Brain Freeze

And people complain that Java has too many web frameworks…. Now we hear of yet another web framework for Ruby. There is Rails, Merb, Camping, Waves, and I assume others. Funny how the Ruby space is becoming so crowded with web frameworks. And here I always thought Rails was perfect but this guy says in the interview that he was running up against limitations of Rails. I could swear Rails was going to solve everything….

I’ve been reading the Hg book today and have found that merging between branches is a much different operation than with CVS or Subversion and much easier. I’m really glad to see this and want to take an even better look at Mercurial by using it a bit. Maybe thats why Tor didn’t talk about it at all in the Posse podcast…there really isn’t much to it

So the guys were discussing version control systems and Joe was talking about SVN. Tor was talking about Mercurial. The only thing they were talking about was stuff that, quite frankly, really doesn’t matter all that much because any revision control system is going to allow check-ins, etc. Obviously thats the point Joe wonders how dangerous is it to use Mercurial since you’re not checking in to a central repository. You might lose something! Joe…just a note that the same thing is true of SVN if you don’t bother checking in your code
But all this really doesn’t get to what I think is the most important point: what is the merge model like in Mercurial? In SVN when you are merging changes from branch to branch (and in branches I’m including trunk) you have to be really careful with making sure you’re getting the revision numbers right. This is no better than CVS. Sure SVN does most things better than CVS but in this important case it does nothing to make the process better.

I have yet to read about how merging happens in Mercurial. I wonder if you have to track revision numbers as in SVN.

At work we’re looking at Accurev which has a pretty smart model for merging changes. Obviously any merge is going to require some careful checking when you have multiple changes from multiple people to the same area of code but Accurev makes the rest of the process much easier. They use the idea of streams, which are sort of a combination of an SVN branch with workflow attached, and when you merge code you are promoting it to streams higher in the hierarchy. You still have to worry about overlapping code areas, no way around that, but you don’t have to worry about tracking revision numbers.

Now if we could finally get off of CVS….

Children are just amazing. Via Andrew Sullivan here is a sampling of things children have written to the US troops in Iraq:

Andrew Sullivan

Wow. I really wanted to love Mediamonkey. Actually I do love Mediamonkey because it’s a damn fine piece of software. There are some warts like the fact that the newest version, 3.0, has a link to the Yahoo Podcast directory when that service was discontinued back in October of 2007. That is a minor thing though.

The biggest wart, and the reason I can’t use the software, is the iPod syncing. It “works” but there are glitches all of the time like artwork not being set properly for albums (I had Benny Goodman looking out at me from a Telemann piece for instance). The iPod “fast scroll” feature where you get the letter of the alphabet pop up when you are scanning quickly through the playlist doesn’t work right because for whatever reason when Mediamonkey syncs it isn’t making the iPod ignore “The” in band names. I get no indication that the iTunes-purchased song I just synced won’t actually play back on the iPod. It will play back just fine in Mediamonkey itself however.

So, even with all of the great features that Mediamonkey has, I’m heading back to iTunes simply because it works better with my iPod and that is just more important to me because my music collection isn’t big enough to bog down iTunes. If the Mediamonkey guys could fix that stuff I’d pay for it in a heartbeat but that day hasn’t arrived yet

We’ve had over 35 inches of snow so far this winter with 25+ days or so where it has snowed. I’m tired of it. I loved this stuff when I was a kid (which this reminds me of when we always had snow) but now that I have to shovel, etc. I’ve had it

It has been a long time since I’ve posted. I started a new job back in the middle of November and that plus the holidays made life just a bit too hectic to blog at all. I really want to do this regularly and I hope now that everything has calmed down a bit that I can

I hadn’t used the Spring form tag library before and decided to give it a shot for a small test form I was creating. I am using a subclass of SimpleFormController to return a simple list of value/name pairs from a database call to populate a select/option list in the HTML. I figured it would be easy enough to return an ArrayList as my command object and that is populated with HashMaps of the key/values. Oops. Doesn’t work.

It appears that I have to create an object that holds the list (or maybe a list of objects with fields that are the items I need displayed in the select dropdown). It’s too bad that I can’t do it the way I want with that tag library Since this is a throw away screen though (I suppose the controller is as well) I’m not going to worry too much about it