There's a growing interest in browser-based desktop apps built with combinations of Google Gears and Mozilla WebRunner. RIA's using just the browser. This of course was almost what Steve Jobs told us to do with the iPhone. Was he right?
My server was moved and now my SVN repository is completely out of whack - simply off line. No help I can find online seems to do anything useful. The svn command line core dumps when I try to commit or update working copies. svnadmin panics and leaves.
Errors look like total panic from Berkeley DB.
This behaviour is bloody useless. I can't take that kind of risk during a server move - we're not talking OS change or anything just a dumb move. If these are the risks I just to have use something else. Maybe revert to CVS - which throws a lock file problem now and then - but that, I can manage.
There are tons of backup utilities. I was recently looking for something very, very simple however, with great potential, so I'm now backing up my laptop with VMWare. I use VMWare Converter to generate an image of my laptop on an external USB disk and access the backup image using VMWare Disk Mount Utility. Both of these tools are free to use without purchase.
There's the added potential with Converter of going virtual for good. I didn't just ghost the disk, I created a virtual machine image of my physical machine. I'm running Windows XP on my Thinkpad and was seriously considering going Linux and running XP virtualized for eternity. The virtual Windows machine needs to reregister my Windows license - and I haven't tried that yet, so can't tell you if that is going to cause me administrative problems or not - but the backup solution is nice enough and really, really simple - essentially one-click.
I'm sure there are tons of ghosting tools out there, but the potential to just run the VMWare image directly is so appealing.
Taking a break from almost joky anecdotes of horrible software, Worse Than Failure - aka Daily WTF - has a nice essay on how projects end up sucking.
Good stuff. Many situations/problems mentioned that many of us have been in. I've certainly played both flattering and unflattering roles around problems like the described ones.
Another non-technical way to look at it is from the viewpoint of Clayton Christensen’s classic book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. For quite a few years now, we’ve seen a series of sustaining innovations in the “object/service RPC” line of descent originally popularized by CORBA and COM, both of which built on earlier RPC, distributed object, and TP monitor technologies. RMI, EJB, SOAP, WS-*, and ESB are all offspring in that line, and there are surely more to come. I feel that REST, on the other hand, fits the definition of a disruptive innovation perfectly (and if you’re too lazy to read the book, then please at least follow the link, otherwise you won’t understand this at all). The proponents of the sustaining technologies look at REST and say, “well it can’t solve this and it can’t solve that” and voice numerous other complaints about it, precisely as Christensen predicts they would. But Chistensen also explains why, at the end of the day, any real or perceived technical shortcomings simply don’t matter (and in this case, they’re mostly perceived, not real).
- is the awesome pull out from a really good blog post.
Disruptive technologies, "view source", wikis, social media, it all plays together...