In observance of Election Day, we had planned to do a mock presidential debate between two competing technologies. Think Lloyd Bentsen debating Dan Quayle in the late 80s.

Or perhaps the classic Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter exchange…

So as you can seen, politics and software technologies don’t really mix all that well. In fact, the results can be disastrous. We experimented with running a sophisticated source code indexing algorithm against internet-hosted code repositories. The indexing daemon was inadvertently pointed at site hosting political quotes. Behold the train wreck that ensued.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While we very much enjoyed Wired Magazine’s recent Geek Dad list of Geeky Halloween Costumes, the list seemed to dominated by Sci-Fi movie and TV characters. We felt we could go a little nerdier.

iCostume

The potential of using iPads (or any other tablet computer equipped with decent cameras) is exciting. However, the hardware costs may be a little more than you normally budget for costuming.

The Invisible Man : Strap one iPad to your front, and another to your back. Initiate a FaceTime session between the two tablets. The iPad in front will display what the rear one is displaying and vice-versa. The net effect on the adult wearer will appear to be a large hole through the chest, but small children can be rendered nearly invisible using this technique.

Indigestion : Requires only one tablet, mounted just above your belly button. Take several videos from antacid commercials and run them in a slideshow loop.

Infinity : Uses the same chest-mounted tablet. Attach a webcam to a long stick protruding from your shoulders and arrange it so the webcam points to the tablet. Display the webcam image fullscreen on the tablet.

Coding T-Shirts for Groups

A group of three could go as public, protected, and private. If you pick up a 4th wheel, they get the friend shirt.

Also for threes, make up shirts with <, =, and >. See how many relational operators you can construct. Extra candy for implementing (or having anyone recognize) the Perl spaceship operator.

For couples, go dressed as && and || and, in conversation, && disagrees with everyone as soon as he disagrees with one thing, and || agrees with everything anyone says once he’s heard on thing he agrees with. See if anyone catches on, or if everyone just eventually decides that && is a jerk.

Another idea for couples is to go as NULL and -> (alternative being * and 0). Stand close together and fall down (or freeze) whenever anyone addresses you.

So, you’re in your basement listening to Pink Floyd albums on vinyl, and wearing a tinfoil hat, and writing a version control system.  Your version control system is going to fix the problems of the 783,711 version control systems – free and commercial – that already exist.

Mathematically, it stands to reason that you are going to overlook something.  We have already established that there are 783,711 version control systems available, yet there you are with the same Pink Floyd album side playing over and over writing #783,712.  Because all of them didn’t do it right.  So the odds are you won’t get it exactly right either.  Maybe you’re not quite as clever as you think, or maybe your foil isn’t quite thick enough.  Or maybe you just overlooked something I find very important.  So here we go (in no particular order):

• Under NO circumstances should the default check-in behavior be to delete the local file.  I’m going way back on this one… but this one bugs me.  When I have to write support for a version control system, I try to use it’s default options as much as possible.  And in this case I did too.  However, I found it such a terrible default it bears mentioning here.  Perhaps it made sense to somebody at a point in time when hard drive space was measured in megabytes.   But not to me.
• Let us suppose your version control system supports separate repositories at a pre-specified location.  For example you set an environment variable:

SERVER_LOCATION=TINFOIL1,port:80

If you allow multiple repositories (or modules, herds, gaggles or whatever you choose to call them) to be stored at TINFOIL1,port:80, I should be able to list them all.  There should be a command I can run to see all of them.  If your version control system uses a URL where only one thing can exist:

http://tinfoil1/NewVCS

then this does not apply to you.  I do not have an opinion about which one is better, although the URL method seems to be more modern.  But if there is more than one thing, let me see it - do not make a colleague of mine and I sit and try things until we notice that there is a command that you can run that gives an error message for each module, and we can get it that way. I shouldn’t have to do something wrong in order to stumble across a correct answer.

• Let me view all versions of a file  across branches.  I won’t go into detail here because I covered this in Manifesto – Part 1 – Branching.  But it is important enough it bears mentioning again.
• Let me get a file, and put it where I want it.  Do not make me get the whole directory.  Do not make me get the whole directory structure, with just one file in it.  Let me get any version of any file, from any branch, and put it anywhere I please.
• Let me run any command and specify the output in XML, or some other regular format.  I am adding support for this version control system to SlickEdit after all.  I don’t want to use your API.  I want regular output written to a file I specify, or that I can redirect to a file.
• When running a version control command, a history or log command for example, let me refer to the file any way available to me.
  • If I am on Windows, let me refer to the local file, using a relative or absolute path, OR using the URL (or whatever the remote specifier is).
  • Do not make me use forward slashes in relative paths while I am working on Windows.
  • Do not make me change to a directory that was checked out and use a relative path.
    • I should be able to sit in “c:\temp” and run “tinfoilvcs history c:\src\project1\file1.cpp”.
• Let me checkout multiple copies of the same branch/module/whatever.  Most recent version control systems do not have issues with this.  But I often find myself in a situation where I need to fix a bug, but my copy of the branch I am working on is “too dirty”.  So I checkout a new copy, fix the bug, check it in, delete the new copy, and update the other copy.

For extra credit:

• Let a user plug in a 3rd party GUI diff on their own – so if they would like to run vsdiff.exe to view differences even if they run your version control’s diff command from the command line, they may do so.
• In the above paragraph, replace “diff” with “3-way merge”.

Now go flip the record over.