Ever have two completely unrelated problems ... only to realise they are manifestations of exactly the same issue? Sometimes it feels like a win.

... Version Control.

I might as well put in my two cents about version control, now that git has been getting all the blog press for the last, oh, forever. I'm always late to the party. For example, I just started working in ruby this year, and have already missed all the cool kids at RubyFringe.

Jamie had a meeting with a prospective client in London last week. It went alright, but it's going to be at least a few months before it kicks off.

One of my favourite coders Reg Braithwaite shuttered his blog a while back, and I thought it was a huge loss. Everything he wrote got me thinking, and I only understood half of it on the first pass. I got to meet Reg at SciBarCamp and he seems like a really personable guy. I see him in the neighbourhood at Le Gourmand, but I haven't re-introduced myself.

For the first time since I joined Scimatic, I'm working from home. Which is a big change for me, since at my last job, all I did was telecommute.

In general, I'm a big fan of telecommuting and distributed groups. It's how I worked for the last seven years at my previous job, and I found that the benefits far outweighed the disadvantages. The primary advantage is one of efficiency:

The economy is in a death-spiral and we're heading for the Second Great Depression.

Well, that's what everyone seems to be saying. Bad time to be a small software company. Bad time to be self-employed. Start heading for the exits because les bon temps cessent de rouler. Maybe all of those things are true, but I'm actually pretty happy to be where we are right now.

I've been working on some data fitting routines lately. My natural response was to grab my copy of Numerical Recipes, and thought that their section on the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm would be useful. I mentioned it to Jamie, and he said "you'd better check the license."

I'm pretty excited that Yoichiro Nambu, Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa won the Nobel Prize for Physics this year.

As Jamie said, we're doing some Python development in Eclipse, so I cooked up a quick Vibrant Ink-ish color scheme for PyDev. Here is the PyDev preference file for Eclipse.

So it's incredibly bad blog form to just repost what some other, better known (and maybe just better, period) blogger posted the other day ...

.. But I'll do it anyway.