Interesting Links for 01-02-2013

[andrewducker]

• University application rates are up for the more disadvantaged members of society
  (tags: fees university uk )
• git: a Nightmare of Mixed Metaphors
  (tags: language metaphor ux versioncontrol git )
• If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault
  (tags: viafanf internet discussion comments community )
• Why newspaper comment systems are so full of

Comments

[strawberryfrog]

About the Wow Movie

1) an article that calls David Bowie a mere "1960s pop star" *cannot* be taken seriously.

2) Penny arcade has this to say: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic

3) Duncan Jones is a great director, but I fear that this may be an irresistible film-maker meeting an immovable genre. Success is not certain, but an interesting failure may be worth hoping for instead of just junk.

[momentsmusicaux]

Wait, they're missing a short dude with cryptic advice! http://www.badmovies.org/tvshows/dundragon/dundragono/dundragono5.jpg

[strawberryfrog]

Also, if Duncan Jones needs someone to play the role of Goblin King, he knows who to call. (joke seen on twitter).

[andrewducker]

That Penny Arcade link is one of my links today...

[momentsmusicaux]

I saw the link about git on your twitter yesterday, and thought of a very good response to it while not managing to get to sleep. Which now I've mostly forgotten. The gist of it was: some good point ('working tree' is a totally wacky term; stash and tag in particular are inconsistent with the rest of the git family of commands), but git is complex and complex things require terminology. In short, I find the post whiny.

[momentsmusicaux]

Yes, this was it. You need concepts like rebase and merge. Git works with a filesystem tree in 2 (?) dimensions -- there is the tree itself, and then the tree as it changes through time.

Having now been working with git for about 3 years, I find that I not only perceive the file tree as a hierarchy of files, but also as a graph of changes in time, with the commits and branches and all that. It's something that rebasing and merging lets you manipulate -- you are moving objects around in a tree which represents changes to your files over time. (My dream git GUI would let you snip and drag and drop strings of commits to rearrange your history.) It's complex, and slightly mental whatever terminology you apply to it. It's also amazingly powerful.

[andrewducker]

He's not saying that it shouldn't require terminology - he's saying that the selected terminology is bad, contradictory, and lacks coherence. It's not that it doesn't require UX - it's that the UX is clumsily designed.

As someone who appreciates good UX, I'd have thought you'd agree with that.

[momentsmusicaux]

But git has a mixture of concepts. He's not making a case at all for the metaphors being mixed -- just demonstrating that there are a lot of concepts.

Of course tagging and rebasing don't go together -- they are totally different operations!

Version control is not at all a natural thing; I really doubt a coherent set of natural metaphors could exist here. Decapitating Henry VIII's wives into a different order with time travel??

[momentsmusicaux]

I don't care that much about the quality of coffee -- at home I just drink instant and it's fine with me. But when I pay restaurant prices for a coffee, I think it's fair to expect they actually make it.

Also, those capsule doodads have always struck me as an obscene landfill-generator.

[apostle_of_eris]

We seem to be near the crossover where coffee nuts are worse than wine nuts.
It's incredibly important to do it precisely the same every time - but by hand, never mechanically . . .

[meowpurrr]

git has the same problem as postgresql for me. the learning cost vs alleged benefits ratio make them not worthwhile when i have subversion and mysql.

at work this past month i'm finally, slowly, getting most of our web sites in svn, although in some cases the devs need time to do some cleaning up. next will be getting the devs who haven't used any version control before to commit their changes, and possibly even clean up the backup copies of files/directories they leave strewn about for years afterwards. branching and merging's quite a way off, let alone any of the gymnastics git can supposedly do.