We have a nest of baby bunny rabbits just outside our living room window. We’ve had rabbits living around the house as long as we’ve lived here, and I think they’ve built nests under our deck at various times, but this is the first nest we’ve seen out in plain sight. We could see two of the babies this morning, and Denise later counted two more, for a total of four. She has named them “Flopsy-Tail”, “Mopsy-Tail”, “Bopsy-Tail” and “Topsy-Tail”. Here is a picture of Flopsy-Tail (or is it Mopsy-Tail?) peeking out of the nest.

Meanwhile, Oscar is beside himself. To be so close, and yet so far, from this baby bunny buffet. He returned to this spot several times throughout the day to check to see if they were still there, or if it was all just a dream.

Hsv.rb is a users group for Ruby and Rails enthusiasts in the Huntsville, Alabama area. The group has just been formed, and we’re currently working on building up the online community before making any decisions about meeting locations or topics. If you’re a Rubyist anywhere in the North Alabama area, please join us. Thanks to Philip Reed for getting the ball rolling on this!

Dave Thomas writes that, so far, attendees of RailsConf 2007 have donated about $33,000 to selected charities. It’s my understanding that there were about 1600 attendees, so that averages out to over $20 per person (again, so far).

My mind immediately went back to a story I recently heard about the A-Day football game at the University of Alabama back in April. That day, fundraisers at Bryant-Denny Stadium were accepting donations to be used towards relief for victims of the tornado that struck Enterprise, Alabama on March 1. If you’ve forgotten the story, this was the F-4 tornado that (among other things) destroyed Enterprise High School, killing eight high school students when part of the school collapsed on them.

The University of Alabama experienced record attendance at this year’s A-Day game. With more than 92,000 fans in attendance, “fire marshals had to turn fans away because Bryant-Denny stadium was full.” Despite these overwhelming numbers, fundraisers collected a little less than $40,000 that day. Assuming that the numbers are even approximately close, that averages to less than fifty cents donated per person in attendance.

The point of all this isn’t to bash Alabama fans — not that that’s not a worthy pursuit in and of itself. It’s a little bit of an apples and oranges comparison to begin with, considering that at least some of the RailsConf donations came from companies and not individuals, and that a lot of the Alabama fans had no doubt made donations through their churches or other organizations.

The point is that this has the promise of becoming a great side benefit of Ruby and Rails conferences to come. Competitive geeks that we are, each new group of conference attendees will try to break the record for donations. I don’t attend a lot of technical conferences, so maybe this is something that is more common than I realize. Regardless, it’s another great reason to be a part of this community.

Kyle Cordes’ recent post about distributed source control reminded me that learning more about that topic has been on my Someday/Maybe list for awhile now. It’s Kyle’s opinion that distributed source control systems are “dramatically better” than centralized systems (like Subversion). I still haven’t decided whether distributed source control is a solution to a problem that I don’t have, but the bits about it making creating and merging branches easier appeal to me, so I decided to dig a little deeper.

All of the projects that I work on use Subversion as their source control system, so I needed to find something that would play nice with it. SVK seemed like an obvious choice since it’s layered on top of Subversion, and there’s a port for it in MacPorts, so that’s where I started. After I got the software installed, I worked through Ron Bieber’s excellent tutorial series to get a feel for the SVK workflow. I highly recommend these tutorials if you’re considering using SVK.

I’ve been experimenting with SVK for a couple of days now, primarily doing some development on the FXRuby 1.6 branch, and it was working like a charm. I have to admit that it’s a little slow, especially considering that it’s just looking at stuff on the local disk. But it seemed to be working. Unfortunately, I just discovered that SVK doesn’t support the svn:externals property. That is, if a directory in your Subversion repository has the svn:externals property set on it, SVK will not properly mirror those external directories (it just ignores them). This isn’t an issue for the FXRuby repository, but many of the other projects that I work on make at least some use of Subversion externals. For the time being, that means no SVK for me.

So, back to the drawing board. I know of several alternatives that I can look at, like git, Mercurial, Bazaar and arch. The main requirement for me is that it works on Mac OS X, and that it plays nice with Subversion (i.e. it can both pull down the latest changes from a Subversion repository and push my changes back to that repository). And, um, it has to support svn:externals. Any suggestions?

Update: Looks like people are also talking about Monotone and darcs. Meanwhile, at first glance it doesn’t sound like git supports svn:externals either. I’m getting a sinking feeling that none of ‘em will. Oh well, we’ll see.

The Else, the new album CD release from They Might Be Giants, is now available exclusively from the iTunes Store.

A little over a month ago, Paul Graham stirred up a little hornet’s nest with his essay “Microsoft is Dead”. As he found it necessary to clarify a couple of days later, Paul didn’t mean to suggest that Microsoft was on the verge of going out of business. He meant that, in terms of all the progressive and exciting things going on in software development today, Microsoft is largely irrelevant. They continue to bolt on new features to Windows and Office in a desperate attempt to keep up with the competition, but it’s been a long time since anyone other than Microsoft’s marketing department considered them “innovative”.

Given this reality, today’s news that Microsoft is demanding royalty payments, for what it claims are over 200 patent violations by a number of open source projects (including Linux and Open Office), should come as no surprise. Although it’s not quite the same circumstances, I can’t help but compare this to the embarrassing efforts by the SCO Group over the past four years to claim intellectual property rights to parts of the Linux kernel (while their plummeting stock price continually threatens to get them delisted by Nasdaq). As Charles Nutter put it, “I’d hate to be an OSS (Open Source Software) developer or apologist [working] at Microsoft today.”