Last weekend, I was at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in Minehead. It’s unusual as music festivals go: it’s held in a holiday camp, which is great for those who, like me, find that the pleasures of actual tent-in-a-field camping are no match for those of beds and indoor plumbing.

One of the great things about Git is that makes branching and merging so simple as to be a delight, not a chore. One of the consequences of that is that you tend to use far more branches than you would if you were using a lesser revision-control system. Which can make it easy to forget which branch you’re on at any given moment. So wouldn’t it be nice if you had a simple, easy-to-see reminder of where you are, visible at all times?

Once upon a time, handling signals in Perl code had a pretty big gotcha — one that you couldn’t work around. Perl 5.8 changed signal handling in a way that eliminated that gotcha, but replaced it with a different one, harder to trigger, but no less surprising.

JavaScript is a fine language in many ways — a fact that many people have noticed by now. But one of its biggest problems is the design of its standard library. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit to complain about; this note covers just Math.max.

What do you do when you’ve got a large collection of chillies in the house? Well, if you’re us, you make harissa.

Yesterday was the 2008 Doors Open Day in Edinburgh: each year, for one day only, a variety of buildings open their doors to visitors, free of charge. A large number are places that you’d never normally get the chance to visit.

Opera has what seems to be a peculiar bug in its treatment of HTML <img> elements that have align attributes. Fortunately, it’s relatively easy to work around.

Nearly a year ago, Mark Jason Dominus blogged about runN, a program he’d written. I’ve stol– uh, I mean, adapted his version for my own ends, with a couple of differences. This is a rationale for my changes.

CVS might be considered an easy target for software hate, but that doesn’t stop it annoying the hell out of you. Here’s an instance I encountered today, trying to use cvs annotate.