Just this week I went to the movies to check the latest incarnation of Cap. Kirk, Mr. Spock et al. It really was a great movie… I was expecting less, I have to admit. But the movie was not bad at all…
With all that “space and beyond” thing in my mind, yesterday I was surprised with a greatly inspiring picture taken from Hubble Florida, before STS-125 reach Hubble (thanks Florian Weimer for the heads-up):
How inspiring can that be?
You can find the original here, along with the explanation of how and when it was taken.
I was browsing GitHub, getting to know the system and feeling pretty amazed by it (seriously… I felt I discovered Orkut for developers)... when some thought just stroke me: how do they save space?
Yes, I know git is pretty efficient when it comes to saving space. Yes, I also know that space are becoming cheaper with time, but still, they claim to have +50k developers hooked up their servers… if they’re not doing something about space, things will go inefficient quite quickly. Rails alone seems to have 464 forks! If all of them represent one bare clone of the ‘canonical’ repository on GitHub’s side, that is a lot of space wasted in duplicated things…
Git has one amazing feature: hashing the objects it keeps track of. It surely doesn’t seem too complicated to design a schema that avoids having two copies of objects with the same hash. So all those forks of Rails, on GitHub’s side, would be just hardlinks to the ‘canonical’ repository…
Surely people working in GitHub are smart enough to have though about it on their own… Who knows? Maybe that’s exactly what they’re doing already! If so, can I ask them to share their schema, since it can become very useful to the rest of us? If not, can we beat them ;-D?
