Monthly Archives: December 2005

Chronic-what-cles of Narnia

This SNL rap about the Chronicles of Narnia is just hilarious!

Posted in Humor | Comments Off on Chronic-what-cles of Narnia

Source control without committer access

Update: It turns out both CVS and SVN have a solution to this problem called vendor branches. This page has a great description of the technique with subversion! Many open source projects require local file customizations to tweak, customize, and … Continue reading

Posted in Technical | Comments Off on Source control without committer access

Time boxed versus feature boxed releases

There are pros and cons to both approaches: 1. Feature boxed releases allow you to focus on getting the features the business side needs in the release and getting them right. However feature boxing is more easily prone to scope … Continue reading

Posted in Agile Development | 1 Comment

Drupal on Windows with IIS installation problem and solution

I’ve been looking at redoing my website boatblogger.com using Drupal instead of the Roller weblogger. Most of the users that started using boatblogger found roller a little to frustrating and eventually left for the bigger free blogging services. I’m also … Continue reading

Posted in Systems Administration | Comments Off on Drupal on Windows with IIS installation problem and solution

Defrag in Windows in safe mode

I’ve discovered that the only way to really get a good defrag in Windows is in safe mode. Reboot Windows, hit F8 before the starting Windows screen comes up, select safe mode, and then Start -> Accessories -> System Tools … Continue reading

Posted in Systems Administration | Comments Off on Defrag in Windows in safe mode

Ruby rdoc viewers still leave room for improvement

First a question, how do you go about looking up Rails or Gems API docs quickly while programming? As a relatively new Ruby user I’ve just always assumed something was wrong with my Ruby installation because the following wouldn’t work: … Continue reading

Posted in Ruby | Comments Off on Ruby rdoc viewers still leave room for improvement

Bad domain names

If you haven't already seen this, this is a must read on bad domain names. This had me in tears laughing!

Posted in Web | Comments Off on Bad domain names

Tabbed terminals for Windows redux 2

For the past few months I’ve been running Gnome-Terminal under Cygwin as my tabbed term of choice but I’ve always disliked having to run X on Windows just to run a terminal emulator. Now, thanks to an anonymous comment pointing … Continue reading

Posted in Desktop | 1 Comment

Calling the US from Europe with Skype

I arrived in Germany this morning. Before I left I setup our home machines in San Francisco with Skype so I could call home without having to pay. We had our first Skype converstation this evening using an open wifi … Continue reading

Posted in Technical | Comments Off on Calling the US from Europe with Skype

Rails schema migrations… wow!

Managing code versions, unit testing, building releases from a branch, etc… are generally well understood processes where you’ll find numerous organizations following similar practices. Now go to the database schema and every company seems to have a different home grown … Continue reading

Posted in Ruby | Comments Off on Rails schema migrations… wow!