In preparation for recording the PayPal Song I’m writing :), I decided to record Super-Powered Geek.
This was a song I wrote for Barcamp Sydney 2009. It’s on YouTube already, but this is my “home” edition.
Small Disciplines Of A Tubby Man
Yesterday I girded my loins and decided to walk a bit of the way home. I surprised myself by walking over halfway (Don’t forget I had a knee ligament thingy reconstruction a few weeks back). I didn’t push it, cause I’ve been informed by the excellent folk who hook me up to ancient and mad-scientist-looking electrical discharge machines that if you push too hard it swells and swelling is bad for healing.
So. I took the bus. Knee was fine, not much swelling. Icepacked it, but didn’t feel overly sore.
Today I thought I’d try again, but didn’t even think about stopping. Just that I was walking home. 5 kms. Not much by any standard, except that of a tubby man coming off reconstructive surgery (love how that sounds).
Did it, reading a Harry Dresden book on my iPhone, without much trouble at all. The legs are a little muscular-sore, but that’s to be expected (and looked forward to by me I might add, finally, some indication of physical exercise, ha).
So the point of this post is three-fold.
- Perhaps it’s the whisper of summer in the air, but I feel motivated to start getting content on the blog regularly in preparation for the upcoming trips.
- Little. By. Little. Sometimes my frustration at being unable to exercise leaks out. But it’s far better to be slowly getting better with the future hope of exercise than to be broken without the possibility again.
- I do love a good yarn. Or at least a yarn I’m telling :)
And For My Next Trick, San Francisco!
Phew. We (the Beautiful One, Barbarian Kid Hordes, and me) returned last night from four days in the beautiful town of Eden.
Apart from going on an amazing Whale-Watching ocean tour thingy, the main event was the Clarion Aussie Devcon 2009. I’ll be putting up my thoughts on Clarion Folk (along with some mini interviews I did on the iPhone).
Now is the next step in my winter of crazy non-discontent!
This time two weeks from now I’ll be on a plane to San Francisco!
“You lie.” I hear you say. But no, it’s true.
PayPal Australia (Jonathan is Captain Awesome) are sending Steve and myself across as representatives from the Australian PayPal Development community.
This. Is. Going. To. Be. HUGE!
- I’ve never been overseas. And here I was thinking the Queen visit was going to be my maiden voyage from the sunburnt country.
- The idea that PayPal would find enough in me, in what I do, to send me that-a-way.
- The possibilities inherent in going to the States, to the first ever PayPal Devcon (Innovate), to meeting stupid amounts of other developers.
- Being able to bring along my guitar (and a PayPal song, awww yeah).
It’s fair to say that this has been / will be so far the biggest, most momentous year of my vocational life.
Not One But Two Schnitzels!
We arrived in Eden around 6.30pm last night, and after unpacking went up to the restaurant which is in the same building as the conference room.
Yup, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted here.
The Clarion Aussie Devcon 2009 is currently underway. The Training days finished up yesterday (Thursday), and this morning a lot of us went on a Whale Watching trip out around the bays. Mmmmm, whale blubber.
This afternoon the Conference starts in proper. We’ve got a massive weekend chocka-clock full (see Schedule here).
I’ve already heard a lot of great things about Clarion 7 and .NET. It seems like there’s the possibility of Clarion 7.1 being released to Conference members by the end of the weekend (possibility, not certainty).
Last night at dinner Bob Foreman convinced me of the importance of the mindset. I’m going to fire back into Clarion 7 with fervour.
I hope to post some more throughout the weekend. I’ll be trying to get some “Mini” interviews done on the iPhone.
I’m not sure about the future of Clarion Folk, but at least for this weekend it’ll be getting some content :)
PayPal Continues To Make The Right Moves
Not long back a decent-sized envelope arrived in the mail.
Contained within were lots of paper, including a Certificate to signify I was now a certified PayPal developer.
Sure, I look very handsome next to the Certificate. And sure, I do google myself regularly.
And alternatively “sure”, any company can send out pieces of paper.
What is quite obvious (and the below is an example) is this:
PayPal is rushing forward into battle, hearts beating to a far better and more awesome drum, wielding more than plastic swords and papier-mâché battle axes.
Last night I was invited to a very trendy place down within the ultra-chic surroundings of Darling Harbour.
Not only did I get to meet up with Scott again after the Sydney Dev Day; Not only did I meet new folk; Not only was there the company of the most handsome and friendly Australia PayPal faces (Jonathan and Spiro, you know who I’m talking about), but:
I got to sit next to and go all “I’ve got this utterly unique earth-shattering idea that of course is awesome” to This Guy. Osama is the freaking Vice President of All-Things-Awesome at PayPal. He’s so cool that he pretended to like my many and varied stories about what I digested that morning and why the world would be a better place if desktop systems came back in vogue (ahem). 
I got to swap manly football stories with This Guy. Naveed hasn’t been at PayPal long, but you wouldn’t know it. He’s one switched-on dude, and puts you at ease the moment you start talking. Also, he likes rugby. Jonathan AND Naveed. If I worked for PayPal that would be 3, count em, 3 people who were rugby nuts. Nice.
It’s quite clear that the unveiling of the new Development Environment at Innovate09 is a BIG DEAL.
It’s also quite clear that what the PayPal guys will be unveiling is an even BIGGER DEAL. All of the PayPal folk tonight were excited to talk about what is coming up, even though they couldn’t tell us everything.
Nothing was let slip, except that it will be HUGE.
A lot of what they are doing is out there now, in beta. Developers have already started making some fantastic stuff, like TwitPay, and it’s just (or not even) the beginning!
What’s exciting about hanging out with the PayPal crowd that I’ve met is that their enthusiasm is infectious. It’s real, and your own imaginative synapses start to fire.
So, I’d like to pass on some THANKYOUS:
- Thankyou Jonathan, for the invitation, the organising, the time spent away from your burgeoning family :), and for being real good people.
- Osama and Naveed for finding energy after such an exhaustive couple of weeks, for asking us what we think should be the future, and for not showing any disappointment at the fact that only half a dozen folk turned up.
- And Spiro, for being ultra-cool AND ultra-geek. Leading the way man.
The Rugby Man Episode #12 – The “And Yet He Gains” Episode
Source Control In A Binary File Environment
The year is 2009 AD. Development is entirely occupied by the Text File Environment. Well, not entirely … One small village of indomitable Coders still holders out against the invaders.
(Paraphrased from that most excellent of stories, the Asterix series)
I work with Binary files. That’s right. And I’m okay with that.
However, as with that small village of indomitable Gauls, it’s a big world of text-editing coders out there.
If you fire up SVN or CVS or VSS (three letters seems to be the norm), they are built around having many developers working on text files and who want to merge and branch and slice and dice. Fancy stuff.
Source Control with Binary Files just doesn’t work the same, inherently.
“Yeah yeah” You say. “Stop boring me and being lame. We all know that.”
Actually, I had head knowledge of this truth for a long time, but until the last week when it was tested, I truly did not _know_.
We have a small development team, but it’s larger than one. There are three of us who work with a development tool that creates binary files. Sure, there are source files that are text, but we don’t work IN them, usually.
Circumstances changed over the past couple of months, so that we had to implement a serious (not just copy and paste backups, which I do with great gusto, having retentive folder structures and the whole kit) source control solution.
Having used Tortoise SVN for a couple of years for myself, I put my hand up to implement that.
It worked, until the “multi” part of multi-developer kicked in.
It failed big time.
Why?
Because of two reasons:
– I didn’t know Tortoise SVN well enough. All my limited experience had been single-user. We needed a solution that would work multi.
– I did not ask the right questions. Yes, SVN can handle what we need (explanation of that coming). But I didn’t ask the right questions when doing some research into it to find out HOW to get SVN to work.
The big problem was that, out of the box, Tortoise SVN doesn’t stop you from committing files other people are working in.
Yes, it allows you to lock a file. And yes, you can make it work this way. But this requires more knowledge and understanding than I had at the time.
So we turned to Visual Source Safe (the VSS from above).
Out of the box, after a nice MS wizard, we populated the repo and assigned our working folders. It makes all the files in the repo read-only. Which means our “app” files are read-only. Which means we’d actually have to make the decision to “UN” read-only them before we could get around the problem. And that step is one big wall in the way of accidental code loss.
What’s my point?
If you develop with binary files, in a multi-developer environment, make sure your Source Control implementation stops you working on a file unless you’ve checked it out.