One of the things I should link before I lose any memory of it is Bob Clary's Mozilla Spiders tool. Currently, the spiders are designed to point out JS and standards compliance errors, but the obvious next step is to use the event generation harness as a way to do in-browser unit testing without having to pay Segue obscene amounts of money for Silk.
You can take so much away from this visualization of Bush's approval ratings that it's scary how effective it is.
(via BoingBoing)
Spent all day yesterday at the Mozilla Developer Day (hosted on Google's campus). There were several interesting topics presented related to 2D drawing, and I'm excited about a (grudging) commitment from the core Mozilla team to get at least some minimal SVG subset enabled in the 1.8-1.9 timeframe.
Other things happened, interesting people were met, and great discussions were had, but I will spare you (my beloved reader) all the boring details. The big take-away for me is that we are going to be able to abstract away at least SOME way to draw lines at arbitrary angles on every browser within the year. Expect the DHTML world to react with a burst of development the likes of which we haven't seen since '98.
McSweeney's does the research and give you your daily dose of indignance.
I've been meaning to post this for something like a week.
One of my current interests is in trying to figure out how in the heck to get Subversion to support a large number of users, perform hot syncs and backups between locations spread across the globe, and authenticate against a directory (in this case, Active Directory). Oh, and it's gotta happen securely end to end.
In my common usage scenarios so far, I've been very concerned about the way BDB (the database that the 1.0 version uses as a backend) gives up the operational ghost at the first sign of trouble and requires a "repair" operation to get it back in a consistent state. Things like file permission problems routinely cause this scenario. Given that source code is the lifeblood of a geek-driven organization, this seems a stupid way to fail. To be fair though, BDB databases always seem to be recoverable.
As a result of this "set it up and pray" relationship with subversion, I was very excited to see that SVN 1.1 is going to include a new (optional) backend. Given that it's file-based (think CVS's reliance on RCS files), it should be harder to foobar this new backend and as a huge bonus, backup tools can use it to get a consistent version of the repository at any (and every) point in time. This means that in addition to being able to rely on the incremental backup utilities, one can just flock() the repository and backup everything.
Now I just have to solve the little problem of authenticating hundreds of users who will be using SVN repository via SSH (to a linux box) against an ActiveDirectory domain without requiring different credentials.
Yeah. Sure. No sweat.
