Journal: Jan 16, 2009

Bryan Newbold, bnewbold@mit.edu
http://web.mit.edu/bnewbold/thesis/

Today I setup a git repository (for source code management); it's backed up to my personal webspace with a web interface at git.bryannewbold.com. I'll also copy these journal entries to my athena locker. As an aside, keeping notes in a git repository is a great way to maintain scientific integrity. We're taught in our lab classes to carefully keep all of our notes and printouts of data in notebooks with numbered and dated pages and even to sign/initial the corner of each page when it's full to certify it as our own work. This makes omissions (missing page numbers) and changes (which should be indicated, dated, and signed) stand out. Checkins to git repositories are dated and anoted with the author's email address, and can even be cryptographically signed. Each commit is hashed with both its contents and its parent's hash, so the hash of any commit down the line can be verified against the entire chain of commits leading to it; if any files have been tampered with it will be obvious, though of course this assurance is only as good as the hash algorithms used ;)

For the past two weeks or so i've mostly been teaching myself scheme using The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer. My notes on those books are here and here; my notes on scheme itself are here (note: last link temporarily broken?).