So, there has been some talk about how blogs will be able to let average users report the news from their point of view. This will take a small part of the power away from big media – helping to make us all a little more free. Okay, maybe I have lofty goals for this whole blogging thing, but I’m going to try and do my part by sharing my views on the presidential debates here. I make no promise to be fair and balanced or anything like that, this is my blog and you’re going to get my point of view. Deal with it. Okay, here we go.
Continue reading
Monthly Archives: September 2004
Software Engineering Practices
So, I took this software engineering course in my senior year and never really realized how important that class was. I mean, I understood all of the things the teacher was telling me, and figured that they were all good ideas, but never thought of them as being absolutely necessary. That is, I figured you could do a reasonably good job without them. And, when I say “good job”, I don’t mean “create a good product” as much as I mean “create a good product that gets released in a predictable amount of time and doesn’t turn into an unmanageable beast.” I always figured, as I’m sure many programmers do at first, that things like spec documents were a luxury. Over the last few months I have come to learn otherwise. I really hope I still have the PDF of the documents my group and I created in that software engineering class. We did a damn good job and it would be great to use that document as an example and a kind of template in future projects. I’m sure we’ll be done with our current project soon, but it probably could have been done already if we had taken some more time and decided *exactly* what we were building before we started. And, no matter how much anyone tells me, I will always believe that is possible. Small changes are inevitable, but hitting a moving target with code is impossible.
Subversion & Office Bocce
So, I got around to installing subversion on the server I have running at my house. So now this little 366MHz machine is my IMAP server andmy subversion server. I checked my office bocce site into it so that I can better keep track of changes that are made to it. The site amounts to being only a few pages long, but it has been a lot of fun to keep the stats with at work. I’ve registered officebocce.com and should have this code running up there in a week or so. If you are interested (I don’t know why anyone would be) and you want to see the code so far (even though it is in this kind of limbo state and is unusable) you can check it out of subversion with the following command: ‘svn checkout http://markdrago.redirectme.net:8000/svn/bocce/trunk bocce’.
Subversion is a pretty cool version control system. I like it better than CVS in most respects. It certainly gets past a lot of the issues that always creep up with CVS. I have to admit that I’m not exactly sure how the repository should be set up (I have 3 projects and 3 repositories), but it doesn’t seem to work correctly with more than one project in a repository. Plus, subversion repositories aren’t exactly like CVS repositories. But, when I put multiple projects in one repository the revision numbers went up together with each project. That is, if I check in project A and then project B, they should both be at revision 1. Then, if I update project A it should be at revision 2 while project B is still at revision 1. This doesn’t seem to be the case. An update to project A would bring both project’s revisions up to 2. Then an update to project B would bring both revisions up to 3. I’m not sure if this is the way it was meant to work, but I didn’t like it. So, multiple repositories for me. It doesn’t look any different from the client’s point of view really. That is, I could combine all 3 repositories into one and still access it at the same URI. So, we’ll see how it goes. If you’re interested in subversion, there is a free book about it available online.
Fighting with Microsoft Technologies
I got home this morning and noticed that my house had been covered in toilet paper. My brother is on the volleyball team at his high school, and we’re pretty sure it was the girl’s volleyball team that did it. They did a pretty good job, and my brother is going to have some cleaning up to do later on today.
We didn’t have a very good day with Microsoft technologies at work yesterday. Mike spent most of the day fighting with the update for Microsoft Office that fixes a hole in their JPEG rendering library thing. I understand their wanting to make sure that you purchased the copy of Office by having you put the Office CD in your drive during updates, but that is terribly inconvenient. First off, if you’re going to do that, it has to work all of the time. One of the machines in our office still doesn’t have the update because we couldn’t convince the updater that we actually own the copy of Office that was on the laptop. Of course we do, and still had the CD to prove it, but the updater wasn’t convinced. Besides, how many people really have all of the CDs that they’ve ever used to install software? We have an entire filing cabinet devoted to this stuff, but I don’t think that is common practice. It’s probably better to let users of pirated copies get the updates than to put your real customers through all of the hassle of finding their old CDs, having that only occasionally work, and wasting a whole lot of someone’s day updating all of the machines in the office. I also had a run in with Internet Explorer. I guess that isn’t much news. Sometimes I feel like my job is just to get neat things to work in Internet Explorer. I spend a lot of time doing it. It might take me 1 hour to get something to work in Firefox, then I have to spend 3 hours trying to get IE to do the same damn thing. We ended up with something pretty neat, so I’m happy. But, it did require a little bit of hackery to convince IE that it could do what I wanted. Luckily, Firefox’s numbers are up. The market share is either 8% or 15% depending on where you hear it from, but everyone is reporting that IEs market share is down and Firefox’s is up. So, if you haven’t switched your browser over to firefox yet, stop wasting your time on the web and get it now.
This Post Sucks
“Allow me to extend to you a special invitation to watch the wrinkles form upon my face as I grow old.” –Thimbledrome by Pain
I’ve always wondered why TV sucks on Sundays. On one hand it makes sense, being that there aren’t as many viewers on a Sunday night as there are on say a Thursday night or something. But, no one ever has anything on at all. You’d think that if one channel just put their best shows on every Sunday, they would do pretty well. I don’t know. I guess silly ideas like this are what keeps me out of the TV production business. Man, this blog posting sucks.
I recently bought an ass-load of books. I bought Joel Spolsky’s “Joel on Software” book, which I highly recommend. I’ve also recently purchased “The Gnome 2.0 Developer’s Guide”, the “Mono Developer’s Notebook”, “The UNIX Programming Environment”, and “The Inmates are Running the Asylum”. It goes without saying that I don’t really have very much time to read all of these, but I’ve nearly finished “Joel on Software”. It captivated me and reinvigorated my desire to be the best at what I do.
Drew, Mike and I went to Splish Splash yesterday. We had a great time. The water park was nearly empty because it was the last day the park was open. I got a pretty nice sunburn too. I’m dead tired and I’m getting up kind of early tomorrow. Man, this posting really did suck.