Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Sunday, 30 June 2002

# 6:50 PM

Further to my rant about version numbers: I left out two important ways to do it wrong.

Failing to bump the major number when you should have. A good current example of this is automake. Versions 1.5 and 1.6 of this program are incompatible with version 1.4; therefore, they should have been called 2.0 and 2.1.
Incrementing any component by more than one. This contributes to the pernicious misapprehension that version numbers are decimal fractions. People sometimes do that when they want to suggest that there have been a lot of changes and compatibility is not 100% guaranteed; for instance, Autoconf jumped from 2.13 to 2.50. The proper thing to do, again, is bump the major version.

It is, by the way, okay to delete features without bumping the major version, as long as the upgrade path is straightforward.

# 6:35 PM

Yesterday was the wake for my grandfather. Well, it wasn't a wake in the technical sense. There was just a large afternoon party at my grandmother's house, with about eighty of his relatives and friends invited. No speeches were made and no one got drunk. A proper farewell to a man who had three hundred people show up for his fiftieth wedding anniversary (last year), though.

It was the first time since about nine years ago that I saw all my cousins in the same place; they've done an awful lot of growing in the interim. The eldest is off to college in the fall.

This morning, I set out to make pancakes, only to discover that the maple syrup had gone moldy. I didn't know maple syrup could go moldy.

# 5:05 AM

From Salon's interview with the writer for the new HBO miniseries Wire:

I'll tell you what, this would be enough for me: The next time the drug czar or Ashcroft or any of these guys stands up and declares, "With a little fine-tuning, with a few more prison cells, and a few more lawyers, a few more cops, a little better armament, and another omnibus crime bill that adds 15 more death-penalty statutes, we can win the war on drugs" — if a slightly larger percentage of the American population looks at him and goes, "You are so full of shit" ... that would be gratifying.

I'm impressed that HBO is willing to take on a show like that. It seems, well, real, and to be saying something that needs saying. That's unusual in TV.