One of the axes along which revision-control systems differ from each other is where they choose to store their working-tree metadata.

Today is the Jewish festival of Purim. One of the customs associated with Purim is the eating of hamentashen — triangular pastries with a sweet filling. (The word is probably Yiddish for “Haman’s pockets”, where Haman is the bad guy in the events commemorated by the festival; in Hebrew they’re called אוזני המן oznei haman, or “Haman’s ears”.)

I’ve been watching some Prison Break lately. I don’t suppose I’m giving all that much away if I mention that season 2 follows the lives of some convicts after a, y’know, prison break.

One of the convicts in question is Our Hero, Michael Scofield, who we’re meant to believe is a genius. But I saw something the other day that gave me serious cause for concern on that issue.

This is a cautionary customer-service tale about the UK ISP Metronet; that company’s owned by PlusNet, who I therefore assume are bad in precisely the same ways.

Today I read an article by Zed Shaw about the strengths and weaknesses of Ruby, part of a series of similar articles about several dynamic languages, each written by an appropriate expert.

Most of it was just as you’d expect: a description of the Ruby landscape, and the places it works well. But buried here are there are one or two comments that just make no sense whatsoever.

Eric Sink has an interesting piece about MeWare, ThemWare, and UsWare. The basic idea is that one way of categorising software is by who uses it:

• MeWare: only the developer
• UsWare: the developer, among others
• ThemWare: people other than the developer

I think most programmers can see what Eric’s getting at there. If you’ve ever worked on, say, a piece of software used exclusively by people in a different department of the company you work for, you know how hard it can be to ensure that the software actually meets those people’s needs.

However, I took issue with one particular thing Eric says.

I’ve been using Rhythmbox for a while now. (Well, I had a brief sojourn in the land of Amarok, but I now seem to have left it for good.) Rhythmbox is actually pretty good; better in some usability ways than iTunes, for example. But it’s far from perfect.