News You Can Bruise

NewsBruiser CVS now has an implementation of one of the most-requested features in NewsBruiser history (I think I got two requests for it). You can now receive an email every single time someone posts a comment to an entry in your weblog. Go ahead, post a comment. I double-canid dare you. It's as good as spamming me, except that the world can see your shame.

Salon ran an article about CollabNet and I am quoted. Admittedly, all I'm quoted for is to set up Kevin's joke. It's a good joke!

Thing I've learned from talking to reporters: they will get you to talk their ear off and then use one sentence of what you said. It's not their fault. They're just bored. They're hoping you'll say "You know what I hate? Cute puppies!", because that's a story. Not your lame software whatever.

One more set of pictures: the tiny CollabNet Burrito Run series demonstrates the uncanny ability of Kevin, Beril, Josh Lucas, and myself (not shown) to go and buy burritos at the burrito place. It also serves as photographic evidence that the walls of the burrito place were not always that ugly orange color, as Josh has asserted.

Help! I'm trapped at the CollabNet retreat in Santa Cruz! I have to go on a corporate retreat and do work!

I know you want to beat down the doors to obtain the newly released Sourcecast 2.6! However, your enthusiasm is superfluous, as it is possible to obtain it without beating down a single door. It's got Project Tracker! (Also known by the sobriquet "Scarab".)

As always, press release also available in InfoWorld flavor.

Today at work I was in a meeting and I got really tired, stretching and yawning. Chris said "We're almost done." I said "I'm just practicing my jet lag."

The latest SourceCast site: java.net. (Random relevant news article)

You might remember that a while ago the CollabNet engineers went on a retreat. As inevitably happens at corporate retreats, we engaged in team-building activities. One of the activities was this one; we were divided into teams and our group had to come up with a pitch for a television show destined to become a cult classic. I've been holding on to my page of notes, meaning to mention my idea in a NYCB entry, and since I'm cleaning my room now's as good a time as any.

We audition for people with skills associated with how-to shows: cooking, home improvement, gardening, etc. Our ideal candidate is someone who thinks he or she is very good, but who by any objective measure is awful. We film a "pilot" with each candidate, which is broadcast as an episode of the actual show. For instance, we'd have a cooking show set where people would do their cooking show pilots. We'd have everything they might need, but they'd be done in by their lack of skills and/or imagination.

The show is awful, both in a cruel way and in a campy way. The audience watches both to vicariously enjoy the victim's incompetence and to secretly hope that they'll actually do well and put one over on us. However, we use deceptive editing to eliminate any aspect of that.

The other idea from our group I liked was Jason Brittain's "The Great Weiner Dog In The Sky Show", in which a troupe of trained dachshunds perform death-defying high-wire and trampoline acts.

Funny, Alphaman-esque screenshot from my day at work.

Kevin and I are on call all of today for an upgrade, so I'm going to his house and we're going to have an on call party. At any moment, we could be called upon to eat food or whoop it up.

I don't think I mentioned before that Jason Robbins left CollabNet to go back to teaching at UC Irvine. We were all very saddened by this development, and to get through the grieving process we (mainly stack) turned Jason's desk into a shrine. It had various Jason paraphenalia like the bag of potato chips he never opened, some notes for a presentation, etc. It lasted about two days.

Some call Jason the patron saint of UML users. I think that rather than being the patron saint of any particular thing, he should be canonized as the PatronSaint design pattern itself.

I put up 77 pictures from the CollabNet retreat back in February. The retreat was held in the lovely Marin mountains by the ocean, near old WWII Japanese-spotting bunkers and an old Nike missile site. Hence the dual themes of nature and old concrete.

Some samples:

• Strata pictures for my mother: 1 2 3 4
• Kevin curses the sun, which vows revenge.
• A nice little valley with an inlet to the ocean.
• Kevin and I spent much of our daytime free time trying make it to the bunker on top of the hill. This is as close as we got (we didn't have a whole lot of free time).
• Caution! Low voltage!
• A splendid sunset. Kind of showy if you ask me.
• I call this island "Sleeping Walrus Island".
• We kept a close eye on San Francisco.
• Remember the site of entrances to hell in and around the UK? Well, let me tell you that we have some pretty fine entrances to hell right here in the States. 1 2
• Kevin was bold enough to brave the entrance to hell.
• Here's Kevin in hell, which turns out to be pretty much as depicted in the old DOS game Doom.
• We also found hell's loading dock. Here I am in my tacky shirt at the loading dock.
• The food was generally pretty good.
• Another sunset picture to keep you on your toes.
• At one point the trail just stopped, due to having been washed away in a mudslide or something. Kevin and I collaborated on this daring depiction of the drop, a picture which makes it look like there is no drop whatsoever. Is it something about my camera? Every time I take a picture of a precarious drop, the resulting picture makes the drop look not that precarious at all.

This evening the CollabNet engineers, with various degrees of excitedness and resignation, are going to a weekend retreat in Marin. There will be meetings, hiking, and I don't know what all. Internet access will be hoarded jealously, and all NYCB entries for the duration will be pecked out on the Hiptop at dead of night, as I hide in my sleeping bag with a flashlight. The Subversion team is down from Chicago, and they brought guitars. I'm bringing my guitar. There will probably be twenty or thirty guitars at this thing.

• CollabNet Finalizes $13 Million Funding Round
• CollabNet Lands $13 Million From VCs And Oracle (InformationWeek)

What we at CollabNet have known for a long time: Never mind the economy, stupid -- it's the burritos

Hilarious (If you are a Mormon or ex-Mormon)! My aunt Anne's filk of "If You Could Hie To Kolob", "If You Could Hie To CollabNet".

CollabNet is briefly mentioned in the new book Living Networks. Jason met yesterday with Ross Dawson, the author, and got a copy of the book autographed to CollabNet as a whole ("To CollabNet: thanks for a magical weekend," joked Jason). One letter, perhaps, of the autograph text is to me (assuming we have autograph sharing).

The book has an associated weblog, of the "thoughtful technologist" genre popularized by Dan Gillmor and Tim O'Reilly. When will all books have associated weblogs, you ask? The answer is "never".

Hm, I just had a glimpse of a future in which a publisher's books automatically have associated weblogs, accessible from http://www.publisher.com/weblogs/[ISBN], lying dormant like so many IMDB discussion boards.

Last night Kevin went home and turned on his TV, and there was Brian. "I screamed," says Kevin. But no, Brian had not taken control of the world's satellite broadcast system; it was the Sundance Channel and Revolution OS was playing.

Speaking of which, tonight is the night Brian takes control of the world's satellite broadcast system, with an appearance on TechTV's The Screen Savers. Their hailing of Brian as an OpenOffice and Sunversion [sic] developer and "the founder of the open source movement" smells of #FFFF00 journalism, but TechTV once mentioned Segfault, so they're fine by me (tip: this no longer works).

Dan: "It's your error message! No one else would write 'Oh no! Couldn't find localization key!'"

Is this true?

Depressing bug report fragment:

[and it happens again, and again, and nothing else happens]

Papa's got a brand new bag, but Leonard's got a brand new T-shirt. It's courtesy of our new hosted site, Helix Community, which you may have heard of (you may have also heard of the similarly-named but entirely unrelated Helix Code). It has a little green DNA helix to the right of the logo which on inspection appears to be the DNA of some sea creature, possibly a mola mola. It is the second, I think, in the line of T-shirt editions of our hosted sites that I posess (the other being OpenOffice.org).

FHW: CollabNet turning Japanese, Korean.

Noodle lives!

I believe that this is the first time I have seen the phrase "a senior executive played electronic music he had written" in a news article.

I feel much better today.

The link going around CollabNet is this graph of OpenOffice compile dependencies. I think it would make a good technology graph for FreeCiv, although you'd have to get rid of that big bottleneck. Every sentence in this paragraph containes at least one BiCapitalized word.

I'm gonna leave pretty soon, since the machine I do development on has been taken down for the move and there's not much for me to do here. Stay well, do good work, and don't melt.

CollabNet is moving out of its San Francisco offices into a big office in scenic Brisbane (Brisbane, California, not Brisbane, Australia). All my stuff is packed (not that I have a whole lot of stuff) and on Monday it will be in the new office. Anything that means I spend less time in San Francisco is fine by me, although I don't understand how the BART shuttle there and back is supposed to work.

Brian reminds me of Andy. He has the Andy hair color and high school vintage hairstyle, and he turns the same shade of red when he's blushing or laughing. The trained Andy spotter will notice, however, that Andy, unlike Brian, has curly hair; and that Brian, unlike Andy, is a core Apache developer.

It's not just Sun; it's (among others) Dell, HP, Intel, Novell, Oracle, and Turbolinux, and this is the actual second round of financing. This is good news, although as I understand it, it would have been better news had I gotten my options before this happened.