Bazaar loses to git

And now I have tried bzr too. Maybe it is to early to declare a winner in the epic battle between it and git since I only have about 20 minutes of bzr experience under my belt.

Never the less, git is the winner and bzr is the total loser. I have used both tools to mirror the waf Subversion repository. Here are my conclusions:

• Both tools take a long time to clone a Subversion repository. Like an hour for bzr and two hours for git for a repository with about 4000 commits.
• bzr version 1.3.1 released in April 2008 has some severe performance problems. Simple commands like bzr diff, blame and log takes almost ten seconds to execute. Those commands are instanteous in git.
• git log and diff are colized by default. Their bzr equivalents are not.
• git uses some kind of smarts so that it automatically pages output through less when needed. bzr does not.
• The Bazaar User Guide at least looks much more helpful than the Git User's Manual.

The last point is Bazaar's only redeeming quality. But it is a big one and I will spend some more time with it before deciding if Bazaar is rubbish or not.

The reason why I'm even considering bzr is because I'm getting sick of gits branch model. It just doesn't fit my brain. There is no such thing as a branch in git, branches are just pointers to commits. That leads to annoying problems when you want to rebase a branch tree.

Say that you are working on feature branch foo. In that branch you branch of to an experimental branch bar-foo. Then you want to update foo because some new commits has arrived at master while keeping your private branch structure intact. The only way to do that, I've found, is to rebase both branches. First you rebase foo to master, which probably involves solving some conflicts. Now your branch structure is messed up, the bar-foo branch will contain all the commits from the foo branch. That is, the foo branchs commits are duplicated!

It is totally stupid and absolutely not what i wanted. The solution is to rebase bar-foo on top of foo. But now you will have to resolve all the conflicts from the foo branch again!

Multiply with the number of branches you have combined with gits unwillingness to automatically resolve conflicts and you get lots of work needed just to keep some feature branches up to date with a Subversion master. I really hope bzr's workflow is better.

The Year in Review

It is the day after New Year's Eve and yet another year has passed. Most people are doing these reviews of the past year so guess I have too.

In my life there has been upsides and downsides. I have accomplished some goals and failed to reach others. Has it been a good year? I don't really know, maybe I should have been able to complete more goals or been able to avoid more of the bad moments.

On the relationship front, Im Western nicht Neues, sums it up nicely. I haven't gotten a new girlfriend and I haven't really looked for anyone either. I don't think I want to maintain a full-time relationship that I used to have. Though I am completely over my last one. A girl that I would only have to visit a few times a week or something would suit me better.

I have still met some girls over the year and have had some kisses. It is still hard for me to meet people, but at least I've learnt the basics. I'm especially proud of my performance with the chubby teacher. But I'll keep the details to myself. :)

The autumn vacation in France was totally awesome. I went alone to Lacanau for surfing and got to know some wonderfully cool people. It was a total blast. One of my new year's resolutions will be to keep in touch with them. I definitely want to visit Jeff, Jean-Sebastien, Olivia and the others some time this year. I have some great photos from it that I should publish somewhere.

I did some great stuff last year. Unfortunately, I did almost everything on my own. Sometimes that can be a little lonely. I bathed in Mälaren twice, saw Dark Knight in the movies and went to the gym dozens of time, but all by myself. I even went out to nightclubs alone.

Which brings me to the major downside of the year; I didn't make very many close friends. That's simply it. I should be good friends with the boys from Ericsson, I should be closer to the guys I go out with, I should have someone I can play guitar with. But it just hasn't happened and I can't explain why really. It is my biggest goal not reached this year. I hesitate to call it a failure, but that is probably what it is, I'll try harder this year!

I bought a condo in Akalla (actually in December 2007) which I moved into from Södertälje. It is three times larger than my old apartment and I'm quite happy with it. Close to the metro and 20 minutes to the city. Of course I know it was a bad deal and the housing market has tanked. Bo fucking ho, I'm much happier here than in Södertälje. Now I can vacuum clean without having to move the furniture around. :) And I have an oven!!

I like the girls in Husby, they are all dark brown and very hot. I met one in the summer but it didn't work out at all. :) And the mall by Kista station that is open to 21:00 every day is extraordinarily convenient. Hell, it is almost walking distance to IKEA too.

But the major thing in 2008 is that I'm learning to play the guitar. Now I have two hobbies, programming and music. Practicing guitar is like meditation for me, it takes my mind of all the problems and I can't stay sad while strumming my six string. I'm not very good yet but I have no doubt that I will be someday, because I'm practicing very hard. I even took a course.

Now to the shitty things. It doesn't work out with my family. Maybe we are to different or something. I believe that everyone can accomplish their dreams as long as they put their minds to it. They do not agree. So if you can't do something you set out to do, I'd say try harder, they'd feel sorry instead. And I can't stand people feeling sorry for themselves or others. The ambient undertone quite often becomes very inconvenient.

I have to run to the gym soon, because I want to get out before the sun sets. So the last thing I'll mention is that I've taken a new job! I also got a pretty sizeable raise which I'm more than happy with. I can't mention how much I earn for obvious reasons but my salary is now quite decent. :) My previous job wasn't bad at all, and working with Erlang in Ericsson is a total blast. But I couldn't refuse the offer I got from Caliber Media. The new language is Java which frankly is a huge step below Erlang. J2EE has a very time consuming deployment cycle which means that for each change you do, you have to redeploy the application which takes closer to five minutes. That is about four minutes longer than it took to compile an Erlang module, scp it to a live blade cluster and reboot the site. Nevertheless, there are girls on this job which is a big plus. :)

What else is new? Obama won in America! It restores some of my faith in the human race. It is hard to describe how important that was to me personally. It shows that stuff is still possible despite everything. Some things never change though, Israel's recent massacre in Gaza is despicable. Our government apparently has nothing to say about it. Fuck the foreign minister, fuck the rest of the corrupted scoundrels.

That's all for my year. Next year I will quit snuffing. I'll get abs on my stomach and go through another accutane regimen. Oh yeah, my acne/rosacea got worse this year. I'll also double my salary, get a whole harem of fuck buddies and move to a 120m2 flat in Vasastan. Then I'll be golden, but maybe I should move to Japan instead... Hm. Life is still full of possibilities and I enjoy it very much.