Organising a repository takes on several forms. The most obvious, and important, is how you organise the directory structure and name your files. Secondly, you need to make sure all the metadata used by your VCS is organised and effective. Finally, you must have some sort of process in place to ensure that these things are kept tidy and manageable.
Archive for August, 2007
Recently the 3rd year SE students have been asked to give presentations of their work in front of their peers. Last week we had five teams present and this week we will have the remaining four. Overall I was quite impressed with some of the presentations and I’d like to see the rest of the teams do as well. To that end, here are the top 5 things I think you can do to make sure your presentation is well received.
The login page has been changed to better reflect the theme for the site, rather than using the default Wordpress one. I found a nice plugin that takes care of the changes in a way that doesn’t require re-editing files after a system upgrade. You can find the plugin at the Binary Moon blog.
The Myth is the latest Jackie Chan action-adventure flick set in both modern and ancient China and India. Typical for a Jackie Chan film it features quite a few ridiculous, and often hilarious, fight scenes featuring stunts from the man himself. Overall the movie isn’t as good as his old works such as Project A, Drunken Master or Police Story but it’s still fairly entertaining.
Quite possibly one of the most convenient “new” computer technologies, USB disks are gradually starting to replace pretty much all other forms of file transfer for me. It’s quicker to put some files on a disk to take to uni than to send them via email (seriously slow upload speeds). It’s more convenient, and cheaper, to put anime series and the like on my iPod (30GB) rather than burning a bunch of DVDs. Hell, you can even boot off USB disks now!
The reason for this rant is today’s purchase of a 4GB USB pen drive. A snazzy little orange plastic and aluminium job. It’s made by some brand I’ve never heard of: Tomato Flash. I was actually ripped off as it was $98 but I knew this since I was buying it at uni, which isn’t exactly the most wallet-friendly place on Earth (interesting, considering the average student income). (I bought it because I wanted to get 4GB worth of anime from a student of mine!) Still, such a small disk which is almost the capacity of a DVD should last a while, and is a lot more convenient to carry around than an iPod with the connection cable.
I’ll probably buy a 16GB one once they get cheap enough since that should do away with the iPod completely for file transfers, leaving it free for music. 
After writing down some of the things I wanted to achieve for the future of this blog (for my 50th post) I decided I should probably make a start on them! I’d already modified Wordpress to make the “more” link (the link on the front page that says “Read more of this entry”) link to the simple page URL and not to an anchor that occurs after the opening paragraph. For my next mod I thought I should continue in this vein and alter the RSS (and Atom) feeds to include the full post text, rather than an excerpt. This turned out to be ridiculously easy!