May 2005 Entries
In my limited experience so far, and from anecdotal evidence of nearly everyone I’ve ever met who had a boss at one time or another, managers as a whole still do not trust their employees. It’s a real shame if you think about it, because the whole point of hiring employees is to scale up and create an infrastructure capable of handling more work (and ostensibly more profit) than you can now.
Instead, employees often are simple extensions of a boss, mere drones blindly following a script as if the boss is remotely controlling each one in a real life game of The Sims. In order to herd these drones, bosses implement processes for the drones to follow. The end result is that overall productivity and customer satisfaction is only incrementally increased by a small amount with each new employee, while costs increase, creating a top heavy organization.
Allow me to illustrate this point with something that occured this past weekend which serves as the source of this rant. I went to one of these newfangled “Destination”movie theaters to join some friends in watching Star Wars Reveng of the Sith. This was the type of theater that compelled patrons to pay a premium for the convenience of assigned seating.
Upon arriving, a friend suggested we prepay $1.50 immediately for parking to get a discount. After doing so, we both realized we had made a mistake. With validation, parking is only $1.00 for four hours. We informed the young lady who marked our ticket as having been paid that we made a mistake, but she had no idea how to correct the situation. She merely assured us that if we get our tickets validated, we’ll be able to leave without having to pay again.
Well I’m not one to be upset about 50 cents so we left it at that, watched the movie, and then left. On my way out, I handed my ticket to the parking ticket. The ticket clearly displayed that I had already paid $1.50 for parking. When the attendant put the ticket into the system, it showed that I had validated the ticket as well. Good, so there’s no problem I thought.
The attendant’s then proceeded to inform me that his screen states that I owe $4.50 for parking. I chuckled to myself thinking, “Cool, we’ve uncovered a bug in the system that hadn’t been anticipated by the QA team. How neat.” Unfortunately, the attendant couldn’t make that decision. It seemed awful clear to me. The rules state that with validation, parking is only one dollar. His screen clearly shows that I had been at the theater less than four hours, that I had indeed validated my ticket, and that I had already paid more than one dollar.
Unfortunately, this attendant’s training hadn’t prepared him to make a freaking decision. Instead, I sat there waiting for him to find out the name of his supervisor form the othe attendants (how did he not know this?) and then get permission from the supervisor.
You see, unless employees are trusted with decision making, they won’t make a decision. Instead, they’ll blindly follow a process and then become paralyzed when they uncover a glitch in the system. And there’s always a glitch in the system.
Instead, all that is needed is to provide employees with a vision and set of principles and then empower them to make decisions. Give them the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them. In this particular case, the simple principle of trying to maintain customer satisfaction should have sufficed. It does not lead to customer satisfaction to have him wait several minutes to leave with a line of cars behind after already having paid for parking. The cost of a mistake is very low here, if indeed I had’t paid for parking. But the cost in the case that I had paid and am unhappy for being delayed (it was near midnight) is a dissatisfied customer. And trust me, you’re not doing so well that you can afford to alienate customers.
In this scenario, it was a small incident, nothing business threatening. But scale it up a notch, and you begin to realize why so many companies falter with head strong leadership and unempowered employees.
One trap that developers need to be wary of is the mentality of the Hammer Truism. This states that
When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
This is especially true of Design Patterns. I particularly liked what Erich Gamma said in this interview
Do not start immediately throwing patterns into a design, but use them as you go and understand more of the problem. Because of this I really like to use patterns after the fact, refactoring to patterns.
All too often, I’ve encountered code that uses a pattern because the developer felt he should use a pattern there, not because he needed the pattern.
Not every developer understands that patterns add complexity to a solution. Certainly abstraction and redirection are important benefits of many design patterns, but they come at a cost. To use design patterns effectively is to know when the benefits will payback that cost with interest.
The important concept to understand is that Design Patterns are descriptive not prescriptive. They aren’t intended to instruct how one should design a system, but merely describe successful designs that have worked in the past for common problems. Should the problem you’re tackling fit a particular recurring pattern, then applying a design pattern is certainly a good choice. But when the problem doesn’t quite fit one of the patterns, trying to cram the round pattern into the square design just doesn’t fit.
I’ve recently seen an example of this in regards to using an interface. I generally follow the rule of threes regarding polymorphism. For example, if I have a class with an enum indicating its "type" (for example, a User class with an enum property indicating whether the User is an employee or a manager), when that enum contains three values, I’ll consider refactoring the class to have a base class and inherited classes (for example, the User class might have an Employee subclass and Manager Subclass). Maybe I'll use an IUser interface instead.
However, I caution against using an interface (or inheritance) just because it’s the "right" thing to do. There’s no point to implementing polymorphism if it is never used.
For example, I recently saw several classes in some code I was reading that implemented an interface we’ll call ISomeInterface. But nowhere did I find any code that referenced ISomeInterface. Instead, there were only references to concrete classes. I expected to see something like this somewhere in the code.
foreach(ISomeInterface something in SomeInterfaceCollection)
{
something.DoSomething();
}
But no such code could be found. This was a prime example of a gratuitous use of an interface. This interface served no purpose and needed to be removed.
The important lesson here is to always start off by writing the simplest code possible and only add interfaces and design patterns when they are absolutely needed.
[Listening to: Voices (DJ Remy Remix) - Bedrock - Gatecrasher Global Sound System: Latitude (Disc 2) (5:13)]
Many developers, especially those fresh out of college (though older developers are just as prone), fall into the trap of believing in an absolute concept of “the perfect design”. I hate to break such youthful idealism, but there’s just no such thing.
Design is always a series of trade-offs in an arduous struggle to implement the best solution given a set of competing constraints. And there are always constraints.
Not too long ago, I had an interesting discussion with a young developer who was unhappy with the design of a project he was working on. This project had a very aggressive schedule, and he complained about the poor design of the system.
“So why do you think it is poorly designed, the system appears to have met the requirements, especially given the short time constraint”, I asked him. He explained how he would have preferred a system that abstracted the data access via some form of Object Relational Mapping, rather than simply pulling data from the table and slapping that data on a page via data binding. He also would have liked to clean up the object model. It was’t in his mind, “good design”.
I pointed out that it also wouldn’t have been good design to spend time choosing and getting up to speed with an ORM tool, only to deliver the software late (which was not an option). Sure, the code would have been well factored, but we had a hard deadline, and missing it would have been a huge burden on the company.
I suggested to him that constraints are necessary for a software project. I told him,
If a project doesn’t have a time constraint, it will never get finished.
That lit a lightbulb for this developer.
That explains why I never finish my personal projects.
Absolutely! With no time constraint, this developer would spend more time after more time attempting to hit that elusive goal of the “perfect design”. But that goal will never be reached because perfect design is asymptotic. You can get infinitely close, but you can never reach it.
In the end, I told the developer that he’ll have the opportunity to refactor the code into a better design in the second phase of the project, as the time constraint is no longer so aggressive. I also suggested he skim Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design by Henry Petroski. The book makes its main point in the first chapter, that design is about compromise and managing trade-offs to meet constraints. The rest of the book is a tour of various design decisions in history that illustrate this central theme.
[Listening to: Mono Culture / Free - Sasha and John Digweed - Northern Exposure: Expeditions (disc 1) (6:51)]
When something tragic befalls a friend, or even an acquaintance, I used to wonder if expressing my condolences and sorrow really meant much to the afflicted person. It certainly is different from person to person. For Akumi and me, I think the answer to that is yes, it is helpful. We certainly felt some degree of comfort knowing friends and even strangers who read my blog were sending us well wishes and thinking of us.
So thank you for your comments. We appreciate them.
I know the timing is pretty crummy, but here it is. It is required, yes required, that I give you a true geek birthday salute (i.e. a blog birthday greeting).
Happy birthday love!
p.s. Yes, that cake is an ice-cream cake (my wife is allergic to eggs and anything made with eggs).
Hideo Yokoyama 1943 - 2005
Akumi received a very tragic phone call yesterday afternoon from the San Diego county medical examiner’s office. Police had found her father, Hideo Yokoyama, pulled over to the side of the road with his windows down. While driving, he suffered a heart attack and died from cardiac arrest.
Only last weekend we had a great time with him down in San Diego. The fact that we saw him so recently has been good for Akumi. Though stunned and saddened, we both remember how happy he was, throwing back a beer together over fantastic food.
Akumi’s father loved to work, and spent nearly forty years doing so as an engineer at Sony. He is, in many ways partly responsible for all the Triniton televisions in the world. In the later parts of his career, he was challenged by a colleague who said to him...
We’ve sent all these Trinitrons out into the world. We now have a responsibility to do something about them when they return.
This was a turning point for Hideo, who then focused his energies on electronics recycling. He spoke at many conferences and worked hard within Sony to take a lead in recycling efforts. In many ways, Japan is way ahead of the US in this effort.
His efforts landed him a two year post as CEO of a joint venture between Sony, Panasonic, and several other electronics giants to research and promote recycling technologies. The member companies appointed an employee to this position for two years at a time on a revolving basis. He was a believer in sustainable modes of production.
After retiring from Sony, he took a position as President of a Japanese company with operations in Tijuana. Residing in Chula Vista, Akumi and I had the great privilege of seeing him once a month.
My fondest memory of him is that of my second or third trip to Japan with Akumi. We were staying with him at his apartment and we had just returned with some Yakitori. He had bought a bottle of Nigori (unfiltered) Sake (my favorite) for this occasion. He grabbed the bottle, looked at me with a mischevious grin, and said, “Phil. We are not leaving this table until this bottle is empty.” Suffice to say, I had to enlist the help of Akumi to get through it, but get through it we did.
On Tuesday, Akumi’s mom, brother and his wife will fly in from Japan. We will drive down to San Diego and take care of arrangements.
Four friends who hadn’t seen each other in 30 years, reunited at a party. After several drinks, one of the men had to use the rest room. Those who remained talked about their kids.
The 1st guy said “My son is my pride and joy. He started working at a successful company at the bottom of the barrel. He studied economics and Business Administration and soon began to climb the corporate ladder and now he’s the president of the company. He became so rich that he gave his best friend a top of the line Mercedes for his birthday.”
The 2nd guy said “Damn, that’s terrific! My son is also my pride and joy. He started working for a big airline, then went to flight school to become a pilot. Eventually he became partner in the company, where he owns the majority of its assets. He’s so rich that he gave his best friend a brand new jet for his birthday.”
The 3rd man said “Well, that’s terrific! My son studied in the best universities and became an engineer. Then he started his own construction company and is now a multimillionaire. He also gave something very nice and expensive to his best friend for his birthday: a 30,000 square foot mansion.”
The three friends congratulated each other just as the fourth returned from the restroom and asked “What are all the congratulations for?”
One of the three said “We were talking about the pride we feel for the successes of our sons. What about your son?
The 4th man replied “My son is gay and makes a living dancing as a stripper in a nightclub.”
The three friends said “What a shame....what a disappointment.”
The 4th man replied “No, I’m not ashamed. He’s my son, I love him and he’s lucky, too. His birthday just passed and he received a beautiful 30,000 square foot mansion, a brand new jet and a top of the line Mercedes from his three boyfriends!”
[Listening to: Exodus - Bob Marley And The Wailers - Legend (7:35)]
I swear I never do these stupid quizzes or memes or whatever you call it, but this is only three questions. If it’s good enough for Sam Ruby, it’s good enough for me.
-
Why did you begin blogging and what motivates you to blog today?
I started before it was called blogging as a way for my family and friends to keep tabs on me. I was basically rubbing it in that I was in sunny Los Angeles while my family and friends suffered the bitter cold of an Alaskan winter. What motivates me today is fame, fortune and vanity! Though the first two still elude me, what really motivates me are these great relationships and conversations I’ve had online. Blogging spurred me to get involved in open source software and provides a steady stream of alternate viewpoints.
-
What tips can you offer to others who want to start blogging or improve their existing blog?
I think Sam says it well enough. I’ll only add, don’t take yourself too seriously and have fun with it. Write for yourself first, and others second. Thus if blogging ends up being just a fad (I don’t think it is), what would you care as you’ve improved your writing skills, had an outlet of expression, and made many interesting contacts along the way. Not to mention the fame and fortune that most certainly is yours.
-
What are three blogs that you read daily and why?
Did you say three, or three hundred? If I tried to only list three, I’d start to sound like an incoherent academy award winner stepping over the alloted time thanking countless friends and feigning worry about those little people I might offend. I started off with a small list and it just seemed to grow organically. Person A, whom I respect, mentions person B alot, so I link to person B. I often subscribe to people who link to my site (because they obviously have good taste) or comment on my site, and then drop them if they start to bore me. I really need to cut down on my list. But since you asked, three that come to mind are...
[Listening to: So Danço Samba - Stan Getz & João Gilberto - Getz/Gilberto (3:45)]
A soccer buddy, and Doctor, sent me this interesting report. Here's a snippet...
One result was that the refs permitted appreciably more stoppage and injury time to home teams who were trailing their opponents when the game was played in stadiums without an athletics track.
One of my friends from our weekend pick-up game sent around this quote from Nick Hornby's novel, Fever Pitch (which was regrettably turned into a movie about baseball, rather than soccer as it was written).
This quote just captures the love and passion the world has for soccer.
Luckily, it is possible to be a professional footballer without walking on to a League pitch, and without being blessed with a footballer's physique or pace or stamina or talent. There are the grimaces and gestures - the screwed-up eyes and slumped shoulders when you miss a good chance, the high-fives when you score, the clenched fists and hand-claps when your teammates require encouragement, the open arms and upturned palms indicating your superior positioning and your teammate's greed, the finger pointing to where you would like a pass delivered, and, after the pass has been delivered just right and you have messed up anyway, the raised hand acknowledging both facts. And sometimes, when you receive the ball with your back to the goal and knock a short pass out wide, you know you have done it just right, just so, and that were it not for your paunch and your lack of hair, and your lack of height, were it not for all those peripherals, you would have looked just like....(Thierry Henry).
For those (probably just family and friends) that are interested, here are some pics from a recent pick-up game we had. We rented a pitch with a perfect artificial turf for $175 an hour for two hours (I need to get into that racket). One of our players is also an aspiring photographer.
This is Clark, our fearless phenomenal goalie. You may have seen him in that movie, In Good Company.
Ron, who organizes these games at the nice field, attempts to pass the ball.
Peter here, good bloke from England, gives an undoubtedly nice cross to a teammate. Notice the rubber pellets he kicks up.
This here is me, attempting to keep a defender away from the ball.
Vanessa makes sure to look good at all times when striking the ball.
Vince protects the ball from an encroaching Peter. Vince is probably the most talented player on the fierd.
My teammate Bill puts one in the back of the net.
Yesterday we drove down to the San Diego area to spend the day with Akumi's dad in Chula Vista, right on the border with Mexico. Trips to visit her dad end up being culinary expeditions of the highest quality. For lunch, we had some of the most delicious Ton-Katsu since Japan. Unfortunately we stuffed our faces so much that by the time we went to dinner, we were still a bit full and couldn't enjoy the meal. Which was too bad because we went to the best Sushi place in San Diego. Perhaps the best in Southern California. Sushi Ota.
It's a rather non-descript little place in a small strip mall that has been rated by Zagat as the best all around restaurant in San Diego (not sure what its current rating is), not just the best Sushi restaurant. If you call ahead for reservations, ask to be seated in front of Mr. Ota. He doesn't work many days of the week, so you might need to call ahead, but it's worth it.
Today, the esteemed Dare Obasanjo, MSN Maestro, RSS Bandit Ruler, XML Guru Extraordinaire, Social Software Seminarian has just completed his 27th trip around the sun.
Happy birthday you old man.
UPDATE: Whoops! I linked to the wrong versions of putty and pageant. I corrected the links.
UPDATE: June 1, 2006 Sourceforge has changed the CVSROOT in use for each project. The server hostname now has the project unix name prepended. For example, to connect to RSS Bandit’s CVS repository, connect to rssbandit.cvs.sourceforge.net.
Introduction
This post is dedicated to the .NET head who’s grown up on Visual Source Safe and suddenly finds himself (or herself) in the midst of an open source project hosted by SourceForge. CVS is very different from the check-out, check-in pessimistic locking approach taken by VSS. I hope to demistify it just a bit so you can start hacking away at the numerous .NET based open source projects hosted on SourceForge.
Disclaimer
Keep in mind that I’m basing this on my experience. Although there are multiple Windows CVS clients, I’ve only used TortoiseCVS. However, I’m sure these experiences apply to WinCVS as well.
Software
Before we begin, please download the following tools.
Generate SSH Keys
The next step is to run PuTTYGen to generate your SSH keys.
- In the Parameters section at the bottom, make sure to select “SSH2 DSA’.
- Click the “Generate“ button.
- Follow the on-screen instructions (“Please generate some randomness by moving the mouse over the blank area“). Key generation will be performed immediately afterward.
- Upon completion of key generation, enter username@shell.sf.net in the “Key comment“ field, replacing ’username’ with your SourceForge.net user name. This comment will help you identify the purpose of this key.
- Enter a passphrase and confirm it.
- Click on the “Save Private Key“ button and save your private key (using the .ppk extension) somewhere you’ll be able to find it again.
- Good, now you can post your keys on SourceForge. Keep PuTTYGen open to where it is because you’ll need it later.
Posting Your SSH Keys
The point of this process is so that you don’t have to enter your password for every single CVS file operation. In order to do that, CVS needs a copy of your public SSH key. To do that, make sure you are logged in and...
- Go to your account page.
- Scroll down to the “Host Access Information“ section.
- You should see a section about the Project Shell Server. Click on the “Edit SSH Keys for Shell/CVS“ link.
-
This will provide a form in which you can post your public key. The text to post in here is displayed at the top of PuTTYGen in a text box with the label “Public key for pasting into OpenSSH authorized_keys file:“
- Make sure to follow the instructions on the page. Multiple keys can be posted, as long as there is one per line.
There is a delay before your keys are fully posted, so be patient.
Getting Pageant Involved
Now is where Pageant gets involved. Pageant is a little service that runs in your system tray. It’s primary purpose is to provide authentication into SSH. It holds your private keys in memory, already decoded, so you can use them without having to enter your passphrase all the time. Instead, you enter your passphrase once when you start pageant.
- After installing and running Pageant, you can double click on its icon at any time. It looks like a computer with a hat on it.
- Simply click on the “Add Key“ button and find the private (*.ppk) file you created earlier. That’s it!
Checking Out A Module
At this point, you are all set to get going.
- Make sure you’ve been added as a developer to the project you’re going to work on. A project administrator would have to do this.
- In Windows Explorer go to the folder you wish to check the code out into.
- Right click and select the “CVS Checkout“ command.
- You will need your username on SourceForge and the project UNIX name. For example, if your username was “haacked“ (it isn’t, because that’s mine) and the project you were working on is “subtext“, you’d enter the following information
- Protocol: Secure Shell (:ext)
- Server: projectname.cvs.sourceforge.net
- Directory: /cvsroot/subtext
- Username: haacked
- Wait patiently as the project is created on your local machine.
Now Write Some Code
Note that you only have to checkout a module once. Afterwards you can run the update command to get changes committed by other developers. It’s a good idea to do this before and after you make any changes.
Commiting Changes
After you’ve changed some files, their icons be marked with an orange arrow. To commit your changes, right click and select the Commit command. Please make sure to enter an informative comment.
To commit multiple changes, right click on the root folder and select Commit. You’llget a list of all changed files. You can check the ones you wish to commit and commit them in bulk.
Adding Files
If you add a new file to the project, you’ll need to add it to CVS and THEN commit it. To add a file, simply right click on it and select “CVS Add“.
Know when to ignore
TortoiseCVS is not integrated with Visual Studio.NET. Thus it doesn’t know that there are some files you do not want to add to CVS such as *.suo, * and maybe the “bin“ and “obj“ folders. To ignore folders, simply right click on them and select “CVS Ignore“. This will create a .cvsignore file in the directory. It’s probably not a bad idea to add this to the repository so that others don’t accidentally add “ignored“ files.
You can also set ignored files using file patterns within TortoiseCVS’s preferences dialog. Right click on any file and select “CVS“ -> “Preferences“. Under the “Ignored Files“ tab, enter file patters such as *.user.
Submitting Patches as a Non-Developer
If you do not have developer access, you can still submit patches to a project. In most SourceForge project sites, there is a “Patch“ section where patches can be submitted. In order to learn how to submit and apply patches, read the following article “Using a Windows version of GNU Patch.exe with CVS and Diff Files“.
For More Information
Conclusion
I hope this gets you on your feet when joining an open source project in SourceForge. If you find any errors, omissions, and such, please let me know so I can correct it.
[Listening to: Check It Out - Lee Burridge - Nubreed 005 CD1 (6:36)]
Alright, it’s time for me to pull this ratty old thing out of the closet, dust it off a bit, and step onto it. Yes, my pedestal.
In this week’s newsweek, there’s an article entitled “How To Build a Better High School” which starts out with an anecdote about a student who transfers to the number 1 school in the nation (according to Newsweek). To demonstrate the rigor and difficulty of this school, the article highlights that the first assignment for in this student’s AP European History class is to…
…memorize the map of Europe and be able to draw every country, along with 10 captials, 10 rivers and 10 bodies of water.
My goodness what a brain teaser! Can anyone say “busy work”?
Is this what passes for great education today? I can just see this student twenty years from now as a diplomat or foreign policy analyst.
Well sir, before we head into this meeting, do you understand the historical context surrounding the animosity between these two nations and how their cultural differences have stoked this hatred?
Hmm... Not really, but I can draw you a pretty map with turquoise rivers.
Now in all fairness, I'm sure they will cover meatier subjects, but is this rote memorization necessary? Is it preparing them to be thinkers and leaders of the future? Rather than relying on rote memorization, involve them in a discussion about the history, culture and politics of these countries and point it out on a map as you do so. They’ll figure out where these countries are located.
Rote memorization has its place (like sports statistics), but by highschool it should be at a minimum. Ok, rant over. I have to go memorize some HTML entity codes.
[Listening to: Just Be - Tiësto - Just Be (8:46)]
For the past several days, I've been consumed with working on the Subtext blogging engine (not to be confused with the Subtext programming language). It's been the most fun I've had writing software since, well, since working on RSS Bandit as a matter of fact. ;)
Speaking of RSS Bandit, Dare offers some good advice for those starting an Open Source project. I'm going to have to pick his (and others) brain some more and maybe write a short article with advice on starting and continuing an open source project. Especially since I've already violated one piece of his advice, which is to save the announcement till you have a release, in order to generate more excitement.
Despite not having a release yet, I have seen some excitement in the community over this project and I appreciate all the well wishers. If you're interested in taking a look, you can get the latest source code at any time, but you'll have to use CVS until we get a release prepared. I was working furiously to get an installer package ready, but upon the advice of the team, I put that aside so we could focus on having a more compelling release first. That also bought me some time and breathing room as I was completely stuck on a problem using WiX.
So far, some of the interesting features I've implemented are...
- Friendly and informative error pages for missing blog_config records and malformed (or just wrong) connection string.
- Skins can now add an edit link visible only to the admin user to the ViewPost page. So when viewing a page as an admin, you can click the edit link to go directly to the post editor. Sometimes I like to edit an older post and hated having to page through so many records. Instead, I can use Google to find the post and then click the edit link.
-
Fixed the MetaBlogAPI. I hated the fact I couldn't edit old posts with w.Bloggar. Now I can.
- Syndication compression (for aggregators that support it) using contributed code.
- Applied a contributed patch to add "image", "license", and "copyright" elements to the RSS feed for those that want it.
- Comments can be turned off after a configurable number of days.
- ... and more!
Already it's at a point that I can't wait to deploy it to my own blog. But I'm going to hold off till we can implement a few more features and get the installation package together. That's the biggest technical challenge right now and I welcome any offers of help on that.
My pace on this project will slow by necessity as I get my consulting projects moving forward. But I have to admit, I'm having so much fun on this I often catch myself daydreaming about finding a wealthy patron to sponsor me to work on open source projects. But a foot set firmly in reality snaps me out of that stupor and back to writing code.
[Listening to: Plantastic - Artifacts - Lee Burridge - Nubreed 005 CD2 (6:01)]
This is quite possibly one of the coolest music videos ever.
p.s. anyone know how to take a screenshot of a video in windows media player?
UPDATE: Well as you can see I can take screenshots now thanks to Jon Galloway's suggestion to use Fraps. Sweeet.
[Listening to: F.C. Kahuna / What Is Kahuna? (Fatboy Slim's "Smell The Kahuna" Mix) - Fatboy Slim - Greatest Remixes (6:35)]
This just cracks me up. Especially after reading #1 through #3 and then you get to #4, I can't stop laughing. If you've been these various venues (rave, dance club, hip-hop club, etc...), you'll totally get this humor.
You know who you are. Standing behind that deck of turntables, holding one headphone to your ear, being pretentious and aloof as you play with knobs and shuffle through records. You can just settle down, because nobody cares that you're a DJ.
Take a read.
Yes, THAT Hilary Rosen. The RIAA's former top attack dog Hilary Rosen is complaining about DRM on music. This is an interesting topic for her first post on Arianna Huffington's new blog. Does she not realize the inherent irony of her complaint?
[Listening to: Suedehead - Morrissey - Viva Hate (3:55)]
Today has been an awful day, starting just past midnight, I lose the database for my site. Later, I played in the most dreadful soccer game ever. We only fielded ten players, but the other team only had seven showup to start! Yet, they managed to put three in the back of the net by half-time.
At half time, one more of their players showed up and one of ours had to leave, leaving us with a only a 9 to 8 advantage (which felt like a disadvantage at this point). If it wasn't for a red card one of their player's drew for kicking me in the chest while I was down on the ground, they probably would have scored 10 goals in the second half, rather than keeping the score at 3 to nill. It was complete and total humiliation.
Now, after recreating my blog entries (an upbeat note), my Toshiba M205 takes a dive with the blue screen of death and won't boot properly. GodDamnPieceOfShitSonofabitch!!!
Anyways, I'm annoyed, but not too down about it. Heck, I live in Los Angeles, it's sunny outside, and my wife made me a nice coffee. I really can't complain. But I just did, didn't I. ;)
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that my office smells like dog piss because Twiggy has taken a liking to doing her dirty deed in a particular corner of the room. Just lovely.
If there's one thing I've learned as a professional developer, it is that "TIP" is bad. Never Test In Production! Unfortunately in my case, it was past midnight, I was tired, and I had two query analyzer windows open, one to my local host, and one to my website's database, both with the same database name
I was testing an installation script that would drop and recreate the Subtext database, and I just happened to run it in the wrong Query Analyzer window. You can imagine my distress as I visited my site to find it pretty much gone.
Fortunately, my hosting provider takes regular backups and they had a backup from four days ago. Once the backup was restored, I went in and carefully recreated four days worth of blog posts with help from my RSS Bandit cache. You see, it's more than vanity that I subscribe to my own feed.
In case your curious, I used Query Analyzer to reconstruct the posts since the URLs were generated using the ID column (identity) and the DateAdded column. With liberal use of the
DBCC CHECKIDENT ('blog_content', RESEED, 3073)
command, I recreated the proper IDs so that existing links to these posts would not break. Unfortunately I lost all comments.
[Listening to: Duke Pearson (With Airto And Stella Mars) / O Amor Em Paz (Once I Loved) - Blue Note Plays Jobim (5:24)]
As a developer, I like choice. For example, WiX doesn't currently support managed custom actions. You can hack it together, but they won't support your endeavor. Personally, I want the choice to shoot myself in the foot with a managed custom action. Hand over that gun!
However, too many choices can be quite paralytic as well. You ever try to round up more than four coworkers for lunch and figure out where to go? So it comes as no surprise that having too many options in a company 401 (k) actually decreases overall enrollment (as reported by The Wall Street Journal). My buddy Walter here has a analysis of the topic.
Jon Galloway delights with a meaty post outlining a method for creating a SQL Server database cache dependency without the use of triggers. It's an interesting read and worth looking into.
Ken Robertson points out some minor inaccuracies (none intentional) in my announcement about Subtext concerning Community Server.
I went ahead and made some corrections in the announcement, though I defended my point about targeting different markets which I will repeat here.
As for the target market, I see your point that I may be slightly off. My point is that by commercializing Community Server, you've created an incentive to target the needs of larger paying corporations. You're a business and you need the cash inflow. Nothing wrong with that.
I also go on to mention in my update to the announcement
Starting this project is not an attack of Telligent or Community Server by any means. I do wish them well. I just think there's still room for a tightly focused Open Source blogging engine targeted to individuals with no restrictions. It's very likely that Community Server 1.1 or 1.2 will blow our socks off and have us questioning whether Subtext is worth the time. But until then, I think Subtext will ride the wave of backlash at the perceived hastiness in which CS 1.0 was released and hopefully turn into a compelling product in its own right. We're carving out a niche here.
Only time will tell if I'm proven wrong or not. In the mean time, we have a team of people really amped about this project. It will be a fun experiment whatever happens.
Get involved!
If you're interested in helping out, please feel free to check out the project site, make or comment on feature requests, or if you're really bold, load up CVS and take a look at the source code.
Also, if anyone out there is a WiX expert, I could certainly use some help!
P.S. That logo up there is a tentative logo made by Robb. Who knew that dude was an artist?
[Listening to: Need You Tonight - INXS - The Greatest Hits (3:01)]
Scoble has posted Steve Ballmer's email on public policy engagement and outlines the thought process behind the reversal.
After reading the email, I just have to say, much props and kudos to you Steve and Microsoft! One of the key points Steve makes is...
After looking at the question from all sides, Ive concluded that diversity in the workplace is such an important issue for our business that it should be included in our legislative agenda. Since our beginning nearly 30 years ago, Microsoft has had a strong business interest in recruiting and retaining the best and brightest and most diverse workforce possible. Im proud of Microsofts commitment to non-discrimination in our internal policies and benefits, but our policies cant cover the range of housing, education, financial and similar services that our people and their partners and families need. Therefore, its appropriate for the company to support legislation that will promote and protect diversity in the workplace.
It highlights that social responsibility is good for business.
This devotion to diversity, frankly, is heartwarming and uplifting. As a "mixbreed", I'm all over diversity. The more colors the better (although that doesn't always apply to web design people). Reading Ballmer's email made me feel that Microsoft might actually be a great place to work. And that's a good thing for Microsoft. To be seen as a progressive workplace will invite the best and the brightest. As will shipping timely solid software. One down and one to go.
[Listening to: Decoder - Dumb - Diesel Boy - System Upgrade (2:50)]
Greaaat. Another thing to worry about as a developer. You've deployed your slick new Wiki or some other web app and Google comes along and starts deleting content. ;)
From Scoble's blog we hear that...
MAJOR NEWS. Steve Ballmer is sending email to all Microsoft employees explaining that Microsoft is reversing its position on the anti-discrimination bill.
You know, it would be petty to say it, but I will. I Told You So! ;) All kidding aside, I'm heartened to see Microsoft change its positions. It just shows that corporations can look solely past the bottom line and consider the common good. In doing so, I believe it will support the bottom line anyways in a more far reaching manner.
As for those who worry that..
...people should be able to use Microsoft products without having to support political causes they don't.
I'd like to point out two things. First, by choosing any product you're endorsing certain causes whether you like it or not. You're wearing clothes made by children in a sweatshop in Chile? Guess what, you're supporting an oppresive system. Secondly, by purchasing Microsoft, you're already supporting this particular position. This bill in particular is merely a reflection of a policy Microsoft already has internally regarding anti-discrimination. It's not taking rights away, it's merely protecting rights in the corporate environment. In other words, it's a gimme.
I'm looking for a Windows Forms control or dialog used to both parse and build connection strings by walking the user though selecting a server, database, etc...
If you know of such a control, please provide a comment. I've been able to build OLEDB connection strings using the Microsoft OLE DB type library, but it only produces OLEDB connection string. I want a dialog or control that can walk a user into building a valid connection string like:
Server=localhost;Database=SubtextData;Trusted_Connection=True
Thanks!
This quote from Sharp as a Marble just cracks me up.
Then, on the way into work, a car passed me with a bumper sticker on the window that said These colors dont run and a picture of the American flag. Cept the sticker had not weathered the rain very well and the ink had ran. Irony, eh?
[Via Sharp as a Marble]
This document describes the goals for future versions of Subtext as well as
a plan for achieving them. The goals for this roadmap are the following:
- Communicate to end users what features are planned for future releases
- Elicit feedback from users about upcoming releases
- Provides a prioritization of features
This document is a work in progress and feedback is welcome.
Administrative Road Map
- Documenting existing source code and features. (priority: high)
- Fill specific project roles (patch manager, forum manager, etc...) (priority: high)
- Set up a website and Wiki for Subtext (unfortunately subtext.com is taken). (priority: med)
- Set up an automated build process (NAnt) (priority: low)
Upcoming Releases
As we flesh out the roadmap, we’ll divide it into sections based on
planned future individual releases. For now, this document will
simply list goals and features planned for the near and far future.
Gotta Have It Features Immediately (priority 1)
These features will directly support the principles of the Subtext project.
UPDATE: We are rethinking the single vs
multiple blog support. More details later.
One important "feature" that must be discussed is the dropping of the
"multiple blogs on one installation" feature. In order to maintain
Subtext’s goals of simplicity and it’s focus on the hobbyist
and individual blogger, it makes sense to focus on the scenario where users
are using Subtext to create a single blog. This will distinguish Subtext
from Community Server which is geared towards corporations and groups that
wish to host multiple blogs. Please provide feedback on this decision.
-
Installer for local setup: We’ve started an installer using
the WiX toolkit. Initially, this will be an MSI package that will install
both a website and the database when run locally. Eventually, it will have
to be able to upgrade an existing installation.
-
Simplified configuration (single blog): By removing the multiple
blogs feature, configuration can be simplified immensely.
-
Configuration utility: Upon first installing Subtext, the
configuration utility will be an easy to use WinForms app used to
set the connection string (and certain other settings if any) within
the web.config file. This utility can be run at any time to tweak
web.config settings without having to muck around the XML by hand.
-
Kick ass documentation: Can’t stress this enough.
We’ll use NDoc to generate code and API documentation. As for
user documentation, we’ll have both a project site and a wiki.
-
Comments Automatically Expire: This is currently hard-coded
into Subtext and needs to be made configurable. Allow the user to have
comments turned off after a configurable number of days. Existing comments
will still be displayed, but no new comments will be allowed.
Gotta Have It, But Just not yet (priority 1.5)
- Friendly Urls: Currently, Subtext creates permalinks
that look like http://haacked.com/archive/2005/05/04/2953.aspx.
In a future version, we want the permalink to have a more human readable URL.
For example, this might be converted to
http://haacked.com/archive/2005/05/04/AnnouncingSubtext.aspx.
-
Improved Usability: One of my pet peeves about .TEXT is how
hard it is to edit a really old post. You have to page through the
data grid of posts till you find it. Instead, a simple option is to
create a new admin token that skin creators can place in their skin
where a post is rendered. When a user is logged in as an admin, the
token is displayed as an icon with a link that the admin can click to
edit that post. Thus, to edit an old post, simply make sure you’re
logged in as an admin and leverage Google to find the post, and then
click on the admin token.
-
Replace/Upgrade FreeTextBox.dll: Hopefully with something
that won’t mangle HTML.
- Comment Moderation: This is merely one tool in the constant
battle to fight comment spam. Allows users to turn on and off comment
moderation.
- Simple Comment Filtering Rules
Currently, haacked.com uses a simple trigger that filters out comments
with a certain number of links. This exceedingly simple filter does
remarkably well. To fight comment spam, we should start with a few
simple (and configurable) rules for filtering comment spam. We can
add more complex rules later.
Important, But Maybe Next Release Features (priority 2)
- Membership Provider Model
implementation: This will be a very simple system that allows a blog
owner to create accounts with certain roles (reader, author, admin). Thus
a blog can have multiple authors for a single blog.
- New CSS based Templates: These will be templates that
can be "skinned" purely via CSS (ala
CSS Zen Garden). We’ll
provide a tool for a blog owner to edit and switch CSS for this particular template.
- XHTML compliance: Both transitional and strict.
-
Comment Filtering Rules Engine: This will be similar to the Junk
Mail rules engine in Outlook. We’ll provide a web based interface
for creating filtering rule used to combat comment spam.
Features to dream about (priority we’re dreaming)
- A Spell Checker: For all those bad spelers out there.
- Migration utility: We’re not so arrogant as to
believe you’ll never use another blogging engine again.
If you do, we want to help you migrate your permalinks and posts
to it.
- MySql Provider: because not everyone wants to pay for
SQL Server hosting and some people want to honor their license
agreement for MSDN Universal. ;)
- Mono support: This may be way down the road, but
supporting Mono would be a nice way to introduce the Linux
crowd to the beauty of ASP.NET and Subtext. Besides, we’ll
finally get props from the Slashdot crowd for our
1337 sk1llz.
-
Intelligent comment filtering: Whether it be via Bayes filtering
or some other means, but a more autonomous method of spam filtering is
called for.
sub text
Function: noun
1. The implicit or metaphorical meaning (as of a literary text)
2. A story within the story.
What is .TEXT?
.TEXT is a popular (among .NET loving geeks), scalable, and feature rich blogging engine started by
Scott Watermasysk and released as an open source project under a
BSD license. Scott did a wonderful job with .TEXT as evidenced by its widespread use among bloggers and being the blogging engine for
http://blogs.msdn.com/ among others.
Sounds great. So why fork it?
There are several reasons I think a fork is waranted.
.TEXT is dead as an open source product.
.TEXT is dead as a BSD licensed open source project. Out of its ashes has risen
Community Server which integrates a new version of the .TEXT source code with Forums and Photo Galleries. Community Server is now a
product being sold by
Telligent Systems. There is a non-commercial license available, but it requires displaying the telligent logo and restricts usage to non-commercial purposes. I'd prefer to use a blogging engine with an
OSI approved license, in particular the
BSD license works well for me.
As an aside, if you're wondering how they can take an open source project and turn it into a commercial product, it's quite easy actually. Here's the story of another commercially acquired open source project.
Community Server Targets A Different Market
Another reason is that Community Server has become sort of the Team System of blogging engines. By virtue of it going commercial, it's being targetted to a different market than your average hobbyist and blogger. While I'm sure many are looking forward to the tight integration with forums and photo gallery, that's just not something I personally need. This integration project was quite ambitious, but it resulted, in my opinion, a rushed 1.0 release as evidenced by
this list of bugs. Bugs are fine, but many of these are regressions of RSS functionality that worked fine in .TEXT. I've helped
Jayson with fixing some of these bugs in CS. As a developer on the
RSS Bandit team, you can guess that proper RSS support is very near and dear to me. Starting this project will enable me to have a hand in both ends of the blogging spectrum.
Ok, So Who Does Subtext Target?
Subtext is the name I've chosen for this fork of .TEXT. Subtext targets the blogging enthusiast who wants a usable and tightly focused blogging engine. If you've ever caught yourself throwing your hands in the air and declaring that you're going to write your own blogging engine from scratch, Subtext is going to be for you. My first and primary task is to streamline the installation and configuration process (hence
my recent fascination with WiX).
What are the Subtext Guiding Principles
There are several principles that will serve to guide development on Subtext.
- Usability
- Badass Quality
- Documentation
- Focused
- Easy to install and configure
One of the difficulties of many open source projects is their typical lack of documentation. Working with Dare and Torsten, I helped improve their already impressive documentation of RSS Bandit. I'd like to do the same for Subtext.
Likewise, I want to make setting up Subtext a pleasure, not a royal headache. That's my first task and highest priority at this point.
Where's Subtext At Now?
Currently I'm in the planning stage for Subtext. I've uploaded the code to the
Subtext SourceForge project and am currently recruiting a few core members to help out. I've started with the .TEXT 0.95 code base, so if you have patches to submit, by all means please do. I've already added some small changes to make it more XHTML compliant. In the beginning, I plan to recruit a small core team of developers with write access to help me review and apply code patches, as well as do some of the development. Over time I hope the team will grow as we find developers who are making meaningful contributions.
In the meanwhile, I'll be drawing up some project guidelines and a roadmap so stay tuned.
UPDATE: Ken Robertson points out some inaccuracies with this announcement in his blog. I went ahead and made some corrections.
One thing he mentions is that I'm slightly off when I say that the target market for CS is larger institutions. I agree that CS may work well for small fries like me, but I defended my assertion with a comment in his blog.
As for the target market, I see your point that I may be slightly off. My point is that by commercializing Community Server, you've created an incentive to target the needs of larger paying corporations. You're a business and you need the cash inflow. Nothing wrong with that.
Starting this project is not an attack of Telligent or Community Server by any means. I do wish them well. I just think there's still room for a tightly focused Open Source blogging engine targeted to individuals with no restrictions. It's very likely that Community Server 1.1 or 1.2 will blow our socks off and have us questioning whether Subtext is worth the time. But until then, I think Subtext will ride the wave of backlash at the perceived hastiness in which CS 1.0 was released and hopefully turn into a compelling product in its own right. We're carving out a niche here.
I'm posting this in the hopes that it helps someone out there with the same problem because I just KNOW how often you're adding files using CVS. It's the little spark that gets your juices flowing while sitting at work daydreaming about how much you can't wait to use CVS again.
Anyways, I was creating a new CVS module and adding the contents of some source code to the repository when I heard the sound of breaking glass that TortoiseCVS uses to indicate a problem (it's a rather lovely sound).
It seems I had some sort of network issue while adding files. No problem, I thought, I'll just add the files that haven't been added and then commit all the files.
Unfortunately, every time I tried commiting files I heard that dreaded breaking glass. My error message was something like:
cvs commit: failed to create lock directory for `/cvsroot/MyProject/SomeDirectory'
(/cvsroot/MyProject/SomeDirectory/#cvs.lock):
No such file or directory
cvs commit: lock failed - giving up
cvs [commit aborted]: lock failed - giving up
Well that's strange, the error message is having trouble creating a lock for the directory "SomeDirectory" because it doesn't exist. But when I use Tortoise CVS to add contents, it shows that everything has been added.
What I discovered is that CVS stores information about the state of the repository in local hidden folders named, you guessed it, "CVS". If something very bad happens, it's quite possible that the local information will get out of synch with the information on the server. That's exactly what I ran into.
To fix it, I copied my source tree to a new directory, deleted the old source tree, and ran a Checkout command to get the latest version that actually made it into the repository. Then I copied that set aside source tree over the one I had just checked out so that all the new files made it into the tree. That then showed that I still needed to add some files and directories to the CVS repository, which I did. Finally, a commit of the source tree worked flawlessly.
By the way, I'm a relative CVS rookie, though I've used it quite a bit. So if there was a better way to do this, let me know.
For a great tutorial on source control, check out Eric Sink's series Source Control HOWTO.
[Listening to: Chinese Burn (Forbidden City Remix) - Paul Van Dyk - Perspective CD2 (10:36)]
UPDATE
Wow, check out the privacy policy for Google Web Accelerator... On second thought maybe I'll hold off on installing that.
When you use Google Web Accelerator, Google servers receive and log your page requests. Page requests and data sent in encrypted form using an HTTPS connection will not go through Google. It is possible that some personally identifiable information could be sent to Google, if the information is sent without using an encrypted (HTTPS) connection.
To enhance Google Web Accelerator's performance, Google temporarily caches cookies from third party sites that are used in your Web requests. For more information, please see our FAQ.
To accelerate delivery of content, Google Web Accelerator retrieves and caches webpages before you request them. Therefore, your Google Web Accelerator cache may include copies of webpages you have not visited. You can clear the cache following instructions in the FAQ.
Google announced on its blog that they've release a beta version of their new web accelerator designed for broadband use. I'll give it a shot and see how well it works.
Man, these guys are pushing out a lot of interesting products. My screen is starting to look like a Google sponsored desktop.
I started off planning to write a quick installer for a little something I'm working on. Unhappy with the limited abilities of Visual Studio's Setup and Deployment project, I finally started playing with WiX.
After a good deal of time reading through the documentation, I have a pretty good handle on it. However, it's difficult to apply the WiX philosophy (build your setup project as you go along) to an existing project that already has several hundred files.
Along comes Tallow to the rescue (part of the WiX toolkit) which can generate a fragment containing components themselves containing references to your files. Sweet! But now you have to reference all the generated components within your Feature element.
So that drags me further into the hole where I'm performing minor surgery on the Tallow source code. I soon discover a list of other feature requests (auto-generate Guids, etc...) and I soon catch myself. Hey, I'm just here to build a setup project, not rewrite the whole damn setup toolkit.
So I now have a customized version of Tallow.exe that will generate Guids for components. It will also generate a commented section of ComponentRef statements like so.
<!--
<ComponentRef Id='component0' /<
<ComponentRef Id='component1' />
<ComponentRef Id='component2' />
-->
You can manually (eww!) cut and paste that section into your main .wxs file in order to reference all the components in the generated fragment.
Now back to my initial task...
[Listening to: Daydream - Privilege - A Trip In Trance (CD 2) (3:45)]
You've heard CSS purists beat it into you over and over again that "Tables are bad, umkaaay?". But man, what a pain when you're trying to do something as simple as a web form and you want the labels to align to the right and the controls to align to the left.
So Dimitri here rides in to the rescue with TILT (Table Injection for Layout Technique). He showed this to me a few weeks ago and has finally polished it to the point that he's ready to tell the world.
Essentially, this technique allows you to mark up your code semantically like the CSS purist you are, but then with some crafty usage of Javascript, modify the DOM and inject a TABLE (with all the benefits therein). Genius.
I once said he missed the point with Farhenheit 9/11 and he linked to my criticism (bringing with it a lot of traffic). I appreciated and respected that he could see my post as an attack on his position and not a personal attack.
So for your 50th, I'll link back as you requested, though I can't promise I'll bring much traffic in return.
And by the way, Dave, have you seen The Corporation and if so, what are your thoughts?