I tire of people objecting to using git on the basis of bad documentation and UI obscurity. There seems to be a common blind spot here, which is that CVS (which everyone learned first) is just as bad, if not worse. The CVS manual has been getting steadily worse over time, and I challenge anyone reading about cvs up -j for the first time to correctly explain it, let alone sticky tags or binary file handling.

More fundamentally, I think people forget that source control is a very weird and very hard problem. Much like the lower levels of particle physics, you kind of have to implement the behaviour you expect using a model that's not intuitive. That the doc writers for git seem to revel in spewing nerdporn words like "tree-ish" at you is unfortunate, but people like seeing dmesg spew at boot for the same reason: it's obscure and therefore makes you feel cool.

Of course, no one needs to know how pretty much any vcs works under the skin on a daily basis, and that's why sensible git documentation exists. HELLO PEOPLE THE INTERNET HAS SEARCH NOW.

Tags: git
music: front line assembly - future fail

I've been playing a lot of the new Castlevania game on the DS recently. It's pretty cool! There's basically only two points of integration with the touchscreen. The first is after you beat one of the bosses, you can destroy certain blocks on the screen by touching them, which is kind of weak since it's only used to let you acquire rare items. The other is that in order to actually beat a boss once they get to 0 HP, you have to draw a magic seal on the screen, and do it fast enough; otherwise they regenerate and you have to try again. That works really well, leads to a bit of an "oh shit" moment when the seal you have to trace shows up as you fumble for the stylus.

The DS is rapidly becoming my favorite toy, which is pretty high praise.

Also, for as much as I rag on git, I just want to mention that git-bisect is hella awesome. I used it yesterday to isolate which commit introduced a rendering bug in EXA. Unfortunately the commit in question is the one that introduced the 'smart' pixmap migration migration scheme, which is worrying.

Tags: ds, git
music: eat static - bodystealers