Here is something important about system administration: us merely doingour work does not give our users a benefit , not in the sense thatusers perceive benefits. This is because, fundamentally, the job ofsysadmins is to make the systems work the way that they should to startwith, much like the job of the janitorial staff is to keep the buildingclean the way it should be.

(System administration is somewhat different from janitorial work inthat what we work on was not 'clean' in its natural, pre

Every so often, someone says that git is badbecause it lets you rewrite history (usually they have other reasonstoo). This almost invariably irritates me because it is so completelywrong at a deep level.

Git has no support for 'rewriting history' in any meaningful sense. Infact, git's design means that by its very nature you cannot rewritehistory. Since a commit is identified by the hash of its contents,you cannot change a commit once it is made. Since commits identifytheir parents

Here are some quick (or at least short) reactions to all of the newshows of spring 2009 that I've watched some of, written down for variousfuzzy reasons. I am not going to try to summarize or review these, justgive some brief comments.

Rather than agonize over quality ratings, I've decided to rate showsbased purely on how eagerly I'm looking forward to the next episode,from +3 ('want more right now') to -3 (