Symphonious

On Friday night while strolling along the riverside at Southbank just like on our first date, I proposed to the beautiful Janet and she accepted.  The wedding bells aren't expected to actually start ringing until Janet finishes uni in a couple of years but we're very excited to be about telling everyone how happy we are together.

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.

The only unexpected complexity was that our cruisecontrol server suddenly stopped sending emails - the usernames for Subversion are prefixed with the domain whereas for CVS they weren't so the mapping of usernames to email addresses in the config file was wrong.  Once it clicked as to what the cause of the problem was it was easily fixed and it should now be running smoothly.  It definitely checks for changes much, much, much faster under subversion than it did under CVS which is a huge benefit.  That alone should knock 5 minutes off our build times and make the whole process more responsive, not to mention the fact that engineers won't have to wait for it to release locks anymore.

So far I'm pretty impressed by how smoothly it's gone.  I'm sure there will be problems that we come across but hopefully they won't be too major.  I'm pretty confident that this will be a huge benefit for us in the long run.

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.

Now if someone would kindly explain to me why Windows 2003 Server refuses to load the drivers for our backup tape drive because they're unsigned (ie: doesn't provide a yes/no option dialog, just a notice to say it refused to load them) and how I might force it to play nice I'd appreciate it.  The whole signing system certainly hasn't improved my user experience with Windows - it's been nothing but a pain in the neck.

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….

More importantly, even given the fact that most people are already familiar with Word, using Word plugins and macros to provide and interface and managing content within word is generally hated by users who have to use it.  I know because I happen to develop software (featuring a clean up Word HTML feature no less) that replaces that mess for a living and it never ceases to amaze me how much people hate using Word with external systems.  Mostly I see this with content management systems but I'd expect the same problems with blogs since they're just an extremely primitive form of content repository (which is a good thing - it gives them simplicity).

As always the greatest issue with trying to use Word is deployment, just check out the FAQ.  For a consumer level app this will probably work out okay but it will cost them a bunch of users and frustrate a lot of others.

(via Scoble)