Update: TortoiseSVN 1.6.3 is stable and works well — jbminn

A friend of mine forwarded this to me a few days ago; I filed it away under ‘refer to later’.   Later just arrived, as I saw someone tweet about a TortoiseSVN issue on Vista.

I’m relaying this here in the hope that it saves folks the hassle of figuring it out themselves.

I [installed TortoiseSVN 1.6.2] this morning, and it just failed silently, After digging out some logs etc, I found the very helpful Microsoft message "Application did not start because its side-by-side configuration was not correct"
That has to be one of the most non-enlightening error messages of all time.

I had come across that myself before with ScreenCap, and I was able to figure out that it has some mysterious connection to the .NET framework. However, my work-around was pretty ugly, and not useful in this case.

My recovery for tortoise is that I had to uninstall the new version, restart 3 times to make sure that windows forgot about it it, and then install the older (1.6.1) version.

From previous experience with this side-by-side nonsense, this seems to be Vista specific because I’ve never seen that message in an XP machine. Interestingly enough, I didn’t see a bug report on the tortoise site, but I only did a cursory look through the list.

Tags: twitter, tortoisesvn, vista

Popularity: 8% [?]

Almost two years ago, I wrote a log file viewer that asynchronously tails a log file & updates a <div> inside a a page.  As a courtesy to other engineers, I posted about it.

The funny thing about that is, although it is one of my most widely *viewed* posts, there are only a few comments.  This leads me to conclude that the highly technical software engineers who’ve arrived at the post via a search are very interested in learning how I’ve done it (check here for the post & you’ll see an explanation, the source code & a working example), but they aren’t interested in having a conversation. 

Someone else¹ pointed out that Google searches dropped off dramatically during Obama’s Inauguration, while both Twitter & Facebook usage skyrocketed.  This elicits the position that search is not a social application; it is performed as & when needed purely for information.  I’m fascinated by the very real anecdotal evidence of this in my own server logs.

¹ Sarah Lacey http://www.sarahlacy.com/sarahlacy/2009/01/google-dethroned.html

Tags: ajax, twitter, social

Popularity: 36% [?]

For those who’ve been around me for more than a few minutes, you know that I like to be silly, enjoy a great diversity of music, have deep loyalty to family & friends, know a bit about technology, and have strong opinions on almost everything (just ask me).

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I’ve done more systems work today than is typical.

The mail server, after a brutal spam thrashing that began 24 hours ago (see below), has been turned back on with updated Spamassassin rules, enhanced by the always awesome Mailscanner interface.  I’ve also completed the earlier-mentioned theme update.

And, moments ago, I reenabled twitterfeed.  I’m feeling like I’m getting close to convergence of my online presence.  If I could eliminate email… that’d be nice.

Tags: email, spam, spamassassin, mailscanner, twitterfeed

Popularity: 1% [?]

I didn’t take it – I swear. I was nowhere near that server.

Tags: twitter

Popularity: 1% [?]

Dear Ev,

Frankly I’m baffled.  As I type this, Twitter is throwing a 503 error back to twitterific and is showing the newly idiotic "Something is technically wrong" web page at the home URL.  This is the morning after yet another period of system maintenance or upgrades.

Your goodwill is rapidly deteriorating.  The service is notoriously unstable, and in fact just yesterday I saw someone begin advocating against depending upon Twitter for emergency communication.  Why?  Too undependable.  This is quite a turn-around from the period during & after the San Diego fires, where Twitter was embraced by fire dept folks for use in just this type of situation.

It would be easy to say "You get what you pay for" – neither I, nor any user, pay to use Twitter.  And you’d be right.  But you’re trying to make this a business, and so I respectfully suggest that you begin running the operation as though *everyone* is paying.  Bring in some experts.  Redesign – from the ground up if necessary.

Once folks develop a habit of use, they begin to feel entitled.  They show up, you provide a workable twitter service, and somewhere along the way you figure out how to monetize.  That’s the value exchange.  But when they show up and all they encounter is a timeout (there’s the 503 again just now in twitterific) or a condescending error page, they feel cheated.  People are funny that way. 

And they will leave.  As I’ve said before, I really like Twitter.  But the value exchange is currently askew.

(oh, and there’s that 503 again… three times while I was posting.  )

Tags: twitter

Popularity: 1% [?]

Twitter – I like you.  Really.  But enough with the completely unstable platform already, ok?  You have the money and buzz to get whatever is necessary to stabilize your service.  Simply creating a new "Service is down" page ain’t cutting it.

Someone else will figure out how to replace you if you don’t get this right very soon.  Are you really off-line, like the 404 message indicates?  Or is your load balancing solution giving up the ghost?

Whatever the issues, they’ve been going on for so long that you’re now on the receiving end of the dreaded Open Letter to Twitter.   I want you guys to succeed, so please get your shit together.

Tags: twitter

Popularity: 1% [?]

Twitter was off line long enough yesterday for me to notice (I variously rec’vd 500 pages as well as ‘Connection reset; server too busy’ pages). No mention of it in the 20 or so blogs I follow.

The 500 error indicated a back-end problem; this wasn’t just a matter of too much front-door traffic. We’ve already seen the response to that in the form of the tweety-bird page. 500 errors are the server’s way of saying “Holy Shit. I give up.”

I think Ruby’s edges (or core maybe) are showing here. This has been discussed at length at Laughing Meme, but I haven’t seen much about this subject on Twitter’s blog. Lots of folks are using Ruby daily, with many of them adopting Rails, and all of them have a stake in its future.

Performance is a tough characteristic to engineer into a language after the fact. Is Ruby/Rails going to be able to pull this off, or will it remain “…dead slow” to the point of no longer being considered for scalable web development?

Certainly, this is not the first time Twitter has had an outage. The outages were so common for awhile that they were referred to as “…yet another period of downtime” in this posting at Techcrunch . But didn’t anyone else notice? More likely they don’t care. After reloading the page a few times & seeing the errors, I gave up & didn’t check in again until this morning.

If your service can be offline (or at least unusable) for that long without any impact, then monetizing it might be problematic.

Tags: twitter, ruby, rails

Popularity: 5% [?]

Could be.  My frequency of twitter updates has exceeded that of my blogging, which itself may not be a surprise.  Blogging requires an effort easily an order of magnitude greater than tweeting.  Exaggeration?  I don’t think so, and I surmise that this ‘reduced friction’ has accelerated Twitter adoption.

Tags: twiitter, blogging

Popularity: 1% [?]

While commenting on Paul Kedrosky’s post about Twitter, it occurred to me that my opinion of Twitter was changing right then – at that moment.

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