Here’s your definitive manual’s complete comparison of Perforce to Mercurial:

Perforce has a centralised client/server architecture, with no client-side caching of any data. Unlike modern revision control tools, Perforce requires that a user run a command to inform the server about every file they intend to edit.

The performance of Perforce is quite good for small teams, but it falls off rapidly as the number of users grows beyond a few dozen. Modestly large Perforce installations require the deployment of proxies to cope with the load their users generate.

In order, I say, “bullshit”, “feature”, “buy a server, dude”, and “you’re doing it wrong”.

In fairness, the author admits up front that his comments about other tools are based only on his personal experience and biases, and the inline comments for this section point out its flaws. Still, it’s clear that his personal experience with Perforce was… limited. Also, he’s either not aware of the features it has that Mercurial lacks, or simply discounts them as “not relevant to the way Our Kind Of People work”.

I’m not criticizing the tool itself, mind you; I’ve tried out several distributed SCMs in the past few years, and Mercurial seems to be fast, stable, easily extensible, and well-supported. I’m switching several of my Japanese projects to it from Bazaar, and it cleanly imported them. It handles Unicode file names and large files a lot better, which were causing me grief in the other tool.

There are things I can’t do in Mercurial that I do in Perforce, though, and some of them will likely never be possible, given the design of the tool. [Update: for-instance deleted; it appears that if you always use the -q option to hg status, you avoid walking the file system, and you can set it as a default option on a per-repository basis. If the rest of the commands play nice, that will work. The real value of explicit checkouts, even in that example, is the information-sharing, something that devs often value less than Operations does.]

There are times when the only joy I can extract from the work of the Hello!Project costume designers is the thought that they’re an aberration, and that outside of Harajuku, most people involved in costume design in Japan at least try to achieve some sort of tasteful enhancement.

Yeah, well, not so much.

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It’s 10pm on a Friday night. When I open my windows to cool the place down, what do you suppose I hear?

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Just for amusement…

I know you’re in it for the ad impressions and referrals to your horribly-overpriced online store, but when you’re retyping a press release for a new product announcement, could you at least identify the product correctly and link to the goddamn press release. Especially when it includes useful information like a release date and a price.

For instance, today’s little gem is the new Buffalo USB-powered 3-port Ethernet Switch. Note the link to the press release. Note the fact that I correctly describe it as a switch, where you mistakenly called it a hub. This is a difference that may matter to customers.

I’m sure you’ll be selling it at an 80% markup in your store soon, so here’s the Amazon Japan link that’s taking preorders for 15% off with free shipping.

Vlc hits version 1.0. Now they can start working on the user interface!

Congratulations on your new implementation of Usenet. That is, “FAIL”.

The Product: Sylvania 20682 CF13DD/E/827 Double Tube 4 Pin Base Compact Fluorescent Light Bulb

The “active discussions in related forums”:

• (health) My daughter has ulcerative colitis...help!
• (health) how do you get your wife to lose weight?
• (health) Is Spanking a lovable or harmful form of disipline?
• (health) Are Gays and Lesbians a future endangered species?
• (health) How come it burns when I pee?
• (home improvement) Are energy saver halogen bulbs green enough?
• (home improvement) What your local contractor doesn't want you to know.

Just noticed that a translated version of the Asu no Yoichi manga has been released, under the title Samurai Harem.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Meanwhile in Japan, volume 10 is about to hit the street.