code from the deep past

I had an amusing email from out of the blue, asking me to dig up the IDL (yes, IDL) code that I (and Blanton and Bovy and Johnston and Roweis and others) wrote to analyze the local velocity field using the ESA Hipparcos data. Being a huge supporter of open science, I had to say yes to this request. I dug through old cvs repositories (not svn, not git, but cvs) and found the code, and moved it to Github (tm) here. I didn't truly convert the cvs repo to git, so I erased history, which is bad. But time is precious, and I could always fix that later. I hereby apologize to my co-authors!

All this illustrates to me that it is very good to put your code out in the open. One reason is that then you don't have to go digging like this; a simple google search would have found it! Another is that when you know your code will be out in the open, you are (at least slightly) more likely to make it readable and useable by others. I dug up and threw to the world this code, but will anyone other than the authors ever be able to make any use of it? Or even understand it? I don't know.