Beyond Diet: on red pandas and doing better
This week I was busy writing code for a research project I’m working on here in New Zealand, so no travel pictures from me.
Here is a red panda in the Wellington Zoo (photo credit: Marie-Pascale Desjardins, as well as for suggesting this tip).
It turns out that red pandas and giant pandas are not related aside from both being cute animals. Giant pandas have a 99% bamboo diet, while red pandas are at 85% bamboo.
You also have to descend
Following up on last week’s tip, here’s a near-data-disaster from Rollen D’Souza:
I decided when I started grad school that I would always keep track of my research and general course notes in repositories. This wasn’t entirely just for backup purposes. It turns out that when you want to work on three different machines — work desktop, home desktop, surface laptop — making sure they are all synchronized with your latest work is non-trivial without some automated or manual tracking software. I use Mercurial (distributed vcs) because then there is an entirely cloneable copy of all my work on every machine I work on. (Why Mercurial versus git? Another story.) I’ve gotten into the habit of pulling, committing and pushing whatever I have whenever I work on a given machine.
