A while back I was using CVS to synchronize and version my school work, and I was looking for a method of writing papers so the working files were text instead of binary allowing diffs to be generated via CVS. That lead me to LaTeX, and it worked out all right. I found that I was quite happily able to generate my text in vim, version it with CVS and generate a final PDF, the only binary format in the whole process.

Now, well after I really could have used it, this article pops up. It is a useful primer, but it doesn’t really touch on the one things that will probably bite a lot of users in the ass – there are zillions of versions of LaTeX and its packages, and so you’ll have to experiment to find out what works on your system. Still, it’s a good document preparation system, and I’m glad to know something about how it works.

I had a store credit to use up before Christmas, and so I bought a couple of USB key storage devices, one for the lady and one for me. I was quite please at how easy the were to set up, just adding a line to /etc/fstab and mounting the device. For the longest time though, I could only perform operations on it as root, which is tiresome. Luckily, Emma pointed me at some good documentation and so I was able to get everything working sweetly. Here’s what I’ve got working:

# A directory called /mnt/key
# These lines in /etc/fstab
none        /proc/bus/usb usbfs defaults            0   0
/dev/sda    /mnt/key    vfat    rw,user,noauto      0   0
# And these lines in my .bashrc
alias key="mount /dev/sda;ls /mnt/key"
alias unkey="umount /mnt/key"

It works pretty sweetly, and these storage devices are awesome. I’ve never gotten close to filling it up yet.

I used CVS for a while for keeping my desktop and laptop in sync, as well as for versioning all of my school stuff and programming web projects. While it worked fine, I did find that it wasn’t great for binary data (because of its basis on RCS) and the fuss involved in copying, moving and deleting was tiresome.

After reading this I decided to give subversion a try. It was pretty easy to set up, and it works insanely well with binary data, because it uses binary differencing on all files, making the distinction moot.

Before I got started with subversion though, I wanted to clear out all of the CVS administrative directories so I wasn’t versioning those as well. Well, since there is a CVS directory in every directory in the tree, I didn’t want to remove them all manually. Luckily, TLUG came to the rescue with this: find . -type d -name CVS | xargs rm -Rf. Very nice, and useful in a lot of ways. I’ll have to spend some time with man xargs though, because I think that I’ll be glad to know it better.