You may have noticed I haven’t posted in a while. One of the reasons is because I have been immersed in the world of digital books. In my previous post I mentioned that I purchased myself a new toy, namely the Sony PRS-300 Pocket eReader. Now I’ve had it almost 3 weeks so I feel I’m in a position to write a fairly accurate review and not one based solely on first impressions.
I’ll start with all the fluff that don’t relate to actually reading a book, then I’ll move on to what it is actually like to read.
I bought my Pocket Reader online from WHSmiths for a very reasonable £159. I had weighed up getting the more expensive PRS-600, but decided against it as I don’t need my book to play me music, and whilst it can hold 8000 books compared to “only” 350 of the PRS-300 I’ll be impressed if I read 350 books a year!
I’ve just read quite an interesting article on the Linux Mint blog courtesy of Linux Today. It describes how Clem, a Linux Mint user, managed to get a refund on Windows that was pre-installed on a Dell laptop they purchased, and then donated the money to Linux Mint!
One of the comments tries to argue that Clem shouldn’t have been entitled to a refund as they knew what they were buying. I don’t hold with this argument as last time I tried to purchase any laptop that wasn’t a netbook I found it impossible to buy one without Windows pre-installed – and to make it worse they were pretty much all Vista!
With people like Clem engaging in this kind of action, and with Ubuntu trying to make Linux more accessible to the average user, hopefully one day I’ll be able to purchase a laptop and have a choice of what I put on it.
In a current database driven project that has multiple developers the single biggest issue we have is version control for the database.
For us at ibrow, the number one practise that we engage in is Version Control/Revision Control. I personally use version control for almost everything and not using it when having multiple developers working on a project sends shivers down my spine.We currently use Subversion, however I’m thinking of moving over to Git, but there is also Bazaar and Mercurial plus many, many others.
Whilst there is this vast array of version control system for code, there doesn’t seem to be the focus on version control for database schemes. Jeff Atwood has a couple of posts espousing the virtues of version control for databases. There is Rail’s Migrations which seems to be the most advanced version control for databases to date and there is a project to make a PHP version of Migrations. However, Migrations still has it’s flaws, which are discussed in Adam Wiggins’s blog post about this very subject. Adam offers some good insights into the problem and has a brain storm about possible solutions. But I think I’m coming to the problem from a slightly different angle to him.
As most of our projects are in constant development we do not, as such, have versions, but instead revisions. This is a key difference here. If we check in a database change to the version control, we don’t yet know it’s revision, especially if we have multiple developers working on the same project and possibly changing the scheme of the database at the same time.
The ideal solution would use the following steps:
Developer finishes their chunk of code with any database changes, and are ready to commit. The database changes include UP and DOWN changes.
Developer commits their code changes, a revision number is assigned
Based on this revision number, the database changes are committed.
Obviously the developer should update their working copy before committing, just to see if there are any conflicts and to make sure they have the latest copy of the code.
On the updating side, the following steps should occur when the developer updates their code:
The update process makes a note of their current revision number
Downloads all code changes via the SVN update command
Downloads all the database changes since their last revision
Update process applies all database changes to developer’s local database
This process can be reversed for reverting or merging backwards.
Currently I can’t find anything out there that does this – which probably means one of 2 things:
My Google-fu isn’t up to scratch
It is actually a lot harder than I think!
I really need to get this right, as this is possibly the most important thing to get right for us at the moment. It would be great to hear any possible solutions or existing implementations out there.
Maybe this will be an interesting sub project for me over the next few weeks?
(And obviously I haven’t even considered trying to keep the data up to date – but I guess that will be for another day.)
One small step for man, one giant wait for mankind.
Well, it was something like that. Today marks the 40th anniversary since man first landed on the moon. 40 years. Forty years. Four decades. Fourteen thousand, six hundred and ten days. And I have one question:
Why can’t I visit the moon?
On September 12, 1962 President Kennedy proclaimed that man will go to the moon, as a challenge, a challenge that “is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win”. And they did. America went to the moon. America travelled 238,857 miles and into the future. And we are now further away from the future then ever.
Because we have lost the will. We have lost the will because we are focusing on the now. We are fighting amongst ourselves instead of realising we are more alike than we want to admit. We are squabbling over who has the most vengeful invisible friend whilst ignoring the glorious beauty of the universe we live in. We are blaming each other for making the planet slightly warmer instead of doing something about it. We have been sucked into worldly problems of survival instead of lifting our heads above the grass to look at the amazing view. We are waiting to see what happens. We are looking to the past, we are looking behind us to admire what we’ve done.
The human race is living out of it’s inbox and we are all missing the bigger picture.
I think the words of Kennedy summed it up best: “the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward–and so will space.”
So this is a plea from a citizen of a fallen empire: Come on America. Stop waiting. Stop looking to the past. Stop reminiscing about previous greatness. You are the only country that can possibly accomplish the unaccomplishable You are the only country that has the will, the drive, the energy to do this.
At last, at long, long last, there appears to be a groundswell of opposition to supporting IE6. The revolution has begun! First Twitter began hinting to its users to upgrade to Firefox 3.5 (oddly, even if you were using Firefox 3.5 apparently). Next Digg announced that they might be “cutting back on development time” for IE6. And now it appears that YouTube will be phasing out support for IE6.
IE6 is the bane of most developers’ lives (including yours truly). A lot of people are getting very excited about the prospect of nomoreIE6. I would be one of the first to crack open a bottle of bubbly when the final installation if IE6 was wiped from this world. But is this tactic of “phasing out” going to work? Read the rest of this entry »
I’ll let you into a little secret: I’m a huge Twitter fan. I’ve been using Twitter for over two years now (excluding a month’s break to get some actual work done) and I find it is a valuable source of news, opinion and comment. However, the more I think about it, I can’t help but conclude that Twitter is bollocks.
“But how can that be?!” I hear you cry, “surely Twitter is a the archetypal example of a Kuhnian paradigm shift: exponentially changing the way humans communicate with each other forever more. Gad zooks! just look at how it is redefining collective interaction, stripping out the once hierarchical monoliths of a bygone age, and helping to rebuild in their wake the conversations of meritocratic individualism, whilst simultaneously aiding us in our quest to navigate the choppy waters of “the long-tail“. For Christsakes man! what about the democratic ideal it is helping to instigate – just look at Iran!”
Well, yes, that is all true. But Twitter is still bollocks.
You may have noticed I haven’t posted in a while. One of the reasons is because I have been immersed in the world of digital books. In my previous post I mentioned that I purchased myself a new toy, namely the 
