Ruby/Rails community)  thanks to it’s superior branch handling.

I haven’t been entirely convinced that the switch to Git would make sense for me. Branching an entire project is something I need to do only occasionally (one of those times being this week, coincidentally) and the other benefits Git offers, while appealing, aren’t enough to make me think I can’t live without it.

Now with SVN improving one of the two flaws I think it has (the other being it leaving .svn directories littered throughout your project, something which I believe is also going to be fixed), I think I may well stick with what I know for the time being!

Decided to take the plunge and move my blog over onto Wordpress. I’m really impressed with how much it’s improved since I last used it.

Compared to writing my own blogging software, which is what I’d done previously using Rails, everything is easier. The admin interface is superb, with the post, media and plugin management all top notch. Check this evaluation of the Wordpress 2.5 interface (which was designed by Happy Cog no less).

Still using the default theme at the moment but I’ll create a custom one soon, if only just to get rid of the horrible justified text!

Discovered a handy open–source application for OS X on Sourceforge last night called Grand Perspective, which allows you to create a visualisation of the relative size of your files. You can specify a specific folder or your entire disk and the program will scan all your files and create an interactive graphic that lets you identify what’s using the most space – great for finding things you’ve forgotten!