I used to be a contractor for Apple, working on a secret project. Unfortunately, the computer we were building never saw the light of day. The project was so plagued by politics and ego that when the engineers requested technical oversight, our manager hired a psychologist instead. In August 1993, the project was canceled. A year of my work evaporated, my contract ended, and I was unemployed.
I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple’s doors, so I just kept showing up.
Ok I admit it - I thought I had done skunkworks stuff - but this is truly crazy..
I got a crash course in Cuba Coffee. it is a strong combination of coffee essence and sugar served up in a shot glass. good thing i haven’t developed an addiction to the stuff
I’ve know Obie for a while - and I was knew he was a rock star - but now I have proof. He’s built a business model around jumping in, gathering some info, and kicking out the jams (er…. I mean apps). I have to admit I’m a little jealous since I would love nothing more than to smoke jump this way - I look forward to seeing his notes from the field.
The cost model for the 3 weeks 3 days (including deployment and post-support) is fixed-price: 30,000 USD. An essential value of the offering involves client mentoring: our curriculum, which will probably be marketed separately within a few months teaches new web entrepreneurs the essentials about the development process, recruiting and vetting technical people, as well as evaluating hosting options and costs. We want to give our clients everything they need to establish accountability from their technical resources and not get ripped off “in the ghetto”.
I’ve been following the world of distributed source code control since Jesse Vincent convinced me to try out SVK at FooCamp a couple of years ago.
I constantly watch them get better and better - both in the sense of actual code management as well as being able to seamlessly sit on top of a central SVN repo. That last part is one of those things that has its advantages - especially in the event that you work in a team that actually has people who
a) Use an OS other than Linux
b) Are not all developers but need access to the code
The only thing that holds me back from diving back into using SVK, bzr, or git is several of my svn repos make heavy use of externals which seems to be the one feature not well represented in the tools to wrap around SVN. I continue to hold out hope that this problem won’t exist forever….
That being said - now it looks like I have a completely different reason to start using git - and that reason is backups.
At NITI we built a file backup system using what was a pretty clever data structure to speed up file accesses. But we never got around to implementing sub-file deltas, because we couldn’t figure out a structure that would do it both quickly and space-efficiently. With git, they did. To build your own backup system that’s much better than ours, just store it in git instead.
This is a strange thought - especially since the author goes on to show how in some cases git is actually faster than cp.
It is a very strange idea - but could be very useful for some of my odd backup tasks. Now I just need to carve out the time to test it.
