GitHub developer Scott Chacon on the question "SVN or Git?"

SVN. I’m a huge fan of slow development, waiting twenty minutes for commands to run, useless merge functionality and single points of failure. Why would anyone want cheap branching and easy merging when you can bill 5 hours for each merge instead? Those Git people are just crazy. If my commits took 1/10 of a second instead of 5 minutes, when would I ever find the time to read Hacker News?

Full interview. Especially poignant (to me) this week as I get to hit the repo via crappy residential broadband and crappy enterprise vpn.

Appropriate for Tablet-eve, Joel Johnson writes:

The reason I bought the van is that even when I am in the process of wanting to drop out of society, "get back to nature," etc., I can't do it without spending $5K on a fuel-snorting machine. It's what tech dorks do when we look at the world: try to find a thing to purchase through which to realize our fantasies.

With that in mind, consider what it's like to be a technology writer, especially on the consumer side of the business. It's not like we sit around trying to get people to buy things that they don't need, but we're sort of fundamentally part of the problem. I mean, we take some comfort in the fact that we ostensibly are steering people toward the best items for purchase, but, isn't the world shaking itself apart? Aren't we running out of oil and rare earth metals and kids in Liberia are smoking heroin and raping their neighbors and the entire civilization is ready to collapse?

In addition, by moving Microsoft Office Excel 2010 to the cluster, customers are seeing linear performance scaling of complex spreadsheets — spreadsheets that before would take weeks to complete, and which are now completing their calculations in a few hours.

Wild. Press release.

When you want to include header files in your source code, you typically use a #import directive. This is like #include, except that it makes sure that the same file is never included more than once.

What a concept.

I don't foresee a scenario in which millions of people that hope to finally get some conclusion in Lost are pre-empted by the president.

-White House spokesman Robert Gibbs

Belle de Jour explains the messages underlying her critics' snark:

When someone says: "I have similar factors in my life and didn't choose this route." What they mean is: "I am unfamiliar with the notion that free will more or less assures that people will makes decisions I would not have done."

Slate posted a cute piece on Lifehacking techniques of the moderately famous. I found Judd Apatow's responce unnervingly familiar:

I am always driven by the terror of humiliation. I do not need to trick myself into getting anything done because the voice in my head is always there reminding me that if I don't get it done, my world will collapse. It is not true. It makes no sense, yet I believe it every time. It is not a healthy way to motivate oneself. I have gone to the therapist for almost 20 years to remove this type of thinking from my head, but I can't argue with its effectiveness.

It's been a while. I've been busy.

Stephen Metcalf speaks of Where The Wild Things Are on Slate's Culture Gabfest:

Especially awful in this instance, because Sendak is a genius when it comes to the nature of childhood-its neurosis, its fears and furthermore, he gets into the mental and imaginative world of children brilliantly and... this strikes me as exactly the opposite of the movement of Gen-Y creative people which is this avalanche of forced whimsy under which they bury everything, which utterly sentimentalizing childhood -and for them to now try to score points by reaching out to Maurice Sendac for "cred" on the issue of the dark nature of childhood is utterly repulsive.

Sorry for any annoying RSS reposts/disruptions you may have experienced - I committed the cardinal sin of deploying a feature that was only half-finished.

My fears of impending IE6 responsibilities have lessoned ever so slightly. However, this does little to alleviate the two main holdouts for IE6:

1. Conservative (i.e., lazy and/or incompetent) IT groups.
2. Folks for whom nuanced browsing experience just doesn't matter (e.g., my mom).

Much like legalizing gay marriage, the best weapon in this fight remains time itself.