switching to mercurial

After using bazaar for a few weeks, I'm switching to mercurial because it is faster. I was seeing check across the network (using bzr+ssh) in of a modified quicken qdf file ( about 12mb) take 15 minutes or so. Using mercurial this takes just a few seconds. I imagine that mercurial is doing a better job of diffing binary files. Also mercurial has better error messages. Also, mercurial worked out of the box in cygwin - though I'm using the windows native mercurial now.

I still like some things about bazaar better. It seems to handle empty directories better - I'm not sure if mercurial handles them at all. Mercurial assigns a hex string to each version. Is it a hash key? Probably. These strings are more visible than I would like them to be.

I still may try git at some point. For now though, I'm using mercurial.

ypops on ubuntu linux

I've been working in linux today. After yesterday's success with ypops. I wanted to get it working on linux as well. Unfortunately there does not appear to be an ubuntu package for ypops available ( though I did not look too hard).

So, I went to sourceforge for the source but it did not compile. Both the most recent CVS and the code tagged YPOPS_0_9_5_1 does not compile. However, from searching through the ypops forums, I did find the following:

YPOPs! 0.9.5.1 sources for UNIX platform

Posted by Thomas Skariah in this ypops forum entry along with instructions for compiling.

Thank you Thomas.

This code compiles and links. I glanced at the differences between Thomas's version and the cvs code and it all looks good.

Having compiled and linked the code I put my new ypops binary into /usr/local/bin . To get it to start up automatically on ubuntu 8.04, I created a file called /etc/event.d/ypops with the following content:
----------------------------------------------------------
description "start ypops"
author "Dave"

start on runlevel 2
start on runlevel 3
start on runlevel 4
start on runlevel 5

console output

exec /usr/local/bin/ypops
-----------------------------------------------------------

This file instructs upstart to start ypops .

Having done all this I can read my yahoo e-mail with thunderbird using localhost as my server.

ypops

I belong to a few yahoo groups - essentially yahoo mailing lists. Rather than log on to yahoo multiple times to read the e-mail from these lists, I use "ypops", a nice little open source that provides a pop3 interface to yahoo. A couple of months ago it stopped working. Well, today I looked into it and learned that by setting yahoo e-mail to use the new-and-improved online yahoo mail interface, ypops works again

TiddlyWiki

I'm using tiddlywiki again. I had used it before but stopped because my data seemed to be getting corrupted. I had (have) backups but didn't want to bother searching for the time of corruption and then dealing with entries past then. I weeded the useful info out and stored it in google notes but was not too happy with that because:

1. I was/am a little concerned about security - not that I had anything of a sensitive nature stored but just the principle of the matter bothers me.

2. I never looked at it. This is more important. I want something that I can double click and *easily* edit. google notes didn't satisfy that need but tiddlywiki does.

So now I'm using tiddlywiki again and my data is under version control and the version control data itself is backed up. This is mostly for speed of access reasons. With the data under version control I can keep my working copy locally. Hopefully it will also help prevent/track corruption problems.