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It seems sanity is back in the winds. Now I may be misinterpreting this but it looks like we won’t (in theory) need to do any more javascript insertion hacks to get active content on a page to actually be active in IE.

I certainly hope that this update gets some penetration amongst the windows machines out there, because catering for this issue when embedding flash has been a particular pain point for us.

Yay for sanity.

So I ran into this application over on codeplex the other day: SvnBridge. I’m impressed.

I’ve been using Subversion since the mono project adopted it many years ago, and was an instant convert. At the time the only real SCM systems I’d used before that were Visual Source Safe (VSS) or cvs. Subversion was such a breath of fresh air. (I’ll save my rant for any dev team with more than two devs in it that’s still using Source Safe when subversion is available for another time.)

Anyhow since then I’ve pretty much adopted or championed subversion use at any place I worked at because for some strange reason they all seemed to still be using Source Safe even with it’s issues with network access, VPN access, scalability, database corruption and uselessly slow history retrieval (I know I lied when I said I’d save the rant for later).

I continued to be impressed with the availability of tools to use with subversion from client side (tortoisesvn, ankhsvn) to server side (viewvc, mantisbt, redmine, reviewboard) which combined together help make an end-to-end high performance software development environment and process (I’ll definitely save those discussions for more posts to come).

Anyhow, now that Microsoft has released Team Foundation Server (TFS) it’s worth considering that most teams will be moving from VSS to TFS. And all indications are that a correctly configured TFS system is everything that VSS wasn’t.

So to get to the originally intended point of this post, svnbridge enables you to run a local svn server (in your taskbar) that actually proxies all it’s calls to a TFS system. This enables your developers to continue working locally with an svn working folder and therefore be able to use all the other svn integrated tools you may have included in your development process, while having your source code repository actually sit in TFS.

Now it’s relatively fresh software, in that it’s only just been released but I’ve actually used svnbridge and was impressed with how it does a direct mapping for most svn SCM operations to TFS operations including the obvious commit messages, branches and revision sets.

So I was all psyched up to go to BarCampSydney 3 this weekend, but woke up on Saturday feeling a little flu-ie. Having roped DG into giving me a ride into the uni I couldn’t really pike out though.

I got as far as about 3 in the afternoon before the flu symptoms were too much to bare, but I did get to see a few decent presentations and ran into a few notable notables. Luckily I was able to convince Michael to leave early so I could get home and put my head down for a while.

What follows is a brief rundown of the sessions I was able to attend

• Interesting discussion about why we still write software in a text editor titled, ‘Making PC’s Cooler’. As was the theme for me at this barcamp I walked into this session late. I was still able to participate in a very lively discussion about it anyway.
• There was an interesting talk on the mobile market which I unfortunately missed the first half of as I was in a discussion about the OLPC’s adhoc mesh networking.
• Saw an entertaing talk that revisited the demo days and introduced a cool demoing java app called Processing (it does more than just demoing).
• Walked in on second half of yet another talk on Facebook that was, as always, good banter.
• Walked out on a dicussoin about Web 3.0, try as I might I just can’t stand hearing people talk about Web 3.0 and take them seriously just yet.
• The only session I saw fully was pretty actively discussed. Marty Wells and Elias Bizannes gave an intro to DataPortability. Lots of talk on what it means, how hard it is to do, and what the next steps should be. It’s an interesting idea, which I agree with completely on academic terms. I just think, like others, that given the amount of publicity they’ve received so far they need to get something real out soon or risk losing momentum and becoming yet another overly-complex standard. This is not necessarily an easy thing to do as the problems DataPortability is trying to solve are incredibly complex

Actually most of the interesting discussions happened in the hallways between (or during missed) sessions. Mike Cannon-Brookes had a captive audience talking about what he got up to at NZ FooCamp recently. No doubt all the geeks in this discussion were incredibly jealous. The GoodBarry guys were there as well and we had an interesting talk about ad-tech and gaming. Also chewed the fat a little with Nick Hodge and DG about the Asus EeePC.

I’m sure there was more that happened during the day that I missed, but I’m still feeling too sick for my memory to work properly. This will have to do for now.

Over on the Virtual Earth blog i found this post about a virtual earth Wordpress plugin.

Haven’t had a chance to play with this yet, since it’s early days in my Wordpress journey, but I look forward to giving it a crack at some stage in the near future. I’ll follow up with post about my experiments with it when I get time.

On this past Sunday I was putting my three year old on the toilet when he started pointing at my shirt spouting out the letters Y - E - E - K. I was wearing shirt that is a rip off of the “FCUK” shirts (picture to come), which has the word “GEEK” printed on the front. It was given to me as a farewell gift from one of the last few companies I worked at.

Anyway, I looked down at his fingers as he was saying “eeee” the second time, and he was pointing at the second “E” in “GEEK”. To my amazement he was identifying and saying each of the letters in the word on the front of my shirt. Now he confused the lower case “G” for a “Y”, but that’s an acceptable error.

The thing that freaked me out the most is that we haven’t been going through his letters with him lately. We read to him regularly, and he’s incredible at numbers, but we haven’t started focusing on letters yet.

He’s been spending way too much time with this toy for the past two weeks and it appears that he’s learned some of his letters largely from the letter games in this toy.

The cognitive process of the human mind is an incredible thing to watch developing.