Moving a Subversion Repository to Another Server

Pete Freitag has a great tutorial up for quickly and easily moving a repo from one server to another. It couldn't have been easier and it worked like a charm. Thanks Pete!

GetDropBox? I got it.

I do a lot of work for a wide array of people and companies. A lot of times that work is done remotely via some kind of vpn or remote desktop or thin client (citrix) that keeps my local files completely separate and unavailable on the remote machine. However, sometimes I need to share a file between the two machines yet there is no way to do so.

For instance with some of the client machines I can't ftp, I can't email out a large (over 5mb attachment), I can't ssh or rsynch or anything else that might help me move a file between the two locations. For a while I had a good solution in strongsafe.com but that server was eventually blocked by one or more of the client firewalls.

In general they have very very good reasons for blocking this stuff; they really want to make it hard for sensitive stuff from getting out of the house. However, the things I need to move around are often large images, or development libraries (dlls, jars, etc) that I work on locally (where there is no keyboard lag) and then I want to push them to the client machine for use in the overall project. I really need a way to share these files to maximize my productivity and now, thankfully, getdropbox.com is on the scene to solve my problem - at least temporarily (so long as my files aren't more than 2gb in size).

With getdropbox I just install the app and it creates a pseudo-directory on my machine. Then any file I plop in that directory is automatically pushed to any other machine that I have linked to my getdropbox.com account. It works over the clients http proxy and it works pretty well. So far I've only tested it out with small files but I feel like this is going to be a good way to move forward (well, until they block it too).

Getdropbox.com just came out of private beta this week so if you are looking for a good way to synch or share files you might want to give them a look. It's free, encrypted, and pretty damn easy to use.

OT: Ryan Parker Featured at Playboy.com

Surprise surprise - my friend Ryan Parker's song writing caught the eye of some folks at Playboy.com and they had him make a video, "Bristol's Mom Has Got It Goin On" which is a bit of a political satire about Gov Palin.

Funny, I never really thought my tech blog would have a link to playboy on it.

Chrome at 7.8% On This Site

Looking at Google Analytics today I see that Chrome has accounted for 7.8% of my sites hits in the past month - that's not to bad for just a couple of days in the wild.

Interestingly the version i have, 0.2.149.27, is not the latest version to hit my site (though it is the latest according to Chromes auto update. My site has been visited 2 times by version 0.2.151.0 - I wonder when this newer version will see wider spread (or if this is just to reflect the new EULA)? If it is an actual new version then I wonder what changes are already heading out.

London Calling

Early next month I might be going to London for work; however, as you know all work and no play makes a dull boy. Thus, I am looking for some cool/interesting places to visit while I'm there.

I know London is huge and there is a ton to do so I need to kind of filter things down since I can only do stuff other than work on a Sunday and weeknights. I'll be there with a few other guys between the 4th and the 10th of Oct (If I go).

So, please drop a comment or suggestion on things I can do.

Google Chrome - Early Impressions

Google Chrome, Google's newly announced and just released browser, has been available for download for about 20 minutes now so I assume you have gotten it and had a chance to play. If not I offer you my initial impressions on this new browser and how I think it might effect the browser landscape in the future.

Bookmarking is basically the same as it is in Firefox; you just click a small star icon and it is done. You can edit the bookmark for further control such as folder hierarchy. You can not, however, add tags to your bookmarks which, I suppose, will disappoint some people. I am a pretty avid bookmarker but I honestly don't use the bookmarks themselves very often so I don't really care much about bookmark management. I typically use del.icio.us to store my bookmarks so the one thing I am already missing in Chrome are extensions.

That's right there are no extensions, at this time, in Chrome. It is possible that extensions will be in a future release - this is a first ever beta for the product after all - but the absence of extensions is glaring. I don't use many extensions in my firefox install but those that I do use are fairly critical to my daily tasks. For instance I use the gmail manager extension so I don't have gmail open all the time. Likewise I use the Google reader notifier extension. I already miss both of these in Chrome.

One thing I instantly noticed about Chrome though was it loads webpages fast. I know this is no scientific measurement but trust me it just loads them fast. For instance newsvine, which can often be sluggish for me in Firefox loaded with a nice peppy responsiveness in Chrome. Not only did it load fast but it works without a problem. No weird bugs have popped up, no strange rendering, it just works and it does it well. As far as clean and simple browsing goes Chrome seems to have it down.

One nice thing about not having extensions is I can focus just on what Chrome is doing. However, were Chrome to have extensions there is a cool feature called the Task Manager that lets you see what is going on in the browser. I think this would be a great addition to Firefox for helping users decide what plugins might be causing problems in their browser. A quick "shift+esc" is all it takes to load the task manager. The task manager also gives you the option to dig a little deeper into some memory usage reports which load up in a new tab within Chrome.

Like the memory report you can load your history and your download history into a new tab. Both are fully searchable. When you search your history you are not only shown a link to each matching entry but a thumbnail is loaded as well. I imagine the enhanced history view is thanks in no small part to the Google Gears backend that helps power Chrome. Gears provides a local database for data storage and indexing so it seems a natural fit.

The tabs' show up a little different than in any other browser because they show up above the address bar. This is because each tab is really its own browser so you get all the controls with the tab. That means you can drag a tab out of the window and easily spawn a new window if you want. This is good because if one page starts to go haywire you can kill it without shutting down the whole browser. The negative is there is a slightly higher up front memory cost to using Chrome.

Text areas, such as the one where I write my my post, highlight spelling problems but there doesn't seem to be a real spell checking correction tool in the right click menu. I really like that feature in firefox so I hope I am just missing it in Chrome and that it will appear shortly; I mean what good does it do for me to know a word is spelled wrong if the spell checker won't offer some suggestions?

I'm going to try and stick with Chrome for the next week at least and see how it does. As much as I like the convenience of some of my firefox extensions I am more interested in stability and if Chrome turns out to be more stable than Firefox (which has had some problems for me) then I will probably switch for good (or until a better browser turns up).

Finally, I don't think Google is really aiming for market share with Google Chrome. Sure, I think market share would be nice but I think, in truth, they are just looking for a more tenable position from which to lobby and petition for new features in future browsers and for new standards. By making this move they are hoping to spur innovation and technological capabilities in all browsers so that their online applications, such as Google Docs, can become even more powerful.

They have currently hit the apex of what can be accomplished within modern browsers considering their current limitations. However, if all browsers offer a standard local data storage mechanism, improved javascript processing, and "garbage handling" then Google can look toward building even more compelling online applications. In the end Google doesn't care if you use their applications with IE, Firefox, Safari, or Chrome - they just want you to use their applications. By improving the platform those applications are delivered on they can then add more value to their applications and thus convert users into loyal ones.