RIP: geocities

They wrote email to me 3 month ago they warned me, We are shutting geocities down..
Now they are gone and I feel so empty..

It is a big loss for the Internet community. It shows the way to the future:

No room for free for all websites as you like it. You have to put everything into the spirit of web 2.0.

Other subjects are not important.

Geocities, I miss you!

District 9 rocks(no spoilers)!!

I just saw the movie district 9! And I was really impressed. In the middle, when all the action unfolds, alien weapons, millitary action, snipers, etc. I just felt like "Hey man I know this! This is half life 2!!"

The setting is very similar and although the movie has a fully different scope the action scenes are definitively intense.

Similarities:

- alien weapon technology

- evil business plans from mega corporations

- lonesome fighter allies with aliens

- intense fire fights with three parties(black market, military, aliens)

- supersized alien installation as background in most of the screens;)

Of course both stories made different points and especially district 9 is a very well told story about humanity(or the lack of it), but if the action starts, You will feel like a movie version of half life 2

SVN-script for examining repo usage

If you administrate more than one repository you should sometimes monitor the activity of your repositories, maybe some of them are not in use anymore.
For this you can use this nice perl-script, which will print out the number of commits in the last 180 days. You can also provide the number of days as argument.

#! /usr/bin/perl -w
# config area: put the path to your repositories in here!
$RepoPath="/opt/svn/";
$SVNPath="file://$RepoPath";
# only 1 parameter is needed: the number of days we will look for the commits
$TimeLimit=@ARGV[0];
# if user dont provide a number of days, we will default to 180 days
if ($TimeLimit eq ""){
 $TimeLimit=180;
}
# print out a help message, if someone gets lost..
if ($TimeLimit eq "-h" || $TimeLimit eq "--help" || $TimeLimit eq "-help"){
 print "Output the number of commits which occured in the last X days\n";
 print "repo_usage [days]\n";
 print "  days (optional, defaults to 180 days)\n  will provide the number of days\n  where commits will be count.\n";
 exit;
}

#.......here starts the main program.......
# first we will calculate the current date and the requested date
# after this we will build a string with the appropriate svn command
# at last step we will loop through the given directory and apply 
# our svn command for all repositories
$svncmd = "svn log -q -r{";
($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) =  localtime(time);
$year+=1900;
$mon+=1;
$svncmd .= "$year-$mon-$mday}:{";

($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) =  localtime(time-60 * 60 * 24 * $TimeLimit);
$year+=1900;
$mon+=1;
$svncmd .= "$year-$mon-$mday} $SVNPath";
# here we loop through all repositories
# as svn outputs the log messages with a separator line 
# we need to divide by 2 and svn starts with an additional separatorline
# thats why we need to subtract 1 line also
# to get the number of commits.
opendir(DIR, $RepoPath);
foreach (sort(readdir (DIR))){
  if ($_ ne "." && $_ ne ".." ){
    $output = `$svncmd$_ | wc -l`;
    $output = ($output-1)/2;
    print $_." :".$output."\n";
  }
}

introducing meta_tree

I finally got some time to implement a small amount of my meta_tree project.
meta_tree (always lowercase) is an NT-only implementation of my own file-meta-data managing-software.
It gives you the possibility to add meta-data ("tags") to your files.
It is aiming for people who are organizing their data heavily on folders and find it difficult to find and reorganize their structure to changing needs.
meta_tree will allow you to use tags on their files and search and reorganize their files depending on this tags.

Computer security in 10 years? dark, very dark!

This is an interesting interview with security-men Bruce Schneier and Marcus Ranum.
See here:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/12/security_in_ten.html

they paint a very dark future:
-there will be at least a real large scale disaster of misused computer security
-security concerns will lead to software-service companies
-these companies will try to lock-in their customers

All in all a very dark, but realistic view into the future..

why subversion really rocks

Subversion leaps giantly forward. Not only some opensource people are using it, now a lot of large companies try to make the switch. And I do not speak of some old fashioned CVS-users how just try new things: There are companies outside which will abandon their commercial version management systems for subversion.
I think the main reason for this is subversions model of representing version control:
At the end users are most comfortable with the most common computer metaphor:
the file(-system)
Nearly all users now how to copy, rename move and delete files. I think all developers know.
Subversion breaks not with this metaphor, it just enhances it with a new dimension: time. This makes the learning curve so shallow. You do not need anything to now about branches, tags or anything else. Just this: a commit saves your versions into the repository and creates a new revision an update will get changes from your coworkers into your workingcopy.
Of course there are voices against this simple model: some people think it is a problem that svn doesn't support native tags or branches but I think as long as you can map this usecases on your filesystem more people will understand what is happening. So if your branches/tags are just plain directories, it is much easier to grasp than an abstract concept for people who do not work day to day with version control.

a small script for searching in subversion repositories..

If you are using subversion for versioncontrol, you might have sometimes the need to search for a string in all files.. here is a small script for doing this without checking the whole repository out.
This script needs only 1 argument: the string to search for.
PLEASE NOTE! change first and second line to match your own Repository.

REPO="svn"
BASEURL="http://svn.collab.net/repos/"
SEARCH=$1
svn ls -R "${BASEURL}${REPO}/trunk/" | while read file;
do
   result=`expr match "$file" '.*/$' | cat`
   if [ $result == 0 ]; then  
     result=`svn cat "${BASEURL}${REPO}/trunk/$file" | grep $SEARCH | cat`
     if [ -n "$result" ]; then
       echo "${BASEURL}${REPO}/trunk/$file"
     fi
   fi
done