Yesterday I had a tad too much free time so I decided to finally put all of my writings on subversion (you could also say I got fed up with always having to sync between computer, laptop and flash drive), but when I was setting it up on dreamhost because I'm too lazy to set up my own, I noticed a checkbox. It said "autoversioning". Hmmm I thought, what's this? And it led me to a short explanation of the wonder that is WebDAV.
Apparently webdav allows you to mount a svn repository as if it were a remote drive and that's just bloody awesome I must say. Edit your files directly on svn, drag and drop, the whole shebang. At first it seemed totally miraculously awesome and too good to be true. Well it was too good to be true. See, the problem now is that those files are no longer stored on my computer at all and suddenly that svn repo stops being a lovely backup and sync device, it becomes the sole storage of your files ... and that's just not that great. Especially since sometimes you're left without an internet connection, but would still like access to them. Further searching will be required.
Over the weekend I convinced my girlfriend to switch to Kubuntu and you know, I thought it'd be easier on her. I set up everything, gave her the wonder that is compiz and installed the pretty kde4. Her brother fell in love, she, however, hates it thoroughly. I'm not exactly certain why, but she was opposed to almost all the fancy compiz effects and she has trouble doing the simplest tasks.
Although later on it turned out the simple tasks she has trouble with are really a result of a decade of bad practices picked up from Windows and being halfway between a power user and a regular one she's having trouble with just about everything. She knows enough to do interesting things in windows, but not enough to be able to generalise the concepts and do the same things with slightly different looking menus and icons.
For example she's having trouble figuring out how to install applications. But you just bloody say what you want and ALL is done for you woman! ... But how do I install something I download from the internet? I used to simply download from the internet and doubleclick. .... Why the hell would you go through the trouble of googling for it, downloading it and all that? It's all right bloody here for christ's sake, you don't have to do anything. ... But how do I install something I simply download from the internet?
Needless to say that argument could still be going on to this day if I didn't avert her focus to other things.
Continue reading about WebDAV, girlfriends and linux
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