Thinking out loud.

In need of version control

Johan Idstam — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 06:15:50 +0000

A friend of mine, that I’ll keep anonymous, asked me to help her with an ASP page that didn’t work.
The changes she made wasn’t visible when she ran the script on the server. I got most of it running on my local machine and thought there should be no problem running it on the production server.
A couple of hours later the ASP file contained nothing but plain HTML and it still wasn’t working. By this time she was convinced the web server was serving an old file to visitors.
(No it wasn’t a caching issue.)
I didn’t hear from her in about two hour until she told me the issue was solved. Clearly a bit ashamed she told me she had an intern working for her. They had been working on the same file and none of them had a development server, so they were both uploading their versions of the same file to the server.

Not considering the lack of coordination and development environments, they definitively would have been better off using version control.

Call for logview4net user stories

Johan Idstam — Wed, 20 May 2009 09:00:33 +0000

Please let me know how you are using logview4net and what more you want it to do.

I know there are some who use it to monitor and consolidate Apache web logs.
One user told me he monitors the chat log of his MMORPG with logview4net running on a second monitor.
Another use is to watch for activity in an ftp archive.

How are you using it?

New release of logview4net (9.19)

Johan Idstam — Mon, 18 May 2009 18:48:19 +0000

Yesterday I made a new release of logview4net my multi channel log monitor.
I got a request for a TCP listener in addition to the UDP listener that was already there.
It actually wasn’t much work; First I copied the UDP listener, then I copied some code from the MSDN documentation.
I haven’t done any real testing though so if you want a stable TCP listener please try it out and give me some feedback.
The documentation isn’t updated yet, but the TCP listener is configured just as the UDP listener.
I just realized that the documentation doesn’t mention that you can use “ANY” as the remote IP address if you want anyone to be able to send data to your machine.

Reporting and/or data mining

Johan Idstam — Fri, 15 May 2009 18:00:42 +0000

When do you really need a reporting engine like Microsoft Reporting Services or one of the Data Dynamics offerings?

I’m working with a customer to rewrite an old application that is used to collect and publish a lot of data.

Some of the data is easy to pull from the database, but needs complicated layout. Other data is hard to get out of the database, filtering is ad hoc and it is published without formatting in an Excel spreadsheet.

There is also the unspecified requirement that the end users should be able to create their own reports and/or modify the shipping ones.

As far as I’ve experienced it is usually the creator of the application that ends up making modified or new reports anyway so I think a steep learning curve is OK. It is a good thing to have the reporting engine separate from the main application tough. That way you are not locked to the main applications release cycle. You also have the option to merge your application data with the customers existing data from other applications.

I guess I’ll vote against the reporting tool for the ad hoc Excel report.

logview4net 9.15 released

Johan Idstam — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 07:55:35 +0000

Get your fresh copy from SourceForge.

I need some help designing part of the GUI for the next release.

The changes in this release are:

Fixed: [2250820] The part “User Interactions” in the settings dialog doesn’t expand if one adds more patterns.
Fixed: [2250843] Manage actions missing scrollbar
Fixed: [2250810] FolderListener: logview4net crashes if an additional file …
Fixed: Http authentication in the RSSListener
Fixed: [2250834] Save dialog default folder
Fixed: [2250823] The default font is “Courier new”. But when one opens the font dialog then”Microsoft Sans Serif” is selected.

pifts.exe

Johan Idstam — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:19:55 +0000

I just read about pifts.exe at a fellow Swedish blogger.

It does look a little suspicious, but I am not convinced it is a cover up.

All the threads I have seen mentioning pifts.exe at the Norton Forum site, before being deleted, has contained loads of junk.

I might be a social attack against Norton.

Windows Azure goes local

Johan Idstam — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 20:13:19 +0000

According to Computerworld the technology in Windows Azure will be part of Windows Server in the future. I really hope this will come with a service pack about the same time Azure is released for commercial use.

By keeping the entry level pricing low, or free, this is a perfect way to get students and start ups on the Microsoft train. It doesn’t come as a surprise since Microsoft makes its money from selling licenses, but it’s nice to get the information out.

No history to Subversion

Johan Idstam — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 08:59:49 +0000

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

Johan Idstam — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 18:27:06 +0000

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?

Johan Idstam — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 13:37:16 +0000

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.