jls(~) % sudo yum install subversion
Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit
Setting up Install Process
Parsing package install arguments
Package subversion-1.4.6-7.x86_64 already installed and latest version

I had hoped (hope is not a strategy) Fedora would have given me svn 1.5 by now. Nope.

To get svn 1.5, rather than ask fedora or google, I just built it myself. I needed to 'yum install neon-devel' and used './configure --with-neon=/usr --with-ssl --with-zlib=/usr/lib' to configure subversion. Otherwise the build/install went fine.

Huzzah!

I have a confession: I actually like Vista. It has some nice new features.

Vista beats the pants off of XP. Both my work laptop and a recently-purchased workstation at home run Vista (business and home premium, respectively) and I've never looked back. I can't tell you if it's slower, or if it eats more memory, because I haven't thought about it (because it's not a problem).

I didn't like it at first. They moved everything. Normal control panel operations were totally moved around, icons changed, start->run went away. It took me atleast a week to stop looking for folders like "My Computer" or "My Documents" which had been renamed simply "Computer" and "Documents".

The two best things so far are search related: the start menu search box and the search box in the control panel are both awesome. Forget futzing around with %PATH%, the start menu search box will just search for things in the start menu as you type (and perhaps other areas); certainly a nice touch.

The control panel search is awesome, and actually helped me stop asking "Where the F is network configuration?"-type questions. I type 'disable uac' and get this result - so useful.

Aero is meh, but it's not displeasing. The task switcher showing a thumbnail of the actual window is kind of neat and slightly helpful, too. I installed virtuawin to give me multiple desktops and everything's been peachy.

Woot. Another Yahoo! Hackday :)

Same basic structure as the one held 2 years ago at the same location (Y!'s Sunnyvale campus): free concert, free api tutorial sessions, and a 24-hour idea-to-implementation challenge.

The only bad part, which was the only bad part about the last hackday, was the presence of startup companies presenting their product as their 'hack'. This year's overall winner was Xoopit which won simply on not a hack but on Xoopit's product, which has been around for a while. Maybe I was already annoyed at Xoopit for plastering their stickers all over Yahoo's cafeteria.

Big frownyface to all the companies who used hackday submissions as an advertising feature.

Ignoring those silly people, the rest of the hackday festivities were quite good. The concert was a bit strange but still very entertaining - Girl Talk puts on quite a show. My favorite hacks, mostly because of the entertainment value of the presentation and the hacks, were iHeater and Moshpit.

My hack, as listed on hackday.org:

    * hack: SnackUpon
    * url: http://pipes.yahoo.com/jordansissel/snackupon
    * people: Jordan Sissel
    * comments: Get StumbleUpon-like behavior trained automatically from your
      own tags in delicious. Sources are BOSS news and web search, your
      Delicious network, recent Delicious posts, and your own recent posts.

Slides are here Super huge thanks to Yahoo! for hosting another hackday near me; it was fantastic.