The World According to Marc

  • Blogeting?

    2 Comments

    As a customer of Sourcegear (Vault) and Fog Creek (FogBugz), I was thinking today about how much blogs are influencing my purchasing decisions. I don't think we can call it "Marketing", its more like "Blogeting".

    In the past I would learn about new products either from a friend or by seeing an advertisement. My decision to purchase was based almost exclusively on the demo experience. I'm sure that I missed out on a lot of great products simply because I didn't "get it" when I played with their demonstration product. If they didn't hook me within 10 minutes I moved on without so much as a second thought.

    But with these two products something different occurred; I learned about them from the owner's personal blog (Eric Sink of Sourcegear and Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek). This changed the entire sales paradigm by injecting a personal connection not found in normal business relationships. I found I cared more about them, their company, and their products. I was no longer dealing with "Faceless Company X" but a real human being. I was buying a product from someone that I knew, I liked, and wanted to be involved with.

    This connection also effected my demo experience. Although in both cases I found the initial releases didn't fit me, I didn't walk away. This was because I wanted to like their products. I liked them so much, how could I not? So I stuck around and eventually purchased each product when it did fit my needs (I purchased Vault at 1.1 and FogBugz at 3.0). And since I had watched the product grow and became part of the community around the product, I can't see me ever leaving.

    I'm a customer for life and that means a lot in today's market. Thanks guys.

  • view

    2 Comments

    As I said before, I really like Sourcegear's Vault. Well I finally put my money where my mouth is and purchased it today. Now I just need to start building the repository.

    I just love new toys. :)

  • Vault 1.1

    1 Comment
    This past week I've spent some time playing around with the 1.1 preview for Sourcegear's Vault source control system. After a few minutes I was impressed, after a few days I am in love with it. 
     
    A little background on Vault might be in order. Vault is a full features Source Control system that handles both CVS and VSS versioning styles. It is also their answer for replacing Visual SourceSafe. They make this really easy by offering a complete migration tool. It was written using C# and uses ASP.NET Web Services to connect to its SQL Server database. All-in-all, very cool product.
     
    The single most important improvement over 1.0 is the integration with FogBUGZ. Although other SCC providers can be integrated, Sourcegear is the only provider to build their implementation directly into the product. Most other implementations are simply hacks devised by FogBUGZ users to parse comments for the bug#. But with Vault you get a dedicated field for this purpose, making it a lot less error prone.
     
    Integration with FogBUGZ gives Vault an almost complete answer to the Borland StarTeam Task feature (my all time favorite SCC feature). Tasks allow you to put any collection of changes into a single context. For example, you could have a task "Fix error when printing" and every checkout and checkin would happen within the context of that task. This let you know what code was changed for any given task. Now I can achieve similar results with a combination of Vault & FogBUGZ. So when you want to know exactly what was changed to fix your printing error, just look at FogBUGZ and it will list the files (you can even run a diff against them from your browser).
     
    Why almost complete? It is still missing one key aspect of a task based system. In a true task based system, checkouts should be related to a task (not just the checkin). This is only a minor issue for me and if you use a CVS style of versioning then it isn't an issue at all (being that you don't checkout in the first place).
     
    Most of the other changes seem are what you would expect from a point release. There are some noticeable performance improvements and I'm told the Visual SourceSafe import has improved a lot. There is also a new feature called Keyword Expansion but I have no earthy idea what that means.

  • MapPoint Annoyance

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     <pointless rant>
     
    In New England we have this thing called a rotary (you might know it as a Traffic Circle). Unfortunately MapPoint has forgotten that New England is no longer part of the British Empire. I say this because they insist on referring to a "rotary" as a "roundabout"; something you might find at Big Ben but certainly not on Cape Code. And for whatever reason, this drives me out of my mind.
     
    I know I'm being ridiculous and petty. I know it really doesn't matter. But as a full fledged Masshole, it is my duty to be ridiculous and petty.
     
    Maybe I should top of my petrol, toss my gear lever into drive, and speed down the motorway for a bit. Maybe I'll stop at a flyover, grab a pint out of the boot, and spend some time cooling off.
     
    </pointless rant>
     
    On different note, it is hot here today. Damn hot. And genius that I am, I've yet to pull the A/C out of the attic. Sigh....

  • MSN 6

    3 Comments

    I downloaded MSN 6 yesterday and aside from some issues signing in, it seems to work great.

    My only gripe is that they still have not added my favorite ICQ feature; the ability set your status (offline, busy, available, etc) for each person individually. I used this feature a lot in ICQ so that I wouldn't get interrupted by friends and family while working. But I also want to remain online so I can be seen by the rest of my team who do need to be able to interrupt me on occasion.

    Without this feature, as soon as I go online I get assaulted by 100 IMs from everyone I've ever met in my life. :-)

  • Source Selector Utility

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    Many people are forced to use multiple source code control systems on a single PC. For example, I do a lot of side projects that are stored in CVS. I have another project that has some VB code stored in PerForce. And I'm working on a new project that will likely be using SourceGear's Vault product.

    On top of those three systems, I'm a zealot on Source Control and try just about every product that comes out. This means that I often have 5-10 different systems installed at the same time.

    For some reason, Visual Studio only supports a single SCC provider called the "default" provider. This always struck me as odd because it implies that there can be "non-default" providers. Well, there can, you just can't use them. :--)

    The fix has always been to edit the registry. Or if you are like me you would create a bunch of .reg files to make the edits a bit quicker. This works but is a real pain in the butt.

    But thanks to Tor over at Subway (an SCC connection to Subversion), I now have a neat utility called SourceSelect.exe that allows me to switch the provider. This just made my life a lot easier.

  • Visual Studio .NET 2003

    1 Comment

    So, I'm installing Visual Studio .NET 2003 right now. Based on my prior experience with this installation, I can plan on working by Friday.... Maybe...

    I'm going to go to my corner and whimper in pain for a few hours. <sigh>

  • Mumbly-peg

    9 Comments
    There is a rather amusing post over at Arcadian Del Sol (sort of a blog for gamers). The post deals with violence in video games and how previous generations were not lacking in violet games themselves. But what really got me was "Membly-peg":
     
    If you aren't familiar, here is a summary: Mumbly-peg is a game where you throw a knife in the dirt near the outside edge of someone's shoe. They move their foot to the knife, pick it up, and do the same to you - as the game proceeds, your feet get further and further apart until someone falls down; last man standing is the winner. My father explained the one wrinkle in the rule set as follows: "you had to be careful not to stab the other guy in the foot because if you do, you lose."

    Lets make sure we all understand this: If you are stabbed in the foot, you are the winner of the game. Victory is yours; celebrate and revel in it on your way to the emergency room.

    I was never very athletic as a child but if winning had meant having a screw driver impaled into my big toe I think I would have been more ok with loosing.

    Then I got to thinking, can you imagine if this game gone professional?

       Reporter: Well Champ, you have just won the Mumbly-peg World Series for the 8th year in a row. To what do you attribute your success?

       Champ: Good aim, solid balance, and really fat feet.