Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Testing...testing...
...still spot-checking a code rollout to the production server. Blog post tomorrow night.
Friday, May 27, 2011
Frivolous Friday, 05.27.2001: First World Lament
(Blame the "#GoodnightTwitter" trending topic from earlier this week...)
It's eleven p.m.,
The pizza is cold,
My twelfth-level Mage
Has run short on gold.
My Twitter-stream flows by
At barely a trickle.
Pandora's turned flighty;
Her stations are fickle.
My friends' updates likewise
Have slowed to a crawl.
I hear through the silence
The Facebook games call.
But I'm not keen on farming
Nor buccaneering tonight;
Don't feel like a mobster--
Much less elven knight.
I could turn to my Netflix
On-demand streaming.
(Tho' when credits are rolling,
I'll already be dreaming.)
I could pound down a 'Dew
Or blend a frapee,
Except my IM-mates
Have called it a day.
Or fire up the tablet
And download new apps.
To amuse my remaining
(Non-snoozing) synapse.
Or load my e-Reader
With books new and cool
And hope I don't short it
In a puddle of drool.
Both eyelids are south-bound,
I won't greet the dawn,
Tomorrow's a new day--
Another re-spawn.
But it's Friday night on
A three-day weekend:
And moi turn in early?!?
Cthulu forefend!
It's eleven p.m.,
The pizza is cold,
My twelfth-level Mage
Has run short on gold.
My Twitter-stream flows by
At barely a trickle.
Pandora's turned flighty;
Her stations are fickle.
My friends' updates likewise
Have slowed to a crawl.
I hear through the silence
The Facebook games call.
But I'm not keen on farming
Nor buccaneering tonight;
Don't feel like a mobster--
Much less elven knight.
I could turn to my Netflix
On-demand streaming.
(Tho' when credits are rolling,
I'll already be dreaming.)
I could pound down a 'Dew
Or blend a frapee,
Except my IM-mates
Have called it a day.
Or fire up the tablet
And download new apps.
To amuse my remaining
(Non-snoozing) synapse.
Or load my e-Reader
With books new and cool
And hope I don't short it
In a puddle of drool.
Both eyelids are south-bound,
I won't greet the dawn,
Tomorrow's a new day--
Another re-spawn.
But it's Friday night on
A three-day weekend:
And moi turn in early?!?
Cthulu forefend!
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
iPotato
After last year's suicide scandals, Foxconn and its most glamorous customer, Apple, are again in the news, and--again--not in the good way. The invisible people who make our toys are supposed to stay off our radar. Just like the elves who make toys for Santa, don'cha'know? A predictably boring supplier is a good supplier: That's just how it works.
After reading--by which I mean deep-skimming and yes, I do consider that a distinction--the article, the Inner History Major snorted awake and mumbled, "Right. Basically we're talking the Irish Potato Famine. Got it. Zzzzzzzzzzz..." The IHM was mainly thinking of the monoculture component of the famine, what with the concerns about consistency and timing in the supply chain. Not to mention the overhead cost associated with putting the screws to multiple suppliers to insure that one doesn't chisel you out of that fraction of a penny on a three-figure tablet or smartphone: Quelle horreur... (An economy stacked in favor of absentee landlords and de-facto colonialism...that historical parallel pretty much speaks for itself.)
But IHM had a point, and the leftier-brainier part of me couldn't help but wonder: How scalable is scalability itself? True, macroeconomics has reams to say about the virtues of specialization. But even the most greasiest of gears can't avoid some grit. Or--more ominously--flaws and stress-points in the metal itself. Or--as this week has demonstrated--random acts of freakish nature.
(Then, too, the contrarian part of me--smirking sarcastically at every other part from its snarky digs--likewise couldn't help itself and wondered why anyone would shell out half a grand on a tablet to be like every other slavering fanboy/fangirl. Doubtless, the next iPhone/Android phone could easily get away with the schtick so common to '90 boutique catalogs: "Due to the natural variations in outsourced manufacturing, please allow us to select one for you." You can't tell me the Kool-aid swillers would pound that down...)
The geek in me just knows, though, that if you rely on disasters to test your failover plan, you don't really have backup. Which applies to people and their knowledge-sets just as much as it does to hardware and connectivity, by the bye. And baking in a certain amount of slack in lieu of stuffing more eggs into the same basket is, really, what it amounts to. Plus, I figure that if my own trade--programming computers--can be subjected to the ethos of assembly-line manufacturing...hey, we might as well make that botched metaphor a two-way street, no?
After reading--by which I mean deep-skimming and yes, I do consider that a distinction--the article, the Inner History Major snorted awake and mumbled, "Right. Basically we're talking the Irish Potato Famine. Got it. Zzzzzzzzzzz..." The IHM was mainly thinking of the monoculture component of the famine, what with the concerns about consistency and timing in the supply chain. Not to mention the overhead cost associated with putting the screws to multiple suppliers to insure that one doesn't chisel you out of that fraction of a penny on a three-figure tablet or smartphone: Quelle horreur... (An economy stacked in favor of absentee landlords and de-facto colonialism...that historical parallel pretty much speaks for itself.)
But IHM had a point, and the leftier-brainier part of me couldn't help but wonder: How scalable is scalability itself? True, macroeconomics has reams to say about the virtues of specialization. But even the most greasiest of gears can't avoid some grit. Or--more ominously--flaws and stress-points in the metal itself. Or--as this week has demonstrated--random acts of freakish nature.
(Then, too, the contrarian part of me--smirking sarcastically at every other part from its snarky digs--likewise couldn't help itself and wondered why anyone would shell out half a grand on a tablet to be like every other slavering fanboy/fangirl. Doubtless, the next iPhone/Android phone could easily get away with the schtick so common to '90 boutique catalogs: "Due to the natural variations in outsourced manufacturing, please allow us to select one for you." You can't tell me the Kool-aid swillers would pound that down...)
The geek in me just knows, though, that if you rely on disasters to test your failover plan, you don't really have backup. Which applies to people and their knowledge-sets just as much as it does to hardware and connectivity, by the bye. And baking in a certain amount of slack in lieu of stuffing more eggs into the same basket is, really, what it amounts to. Plus, I figure that if my own trade--programming computers--can be subjected to the ethos of assembly-line manufacturing...hey, we might as well make that botched metaphor a two-way street, no?
Friday, May 20, 2011
Frivolous Friday, 05.20.2011: The simple joys of apocalypse
The office 'fridge was growing progressively riper, so our receptionist sent an email asking us to triage anything that might be ours. I found, to my chagrin, that the bagels I'd popped in there bore a March expiration date. Which didn't disturb me nearly so much as the fact that they showed no signs of mold. Which in turn didn't disturb me nearly so much as the fact that I'd actually eaten these things. Normally, stale bread feeds the birds & such at home, but consigning them to the landfill seemed the more responsible option, under the circumstances.
That was Wednesday. Given no improvement in the smell, our office manager laid down the law and bravely did battle with the 'fridge in the late afternoon. I thanked her for her courage, and joked that if we let it go another week, we'd have to call in Bruce Campbell. No sooner had my fingers typed that than I thought, "How cool would that be???"
Welcome to Geekhood. Never mind that the end result would be a new 'fridge--maybe even new breakroom--after the shotgun and chainsaw and toxic alien guts took their toll: The trash-talk alone would be worth it.
But since then I've been noodling why geeks are stereotypically attracted to B-movies, in particular apocalyptic stuff featuring zombies and alien invasions and mega-monsters. (Naturally--nerdery being nerdery--busting Sam Raimi's chops for substituting "verata" for "barada"--thereby corrupting generations of nerds to come--just goes with the territory.)
It can't necessarily be identification with the protagonists. Simon Pegg's character in Shaun of the Dead, for instance, is a good bloke, but not exactly the sharpest dart in the board. He's loyal to his small social circle--which, admittedly has a lot of pull with we naturally introverted types. Ash Williams' encounters with the evil dead over the course of a few days seven centuries apart bring out his inner boor. But, hey, this is the kind of guy who keeps science books in the back of his car--even on a romantic getaway weekend.
One twist, though, is that, in most Japanese monster flicks that I've seen, at least one monster is more or less the protagonist. When I were but wee lass honing my reading skillz on those English subtitles, that struck me as more than a little counter-intuitive. I mean, weren't monsters and those who fought them supposed to be as black and white as the films themselves? (Now it makes much more sense. Godzilla 2000 is a good example of why.)
I think, ultimately, it comes down to the fact that disasters simply cut to the chase. There is no room for politicking. No having to wheedle buy-off from the design committee. No having to account for your time in half-hour increments. No issue-tracking. No source control. No writing use cases. Just pure problem-solving, really--although "QA" does tend to become a life-or-death matter. For once.
Most importantly, though, you know who your friends are...even when they've been turned against you. Which is why you risk everything to bring them back to themselves. After all, not having anyone else around to laugh about the whole thing when it's over is a shameful waste of a perfectly good apocalypse.
That was Wednesday. Given no improvement in the smell, our office manager laid down the law and bravely did battle with the 'fridge in the late afternoon. I thanked her for her courage, and joked that if we let it go another week, we'd have to call in Bruce Campbell. No sooner had my fingers typed that than I thought, "How cool would that be???"
Welcome to Geekhood. Never mind that the end result would be a new 'fridge--maybe even new breakroom--after the shotgun and chainsaw and toxic alien guts took their toll: The trash-talk alone would be worth it.
But since then I've been noodling why geeks are stereotypically attracted to B-movies, in particular apocalyptic stuff featuring zombies and alien invasions and mega-monsters. (Naturally--nerdery being nerdery--busting Sam Raimi's chops for substituting "verata" for "barada"--thereby corrupting generations of nerds to come--just goes with the territory.)
It can't necessarily be identification with the protagonists. Simon Pegg's character in Shaun of the Dead, for instance, is a good bloke, but not exactly the sharpest dart in the board. He's loyal to his small social circle--which, admittedly has a lot of pull with we naturally introverted types. Ash Williams' encounters with the evil dead over the course of a few days seven centuries apart bring out his inner boor. But, hey, this is the kind of guy who keeps science books in the back of his car--even on a romantic getaway weekend.
One twist, though, is that, in most Japanese monster flicks that I've seen, at least one monster is more or less the protagonist. When I were but wee lass honing my reading skillz on those English subtitles, that struck me as more than a little counter-intuitive. I mean, weren't monsters and those who fought them supposed to be as black and white as the films themselves? (Now it makes much more sense. Godzilla 2000 is a good example of why.)
I think, ultimately, it comes down to the fact that disasters simply cut to the chase. There is no room for politicking. No having to wheedle buy-off from the design committee. No having to account for your time in half-hour increments. No issue-tracking. No source control. No writing use cases. Just pure problem-solving, really--although "QA" does tend to become a life-or-death matter. For once.
Most importantly, though, you know who your friends are...even when they've been turned against you. Which is why you risk everything to bring them back to themselves. After all, not having anyone else around to laugh about the whole thing when it's over is a shameful waste of a perfectly good apocalypse.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
"Drawers" vs. "Blurrers"
Back in college, one of my niftier History profs taught the concept of the Hegelian dialectic. (Dr. L. hailed from Latvia, and on the first day of class tried passing off his accent as North Dakotan. He had me eating out of his hand from that point forward.)
Anyhoo. The basic premise of the Hegelian dialectic is that it starts with the current concept of How The World Works (a.k.a the "thesis"). But it doesn't quite cover everything. And, being creatures whose moral/intellectual impulses encourage us to shove the pendulum to the other side of its swing, Newton's Third Law kicks in (and thus is born the "antithesis"). But that doesn't quite cover all the bases, so the weltanshauung hammers out some sort of midnight backroom deal (resulting in the "synthesis").
(The cynically-minded will, of course, recognize that, after a short honeymoon in the popular conciousness, the synthesis becomes the de-facto thesis, and the process begins anew.)
But it's with such memories of thesis-antithesis-synthesis that I turn over an apparent conundrum from two authors that have lately graced my reading list.
Based on nothing save chronological order in the list, the "thesis" is represented by Gary Vaynerchuk, who likes to talk about "lines in the sand." A favorite keynote tactic is to ask the audience to raise their hands if they thought something like, "I will never get a cell phone: Why would I want people to be able to call me wherever I am whenever they felt like it," and then to ask everyone who does not currently have a cell phone to keep their hands up. To a social media consultant, these lines in the sand point to where there is money to be made.
The "antithesis"--again based on nothing other than the order in which my eyeballs hit the oevre--is represented by Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody. Shirky largely deals with the blurring, rather than the drawing of lines. Case in point: Professional journalism vs. amateur reporting/blogging. Or the "blind justice" dispensed by The State vs. the quasi-vigilante name-and-shame "karma" meted out via social media. This no-mans-land, to a preternaturally insightful social philosopher--which is how I categorize Mr. Shirky--is where the action lies.
For those of us who who--for whatever reason--haven't developed the superpowers necessary to decide which trend--i.e. the drawing of lines vs. the blurring of them--to bank on, I think that's where our friend Mr. Hegel comes in. Because, of course, the lines are drawn by those who have something to define...and thus defend. (Never mind that the original "defenders" of the Alamo were, technically, squatters on sovereign Mexican territory. The Bible notwithstanding, history is typically penned by the victors.)
In some cases, it's obvious that for every line-drawer (e.g. the RIAA/MPAA or traditional media) there is at least one party with a more than vested interest in blurring (e.g. indie bands, YouTube, Apple or Markos Moulitsas, Matthew Drudge). The battle lines have already been drawn; protectionist legislation will only postpone the inevitable equalibrium.
In others, the contested area is more like a no-mans-land--and that in a shadow war. To wit: In an amazingly short time, an economy predicated on raising 2.1 kids in the suburbs may seem as ridiculous as the "norm" of snarfing a farmer's breakfast (bacon, eggs, pancakes, etc.) before heading down the hall for nine hours of telecommuting.
Either way, the game is, and will always be, to give value for money. And, naturally, you're better off defining the terms of "value" rather than chasing the metrics after the fact. Whether lines are drawn only after they start to blur (or vice versa) is, to me, a chicken-and-egg kind of question. I won't presume to tackle that--nuh-uh. The job of the entrpreneur is to make money in that hinterland. The job of the social philosopher is to make sense of it on behalf of the rest of us. And, hey, ya gotta have something to think about in the shower, am I right?
Anyhoo. The basic premise of the Hegelian dialectic is that it starts with the current concept of How The World Works (a.k.a the "thesis"). But it doesn't quite cover everything. And, being creatures whose moral/intellectual impulses encourage us to shove the pendulum to the other side of its swing, Newton's Third Law kicks in (and thus is born the "antithesis"). But that doesn't quite cover all the bases, so the weltanshauung hammers out some sort of midnight backroom deal (resulting in the "synthesis").
(The cynically-minded will, of course, recognize that, after a short honeymoon in the popular conciousness, the synthesis becomes the de-facto thesis, and the process begins anew.)
But it's with such memories of thesis-antithesis-synthesis that I turn over an apparent conundrum from two authors that have lately graced my reading list.
Based on nothing save chronological order in the list, the "thesis" is represented by Gary Vaynerchuk, who likes to talk about "lines in the sand." A favorite keynote tactic is to ask the audience to raise their hands if they thought something like, "I will never get a cell phone: Why would I want people to be able to call me wherever I am whenever they felt like it," and then to ask everyone who does not currently have a cell phone to keep their hands up. To a social media consultant, these lines in the sand point to where there is money to be made.
The "antithesis"--again based on nothing other than the order in which my eyeballs hit the oevre--is represented by Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody. Shirky largely deals with the blurring, rather than the drawing of lines. Case in point: Professional journalism vs. amateur reporting/blogging. Or the "blind justice" dispensed by The State vs. the quasi-vigilante name-and-shame "karma" meted out via social media. This no-mans-land, to a preternaturally insightful social philosopher--which is how I categorize Mr. Shirky--is where the action lies.
For those of us who who--for whatever reason--haven't developed the superpowers necessary to decide which trend--i.e. the drawing of lines vs. the blurring of them--to bank on, I think that's where our friend Mr. Hegel comes in. Because, of course, the lines are drawn by those who have something to define...and thus defend. (Never mind that the original "defenders" of the Alamo were, technically, squatters on sovereign Mexican territory. The Bible notwithstanding, history is typically penned by the victors.)
In some cases, it's obvious that for every line-drawer (e.g. the RIAA/MPAA or traditional media) there is at least one party with a more than vested interest in blurring (e.g. indie bands, YouTube, Apple or Markos Moulitsas, Matthew Drudge). The battle lines have already been drawn; protectionist legislation will only postpone the inevitable equalibrium.
In others, the contested area is more like a no-mans-land--and that in a shadow war. To wit: In an amazingly short time, an economy predicated on raising 2.1 kids in the suburbs may seem as ridiculous as the "norm" of snarfing a farmer's breakfast (bacon, eggs, pancakes, etc.) before heading down the hall for nine hours of telecommuting.
Either way, the game is, and will always be, to give value for money. And, naturally, you're better off defining the terms of "value" rather than chasing the metrics after the fact. Whether lines are drawn only after they start to blur (or vice versa) is, to me, a chicken-and-egg kind of question. I won't presume to tackle that--nuh-uh. The job of the entrpreneur is to make money in that hinterland. The job of the social philosopher is to make sense of it on behalf of the rest of us. And, hey, ya gotta have something to think about in the shower, am I right?
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Post-pwnd
Home much later than expected from a meeting and after-meeting dinner downtown. Tomorrow, alas, will have to be soon enough to break the writing hiatus. Good night, gentle reader.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Frivolous Friday, 05.06.2011: Revisionism hits home
Last night, the power for most of our street was off. To their credit, the folks who keep the juice flowing through the lines are normally pretty consistent about sandbagging their restore-times. This wasn't one of those times: 9:30 pm was extended to the improbably specific 12:17 am. (As it turns out, they were only off by an hour.)
Before I powered down the cellphone to conserve battery life (a.k.a. propitiate the Gadget Deities), I texted a snarky Facebook post to the effect that I was pretending to be Laura Ingalls Wilder by reading a Nook by candlelight. (Not at all surprisingly, folks from The Society for Creative Anachronism were the ones to comment.)
In reality, I rolled old-school--eking out another chapter or so in the dead-tree version of John Keay's India: A History. That was before the commotion from a power-company truck inspired a certain cat to investigate by hopping into the bow window that contained our "reading light"--meaning five taper-candles. (Mercifully, only one of them attempted to topple over during those seconds of panic.) That, in turn, inspired us to just go the heck to bed before His Doodness managed to set the house a-blaze.
But not before a certain connection was forged in made in the snarl of my synapses. The plague of Indian history lies in the fact that those who wrote stuff down weren't at all concerned with giving context to future generations. At least not for, roughly, the first couple millenia or so. Which leaves the poor historian with pottery, language shifts, copper bars, and heavily-redacted religious tracts and fawning pangyrics to chieftain-kings. (Ironically enough, this is more than can be said for India's future landlords--a.k.a. the British. By considerably more centuries, even.)
The upshot of that is that such obsessively linear (and always, always patrilineal as well as divine) geneologies and battles in which the opposing sides are invariably reckoned in neat factors of ten and kingdom boundaries expand rather than fluctuate...and most certainly never, ever, contract.
Which, harking back to the earlier jest--entirely at my own expense rather than Laura Ingalls'--reinforces my wondering at how generations to gloss over and...errrrrrr...dare we say?..."tidy up" the narrative now central to present geekdom's weltanschauung. To wit: In relative terms, the late 18th century in America is extraordinarily blessed with first-hand documentation.
Despite such abundance of what historians term "primary sources," many--sometimes diametrically opposed--political cults are willing to claim the same Founder as their patron saint. Thus is a slave-owning George Washington co-opted by the self-proclaimed mouthpieces of personal liberty--or by blatant racists who twist quotes about war profiteering into anti-Semitic screeds. Or the author of the Declaration of Independence is judged too complex to fix a pre-packaged narrative of America and is tossed aside in favor of more...(ahem!) amenable...personae.
Cynically, I don't expect any more favorable treatment a few centuries hence, when the explosion of available information is taken for granted. (At least, I hope all the way down to my marrow that it's still taken for granted.) Now, I'll 'fess up to the fact that being the proverbial fly on the wall in an age when academics almost come to fisticuffs over whether Al Gore or Ted Stevens created the inter-tubes in their garage would be downright hilarious. But, then, I'm kinda sick and twisted that way. (It comes with morphing from a Liberal Arts major into a programmer. Undergraduates of 2011, you have been warned: #LFMF and all that...)
Sadly, I think that if I were cryogenically frozen until, say 2100 and then unthawed, I would have a difficult time convincing folks that a Laura Ingalls Wilder didn't actually have to "rough it" with a first-generation eReader.
In fact, I could probablly joke about it having green text on a black background and weighing 20 pounds (what with all the clunky vacuum tubes, don'cha'know) and (horrors!) no 100G network capability, because of course that was Back In the Day(tm) when AOL enticing everyone to sign up for DARPAnet by mailing them stacks of punch-cards. And no one would laugh because, well, that's how people lived back then, riiiiiight???
That the knowledge-hungry Ms. Ingalls would have Snoopy-danced to trade (roughly) eight minutes (pre-tax) of her workday for the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin would never occur to the denizens of the 22nd century. Or--again--so I fervently hope. Because projecting our hopes and fears on History cuts both ways--meaning forward as well as backward.
Before I powered down the cellphone to conserve battery life (a.k.a. propitiate the Gadget Deities), I texted a snarky Facebook post to the effect that I was pretending to be Laura Ingalls Wilder by reading a Nook by candlelight. (Not at all surprisingly, folks from The Society for Creative Anachronism were the ones to comment.)
In reality, I rolled old-school--eking out another chapter or so in the dead-tree version of John Keay's India: A History. That was before the commotion from a power-company truck inspired a certain cat to investigate by hopping into the bow window that contained our "reading light"--meaning five taper-candles. (Mercifully, only one of them attempted to topple over during those seconds of panic.) That, in turn, inspired us to just go the heck to bed before His Doodness managed to set the house a-blaze.
But not before a certain connection was forged in made in the snarl of my synapses. The plague of Indian history lies in the fact that those who wrote stuff down weren't at all concerned with giving context to future generations. At least not for, roughly, the first couple millenia or so. Which leaves the poor historian with pottery, language shifts, copper bars, and heavily-redacted religious tracts and fawning pangyrics to chieftain-kings. (Ironically enough, this is more than can be said for India's future landlords--a.k.a. the British. By considerably more centuries, even.)
The upshot of that is that such obsessively linear (and always, always patrilineal as well as divine) geneologies and battles in which the opposing sides are invariably reckoned in neat factors of ten and kingdom boundaries expand rather than fluctuate...and most certainly never, ever, contract.
Which, harking back to the earlier jest--entirely at my own expense rather than Laura Ingalls'--reinforces my wondering at how generations to gloss over and...errrrrrr...dare we say?..."tidy up" the narrative now central to present geekdom's weltanschauung. To wit: In relative terms, the late 18th century in America is extraordinarily blessed with first-hand documentation.
Despite such abundance of what historians term "primary sources," many--sometimes diametrically opposed--political cults are willing to claim the same Founder as their patron saint. Thus is a slave-owning George Washington co-opted by the self-proclaimed mouthpieces of personal liberty--or by blatant racists who twist quotes about war profiteering into anti-Semitic screeds. Or the author of the Declaration of Independence is judged too complex to fix a pre-packaged narrative of America and is tossed aside in favor of more...(ahem!) amenable...personae.
Cynically, I don't expect any more favorable treatment a few centuries hence, when the explosion of available information is taken for granted. (At least, I hope all the way down to my marrow that it's still taken for granted.) Now, I'll 'fess up to the fact that being the proverbial fly on the wall in an age when academics almost come to fisticuffs over whether Al Gore or Ted Stevens created the inter-tubes in their garage would be downright hilarious. But, then, I'm kinda sick and twisted that way. (It comes with morphing from a Liberal Arts major into a programmer. Undergraduates of 2011, you have been warned: #LFMF and all that...)
Sadly, I think that if I were cryogenically frozen until, say 2100 and then unthawed, I would have a difficult time convincing folks that a Laura Ingalls Wilder didn't actually have to "rough it" with a first-generation eReader.
In fact, I could probablly joke about it having green text on a black background and weighing 20 pounds (what with all the clunky vacuum tubes, don'cha'know) and (horrors!) no 100G network capability, because of course that was Back In the Day(tm) when AOL enticing everyone to sign up for DARPAnet by mailing them stacks of punch-cards. And no one would laugh because, well, that's how people lived back then, riiiiiight???
That the knowledge-hungry Ms. Ingalls would have Snoopy-danced to trade (roughly) eight minutes (pre-tax) of her workday for the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin would never occur to the denizens of the 22nd century. Or--again--so I fervently hope. Because projecting our hopes and fears on History cuts both ways--meaning forward as well as backward.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Another rogue for the gallery
Archiving previous versions of computer code is a good idea. I can't--much less won't--argue that. Trust me, I've borked too much code to say otherwise. I rarely miss an occasion to slag Subversion (and its front-end TortoiseSVN) to the point where it's almost a personal vendetta. I'm fully cognizant of that.
But, seriously, all I was trying to do was merge changes from a low-priority fix that had languished in testing for months. Which is when I got this error:
(Note: Server names blacked out for security reasons.)
Basically, what it's saying is that I'm trying to change some server-related property (bundled as meta-data with the actual file changes being merged) from A to A, but that it's current property is B. Something that I think rational adults would agree is a contradiction: You can't change something from A if its value is actually B.
The backstory, as it turns out, is that we changed the name of the server that actually hosts the Subversion repository (i.e. its cache of code-history) between the time I originally committed my changes to it and the time QA gave me the green light to pull them out and push them out to the next stage. It was the mis-match of URLs that was causing Subversion/Tortoise to freak out.
Unfortunately, that took the intervention of Those Who Know Best to sort out. And the whole episode is not exactly a glowing recommendation of software that's supposed to serve a haphazard distributed batch of programmers and a code-base liable to splinter off at any moment.
Now. I've done any amount of damage in Mercurial, and I personally think that the "ignored file types" feature could have been much better thought out. But the bottom line is, nearly all the grief I've come to using it to archive my code can be attributed to my own ignorance and/or stupidity. Not--and I can't stress this enough--just trying to accomplish boring day-in-day-out tasks like merging code.
- - - - -
Correction, 05.04.2011: The URL in question is actually that of the server we use for bug-tracking (issues now show the files involved). My bad...don't ask me what I was thinking with that being the repository server. Except that it might be more understandable. Sigh.
But, seriously, all I was trying to do was merge changes from a low-priority fix that had languished in testing for months. Which is when I got this error:
(Note: Server names blacked out for security reasons.)
Basically, what it's saying is that I'm trying to change some server-related property (bundled as meta-data with the actual file changes being merged) from A to A, but that it's current property is B. Something that I think rational adults would agree is a contradiction: You can't change something from A if its value is actually B.
The backstory, as it turns out, is that we changed the name of the server that actually hosts the Subversion repository (i.e. its cache of code-history) between the time I originally committed my changes to it and the time QA gave me the green light to pull them out and push them out to the next stage. It was the mis-match of URLs that was causing Subversion/Tortoise to freak out.
Unfortunately, that took the intervention of Those Who Know Best to sort out. And the whole episode is not exactly a glowing recommendation of software that's supposed to serve a haphazard distributed batch of programmers and a code-base liable to splinter off at any moment.
Now. I've done any amount of damage in Mercurial, and I personally think that the "ignored file types" feature could have been much better thought out. But the bottom line is, nearly all the grief I've come to using it to archive my code can be attributed to my own ignorance and/or stupidity. Not--and I can't stress this enough--just trying to accomplish boring day-in-day-out tasks like merging code.
- - - - -
Correction, 05.04.2011: The URL in question is actually that of the server we use for bug-tracking (issues now show the files involved). My bad...don't ask me what I was thinking with that being the repository server. Except that it might be more understandable. Sigh.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)