I attended the EuroVis 2013 in Leipzig this week. It is the largest european conference on visualization. In my post about the annual meeting of the BZS I wrote that for scientific collaborations the small meetings are the best. An that is true. The EuroVis is nice, but is very hard to get in touch with people you don’t already know. But that is not a problem. The large conferences have other qualities.

The large conferences provide you with a good overview of the current state of the art in the corresponding field of science. They seek to select papers of high quality and, therefore, to present the most important scientific results. I don’t want to bad-mouth anyone or anything. There are always good papers and there are always paper I can only stand by, stare at and ask myself: WTF?

And that was exactly the case this year again. There were some good papers and I took some good ideas with me. Let’s see what I can make out of these.

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This week I participated in the V. annual meeting of the Boltzmann Zuse Society for Computational Molecular Engineering in Kaiserslautern. For scientific collaborations the small conferences are the best! This year, again, we discussed a lot of interesting ideas and topics. I took a whole bunch of them home with me.

In addition I got news (Tuesday night) which make me unbelievably angry. I won’t write any details before I don’t know the whole extend of the consequences. Maybe next week …

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Today again I want to talk about a tool I do not want to miss anymore: KeePass

It is a nice editor for encripted password data bases. Since a friend of mine told me about that tool and since I tried it, I have to memorize far less passwords now. More importantly, I now use generated, secure passwords everywhere. Thanks to KeePass these passwords are entered automatically without ever appearing on my screen and without ever being typed in on my keyboard.

Ok. The whole security-thing is sorta paranoid. However, KeePass is convenient to use. Convenient and secure! A great combination.

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Drat! I wanted to write a post each sunday. Oh well. I will try to minimize these slips and I will try to catch up as quickly as possible.

The news: The TheLib project now uses a Subversion repository!

After Mercurial failed to proof its value, our eagerness for experiments had dried up. We thus switched to a system we knew it worked and how it worked.

Of course, there are countless projects happily working with Mercurial and, of course, there are countless good reasons why everything would be better using Git. To be honest: I don’t care.

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Some time ago I fret about Mercurial. My opinon on that has not changed since then. The conversion tools are still ridiculously bad and the fact that no development group is interessted in SCM protocol interoperability is pathetic.

Nevertheless, I want to talk about Mercurial again. During the last weeks I worte some (scientific) texts together with several co-authors. These texts were controlled by Subversion repositories. I have to say: It did work perfectly!

Additionally I am working on a small (or maybe medium-sized) code project. There I create a library which is used by several persons by now. This is part of my working project VICCI. For reasons out of my control there is only one single subversion repository for all subprojects in VICCI and there is a globally dictated directory structure making it impossible to set up the usual “branches” and “tags” subdirectory for my project, because of external dependancies. This is … painful. I really should make some changes of the API of my project, but as it is now, I cannot do this without either not commiting unfinished code for some time or without breaking code of some of my colleagues. Of course there are solutions which only break everything for a very short time and which make everything better after that. But it is amazing how difficult it is to change something as soon as the group of people involved has a certain size. Whatever. With the current state I will not be happy.

A nice technical solution would be multi-protocol interfaces to repositories: i.e. a hg- or git-repository with interfaces for all: hg, git and svn. This is possilbe (see my conversion-tool-rant). Just, no one is doing its. *sigh*

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Today I want to introduce a new Category for my website: “Tool links”. Here, I will link to tools by other people. (Small) tools which I like and which I use myself.

I will start with “Everything” (http://www.voidtools.com/). This nice program directly reads the NTFS partition table. Results for file-name-based searches are available in parts of seconds for the whole file system. There is no faster way!

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