As of today, all projects on Sourceforge.net have access to their new Subversion service.

Administrators should go to their Admin pages and enable the SVN service there.
Here’s to the fall of CVS!

TheStar.com - If Hamas must renounce violence, so should Israel, says Linda McQuaig

Ottawa also made clear last week that Canada would withdraw financial support unless Hamas renounced violence, recognized Israel and accepted previous Israeli-Palestinian peace agreements. At first glance, this seems reasonable. But why are these demands placed only on Palestinians? Shouldn’t Israel also have to renounce violence? As the World Council of Churches recently argued: “If violence is incompatible with democracy and with peace, it is incompatible for both the Israeli and Palestinian authorities.” As for recognizing Israel, Hamas has implicitly indicated a willingness do this if Israel ends its occupation. Hamas official Khaled Mishaal told a Russian journal last week that Hamas would halt its armed struggle if Israel withdrew from Palestinian land it has occupied since 1967.

The writer of this article is obviously confused. Perhaps she should live in Israel for a couple of weeks and see the situation with her own eyes before writing such a reprehensible article.

Hamas is a terrorist organization. Their goal is to use violence such as suicide bombings, rocket attacks, or full fledged war in order to at try to completely destroy Israel.
This is not something talking can resolve. It is impossible to negotiate with these people. They believe in what they do.

Now why should Israel renounce violence? Should Israel just stand by and watch the palestinians come in and destroy them? Can Israel just stand by and watch as they are being attacked?
It’s not Israel on the offensive–at least for the most part. It’s the palestinians. But the awesome part is, Israel can not ever be destroyed, unless it be from the inside out.

And NO! Hamas has never had a willingness to halt it’s terrorist activity. They may have expressed such in order to deceive the west, just as their previous leader has lied to the west so consistently only to say something completely different to the palestinians and his friends.

Israel has the complete right to the land it is on right now, and even right to some of the land it’s not on. Much of it was won in a war the palestinians started. Why should the back down? To make some terrorists happy? I THINK NOT!

I know from personal experience and from watching others that many times when building software, after awhile it gets bloated and messy. Things get disorganized and you feel like starting over. And many times that’s what we do.

But what’s the best thing to do? I’ve done two major rewrites of software so far; And once I tried to do a rewrite but ended up just improving what I had because of time restraints.

What are the advantages of redoing (rewriting) your software rather than improving it?

1. You get to start from scratch and use your previous experience to build something with a much better foundation.
2. You can reorganize without breakage.

The disadvantages include:

1. It takes a lot more time.
2. You need to work on two release branches simultaneously.
3. Requires more resources.

When improving the advantages are:

1. You can do it as you have the time.
2. There is no need to redo parts that have no faults.
3. Instead of writing something new from scratch, you can refine what’s there resulting in code without the lot of bugs.

And disadvantages include:

1. It’s easier to say I’ll get to it later and leave it as is.
2. Some things might be impossible to improve without major reconstruction.

But overall I believe the better choice in most cases is to improve. Except in those cases where you need it in another language or it requires some major code reconstruction.

Why I wrote this I don’t know. But maybe it’ll help someone. It’s like this in life a lot of times too. People say, starting this year I’m going to turn my life around! Usually it doesn’t work that way. They start but end up turning back because it’s too difficult.
Meanwhile if we turn our life around gradually, it is much easier to do, and usually is more successful.
But even then we can’t do it ourselves. Only through the power of Jesus Christ can we do anything of worth. Much in the same way, only if we have the resources can we improve or redo software.
But the power Christ gives is enough to redo our life in a split second. Like redoing software, it starts at the heart and works it’s way outward. And the result is amazing.

I downloaded and started to use Camino 1.0 a couple of days ago. I like how much better it integrates with Mac OS X and many things are more “snappy”. But the thing that is driving me back to Firefox, is extensions and Firefox’s builtin RSS/Atom feed reader.

Camino is very nice, but simply lacks the power I’m used to with Firefox.

I recently heard someone talk about how we have so and so many hours every year where we do nothing and how all this time could be used elsewhere doing something of use. I must agree to come extent. But not in the way implied.

There are 8,760 hours in a calendar year. Here are some statistics about how my time is spent in a year according to current conditions:

• 27% (2,372.5 Hrs.) - Spent Sleeping.
• 6% (547.5 Hrs.) - Eating & Drinking.
• 33% (2,920 Hrs.) - Working outside.
• 6.6% (584 Hrs.) - Out with friends/family/church.
• 2% (182.5 Hrs.) - Maintaining church web site and audio editing/publishing.
• 1.6% (146 Hrs.) - Working on several software projects.
• 5% (438 Hrs.) - Personal time–usually prayer and reading of scriptures.
• 1.2% (109.5 Hrs.) - Physical cleanliness.

That leaves 17.6% (1,541.7 Hrs.) Now say 12% of that is spent doing something else (such as posting this here.) not part of the regular week, or just not worth seperating above. Which leaves 5.6% (499 Hrs.) of my time left doing nothing.

Have you ever tried to work constantly over the entire day? From sun up to sun down? I’ve done it and can say if you do it constantly every day, you will end up a nervous wreck. Our bodies are designed to require rest. And while it is true by far most people have too much time on their hands, it’s not because they’re doing nothing.

My point is, you are always doing something. You are either sleeping, thinking, or working. It’s not about how much spare time you have doing nothing, it’s about how you use your time and whether or not it’s used in a benificial way.
It’s impossible for us to do nothing as long as we live, but we can choose how we use that time, and these decissions are highly significant.

Now back to my time chart above. I must confess it’s not the best at all. In a preferred time statistic, time spent alone with God would meet or exceed 10% or 876 hours in a year.

I just read the following quote,

Software should be free in this very competitive world and to make money charge customers for support.

That is the most silly thing I’ve heard about free software for some time now. Just think about it. Sure, the concept sounds good. But what would this really mean for users?

I can almost hear it now. “Because we make most of our money off of support, why not make our software a little more difficult to use.”
The software might be free, but you would see the quality go down the drain. And it’s bad enough already.