I’ve started to miss making blog posts with fancy diagramme, mind-blowing pie charts.
The Open letter from Opera’s CTO published in The Register has given me the opportunity to drawn this blog under the total wisdom of yet another pie chart as buried in the comments to the article, I found this:
You’ll notice it’s in the same vein as that one from last year 
I hate subversion right now.
For reasons outside my control I have to keep development branches open for a long time and therefore I need to sync them regularly with trunk and these merge operations are quite annoying and source of headaches.
Additionally, in the recent months I found myself coding disconnected from a network more often than before and I wished I could commit my changes locally and sync them when back online.
Some perl developers around me have played with SVK in the past, and at the end of last year I came across a blog post reviewing several Distributed Version Control System (DVCS).
And Let’s not forget DARCS.
I’ll play with a couple of these, but my choice may be simpler as two developers in my team have already started using Git with the git-svn hook between themselves.
Recently, I’ve been working on a Rails project for the first time.
It’s a nice change after years of perl.
There are quite a few little things that I knew how to do in perl, that I didn’t have clue on how to do it in Rails. Also I run into issue peculiar to Rails or ruby.
I solved all these issues so far and the links below give pointers to some helpful information.
I’m quite annoyed at Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo!
I’m a happy user of several Yahoo services but given the services overlap between the two and what Microsoft wants Yahoo! for, I fear for future of the Yahoo services (I’m a paying customer for some of them).
I fear because I’ve chosen to use them and for the way I go about online things, I feel they are superior to the competing offerings from MS, Apple or Google (in areas like user experience, platform agnosticism, integration between services and use of open standards).
After some grumpy start following Yahoo’s ingestion of Flickr, I’ve actually started to like Yahoo! integration between web services and I like their openness (use of microformats, restful apis, recent adoption of OpenID).
Most importantly though, I’ve got quite a few former colleagues and friends working at Yahoo! and I can just imagine how p**ed off they are at the moment.
I think, in my humble opinion, part of Yahoo!’s troubles comes from not having played the openness card in all their areas of business. I’m thinking about Instant Messaging where they slept with Microsoft and Search where they stood alone. That way they let MS think that there are “synergies” possible or a common vision can be shared.
It would be different, if say, Yahoo! were part of a cloud of interacting open APIs with liberal licensing between coo-petitors, partners, clients.
Elsewhere, Daring Fireball is making a layman’s translation of a Yahoo! memo about the subject.
Also, Roughly Drafted has an article about Microsoft’s intention and why everyone is going to loose if the bid goes through. The article is interesting as it’s full of background and historic information.
In another part of the web, the TechCrunch blog proposes a solution for Yahoo! (or the new entity) to survive in the Search market.
Finally, Yahoo! has rejected (for the moment) Microsoft’s offer.