NOTE: You almost certainly don’t want to do anything in this article. I wrote this in 2008; Mercurial has improved a lot since then. While everything’s still accurate (as far as I know), using MQ is pain-ridden and unnecessary. Instead, you should use histedit (which is bundled with Mercurial) or the evolve extension (which is not yet, but may be soon). Either will get you to the same place, but they’re both easier, safer, and more powerful than MQ—a rare triple. That said, if you’re curious how...

This is an amazing, riveting talk on the progress—both social and economic—that has been made in the Third World. If you vote, if you’re active in politics, you need to watch it.

I love meetings. That’s a pretty heretical statement. I suspect most diehard bureaucrats just tolerate meetings, and Joel—who I might emphasize has more than a passing relationship with Team Copilot—has spoken rather strongly against them in the past. Hell, I grew up hating meetings, and I’d be lying if I said that part of why I loved the idea of working at Fog Creek wasn’t that the company has traditionally had a strong anti-meeting culture. That’s not to say Fog Creek doesn’t ever have...

I don’t want to get into the habit of posting videos, but having played a lot of Rachmaninoff when I was younger—including Prelude in C# minor, Op. 3, No. 2—this video had me in hysterics: For the record: when I last played the piece, I couldn’t play the full chords, either. (Courtesy of The Old New Thing)

While I’ve gotten pretty good at deploying Squeak and Seaside behind Apache, I remember that the first time I tried it, I got horribly confused and frustrated by the lack of any simple, easy-to-follow guide. Well, if your virtual host runs a Debian-based distro, now you’ve got one: Peter Osburg has provided a step-by-step guide to deploying Seaside apps behind Apache using reverse proxies. The directions should be mostly applicable to other Linux distributions as well.

I have to confess, this is roughly my take on the situation. I’m not especially clear on what the hullabaloo is about.

Would we recommend the Storm? If you’re locked into a contract with Verizon, want a touchscreen phone, and are willing to put up with an OS that moves like a tranquilized yak, then yes the Storm is for you. Not exactly the rousing endorsement that Verizon and RIM were hoping for, I think, but consistent with what I expected. Verizon is utterly terrified of giving up any control over its cellular network. That may seem like a good idea in the short term, but with T-Mobile and AT&T making...

When I was a junior at Duke, we had to make some changes to the Linux kernel for my OS class. Unfortunately, I was the only one who’d had much experience in Linux before, and our professor seemed to think that providing any instruction about how Linux’ kernel worked—or even how Unix programs in general worked—would be overkill. Even great coders will fail if not provided any guidance how to solve a problem. At the time, our options were to spend serious cash on books, or to struggle along...

I’m proud to announce that we’ve just shipped Fog Creek Copilot OneClick. You can read about the details at the new Fog Creek Copilot blog, Air Traffic

Hamster Emporium has a great article on how to debug crashes within objc_msgSend. When I first learning Cocoa to write Fog Creek Copilot for Macintosh, I remember my first crash within objc_msgSend leaving me frustrated, as I had absolutely no idea how to proceed. I wish this article had been available then.