Zevils

An avocado, found in the snow near Portland St and Broadway, Cambridge, MA An avocado in the snow. Who left it there? I do not know. Not Father, Son, nor Ghost so holy, Rebirths you into guacamole. Did leaping from some wretched fate Allow you to feel special, great? Or did, cast down like ancient foe, You weep from terror, weep from woe? But lie here now, near Portland Street, And rest, green flesh and tasty meat.

One of the open-source projects I contribute to is Fink , a package manager for OS X; if you've used apt-get or yum on Linux, it provides a similar facility, allowing you to install, say, GnuPG by running fink install gnupg . It installs things into its own directory tree, rooted at /sw by default, to avoid interfering with things shipped by Apple ( / , /usr ) or manually installed by the user ( /usr/local .) That is, if you have Fink installed, your system will have /sw/bin , /sw/lib , /sw/etc , /sw/share/man , &c. So that you can run things installed in these nonstandard locations, Fink provides some shell commands in /sw/bin/init.sh which edit environment variables like PATH and MANPATH to include the /sw/* directories. Most Fink users have . /sw/bin/init.sh in their ~/.profile , so these commands will be invoked when their shell starts. Having my shell automatically pull in Fink at startup doesn't work for me, though. It's important to me to have a clea

While working with a large codebase, I often want to find the origin of a particular line. Subversion offers a tool, annotate (aka blame , aka praise ), which displays the author and revision for every line in a file, indicating who made the last change to a line. However, the last change is often not very useful; it was a minor change as a result of some other change you're not interested in, or the code was moved around due to refactoring, and you need to go back even further. When I need to do this, I find myself doing a sequence of: 1. svn blame FILE | less ; find the revision N where the line was last changed 2. svn log -r N FILE | less ; if the change is interesting, read the commit log for the file 3. svn blame FILE @ N-1 | less ; using Subversion's little-known pinned revision syntax, find the previous time the line was changed 4. Using N-1 as the new N , return to step 2. : Pretty much any Subversion command that takes a path argument can be given PATH @ REVIS