I love Subversion. Martin Fowler has come to the same conclusion. On the basis of my informal conversations with my colleagues, Subversion is a better [source control] system than all the commercial tools except Perforce. So if you’re using something else, you may want to consider a switch. He also points out a common complaint: lack of plugins. However, one of the nice things about Subversion is that it works on the edit-merge-commit model. This is different…
At perhaps a rate of a dozen a week or so, we get errors from our web site about invalid URLs. They always look like this: Alright, so here’s the funny part. That’s not a page on our site, and there’s no link anywhere on our site to that URL. There’s no referer header, so I have to guess that Squid is scraping it out, but it doesn’t really matter. See, here is the link we have:…
Mike Sax wrote: Let’s not forget that when Microsoft encounters smart competitors, they have a hard time competing. Quickbooks and Quicken still blow away anything Microsoft has tried. Adobe dominates in graphics, fonts, and document exchange. Google is still the clear number one. Play Station 2 blows XBox away in market share and game support. My boss is fond of talking about markets by using the picture of the bell curve (my apologies if I butcher…
Lisa comes home today after her two week whirlwind tour of the east coast. Her plane lands in 5 hours (in the intervening time, I’m building and releasing a version of our product today to a custom who is being trained in 6 hours… whee!). On this trip: she met our baby niece, reconnected with her brother while getting to know his wife, hung out with old friends and new, celebrated her dad’s birthday, saw her step-mom’s wall color vision…
Date: Tuesday, July 13, 2004 5:30 PM-8:00 PM Location: (map) Interlink Group Offices 2nd Floor Conference Room 98 Inverness Drive East, Suite 150 Englewood CO 80112 Topic: Interviewing Sooner or later, every developer is asked to participate in the interview process. Or, when developers become managers, they must oversee the interviews for new members of their teams. How can you effectively interview someone with just a few hours of face to face time? Does being an…
My love/hate relationship with Outlook has spilled back into “hate”. Unfortunately, this means no more NewsGator. Well… does it? I’m a subscriber to NewsGator Online Services. I tried to live with another aggregator all day (sorry, but I still can’t stand RSS Bandit) and I was plain frustrated with the ways it wasn’t acting like I expected. Greg (the NewsGator author) told me to try out the POP edition, since I’m already paying for it. Sure enough,…
I did manage to get sound working in a Virtual PC image of Windows Server 2003, but only after a fashion. The drivers are installed, and it does make sound, but quite badly. Playing back MP3/WMA files is out of the question, because it’s apparently CPU starved or data starved or something, causing the sound to go staticy and slow down. However, even if I never get it to play music happily, at least I…
DeveloperWorks has an interview with Kent Beck posted. At the end, he says something that just really resonates with my displeasure with PCs in general and Microsoft in particular: dW: What do you think about software quality? Beck: I wish developers would consider the enormous consequences of their actions. When I got my driver’s license at 16, I was both elated and terrified; I had newfound freedom and responsibilities to go with it. Now, compare that feeling to…
Well, there’s no doubt that you can build some pretty amazing laptops. All you have to be willing to do is put up with carrying around a brick with a battery life of about 20 minutes. Elite Notebooks clearly takes the cake of what I’ve seen. Little things like a desktop-class Pentium 4 at 800 MHz FSB with Hyper Threading, dual channel DDR at 400 MHz… those are purely pedestrian. Old hat. How about… A 128MB…
Always the last to know, I am. At Gnomedex I learned about the new phenomenon called Podcasting. Basically, it’s audio-blogging, except that it’s done on a regular basis, in some cases sounds quite professional, and can be combined with software to automatically download the Podcasts and shove them into your jukebox. If you’re an iPod user, you want iPodder, which just released to version 1.0. It integrates with iTunes on the Mac, and iTunes or Media…