I pulled the big red lever on CVS this morning and converted over to Subversion at work.  It’s gone pretty smoothly though one of the engineers is complaining that Eclipse is now freezing up a lot.  Not sure if that’s related to the Subversion change of if something else is going on but it’s something I’ll have to investigate some more.

It’s sad but I get a buzz out of being able to move things around in the repository right from within Eclipse and knowing that the history is being preserved.

It’s interesting to watch our press release about the release of EditLive! for Java 5.0 flowing around the various news agencies via a Feedster search.  I really should circle back with the guy pushing out the notifications to see which ones he actively submitted and which ones it flowed around to by itself. It’s pretty amazing what you can track these days.

Okay, lets get this clear, driver signing has nothing to do with security.  It might help stability, but security – nope, totally unrelated.  So when you see Windows developers posting under the title When people ask for security holes as features: Silent install of uncertified drivers, and then talk exclusively about system stability without mentioning security once you really have to wonder.

The security of the system has been breached long before the unsigned driver warning pops up – security is breached the minute the installer starts to run or possibly even by the time the installer downloads.

You’d think it would be obvious given the number of people looking for ways to clean up Word’s so called HTML output to make it look something like HTML, but apparently Google failed to google it.  Good work guys.

So the new Blogger Word plugin is going to result in a whole ton of really, really, really bad HTML being published to the internet (in addition to the current volumes of it).  Sigh, and we had been making progress….

Everyone’s been busy arguing about what the appropriate name for those things that NetNewsWire and FeedDeamon download, parse and display (eg: Scoble, Steve Gilmor, Scoble, Dave Winer, Scoble, Scoble and of course Scoble – not that Scoble posts a lot or anything….)  Anyway, no one really cares, the vast majority of people haven’t heard of any of those terms and will have to learn what they mean so whatever the majority of people wind up learning is what will stick and everyone will have to live with it.  I’m betting the easiest thing to say will win – most likely “feed”.

For the past few weeks I’ve been investigating and planning a move from CVS (CVSNT actually) to Subversion at work. Hopefully this week I’ll be able to do the actual conversion and see what mess it makes.

The main thing that’s missing from Subversion is an exact equivalent for CVS’s meta-modules. Subversion’s externals are good but need to support relative URLs so that branching is simple. Even so, it’s not that hard to go back and re-edit the externals property after branching and it can probably be automated with a small script.  It might actually be a good opportunity to automate adding new branches to our automatic build setup as well so whenever we create a new branch the build machine (affectionately known as Bob) automatically starts building it.

Ken Coar starts each post with a one-line comment/quip/remark which may or may not be related to the topic of the post.  Apparently Leo Simmons reads them:

Hi, Leo!

This isn’t the only not-so-hidden message to Leo hidden in Ken’s summary and I’m beginning to suspect their up to something.  If only I could crack the devious code their using…

Maybe I need a monacle…  BTW Ken, do you always wear that or is it just to make you look uber cool on your blog (which it does btw)?

I’ve previously griped about the lack of a good IDE for Ruby on Rails and despite trying out TextMate for a month I just wasn’t happy enough with it – I’m still spending far too much time navigating files and not enough time coding.  There’s a lot of talk about just using VIM and being happy with that (example) but that VIM just doesn’t have a good enough interface for selecting which file to edit and navigating the file system, let alone for quickly scanning files to find the section I want.

I’ve got a few little projects in mind that I think Cocoon would be a good fit for and one system already in production that uses Cocoon (badly) so I’m thinking I need to work take some time and really learn how to use it properly and what the best practices are for using it.

So, oh great Cocoon guru’s who hangeth outeth at planet apache (and those who don’t), what’s the best way to go about learning Cocoon?  Book recommendations, article recommendations etc?  Where do I learn best practices and get a good overview of all the parts etc rather than just how to do specific things?

Wikis were invented to make it easier for people to contribute content.  They do this with two key features:

1. In browser editing.
2. Users don’t have to learn HTML.

That sounds awfully familiar.  It is in fact two of the key things that Ephox provided as we helped create the in-browser WYSIWYG editor industry which is now a key feature of most content management systems, knowledge management systems, document management systems and most other enterprise systems that people want to encourage contribution to (or reduce the complaints from people who are forced to contribute).  As a side note, I’m not sure whether the inventor of EditLive! had heard of wikis or not when he started his work and I’m not sure which was created first but it really doesn’t matter.

I probably should title this post, Why Big Media Is Dominating Podcasting, because I suspect that there are already more listeners of “big media” podcasts than there are of “little guy” podcasts.  I don’t have figures to back that up though so lets not worry too much about what the current state is and look to the future – will podcasting stay true to it’s roots and be a way for the “little guy” to have his say or will big media take over?

Scoble pointed to a random blog posting of someone saying they prefer Windows over Mac OS as he’s paid to do.  Usually I skip them but for some reason I read this one.  It really struck me as odd that in a post that’s meant to be pro-Windows, it’s really more about how to get by with Windows:

There are a few things to remember about windows. Turn on automatic updates and put everything on a broadband connection behind a router. They can be picked up for about $40 bucks. Don’t install every crappy shareware program or file sharing software that comes along .