Spyced

I went to the BYU CS alumni dinner tonight. At one point they briefly put everyone's name and position on a projector, one at a time. (At five seconds apiece it wasn't as tedious as it sounds.) When it was my turn, it announced "Jonathan Ellis, System Administrator." What the hell? It turns out that when I RSVP'd I said I was a "python kung-fu master & sysadmin of last resort." (In the sense that, if you really can't find a better sysadmin, I know enough to be dangerous.) Don't bother trying to be clever around bureaucrats.

The first Utah Open Source Conference finished today. I heard that they had close to 300 attendees -- not bad at all for a freshman effort. I reprised presentations that I've given before, on SQLAlchemy and distributed source control. My slides are on the presentations page (although if you've seen my slides from either before, there's not much new there -- I got lucky, SA 0.4 isn't stable yet so I stuck with 0.3.10). I had to work Friday so I missed a lot of presentations, but of the one I saw my favorite was on Ganglia , which I hadn't heard of before but which looks quite useful for anyone running a bunch of servers that takes uptime and qos seriously. (This was actually Brad Nicholes's third presentation of the conference -- he must have been busy!) Afterwards I went to the board games BoF and played Mag Blast. Fun little game.

Since Adam Barr replied to my post on his book , I'd like to elaborate a little on what I said. Adam wrote, [F]or me, "knowing" Python means you understand how slices work, the difference between a list and a tuple, the syntax for defining a dictionary, that indenting thing you do for blocks, and all that. It's not about knowing that there is a sort() function. In Python, reinventing sort and split is like a C programmer starting a project by writing his own malloc. It just isn't something you see very often. Similarly, I just don't think you can credibly argue that a C programmer who doesn't know how to use malloc really knows C. At some level, libraries do matter. On the other hand, I wouldn't claim that you must know all eleventy jillion methods that the Java library exposes in one way or another to say you know Java. What is the middle ground here? I think the answer is something along the lines of, "you have to get enough practi...

Update: an anonymous commenter pointed out that yes, there is a (much!) better way to do this with svnadmin load --parent-dir, which is covered in the docs under "repository migration." All I can say in my defense is that it wasn't something google thought pertinent. So, for google's benefit: how to merge subversion repositories . Thanks for the pointer, anonymous! I needed to merge team A's svn repository into team B's. I wanted to preserve the history of team A's commits as much as reasonably possible. I would have thought that someone had written a tool to do this, but I couldn't find one, so I wrote this. (Of course, now that I'm posting this, I fully expect someone to point me to a better, pre-existing implementation that I missed.) The approach is to take a working copy of repository B, add a directory for A's code, and for each revision in A's repository, apply that to the working copy and commit it. This would be easy if...