linky dinky

The Wall Street Journal has an article that tells us things we already know: India churns out a lot of graduates from a system that is rife with insufficient funding, peppered with corruption and laced with stale knowledge; these graduates don't really cut it when it comes to the jobs that have flooded the market and contributed to all the "prosperity" the nation seems to be enjoying (the call centre kind). I liked what Vijay Thadani of NIIT had to say: If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

I have been learning and using git for quite some time now and my experience with the DVCS (although not as D as I would have hoped it would be) has been fun so far (endorsements from various open source projects and enthusiastic presentations from the likes of Matthew McCullough have also helped). Windows is still a secondary platform for it and EGit offers IDE integration but is still in incubation. That's why I always wondered about that other DVCS that I had heard people talk about: Mercurial. I had heard about it first from a friend at Sun as they were moving to it. That was probably when the OpenJDK project moved over to Mercurial as well. Mercurial is written in Python and when Python moved over to Mercurial, it seemed to make a strange kind of sense (the dogfood kind). The reasons, however, were more interesting and backed by some thorough investigation. Simply put, the team chose something that would meet the needs of the developers as much as possible. The articles about the journey from PEP 374 to PEP 385 have been very interesting. They will also help me learn how to use Mercurial and MercurialEclipse.