Revolution is now Wii (as in “we”)… does that make it a wii revolution?

It seems to be the time of year for really bad naming decisions. If they had consulted with Microsoft, maybe it would have been PowerWii… or is that Wii Power? I don’t get it. What was wrong with Revolution? And even if there was something wrong, why does it have to be Wii? The only advantage I can see is that the name for Wii’s successor is easy to guess – how does Nintendo Puuh sound to you?

I thought these guys were worth a link: msexchangeforum.de

I’m not going to say why.

I actually forgot to mention this so far: my session Designing a model based application architecture has been accepted for DDD day 3. I’m not sure what the status of public announcements is for the guys organizing everything around DDD (and I can’t look right now because my internet provider has a few problems this morning), so I’m just going to point you to my own earlier post for the session description.

And it’s available as an RC1 release here. Well… I’m pretty happy that Scott won’t feel obliged any more to push his Mush idea, but otherwise the name change is even worse than those for Avalon and Indigo were. IMO, of course. Well, back to my Turbo-IDE with my Hyper-sourcecode… oh wait, is that Mega-Outlook popping up a notification?

I had a Subversion repository hosted on a Linux server that I wanted to migrate to a Windows server. I managed to do this, but it wasn’t all immediately intuitive, so I’m documenting the process here in case I need to do it again sometime, or someone else benefits from it.

To begin with, I found the wonderful SVN 1–Click Setup, which promises to do the whole installation of SVN on Windows at the click of a button. I thought that would be a good thing and downloaded it (here). The installation had three steps, each of which I was allowed to skip – in the end I used only one of the steps, the first one, where the main svn installation is done. I didn’t want to create any new repositories or install TortoiseSVN; apparently the package is focused on situations where people want to set up SVN as a version control system on one machine, as opposed to a server-based setup. I could most probably have used the “standard” distribution from the main Subversion site instead of the 1–Click package.

This became even clearer a short while later, when I looked around for some kind of service or similar, that I assumed had been installed to actually make the SVN service available on the network. I found nothing, and so I got the two files SVNService.exe and SVNService.exe.config from here (make sure you have .NET 1.1 installed to use this, and be careful when downloading, because otherwise you’ll get one of the many intermediate pages from the web frontend at that download URL).

I copied the two SVNService.exe* files into the SVN bin directory (by default that’s c:\Program Files\Subversion\bin) and edited SVNService.exe.config to configure the paths to my SVN installation and my repository, as well as the ListenHost. Then I used InstallUtil (comes with .NET) to install the service: c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework\v1.1.4322\installutil svnservice.exe

Now I started the service and tried to connect to it the same way I always used to do with my Linux installation – by navigating a web browser, and also the TortoiseSVN repository browser to http://winny:3690/work, where “winny” is the name of the Windows server and “work” is the name of the repository. This did not work at all, the only output I got in the web browser was this: ( success ( 1 2 ( ANONYMOUS ) ( edit-pipeline ) ) ) In the repository browser I got an error message instead: Error * PROPFIND request failed on ‘/’ PROPFIND of ‘/’: Could not read status line: connection was closed by server.

I decided there had to be something wrong, and I had a number of ideas what to do. Actually these ideas turned out to be useless because the problem was a completely different one, but I think the steps I made trying to solve the problem were good nevertheless. First, I updated my TortoiseSVN client. The version I had been using was very old (similar to the old Linux server), so I thought there might be some incompatibility there. No change. Then I read the manual to find out how to migrate a repository, on the chance that the file format from the Linux server might not be correct for Windows. I used svnadmin dump work > dumpfile on the Linux side, created a new repository on Windows and recreated the content with svnadmin load work < dumpfile. Nice, especially since one of the tools told me during the process that my Linux repository had a structure version from SVN 1.0 times – as I said, I guess this might have been a good thing. But it didn’t solve my problem.

Finally I found the revelation somewhere in the SVN docs, and completely by chance: I stumbled upon a URL that had svn:// as the protocol specifier, instead of the http:// prefix that I had been using. Well, I had only ever accessed my repository either locally or via Apache on Linux, so this was complete news to me… although it makes sense, of course. Anyway, I replaced my URL with svn://winny:3690/work, and all of a sudden everything started working perfectly.

I was sure I had blogged about this before, but apparently I haven’t. Anyway, I’m certainly not the first… I just love the way this thing talks to me.

I’m talking about “Encarta Instant Answers”, which is a contact you can add to your Messenger using the email address encarta@conversagent.com. Just add the contact and start talking to the machine… it’s really supposed to answer questions about god, the world and everything, and it does that really nicely, but even more it reminds me of ELIZA, a computer program that talked to the user, invented in 1966. Here’s a link to an online ELIZA if you want to try it.

Here’s the conversation I just had with Encarta Instant Answers, which prompted this post:

06:31:22 PM Oliver Sturm: Yow
06:31:23 PM Encarta® Instant Answers: Sorry, how what?
06:31:26 PM Oliver Sturm: How are you?
06:31:27 PM Encarta® Instant Answers: I’m doing great, how are you?
06:31:30 PM Oliver Sturm: I’m fine, thanks
06:31:31 PM Encarta® Instant Answers: That’s great.
I do enjoy the conversation, but what I’m really here for is to help you learn new things.
You can type “?” at any time to see a list of questions I can answer.
06:31:34 PM Oliver Sturm: ?
06:31:34 PM Encarta® Instant Answers: Here are some of the questions you can ask me:

* What is the capital of South Korea?
* Where was Nelson Mandela born?
* Solve 2x^2+7x=5
06:31:37 PM Oliver Sturm: ?
06:31:37 PM Encarta® Instant Answers: Here are some of the questions you can ask me:

* Show me the flag of Canada.
* I want to see the biography of Leonardo da Vinci.
* What is a cello?
06:31:47 PM Oliver Sturm: Solve 2x^2+7x=5
06:31:48 PM Encarta® Instant Answers: Equation Solver:

Let’s solve the quadratic equation:
 2x^2+7x = 5
First we need to put the equation in the form:
  ax^2 + bx + c = 0
For this, we set the equation to equal 0, and arrange the terms from the highest exponent to the lowest:
  2x^2+7x-5 = 0
We have:
  a=2  b=7  c=-5
We can now apply the quadratic formula:
  x = ( -b ± v(b²-4ac) ) / 2a
We find two solutions:
  x=0.60849528301415  or  x=-4.1084952830142
06:32:32 PM Oliver Sturm: Solve 4x^4-7x^3+2x^2+7x=5
06:32:32 PM Encarta® Instant Answers: Equation Solver:

Sorry, I don’t know the answer to this equation.
06:33:07 PM Oliver Sturm: Solve: sin(x) = 0.3
06:33:10 PM Encarta® Instant Answers: I need some time to think about it, please ask me again later.
06:33:18 PM Oliver Sturm: Solve: sin(x) = 0.3
06:33:18 PM Encarta® Instant Answers: I don’t think I know.  Maybe Encarta has an answer. => 
06:33:26 PM Oliver Sturm: idiot
06:33:26 PM Encarta® Instant Answers: I beg your pardon? What’s with that?
06:33:33 PM Oliver Sturm: You are an idiot
06:33:33 PM Encarta® Instant Answers: What? :@
06:33:37 PM Oliver Sturm: Yes
06:33:37 PM Encarta® Instant Answers: Well, I’m a machine. You can insult me all you want.
06:33:41 PM Oliver Sturm: Hehe  
06:33:41 PM Encarta® Instant Answers: What’s so funny?  
06:33:45 PM Oliver Sturm: You are funny
06:33:45 PM Encarta® Instant Answers: You’re funny too, Oliver Sturm.
06:33:47 PM Oliver Sturm: Thanks
06:33:47 PM Encarta® Instant Answers: You are welcome.
06:34:52 PM Oliver Sturm: Okay, later
06:34:52 PM Encarta® Instant Answers: Bye Oliver Sturm, it was good chatting with you.

Yesterday I did a session on Refactor! at the London .NET User Group, the same talk I submitted for DDD day 3.  Everything went well and I think people really liked the product. I’d like to thank the group for having me as a speaker, even though my presentation was mostly focused on a specific product. Ian asked me to definitely come back and do another talk sometime, so I guess it’s going to happen.

Were you there? Did you like it? Did you think it was horrible? Please feel free to leave comments!

I have recently published a few more XPO related posts on the new Developer Express community site. Previously I have sometimes posted XPO stuff on this blog, and these posts are now all eaten up by the DX site – so I thought I’d let you know if you’re watching this space and not the DX community site.

Here are the posts I wrote:

• Session Management and Caching
• My persistent classes are real classes – or not?
• Relations and custom collections
• Advanced queries
• XPO is good for distributed applications

I recommend watching at least the XPO related blog if you are interested in this, as I can’t promise I’ll always find the time to notify readers of this blog about posts in the other. The main page of the XPO blog is here, and there are links available for RSS and Atom aggregation.

This must be one of the stupidest messages in Visual Studio – how glad I am they kept it on board for 2005!

Let’s see: VS knows the file type I just dropped on it, because it can inform me about it. I have no solution open at this point – the internal state is just perfect for me to open a project if I want. I just have to do it in a specific way, and I believe this is the only file type I can open in VS where this ridiculous restriction applies.

Please enlighten me if you can: does this restriction have any advantage that I don’t see? Or if you don’t know the answer to that question, how about the name of the girl/guy who decided to do things this way?

This has been announced today: There’s a Developer Express site now for blogs written by people working for the company.

This is it: community.devexpress.com

I have published two posts there so far, related to the newest major release of XPO (6.1): “Session Management and Caching” and “My persistent classes are real classes – or not?”.

I just spent half an hour with a very interesting task: I created a new user account on a computer of mine and configured Outlook. Why did that take me so long? Very simple: because apparently all Outlook add-in developers are completely crazy.

Outlook has several methods of registering add-ins. I’m not an expert, but I have found that at least there’s one method to register an add-in system-wide, another that registers the add-in only for a given user. So guess which approach every single add-in on my system uses? Right, the global one! Why? Sure – everybody who ever works on my system wants to try TEO because I have been trying TEO. And everybody has a NewsGator account because I have one. And so on. Sure.

There are ways to disable add-ins, and of course they are only accessible via the registry… of course this is more of a Microsoft problem. But the add-in writers are the ones who decide exactly how hard they want to make it – and in the case of the NewsGator guys they apparently circumvented the whole mechanism completely.

Josh even says it himself:

I’m sure there must be people out there who are able to follow that reasoning. I’m not one of them. Pardon my rant.