Tomboy’s “Start Here” note

I use Dropbox to synchronize my Tomboy notes. This works very well, but there is a problem when setting it up on a new computer. Tomboy has a special “Start Here” note, which is used mainly for organizing other notes. When I tell it to synchronize notes from the Dropbox directory and overwrite the existing default notes, it will do so, but it doesn’t change it’s “Start Here” note pointer. As as result, Tomboy is not aware that my new Start Here note is the one it should use. As far as I know, there is no way fix this using Tomboy itself. It can be done only using GConf. Here is an example how to do it from the command line:

TagLib 1.6.3

TagLib 1.6.3 was released this Monday, but somehow I forgot to post an update here. There isn’t many changes, the main reason for the release were configuration issues with 1.6.2. The 1.6.3 tarball can be downloaded here or here.

“Punchcard” graphs for Bazaar

GitHub has a nice feature called “Punchcard”. It’s a graph that represents numbers of commits by day and hour (example). You can easily see wherether a project was hacked over weekends or nights, if it’s done by full-time employees, etc. There are two problems though:

Fun with timestamps

Some programming languages really encourage using UNIX timestamps for working with dates. PHP is a good example of such a language. Functions like date, strtotime, strftime are used all the time. Most people don’t realize that timestamps in general can’t really be used for calculations though. The problem is that most countries use daylight saving time, which means that two times a year the local timezone changes. This nicely breaks the assumption that every day has 24 hours. It doesn’t. Sometimes it has 23 or 25 hours.

Database Modeller 0.3

Database Modeller 0.3 has been released. There isn’t as many changes as I wanted, but the main changes were unreleased for almost half a year. You can download the source code and Windows installer on the project page.

Mercurial, part 1

I’ve been using Mercurial at work for two months now and the expectations I had about it didn’t change to anything better. I guess it looks cool for people who are used to SVN, or even CVS, and are not familiar with other DVCS. I must say that as a Bazaar user, I miss a lot of things. There are some that can be worked around, for something you just have to be extra careful and for something you are out of luck. I really don’t get how people use Mercurial for managing large projects.

Technical book authors

To be honest, I don’t read technical books much. I prefer reading the official documentation for a product I need to work with, or use some other ways to get information about it. I always assumed people who write such books are experts though. There are many book authors on Stack Overflow, but today I encountered a particularly interesting situation with one of them.