daBlog by goddess101

Source Code Haven

Mon May 12 17:17:00 +0200 2008
daBlog » Tech

Rudi and I easily keep at least a few dozen software projects between us, and have hosted a few Subversion source code repositories for clients. Anyone who’s tried to setup a private revision control system, with secure SSH access and to be used among more than a few developers, knows that it can be a pain in the butt. Each SSH key has to be manually setup in a such a way to ensure developers can’t compromise the server. Developers forget the URIs to their repositories or have to resend you new keys because they’ve misplaced their private keys. Sometimes you just want to give developers read-only access, but dealing with permissions is such a hassle that tar-ing up your code and posting it on a website is much more convenient—even though it will eventually get stale and you would have to manually tar-up your code again.

Then there is the developer’s point of view. Rudi and I have hosted our open-source repositories at Sourceforge and Berlios, both popular CVS and Subversion services, but the very act of starting a repository took days because projects had to be pre-approved and you had to figure out how to install your SSH keys yourself which was often frustrating.

Rudi and I also had the problem of hosting way too many private repositories without any sort of system to track them—forgotten usernames, forgotten URIs. Frankly, I know the source code for this blog is in a revision control system somewhere, but we’ve bounced our repositories from one server to another, as well as converted from Subversion to Mercurial, that I can’t honestly tell you where the repository is, or under what system it’s under.

Hopefully with SSH Control, I can finally get organized. Rudi and I created SSH Control for all the reasons stated above, and it’s a really sweet system. Setting up a repository takes a minute. Inviting other developers is trivial. Installing SSH keys is a matter of just copying and pasting the key into a web form for your project. And we can upload old repositories, and, here’s the kicker, convert old repositories to another repository type while keeping all the changeset history.

We’ve still got some work to do, particularly with some of the displays, but we’ve been using the system for a month so far, and it works great for us. We have just opened SSH Control to the public last night. No new registrations yet, but I imagine that anyone looking to start a Subversion, Mercurial, or Git repository with SSH access will have an easy time at SSH Control.

A Man's World

Mon Oct 02 09:44:00 +0200 2006
daBlog » Tech

I’ve been spending a lot of time on digg and reddit lately, two sites where people can share interesting links/articles with one another and vote for what they like and don’t like. The most popular links, of course, appear on the front page so that any “digger” can find the ‘best’ links more easily.

There’s also a community aspect to these sites as well. Both sites allow users to comment on links, and create a friends list. digg, in fact goes one step further by allowing users to vote on each other’s comments, as well as give them access to what links other users have voted on.

Aside from the wealth of intriguing information and media on the internet, I’ve noticed a couple of things about these two sites and their readership:

1. The community is mostly male. Both sites are havens for geeks all over the world who happen to have, more often than not, a Y chromosome. Hence this derivative site http://nsfw.reddit.com/ (“Not Safe for Work”) which has basically become a porn portal but without the annoying popups.
2. Comments usually fall somewhere between the rude and the really rude category. Wisecracks, snappy remarks, insults – irreverence left and right. Perhaps this is not so surprising as most of us who read digg and reddit have either absorbed too much Buffy-type dialogue, or, though we do mostly see ourselves as liberals, secretly wish we could be as linguistically ‘gifted’ as Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter.

So, when this article appears on digg, All Women Team Takes Yahoo Hack Day Top Prize, we get the worst of both characteristics. Typical samples:

See, us females can be l33t too! :D

Aren’t you supposed to be in the kitchen?
Iron my Shirt Bitch!

I’d hack the one on the left…

What, you want to exploit a local vulnerability and inject shell code into her?

Is there going to be a swim suit calender coming out?

I personally think the idea that these girls came up with (a handbag which takes pictures and automatically blogs them) is a bit of a silly idea. I don’t like handbags. I don’t like serial photography or serial blogging. But I do applaud these girls. As my cousin once said, of the 4 weeks in the month, 2 of those suck: one week we’re depressed, tired, and irritable from PMS, and in the other we’re too annoyed and bothered by the logistics of handling our monthly cycles. So the fact that these women could jump over these technical hurdles, and still elicit illicit comments from the male population, is a pretty amazing accomplishment.

Slow Down

Mon Sep 11 07:38:44 +0200 2006
daBlog » Tech

Why does your computer take so long to boot? Chances are, you are running Windows AND you have some kind of anti-virus software installed. This article, What Slows Windows Down gives us the low down.

So, want to install Norton’s latest software? Expect to wait another minute for your computer to load, and don’t complain about it. :) Mom, if you’re also reading this, watch out for those font CDs. The 1000 Fonts CD will add another 30 seconds!

Ready, Set, Code!!!

Wed May 10 23:01:52 +0200 2006
daBlog » Tech

If I had to take a guess, cilibrar and I altogether have logged at least 120 hours of coding in the last 5 days. We start our day around 7:30am and code straight through until we hit the hay at 12:30pm. He takes an occasional break, of 10 – 15 minutes, playing Oblivion. I spend about an hour or so cooking; the rest of the time is spent punching out code and debugging. We effortlessly hop from one language to another: from C++ to Java to Ruby to HTML… The only time we’ve spent outside in this beautiful weather is to grab groceries for our long periods indoors. It’s a coding frenzy here in Amsterdam!

So what are we spending so much coding time on? Well, perhaps it’s not so good to announce yet, as we are still in the testing stages, but it’s been a fun project so far, particularly working in Java, which is actually a pretty decent language. It’s the first coding I’ve ever really done in Java, and it was easy to pick up. C++ is another story. That stuff is painful and I would not wish it on anyone!

IGN's Top 100 Games of All Time

Sun Aug 21 10:34:28 +0200 2005
daBlog » Tech

I love lists, particular ones that have “of all time” in their title cuz I love getting sentimental and nostalgic. IGN’s Top 100 Games is no exception, taking me back to my arcade years in the early 80s to some of the kick-ass stuff we’re seeing now on the consoles. For long-time gamers like me, this is definitely a feel-good read. :)