After quite a long time of announcements and speculation as to when it would happen, Sourceforge has finally gone live with their support of Subversion as a source control option for their service. Following is a clip from the SourceForge mailing list:

The SourceForge.net team is pleased to announce the General Availability
of Subversion service to SourceForge.net-hosted projects, effective
2006-02-21. This service offering is in addition to our existing CVS
service; as with all of our services, projects may select (and enable in
the project admin pages) the portion of our offering that best meets
their needs.

The best thing about finding this announcement was the fact that Ben Collins-Sussman, one of the developers of Subversion, posted the announcment to the Subversion developer list with the following comment:

So, are we done? Have we made a compelling replacement for CVS?

Congratulations to the Subversion team for making the original vision real. I would say the product is a pretty compelling replacement.

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Photo by rbieber

To go along with the Tickle Test Results, here is a description of me from the Chinese Zodiac, taken from a placemat at the chinese restaurant Jonna and I had dinner at last night.

You are very intelligent and are able to influence people. An enthusiastic achiever, you are easily discouraged and confused. Avoid Tigers. Seek a Dragon or a Rat.

Definitely an enthusaistic achiever, definitely easily discouraged. I take great umbrage at the confused comment, but I can’t figure out whether its true or not. Oh, whatever — I give up.

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I mentioned earlier that I was reading The Real Frank Zappa Book by Frank Zappa with Peter Occhiogrosso. I have found so much value in this book that I’m not even really sure how to review it. That will come later.

I did think it would be valueable to quote the opening of a chapter called ‘Failure’ (Chapter 18), in which Zappa describes many of the business plans that he had put together and tried to sell to venture capitalists and/or investors that never quite made it off the ground, one of which sounds a lot like iTunes.

I think the best thing about this quote is the philosophy expressed. Many of us are raised to fear failure, rather than viewing it as a way to figure out what doesn’t work. Some work environments reinforce the negative view of failure rather than the positive.

In any event, I like the way the concept is explained here.

Failure is one of those things that ’serious people’ dread. Invariably, the persons most likely to be crippled by this fear are people who have convinced themselves that they are so bitchen they shouldn’t ever be placed in a situation where they might fail.

Failure is nothing to get upset about. It’s a fairly normal condition; an inevitability in ninety-nine percent of all human undertakings. Success is rare - that’s why people get so cranked up about it.

Its not only these simple statements that have an effect, but the whole book is pretty incredible. As someone who has struggled for quite a long time with learning a musical instrument, it was quite refreshing to hear Franks opinions and philosophy around music as well.

This book is way more than a musicians biography though. Its a pretty damn good philosphy book on the human condition as a whole.

I found so much value in the reading of this book. Not only that, as is typical when I read a biography, I have spent the week completely immersed in his music. Pretty amazing.

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Tom the Architect pointed me over to this article called Transparent Commodity Infrastructure and Web 2.0. Excellent piece.

I especially like this quote here:

Let me use an example: back in 1998 if you were building a web-based startup, you were probably running on Solaris/SPARC and using an Oracle database. You were also likely to be running on some sort of a Java servlet engine (though there were exceptions, this was again the leading edge). This huge apparatus usually required at least 1 of the following: DBA, sys-admin, release manager, and build manager– nevermind all of the consultants and vendor people that it took to solve problems that arose from trying to get everything working together.

Fast forward to 2005. Anyone still using Solaris/SPARC for web apps is either a moron or a depressed Sun shareholder. MySQL and Postgres are now considered “enterprise-grade,” and if you should be so masochistic as to still want to do Java development on the app-tier, you’ve got Tomcat, Jetty, and even JBOSS available to you on your platform of choice.

I couldn’t agree more. So many companies stuck in the 90’s … excellent article and worth a full read.

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Photo by rbieber

A picture of the Randy Rhoads section of the book "Stairway to Heaven: The Final Resting Places of Rocks Legends"

I found a book called Stairway to Heaven : The Final Resting Places of Rock’s Legends. This is such a cool book of photographs of the grave sites of many of rocks departed.

I had such a kick going through all of these pictures. Not sure why, but this kind of thing has always facinated me.

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In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve kind of slowed the volume of stuff being posted to the site. The reason for this is that I’ve been focusing pretty heavily on the podcast site lately. I’ve found that podcasting is something that I’m extremely interested in, know nothing about, and completely suck at — a perfect place to focus and learn something new.

Not only that, I enjoy the process of podcasting more than blogging. I find it to be a more “personal” medium. I find myself preparing more (not as much as I should, but definitely more than blogging).

So if the site looks like its getting stale, it probably is. This might change, or it might not. Lets see how quickly I get bored or burnt out with podcasting — and lets hope that if that does happen, it happens after I’ve hit my 20 podcast goal that I set with Andy.

In August of 2004 I wrote a post listing some of my favorite quotes. One of those was from a friend who once told me that “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly while you learn it”. I’m putting that one to the test here and seeing whether it holds water. Personally, I’m having fun with it.

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My web hosting provider DreamHost has added Subversion to its list of software available through its one click installations. The service provides Subversion running under Apache.

If your looking for a Subversion provider, DreamHost might be it for you. Their prices are pretty reasonable. I’ve been with them since 2001 and have no complaints whatsoever. Excellent service and you can admin things quite easily through their control panel.

If you want to check them out, hit the DreamHost link on the right to tell them I sent you.

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