No history to Subversion
I’ve been involved in a couple of projects where SourceSafe was kicked out.
In most cases there were long discussions on how to handle the history in SourceSafe.
Most developers seems to manage without migrating the history, but there has always been a vocal minority that desperately want to have the history migrated.
When dealing with this it has struck me that every project that was in favor of migrating the history also was missing decent release practices.
The loudest arguments are usually that they often need to check what changed between two old versions when bugs are triaged. There are usually two reasons for this. The first is that someone has to be blamed for the error. The other is that they don’t really know when the feature was released in the first place.
My recommendation usually is to set up a working release management structure before migrating the source code to a new repository. Especially if the SourceSafe repository hasn’t crashed yet.
As far as I know there is no tool that can recreate the SourceSafe history in Subversion or Team Foundation Server for all edge cases. Especially since the notion of sharing doesn’t exist in SVN or TFS.
If you know of a good tool to get the history out of a SourceSafe repository please let me know.
Wireless networking in Win7
I just read the release notes for the beta release of Win 7.
My problem is that I can not connect to my wireless network when the computer resumes after is has been in sleep mode.
Some googling later I found that it is a known problem as stated in the release notes.
Does any one read release notes before installing stuff?
Will Bush be sent to Hague now?
Since no country has the power to chase down an ex ruler of the USA but USA it self, now is probably the time to stand up for justice.
Wouldn’t it be a huge statement if Bush was sent to trial in Hague for his crimes against international law by the new administration.
It’s probably a pipe dream ant I wonder if that would lead to civil war in the USA.
An ex leader from almost any other country that had behaved like Bush would have been hunted for life.
I don’t mind bringing terrorists to to court, but keeping suspects in weak foreign countries to circumvent the domestic law and calling them illegal warriors to circumvent international law is straight up bullying to me.
Maybe all the countries that USA owe money could gather and put some collective preassure on them. That seems to be a weak point of the super power that is open to exploit right now.
Time Sharing
Cloud computing as it is presented by the big vendors right now looks a lot like time sharing of main frames. In the previous post I wanted Microsoft to offer Windows Azure for in house hosting. That would really shorten the time span to repeat the time sharing history of companies buying parts of the capacity of something expensive and then affording to have all the capacity for them selfs.
I think cloud computing is more beneficial to the organizations that has grown, or plans to grow, out of standard web hosting. They don’t already have the physical infrastructure needed to support their activities and probably not the competence and time needed to keep an operating system running online.
It would be nice if standard web hosting was more scalable. If you’re among 2000 other sites on a box there will be problems if your site gets popular and the hosting is not automatically scalable.
I don’t want to learn enough Linux and Apache to host my own server, be it virtual or not. What I need is some advice or even rules to follow that will make my web applications automatically scalable when needed. Of course I can still write crappy code but at least my success is not hindered from the beginning.
Hopefully both Google and Microsoft will put their offerings in production mode soon so that we can start building the next Facebook without concern of our web host.
Windows Azure
Windows Azure is Microsofts take on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Google App Engine.
All these services offer companies to host their web based applications in ‘the cloud’. For Amazon you upload a virtual machine that you can start as many instances you need of. Google chooses to only allow Python code that is then distributed over as many cores as is needed for the moment. Microsofts solution is in between. You can use any .Net language and it is up to you to configure how many cores to use. I use ‘core’ in the vaguest sense here, I don’t have a clue how virtualized the environments are.
In the usual Microsoft spirit, the tools for developers are outstanding. You can even emulate a cloud of your own in your development environment.
Sadly, Microsoft hasn’t published any pricing information yet. I think a lot of developers would have started on ‘real’ projects already if there was some indication of the pricing level. Both Amazon and Google charges for storage, traffic and CPU-usage in different way, but Google App Engine if free until it gets a lot of page views. To me, building simple services for the small Swedish speaking market Googles model is quite nice. It’s free until the site gets popular enough to support it self.
I hope that Microsoft will offer companies to host Windows Azure in their own data centers. That way one could scale out to Microsofts cloud when there is not enough capacity in house, but still keep the data that often has legal issues local.
Sansa Clip friendly version of jsiPodFetch
I just released version 8.52 of jsiPodFetch
The only change is that I reset some ID3-tags as I mentioned in this post.
Podcasts on the Sansa Clip
I bought a Sansa Clip
A ‘feature’ of the Clip became a major pain for my podcast listening though. It will take all MP3:s that has ‘podcast’ as category and treat them in a special way. It will do that even if they are referenced in a playlist. It is realy annoying to find the playlist created by jsiPodFetch empty on the player.
I ended up adding some code to jsiPodFetch that resets the ID3-tags on all MP3:s as they are copied to the plyer. Now the category is ‘other’, album is ‘jsiPodFetch’, artist is the feed name and title is the title taken from the feed instead of the original title in the MP3.
It fixed my Sansa Clip problem and it also makes the display on the player show the same episode titels as jsiPodFetch.
I will make a release with the tag resetting and a lot of other bug fixes as soon as I can set up a decent testing environment.
Disapearing session data in ASP.NET
A couple of days ago a colleague called me because the session state kept disapearing in his ASP.NET application.
He was running the application in a virtual machine and had a nagging feeling that this was the cause of the problem.
A few basic questions later it struck me that he probably had not changed the memory settings of his virtual machine.
It was still running on the default 128 MB so every time he reloaded the offending page the ASP.NET application pool was restarted because of memory constraints.
So if you are running server software in a virtual environment; remember to allocate enough memory to keep it going.
logview4net goes WPF
I am rewriting the GUI and recompiling everything for .Net 3.5
This will remove a couple of the existing bugs and hopefully not introduce to many new ones.
If there are things in the GUI you would like to change now is the time to tell me.
The first time I looked at WPF, when it was still called Avalon, I really disliked the flowing layout model. This time I kind of like it.
logview4net passes 10k downloads
Tonight logview4net passed 10 000 downloads on Sourceforge.
There are some open bugs so there will be at least one more release this year.
Next year it will probably be moved to .NET 3.5 and made able to route messages.
