This is truely frightining!

Apparently New Jersey is batshit and so is this judge.  How can "no person shall be deprived of the inestimable privilege of worshiping Almighty God" possibly be part of a state constitution? It's so completely out of line with the Bill of Rights.

Beyond that I call into question the judgment of Mr. Camarata. How can the religious/anti-religious views of the parent be considered to "deprive" the child of her "privilege" to worship "Almighty God"? At worst this clause prevents the parents from from forbidding their daughter from worshiping "Almighty God", or otherwise preventing her from doing so.

Hopefully the Burkes win their appeal and Mr. Camarata gets disbarred for gross incompetence.  

Blog Conversion

I just converted www.madscienceguild.org from a bluehost+wordpress blog to a blogger blog! I didn't feel like paying to renew hosting with bluehost, so I decided to just move it over. The process was pretty simple once I found wordpress2blogger.appspot.com which allows you to convert your wordpress export xml files directly to blogger export files which can then be imported into blogger. Huzah!

git - One command to rule them all.

I have only recently learned the joy that is git. For the longest time I thought "SVN works for me why learn a new version control system." Well, as cliche as is sound, you don't know what your missing until you've used it. Two things really impress me with git, the ease of branching and the ability to "commit changes" to a local repo without "push"ing them to the main repo. These two features really put git significantly above Subversion.

Needles to say, after seeing the light and deciding that git is the way, I wanted to migrate one of my subversion projects to git. So I googled "converting svn to git" and found quite a few answers out there. The OS X solution was:

port uninstall git-core
port install git-core +svn

and...

git-svn clone SUBVERSION REPO

However after running the uninstall and reinstall no magical git-svn command showed up. This frustrated me to no end for the better part of an hour. Until I found a blog post that informed me that git had spiffied up the git tools. The new syntax is apparently:

git svn BLAH BLAH BLAH

So essentially a series of 'git-*' commands have all been distilled down into the main 'git' command, which is really neat. Less executables to clutter up tab completion lists, and one stop shopping for all your git needs. I think this is really important so let me repeat it, commands like "git-svn" have for the most part been replaced with "git svn". Spread the word.