I’m leaving tomorrow for a little roundtrip.

First, on Friday, I’m doing a guest lecture about Functional Programming in C# at Campus 02 in Graz, Austria.

From there I’m moving on to Slovenia (on Saturday, May 23rd), for NT Konferenca 2009. I’ll be doing two sessions there, on C# as well as F#. I’m also exhibiting for DevExpress – but of course, DevExpress related questions and conversations are always welcome anyway!

Finally I’ll be in The Hague from Wednesday 27th, for DevDays 2009. Three more sessions to do there, again on C# and F#. I’m also going to sit down with Marianne, Daniëlle, Sara, Mirjam and Sandra and record an interview for Sod This (my podcast – check it out!). Some of those girls have recently worked together to get the Women in Technology issue of the Dutch SDN Magazine out the door. Good work!

If you read this and you think you should be on Sod This as well, talk to me! We’ve recently recorded a few interviews at TechEd in LA and I’m sure it’ll take a little while before we have time to release enough new episodes to go through all the material, but I’ll still take any opportunity I get to talk about interesting things to interesting people! (And of course, if all you want is to have a coffee or beer with me, or to bitch about something technology related, let me know anyway <g>.)

I was just setting up Office in my Windows 7 VM, and something happened that I’ve never seen before: the activation process found that I had installed the license too many times and I should therefore call Microsoft on the phone and explain myself. Or something like that.

Oddly, this time I had been using a license number that was in fact listed as an Office Professional key in my list of keys from my MSDN subscription. In the VMs, I rarely use anything but Access (to look at mdb files that I created during demos, mostly) and sometimes Excel. Somehow I always think I’ll install a bit more than these two apps, although I never actually end up using any of the other applications. Anyway, this time I thought Professional should suffice, so I chose that key – the installer didn’t seem to care though, it listed Universal during the whole process, and since the key was then listed with too many installations though I’d never used it before, there must be some sort of unification going on behind the scenes.

The background of installation counts going up is simple: I’m installing new VMs every now and then, and most of them have Office. Depending on the machine I’m using the VMs on, I also change the RAM amount quite often, though I believe the resulting re-activation shouldn’t count towards the limit. Anyway, after a while I dump a VM and start working with a new one, and the activation that was in the VM is dead to me – still no way to “deactivate” an Office version, I believe.

So I call this number for the UK and go through the process of entering the 54 digit number given in the form. Great fun. That done, the computer lady on the other end asks me to wait for my confirmation code to be generated, and then she says they want to ask me a few questions. Question 1: is my license a preinstalled license on my computer (press 1), a retail license (press 2) or a home/student edition (press 3)? Obviously, being part of my MSDN subscription, none of these applies, so I do nothing. The computer repeats the question, and then another time. Suddenly the line disconnects. Thanks, Microsoft. Way to go.

Second call, 54 digits later, the lady claims that my code could now “not be verified". Doesn’t that mean, pretty much, that I must have entered it incorrectly? No, apparently not: a human finally makes it onto the call, and she only needs the first six digits of the code again to be able to deal with me. She wants to know on how many computers I have the license installed. I tell her I don’t have a clue (I skip the part about the different SKUs thinking that’ll confuse things needlessly), since I’ve installed it in lots of VMs that I don’t use anymore. I don’t think she understands a word, her next question is whether I use the license on one or two machines. I tell her I still don’t know, but it’s probably been installed on more than two, although I don’t actually use it in more than three or so right now. I think she’s confused now.

I feel pity with the woman, so I tell her that my license is from an MSDN subscription that I get from Microsoft for being an MVP. Apparently that’s a magic word, because she says (in a questioning voice, as if I’m the one to know that better than she would): “so you’ve got multiple licenses for this software". I believe her and make confirming noises. She dictates back to me a huge long number and my Office is activated.

Microsoft: please grow up. This is not a licensing scheme, this is harassment. What purpose does it serve? Have you heard that it’s cracked? Well, I have (I think it was in some magazine at the petrol station about two days after the Office 2007 release), and at this point I’m thinking maybe I should be using the cracked version and skip all that activation nonsense. Do what you like to try and prevent people from stealing your software, that’s not the problem. But how about this as a general top-priority guideline:

If your anti-piracy mechanisms start annoying legitimate users of your software, you’re doing something wrong.

And deal with this: this is how I use your software. You don’t want me to use it like this? Well, then I’m not going to use it at all. Fortunately, there are enough alternatives around these days that I don’t have to deal with your “fuck the paying customer” attitude.

What a waste of time. I could have installed Open Office three times over in the same time. Now where’s that Office crack? Don’t worry, I’m just joking. But it’s right there in Google (and in Live Search, incidentally). Seriously.

Yesterday I recorded a video at TechEd about Functional Programming in C#, together with my colleague Gary Short. It’s up on the site now: Functional Programming in C#.

Unfortunately, the quality of the code demo in the video isn’t that great, my apologies for that. I’m not even going to go into what they made me do to the Apple logo on my laptop :-)

The info at the end of the video is supposed to read something like this:

Oliver Sturm / DevExpress

olivers@devexpress.com – oliver@sturmnet.org

Blog: – well, you’re looking at it right now

Podcast: http://www.sodthis.com

Have fun, and let me know what you think!

Just a quick note to say that I’ll be traveling to LA tomorrow for a few days in the DevExpress office and TechEd next week! I’ll be doing a vendor session for DevExpress at TechEd (Wednesday afternoon), as well as a birds-of-a-feather talk about functional programming and concurrency, and I’ll record an online tech talk about FP in C#. I’ll keep everybody posted!

Meanwhile, if you are at TechEd next week, find me at the DevExpress booth and say hi! I’m going to have stickers for Sod This (my podcast, in case you didn’t know yet!) to give away, so if you want one, make sure you stop by!

I’ve been using Subversion for many years, probably since 2002 or so, and when I started using it, I imported my existing CVS repository, which contains stuff dating back to 1995 or so. It’s a big and (to me) very valuable archive, especially since I started early on to put all sorts of stuff in there – not just source code, I mean, but rather everything that may be versioned, and that just benefits from being backed up in that repository. All my business paperwork, things like that.

(As an aside, I’m regularly surprised that many people don’t seem to do anything similar – what do you guys do with important documents that aren’t source code? Every now and then I have this discussion where somebody has the opinion that a source control system only needs to be integrated nicely with Visual Studio to make them happy, and I find that position extremely weird.)

I’ve always hosted my repository myself, in my home office and/or at the company I worked for. Up to this day, the main reason for doing so has always simply been connection speed – the same problem I have with using cloud storage and that sort of thing. Where I live, my broadband connection gives me a 3Mbit downstream on a good day and typically less.

Now, after many years of hosting my infrastructure myself, I have decided in recent months to make an effort to push things outside a bit more. My personal internet connection has been the bottleneck every now and then when I was away – maybe the main reason for me to change my mind.

I looked at a few hosted subversion providers, but I have now decided not to go for any of them. I might host my own subversion on a dedicated server somewhere – will see. But I just wanted to document my reasons for a decision against a hosted service, because when I was looking around on the internet, I had the impression that these things were rarely discussed.

• Starting at the beginning: where are the services hosted. Well, all over the place of course, but I think that’s an important consideration. If my source code, and other even more important content, is stored on servers owned by a US company, for instance, what impact does that have on legislation applied to my property? To be honest, I don’t know, and I don’t want to spend time and money finding out. It just seems a much safer bet to host in the same country where I live, which brings down the choice of providers quite considerably.

• I saw some people comment that they prefer a free service. What a weird idea is that? There’s a consideration regarding long-term reliability there anyway, and if a service is free, that issue suddenly tops the agenda, doesn’t it? And let’s not talk about warranty – IANAL, but I know that in many countries there’s no warranty whatsoever for free services. Kind of understandable as well. So – “free subversion hosting, super-duper nightly offsite backup, somebody personally copying every byte onto a secondary server on commit” – worthless. Please charge me, so I can even begin to trust you!

• Some services aren’t cheap at all. I can almost get a dedicated hosted server somewhere for a similar price. For me, there’s always an implied advantage in the latter – agreed, it’s because I know what to do with such a server, and that doesn’t hold for everybody.

• Finally, and most importantly: I wasn’t able to find a single provider who made reasonable promises, at least, about keeping my data secret/private. Why not? I want my data encrypted in its own private partition of the machine, for instance. I want info and guarantees about checks performed on the personnel that maintains the servers. This is essentially the same huge problem that’s out there with cloud computing – I’m not putting my business papers on somebody else’s machine without that sort of guarantee.

If you are a provider offering hosted subversion services, and you think I should consider your service because you don’t have any of these issues, feel free to let me know - for now I’m all set with my own setup on a dedicated hosted machine, but who knows what the future holds.