Monroe County to get Wireless Internet

This is exciting although details are light, it's just exciting that we are talking about it here in our home county.  Maggy Brooks announced last night during her State of the County address that there was a partnership with Frontier to provide a wireless network for the county.

That is why I am pleased to announce that Monroe County is working with Frontier to develop a wireless internet network that will serve significant portions of Greece, Pittsford and the City of Rochester…as well as portions of the surrounding towns by the end of the year.

In addition, Frontier has also agreed to develop free wireless internet zones within this network…a critical step in our County’s efforts to bridge the digital divide.

We anticipate this wireless network will continue to expand throughout other parts of the County...and eventually become a full-scale, wireless network to serve all County residents.

Our new partnership with Frontier is a win for our taxpayers, and a win for our community. The new network will be created at no cost to taxpayers, and will soon allow our community to reap the benefits of wireless access to the information superhighway.

The loss of Jim Gray is Amazon's gain

Last weekend we learned of the disappearance of Jim Gray, a well respected database architect for Microsoft.  The news was taken pretty hard around the blogosphere.  We learned that the Coast Guard called off the search on Thursday.

I am not sure who took the satellite imagery but satellite imagery was uploaded to Amazon's Mechanical Turk for it's member to analyze.  This was/is an absolutely great idea.  Let the community that cares poor over the imagery and help in the search.

My wife and I spent and hour on Saturday going through about a hundred or so images...we flagged about a dozen or so as needs further review.  I spent another half an hour going through another few dozen last night.

But each time I went I also looked at some of the other paying Turks.  Then I got to wondering how much of Amazon's generousity of hosting and using Mechanical Turk was for the moral good and how much of it was a easy way to get some easy viral marketing of their system again.  Cause let's be honest Mechanical Turk hasn't been talked about much since it came out a couple of years ago.  But since they started this Mechanical Turk links are all I see on everyone's blog.

I know I probably sound morbid in bringing this up, but my curiosity got the better of me and I want to know how much of this is marketing and how much of it is pure heart felt generosity.

I don't think any less of Amazon, I actually have more respect for them for stepping up to the plate and helping out.  But I am sure at the end of the day their return for helping out was worth all the trouble.  But in the end maybe, just maybe the real good will be we find Jim alive and well on adrift boat out at sea.

What are your thoughts?

Anyone want Chicken Wing Sushi for Super Bowl?

Allison over at SushiDay took my suggestion for a chicken wing roll, that I made once last month, and ran with it and made her own for a post on her site.   Wow they look good.

I had originally tried this roll one day when my mom had bought pizza and wings for the boys and I was getting tired of the same old crab and salmon rolls I was making that day. 

I took a medium wing and some blue cheese and rolled them together.

I was totally surprised at how good it tasted.

I eventually suggested it to Allison on one of her other fine Sushi posts and she loved the idea and asked me if she could use it in an upcoming post. 

Makes total sense that she posted it today.  Instead of ordering pizza and wings tonight I am making sushi tonight.  Although I am not making the chicken wing roll I am planning on buying some Tuna, Salmon, Crab and Shrimp for a Smorgus borg of sushi nirvana.

Case sensitivity, SVN and Windows is a recipe for disaster

We are working on a project at work that has four developers working against the SVN repository in Visual Studio.NET 2005.  The other day I had to create a new project in the solution.  I got it all set up and committed the project into the repository using Ankh, great.  I started to close down for the day and in explorer I noticed that there were still files that were flagged that they needed to be committed.  Looking at it, it was the project file that needed to be committed. So I right clicked and committed it with Tortoise.

Yesterday another developer was trying to checkout the repository to his computer and they ran into an error trying to load the project I had committed.  I was roughly told that it was my project file was missing.  They were able to work around it because the project I committed wasn't needed to work on what they needed.  So I took note of it and would look into it when I had a chance.

Fast forward to this morning.  Based on the feedback I had been given I went into explorer to see if the project file was indeed the one that needed to be added to the repository.  But it showed that it was already committed.  Hmm...so I went to the developer and asked him to forward me the error messages he was getting when updating.

Here was ankh's message:

NSvn.Core.SvnClientException:
Failed to add file '[Path to file]\Web.config': object of the same name already exists
at NSvn.Core.Client.Update(String[] paths, Revision revision, Recurse recurse, Boolean ignoreExternals) in d:\tmp\build-2\src\nsvn.core\client.cpp:line 356
at Ankh.Commands.UpdateItem.UpdateRunner.Work(IContext context) in D:\tmp\build-2\src\Ankh\Commands\UpdateItemCommand.cs:line 131
at Ankh.ProgressRunner.Run() in D:\tmp\build-2\src\Ankh\ProgressRunner.cs:line 95


Same file conflict?  That didn't make any sense.  We started speculating.  I run different a different version of Tortoise on my machine then everyone else and thus my client version of Subversion is newer then the server and everyone else.  But I've been running like this for weeks with no problems up to this point.

I have the developer try checking out a project that only I worked on for another client in the past couple of days.  He said he had no problems getting those files.

He then went back and tried to update the original problem project from Tortoise and pasted the errors he got:

Error: In directory '[Directory Path Specified]'
Error: Can't copy '[Path Specified]\.svn\tmp\text-base\web.config.svn-base' to '[Path specified]\web.config.tmp': The system cannot find the file specified.


I went and googled for "Can't copy '': The system cannot find the file specified." the results led me to this explaination.


There are actually 2 different files in the repository whose names differ only in case. This cannot work on a Windows checkout, because the Windows file system is not case-sensitive. It is likely that one of the files got added by mistake, so you need to find out which one, make sure there are no changes committed to the wrong file, then delete it.

I went to our Trac site and looked at the source files and sure enough there was web.config and Web.config files listed.  Going back to Visual Studio.Net and Explorer I noticed that Visual Studio.NET had the Web.config and Explorer had the web.config. 

Here is the solution I came up with, there's probably a better way of doing this and I'd love to hear about them in the comments but this solution did work.  I made a backup of the Web.config file and then I deleted the Web.config in VS.NET and committed my changes. Looking in Trac again I see that I am down to just web.config in the repository.  I figure at this point I can just update and use that single version of web.config but I got the same error as above.

I close Visual Studio and open up Tortoises Repository Browser and I delete web.config. I then delete the whole project folder out of explorer (you have to do this because the svn folders have the web.config still listed in it's cache and you'll get the same errors). 

After the folder had been deleted I reopened Visual Studio.NET and opened the solution.  After I updated the solution from the repository I added my backed up copy of web.config (with the proper case that I am looking for) into the project and committed it.  Everything now had the right case, Visual Studio, Explorer and trac (which is the SVN Repository version). 

I went to the other developers and after they committed all the work they were doing they closed out of Visual Studio. Deleted the problem project folder in Explorer.  Reopened the solution in VS and updated and refreshed the project with a now working copy.

So make sure if you're working with a SVN client in Windows against a Linux based SVN repository that you have the same case throughout or you'll need to fix it.  And so far the only way to fix it is a manual process.

St. John's Signage Case study

In my late night Google searching tonight I found a case study from ASI-Modulex the sign makers that we worked with a few years ago when we rebranded St. John's Universities interior and exterior wayfinding signs around campus.

"In partnership with BrandLogic, hundreds of directional decision points were identified across the two campuses then analyzed to create a wayfinding solution that improved the efficiency of the campus navigation."

I can only imagine the organization and planning that was needed to figure out the need, requirements and the plan to replace every single sign on campus.  If you walk onto the campus you'll see what a momentous task this was.

“ASI-Modulex worked successfully with BrandLogic to implement the new logo design and wayfinding analysis for St. John’s University.”
Wynn Medinger
CEO, Creative Director
BrandLogic

In the end I think I only helped out by creating a Word template that was used by the Staff and Faculty to create their name plate for a slide in sign next to their door. Meaning they would use the Word template to print their name and title and the template would control the placement and font treatment. I thought this was it at first but this is a more permanent sign. Next time I go up to St. John's (possibly next month) I'll see if I can spot one of those name plate signs.

You can see BrandLogic's case study of the signs here.  The mention of the signs is on the last slide and is part of the overall rebranding that we provided.