Blog-O! (Posts about employment)

A long time ago, on a computer far far away…

Blake Winton — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 19:04:00 GMT

Six years ago, I started contributing to Mozilla.

Some VSS to Subversion notes.

Blake Winton — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 00:00:00 GMT

From various places around the net. (Hint: Google "vss to subversion".)

Lock-modify-unlock for Svn. Not that that's what I think we should bd doing, but if I've got to sell it, and that's a sticking point, at least I have an answer now.
Subversion is said to be much faster. "Our CC.NET build went from 3 minutes to 35 seconds for whole tree!!!!" I haven't looked up how much of our nightly build time is spent getting files from VSS, but I seem to remember it's not inconsiderable, and that step has been failing more often recently, so if we can make it both faster and more reliable, that'll be a good selling point.
Ankhsvn (Wow, what a horrible front page! If I were Greg Wilson, and grading them on it, they'ld get a 51%. I mean, it's there, so I'm not going to fail you, but for the love of Pete, hire a graphic designer, or look at the other two links in this entry, or something. Please.) or PushOK or VisualSVN for Visual Studio integration, but everyone seems to use TortoiseSvn. I wonder if there's something similar for OSX? Fortunately, Eclipse integration is good enough that I don't really mind falling back to the command line client when I have to, but still.
A presentation on "Replacing SourceSafe with SubVersion".
A Perl script (shudder) to migrate your VSS repository to svn.

And there you go. Management has been feeling the pain recently, and the Server Team Lead seems onboard with the idea, so we might actually make the change. Exciting times.

The times, they are a' changin...

Blake Winton — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 20:37:00 GMT

So my role at the company is changing slightly. Due to a manpower shortage, I'll be back doing some server development. Fortunately, I sort of know my way around the modules this time, and so I don't expect many surprises to crop up. So, to make my life both simpler and more difficult at the same time, I've decided to try out a new IDE. That's right, instead of using IDEA, I'll be giving Eclipse a trial run. It hasn't been too bad so far, but I'm still kind of getting it set up to do the things I need it to.

My three main motivations for using Eclipse on this project are:

I need to look at C++ code at the same time as Java code, since that's the only documentation we have for this project.
The savings of an IDEA license are not inconsiderable.
The co-worker who is working on it with me prefers Eclipse

Are they great reasons to switch? Maybe, maybe not, but they're good enough reasons to give it a try for a while. It helps that I have been using an older version of Eclipse for my Python development, so I'm a little familiar with it.

Looking for work?

Blake Winton — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 13:11:00 GMT

While I'm here posting up a storm, I should mention that my company could really use some good Java and C++ people, hopefully senior enough to be team leads on some upcoming projects, but I hear that we could use people of any and all skill levels. Well, perhaps not the most junior, unless they're really smart, and self-starters. If you are looking for a job, or know anyone who is, please contact us.

Oh, and if you wanted to know what it was like working here, feel free to email me.

Busy busy busy.

Blake Winton — Fri, 07 Feb 2003 22:22:00 GMT

So my company is on the virge of getting a bunch of new work, which means that I might be back on client development. But not quite yet, since there is a bunch of framework-ish stuff that I can do before that. A couple of new games, with the necessary changes to the base stuff to support them in as simple a way as possible. But before any of that, I get to make our demo project compile. That was a bigger pain than I thought it would be, since we renamed it from "PhantomGaming" to "PgCasino", necessating wide-sweeping changes in many source files, as well as different settings in the project files. But it compiles now, so in theory, on Monday, I can start implementing the new games. Should be fun.

Tool of The Man.

Blake Winton — Thu, 23 Jan 2003 20:24:00 GMT

I notice that Ian Stevens mentioned an application that the company he works at recently released.
Damn, what a sell-out! I can't wait to see what his next announcement will be.

Disclaimer: I work with Ian, and he knows that I don't actually think he's a sell-out.

Released!

Blake Winton — Thu, 16 Jan 2003 19:40:00 GMT

So the company I work for has just released our first product. It took a lot of time and effort to get there, but I think we did something good. The main part I've been working on these past few weeks was the "synchronized (offline) mode!" part. There are a lot of challenges to writing a Conduit for the Palm Desktop, some of which come from our framework. It was really designed to be used in an application, with Models, and Views, and asynchronous network calls. I'm trying to use it in a dll with no UI, no application, and synchronous messages. It's a bit of a mis-fit, but it mostly works.