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Friday, June 24, 2005

AMC Providence Kayaking Trip

Providence from the waterI’m co-leading a kayak trip in Providence this Sunday, June 26, with the AMC Narragansett Young Members. If you’d like to sign up, we have available spots and a few kayaks for cheap rental. Since it isn’t a purely flatwater trip, you should be comfortable with sitting in a kayak, but don’t need a lot of experience in order to enjoy it.

You can sign up online.

Trip description:

We’ll spend time enjoying downtown Providence from the river, and also paddle outside the Hurricane Barrier to get a taste of Narragansett Bay. Not literally. L Bev Thomas, CL Andrew Shearer. The route is similar to the one in these pictures.

   Providence, Outdoors, General  Posted at 7:20 AM    Comments (1)

Announcing fs2svn: make a Subversion repository from archive folders

fs2svn is a new, free, open-source tool that converts a bunch of archive folders into a Subversion repository.

If you’ve kept a series of historical snapshots of your work in folders, fs2svn can help you upgrade to a full-fledged version control system.

fs2svn goes through all the folders under a given parent folder (in filesystem order) and creates a Subversion revision for each one, backdated to the most recent file’s last modified date. The log message is set to the folder name.

Additions, changes, and deletions between one folder and the next are all recorded in the repository.

The input format is very simple. It only covers the mainline trunk, not any tags or branches (though tags for major versions could be manually created later, if your folder names carry enough information).

The format is so simple it could be used as a common intermediary. If you wanted to migrate a mainline trunk from some exotic version control system to Subversion, you could write a script to export it to regular folders, then use this script to import the result into Subversion.

See the main fs2svn page for information, examples, and to download.

   Python, Open Source, Software, General  Posted at 12:14 AM    Add a comment

Bermuda 1-2

Congratulations to my father and my brother Rob, who just finished sailing back from Bermuda to Newport in the double-handed leg of the Bermuda 1-2 race. I still don’t know how they placed officially.

(This is the race I’d done the past few times as the crew, with my father as captain, for the double-handed return leg. The inital Newport-to-Bermuda leg is single-handed, so he of course does it alone.)

The first leg involved two emergencies where my father’s boat started filling with water. I still haven’t heard all the details, but it turned out not to be a real leak. For the return leg, one boat was dismasted, but they managed to rig up something to get to shore. No major disasters like the 2003 race, where one boat capsized, and the crew was picked out of the water by a passing cruise ship.

   General  Posted at 12:05 AM    Comments (2)
June 2005
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Recent Reading

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, by J. K. Rowling

Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut

Bad News, by Donald E. Westlake

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, by Steven Pinker

The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter

Speaking With the Angel, by Nick Hornby (Editor)

In Progress

The Language Instinct, by Steven Pinker

The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen