Here's some interesting bits and pieces for software developers:

• bstring , a C library for safeand easy string manipulation in the style of Python. Every sooften I need to mangle strings faster than Python or Perl canmanage it; at those times, I turn to the bstring library.(I have a longer writeup on bstring here .)

• quilt , a packagethat allows one to manage a series of patches by keeping track of thechanges each patch makes. Patches can be applied, un-applied,

A great deal of system administration consists of not stubbing your toea second time.

(Unfortunately I must mar this by adding 'on the same thing' as afootnote.)

Centralized versus distributed version control is one of the bigdiscussion topics in the field. Being distributed complicatesthe software, and CVS and Subversion (the two version controlsystems most widely used for open source) are both centralized.Recently, Ian Bicking has written some interesting articles on the issue, in Centralized vs Decentralized and its part 2 .

I believe that open source development needs distributed versioncontrol. The argument why this is necessary is a bit too long fora comment on Ian Bicking's articles (and besides,

I feel like I've arrived somewhere: WanderingThoughts , this blog, hashad its first case of comment spam. It's interesting to look at thetrail of breadcrumbs and the actual spam, and to see both how much andhow little work the comment spammers seem to be putting into this.

To skip to the punchline: some machines in 69.57.150.0/24 (ev1.net)left a peculiarly crafted comment spam pushing a web page on the