After spending a good amount of time filling everything out, I submitted the application. Later on in the day I received this response:

Dear Mark Shead,

Thank you for your interest in becoming an Open Directory Project editor!
Although we would like you to join us as a volunteer editor, you have
chosen a category that is already well represented, or is broader than
we typically assign to a new editor. We would encourage you to re-apply
for a category that has fewer editors or is smaller in scope, in order
to increase your chances of being accepted.

Feel free to reapply by submitting an application in another area.
If you wish to re-apply, you must fill out another application.
Please do not reply to this email.

Regards,
The Open Directory Project

Additional reviewer comments:

Now I understand if they only want you to be an editor of a small category at first. When I signed up, I tried to use a sub category, but the only subcategory was for consultants, and I wasn’t really interested in doing that.

If they really don’t want people to apply for these categories, they shouldn’t put links to sign up as an editor at the bottom. If they had of had a suggestion of a different category to try that would at least show that there was some level of thought on their side of things. Just saying “keep applying and maybe we’ll eventually let you in” seems like it has a good chance of just wasting my time.

If you want good editors, you need to make sure you aren’t wasting their time. Good editors are more likely to be busy individuals who want to contribute to the community. Bad editors are more likely to be people who will just keep applying over and over again until someone eventually lets them in as an editor.

Maybe I’ll try signing up as an editor again someday if I find a category that I’m interested in, but at this point I think DMOZ may be shooting themselves in the foot by asking for people to sign up as editors for a category and then telling them “no you can’t edit this category”.

FeedFetcher feedFetcher = new HttpURLFeedFetcher();
feedFetcher.setUserAgent(\"User Agent 007\");
SyndFeed feed = null;
feedURL = new URL(rssUrl);
feed = feedFetcher.retrieveFeed(feedURL);
List entries = feed.getEntries();

To change the user agent you must use the InfoCache as shown:

FeedFetcherCache feedInfoCache = HashMapFeedInfoCache.getInstance();
FeedFetcher feedFetcher = new HttpURLFeedFetcher(feedInfoCache);
feedFetcher.setUserAgent(\"User Agent 007\");
SyndFeed feed = null;
feedURL = new URL(rssUrl);
feed = feedFetcher.retrieveFeed(feedURL);
List entries = feed.getEntries();

Otherwise the User agent is set to “Java/1.5.0_04″. This is odd because the default client for Rome is “Rome Client (http://tinyurl.com/64t5n) Ver: 0.7″. It seems like an attempt to change the user agent without having a HashMapFeedInfoCache will result in changing the user agent, but somehow it reverts to “Java/1.5.0_04″ instead of whatever you set it to.

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.

— Thomas Edison

This is what is so facinating about programming. Your “pile of junk” consists of digital assest instead of physical matterial, so the raw materials are not limited by the normal laws of supply and demand. In software, you are limited only by your imagination.

If most of your queries on search engines return hundreds or thousands of results, then it probably doesn’t matter who has the biggest index. As long as Google and Yahoo get the popular pages, you’ll most likely find what you are looking for. If you get a bunch of results from your search you are probably aren’t looking for a specific document on the web, so it doesn’t matter which page you get as long as it has the information you are after.

Most internet users fall in the above category. I tend to find that many of my searches return less than 20 results and sometimes only 2 or 3 or even 0. For people like me the number of pages searched is much more important. In fact for those types of searches the method used to order the results (determine the relevancy) isn’t really important. With a small number of pages, it is easy to scan through the list and find the most relevant entry.

Today I was working on a piece of equipment and it started giving me a less than helpful error message. I typed the manufacturer (in quotes) and the error message (also in quotes) into Google hoping to find out how to fix my problem. There were zero results. I tried it on Yahoo and got the same thing. After poking around in some forums I was able to find a post that described the problem on a page that was missing from both Yahoo and Google’s databases. The post contained all the phrases that I had searched for it just wasn’t in either of the search engine’s indexes.

Five years ago I taught a community college class about the internet. I used Geocities to put up the tests, class outline, etc. Today I tried search for:
site:geocities "juco internet class"
In Google I get zero results. With Yahoo I get a single result that links to the page I was searching for.

I’m sure that there are other items that I could find with Google that won’t show up in Yahoo. I’m not trying to say one engine is better than the other. The point is that the index size does matter if you are looking for a specific document. If Yahoo decides that they are going to maintain a larger index than Google, then there are going to be pages that can be found in the Yahoo index, but not in Google’s. If you are looking for one of these pages then size is very important.

The backup script I use is run every night as part of a cron job. Each morning I get an email telling me if everything went ok or not. Here is a list of what I want to happen with each backup:

1. Dump all the data out of the repository
2. Name the file with a timedate stamp in the filename. Something like YYYYMMDD-HHMM will work.
3. gzip the file to save space
4. Move a copy of the file to another server using scp

1. Pull the zipped file back down from the remote server
2. Unzip it.
3. Create a new repository
4. Load all of my content into the new repository
5. Checkout a copy of trunk into a directory
6. Cleanup

Dumping Subversion repo /var/svn to my_backup-20050921-0100...
Backing up through revision 340...
	
Compressing dump file...
	
Created /home/admin/backups/my_backup-20050921-0100.gz
	
my_backup-20050921-0100.gz transfered to my.server.com
	
---------------------------------------
Testing Backup
---------------------------------------
Downloading my_backup-20050921-0100.gz from my.server.com
Unzipping my_backup-20050921-0100.gz
Creating test repository
Loading repository
Checking out repository
Cleaning up

If you want to use this on Windows, you’ll need to make a few changes. First the way we generate the time and datestamp for the file name will need changed. You’ll probably want to use something other than scp and gzip as well.

Here is the script. I hope some people find it useful.


my $svn_repo = “/var/svn”;
my $bkup_dir = “/home/backup_user/backups”;
my $bkup_file = “my_backup-”;
my $tmp_dir = “/home/backup_user/tmp”;
my $bkup_svr = “my.backup.com”;
my $bkup_svr_login = “backup”;

#Test Backup
print “\n—————————————\n”;
print “Testing Backup”;
print “\n—————————————\n”;
print “Downloading $bkup_file.gz from $bkup_svr\n”;
print `scp $bkup_svr_login\@$bkup_svr:/home/backup/$bkup_file.gz $tmp_dir/`;
print “Unzipping $bkup_file.gz\n”;
print `gunzip $tmp_dir/$bkup_file.gz`;
print “Creating test repository\n”;
print `svnadmin create $tmp_dir/test_repo`;
print “Loading repository\n”;
print `svnadmin -q load $tmp_dir/test_repo < $tmp_dir/$bkup_file`;
print “Checking out repository\n”;
print `svn -q co file://$tmp_dir/test_repo $tmp_dir/test_checkout`;
print “Cleaning up\n”;
print `rm -f $tmp_dir/$bkup_file`;
print `rm -rf $tmp_dir/test_checkout`;
print `rm -rf $tmp_dir/test_repo`;


Brett Porter - Storing your Maven Repository in CVS/Subversion
It’s pretty rough, but is a working prototype that makes Maven 1.1/2.0 downloads a checkout/update, and deploy is an add/commit. I see this would be useful for snapshot repositories, where you could use one filename instead of transforming the version, so getting the latest would literally be an svn update.

If you are using Subversion with Apache, it is pretty easy to achieve most of this. The problem that I’m faced with is the fact that Maven can’t handle repositories that use SSL and a login.

Currently, I’m using a separate server to host our Maven repository because the Subversion server is using SSL. I hope that Maven will eventually come up with a way to work around this, but right now it looks like most of their efforts are being spent on Maven 2.

Musings of a Software Development Manager » Blog Archive » CruiseControl Warnings
I get about 48 email messages from Cruisecontrol each day for one of our projects. This is not something I’m proud of since this situation has existed for at least 4 weeks now, we’ve had a broken build. The problem stems from some nasty functional tests that no one wants to investigate and we’ve sort of let our process slip.

There is a simple solution to this. Turn off the tests that are failing. People’s first reaction to this is “Oh no, we can’t turn off the tests! They indicate that something is wrong. Eventually we’ll have time to fix it.”

If you are actually going to fix it go ahead, but if something has been broken for more than a week, chances are no one is going to fix it any time soon. You should turn it off so it starts building without errors again.

Why is this better? If your team gets 10 emails each day saying that something is broken, they are going to ignore it. No one is really responsible for all of the problems, so no individual really works on fixing it. However, if the build is working correctly and someone checks in code that breaks a unit test and everyone gets and email, that person is probably going to try to fix it because it shows that he is responsible for the problem.

Think of it another way. Lets say I have 3 smoke alarms, 1 gas alarm, 1 CO2 alarm, and a flooded basement alarm in my house and they all sound pretty much the same. Now lets say that the flooded basement alarm goes off and I decide that it isn’t important enough to fix the cause…. So I just let the alarm go off. How likely do you think I am to notice if another alarm goes off once I get used to ignoring the first alarm.

If I’m not going to fix the problem, the best thing I can do is disable the flooded basement alarm until I have a chance to fix it. After a week of ignoring the alarm and nothing bad happening, I’m not suddenly notice it and decide I should do something about it.

One of the first things I did when I started at my current job, is go through and renamed every test that failed our automatic build process as “pending”. By the time the test would run, I had disabled about 2/3 of the tests. Since they were failing we ignored them anyway, so marking them as pending didn’t change anything. Before they were turned off, it would have been impossible to notice if one of the tests that were previously working broke because of a change.

Over time we’ve turned most of the pending tests back on one at a time as we’ve had more time to fix the code or fix the test.

When your tests fail, it should be unusual. I setup our builds to break if any test fails. I’ve got a lava lamp above my cubicle and everyone in the company know what it means. If something breaks people start asking the developers about it until it gets fixed.

While Kathy makes some excellent points, I don’t think that the cooking school is going to prepare her daughter as well as attending a university. It doesn’t matter what she studies. That is the whole point of a liberal arts education–you don’t just study your field of interest. Places like that are known as vocational schools.

Go to college and pick something you enjoy studying. You are going to spend 4 years developing yourself as a person. If you think the facts you learn in an accounting class to make you attractive to an employer in 10 to 15 years, you’re going to be very disappointed.

export CLICOLOR=true

will turn on color. If you want to enable this for everyone, you could do that by putting it in /etc/profile.

Why Subversion Rocks
In a recent study I performed on my development groups process improvement over the past 5 years, we found that we had cut the cost of managing our build and release process by approximately 92% by incorporating Subversion and related tools like CruiseControl, ViewCVS, and other custom software (and major process changes that accompany them) to integrate and automate our release management processes.