Unruly Rambling - windows tag

CVS obfuscation

Sat, 17 Dec 2005 18:38:42 GMT

A couple days back, I had a really weird thing happen while updating the source code of a project while using IDEA 5(Windows XP). When I would issue the cvs "check directory status" command, it would tell me that the class in a particular package had been removed. After seeing this and knowing that I didn't remove that class, I issued the command again. Now I see that the update put the files back in my workspace like they were new. This went on for a couple hours, acting flakey from time to time. By the end of the day I recreated my workspace and checked everything out from scratch again but the same problem continued to happen. I assumed it was my workspace because our automated build process never had a hiccup. Eventually I went to the cvs repository(Linux) directly to poke around. Low and behold, I saw 2 directories, one using camel case and one using an all lower case naming convention. After looking even further, I noticed that one of the directories was empty but had an Attic directory. The other directory had the mysterious files. Upon inspecting the Attic directory, I saw that files by the same name had been removed from the repository.

In other words, the directory structure looked like this
com/acme/mypackage/Attic/WeirdFile.java,v
com/acme/myPackage/WeirdFile.java,v

My guess is that this weird behavior was happening because I was working on windows where nothing is case sensitive and it couldn't differentiate between these two directories. Bottom line, if you must develop software on inferior operating systems pay attention. Refactoring could cause you to be in this very situation scratching your head.

Google Desktop Cont.

Sat, 16 Oct 2004 16:00:32 GMT

After fully indexing my drive, I've been using the google desktop for about 24hrs now on my work laptop. I have to say it is quite useful and I believe it has already become one of those must have utilities. I'm still a little curious why it doesn't do pdf documents, but I can live with that in the first beta release. Since OS X 10.4 will offer similar functionality with spotlight, I will now be waiting for it's public release with more anxiousness than before.

Google Desktop

Fri, 15 Oct 2004 13:51:42 GMT

After reading about the Google Desktop, I was immediately disappointed that there was only a release for Windoze. Even though I had no intention of using it on my Mac(Mac searching rocks already), I always see companies in a better light if they support more than just Windoze.

One really cool extension might be corporate shared drives. At every company that I have worked for, there is always a company wide shared drive that contain's massive quantities of documents. Normally, searching this document wasteland would take days, months, or lifetimes. Since I believe this feature would bring great value, I think companies would pay good money for google's search functionality in this environment.

Im indexing my Windoze box as we speak, more details to come.