Bring It On

I had to do this again today because of my hard drive crash, so I’ll document it here in case I have to do it again in the future.

Due to the relatively poor integration of GUI tools for Subversion (I consider them a leaky abstraction) with the command line version, I only use the command line for most of the actions. Still, I can’t stand the diff output generated by subversion.

It’s not hard to plug in a different diff tool like SourceGear’s Vault Diff and Merge into subversion. Here are the steps:

• create a batch file called diff.cmd and put it somewhere in your path; the contents of this file should be a single line: <path_to_vault_directory>\sgdm.exe %6 %7
• go to %AppData%\Subversion folder and open config file (it has no extension) in notepad (or suitable replacement); then search for diff-cmd = … and replace right hand side with diff.cmd
• enjoy!

The infamous user/password combination has been with us for as long as we can remember. Proliferation of services on the Internet somewhat fuelled by the large increase of the online population has led to a “login hell” – so many places on the Internet require you to identify yourself that most of the normal people simply can’t keep up.

The result is unfortunately that people start using one and the same identity for many services, not realizing that once a site owner has their username/password, if the site owner is malicious, and the user is careless enough to use the same login for other sensitive services like online banking, the user is in a big trouble.

Those that are aware of the risks and keep a list of logins in a password manager application are annoyed by the number of logins they have to maintain, keep and back-up. Even worse, most of the services require a valid email, so you have to make sure that you have enough of disposal emails to last you forever (you aren’t using your real email address for a random Internet service, are you?).

Almost any site today requires a login. For some sites, this really is a necessity, for some, it’s simply a convenience. I was recently “infected” with the coding challenges on Code Golf. Naturally, because the whole concept is essentially a competition, the site requires a login. For some reason, they want my email and they want me to confirm the subscription by clicking to a link provided in the first email automatically sent by the system (this is a standard practice). I signed up several days ago but haven’t (yet) posted a single solution (out of 4).

The problem is that they never sent me a confirmation email. OK, I tried to signup again, but the username is already taken (by me!). Fine, I’ll contact them through the forum and let them know about this.

Well, I would have posted if I could – I needed to login to post to the forum! Excellent…

All of this would be much simpler with a system like CardSpace. Heck, for CodeGolf, just like for many other places, I wouldn’t even need to create a new card, but use a self-issued one, the same one I’d use on a myriad of other site. Code Golf doesn’t really care who I am, only that whenever I return to the site I can be uniquely identified, whichever user/real name I provided to the system.

This way, not only do Code Golf site administrators have to write their own login system, but they have to keep the username/password combinations too (or at least hashes of the passwords) and make sure their code works (there are bugs in the code that sends a verification email obviously).

In the end I might simply try to signup again, wasting my time trying to figure out another username and the space in their user database with at least one wasted username…

Just like any other organ, your brain needs exercise. If your daily job includes boring “business stuff” where most of the time you struggle with the integration problems and not with the actual problem domain issues, you are most likely not occupying your brain enough. If you want to stay in shape you need to practice.

There are several sites where you can find lots of small problems to solve. I have recently started following the Ruby Quiz and find it quite interesting - each week a relatively small problem is posted; the language of choice is Ruby and there’s no competition, people solve the problems for the fun of it. The best solutions are dissected and analysed so that all the participants can learn something.

One of the problems linked to the Code Golf, which is a slightly different take – challenges are issued less frequently and the goal is to create as short solution as possible. You can use several scripting languages: Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby. The solutions are not posted publicly because every challenge is a competition. There is a simple formula for calculating the score and the list with rankings is available either for a particular language or as an overall list.

Their latest problem involved some ASCII art (the result of the the first sample is on the screenshot to the left), the problem looked simple enough so I decided to give it a try. I chose Ruby as a language, even though the top 10 list for this particular problem was completely dominated by Perl solutions. After a couple of minutes I had a working solutions that was… about 180 characters long (whitespace included).

A quick look at the Ruby leaderboard was quite depressing – the best solution had only 71 character (!) and the 10^th one was 82 characters long.

So I started trimming my solution. After a couple of hours (!) I was able to shrink it down to 104 characters, which puts me in the first 16 for Ruby and barely in the first 40 overall(±1 place).

If you need a shot of humility, this is it

Frankly, without an add-in like Resharper, Visual Studio 2005 (even more so Visual Studio 2003) wouldn’t be nearly as usable. In that respect, Eclipse is as usable out of the box as is Visual Studio 2005 + Resharper. But until recently, there was one big difference between the two (and no, I’m not talking about the cost): speed.

Visual Studio 2005, without any add-ins, is fast on my 1.7GHz Pentium-M laptop, where most of the time processor runs at slower speed, down to 600MHz. Eclipse is snappy too. With Resharper (prior to version 2.5) the start-up speed of Visual Studio 2005 is greatly reduced and for some developers, the runtime speed too.

Not any more. Version 2.5 changes the picture dramatically. You really ought to try it out - the startup speed is now just a tad slower (you probably won’t notice) and if you have a relatively modern computer (my laptop is 2.5 years old now and runs it just fine), the runtime speed will never be an issue anyway.

Over the years I think I've been rather lucky with the hardware purchases - most of my equipment has served me well. Rarely there was a need to invoke a warranty and change something.

But one thing has been in common to all of the issues: timing would always be the worst one possible. Usually things would die on Friday or Saturday, preferably when Monday is a public holiday or something like that. Thus it is not a big surprise that the laptop hard drive gave up last Friday.

I contacted Dell's support by telephone and email (my laptop is still under warranty) but both were "closed" until today. Still no reply...

I don't know what I would have done if I did not have a "spare" computer. So many daily activities revolve around a computer and a fast Internet connection - we tend to forget that until we lose it (just like many other things in life).