Archive for February, 2007

02-27-2007

How To Simplify WordPress Upgrades Using Subversion

The WordPress Codex documentation site has a very handy page on Installing/Updating WordPress with Subversion. For anyone who maintains a WordPress blog, especially if you maintain more than one, it makes the process of upgrading a snap.

If you have command-line access to your web server, and if your server has the subversion (svn) client installed, you can take advantage of the easiest possible WordPress installations and updates. svn is a version control system designed primarily for developers, but also useful for end-users who just want an easy way to install and update software.

Posted by Matt in lifehacks, tech | 2 Comments »

02-21-2007

3GB of Free Music From 2007 SXSW Artists

My friend Jeremy just sent me the link to the 2007 bittorrent of South By Southwest music from various artists performing at this year’s music festival. It works out to be just over 3GB of free music. It’s a lot to weed through, but there are always some gems to be discovered. I previously posted some tips for making it through all the music in time for SXSW.

It’s a good idea to check the official SXSW site from time to time because they usually post another batch of additional music, as the festival approaches. And a batch of trailers for the film festival should be posted soon too.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

Posted by Matt in Austin, music, tech | No Comments »

02-14-2007

Do-It-Yourself Tendencies and Why Software is Hard

Salon has an interview with Scott Rosenberg about his new book, Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software. The book details the long development process of the Chandler open source software project.

In the interview, Rosenberg includes a quote that explains a phenomenon I’ve seen numerous times in my years in I.T., as programmers build their own software rather than learning to use off-the-shelf tools:

And programmers, as I quote Larry Constantine in my book, programmers are programmers because they like to code — given a choice between learning someone else’s code and just sitting down and writing their own, they will always do the latter. And the programmer who says, it will be faster for me to write it, rather than to learn it, is usually correct. Except that what he will write, most likely, is something that will work but will not have its rough edges worked out, will not have the benefits of a piece of software that has actually been used for a few years, where the bugs have been found and the users have given feedback and have helped you figure out where the problems are. So what they will often be handing you at the end of that I-can-do-it-faster-myself thing is something that works, but that is kind of a mess in certain ways. Whereas the thing that you were going to pull off the shelf, maybe it will take the programmers a while to learn it, but once they learn it enough to hook it up to this project you are creating, what they are hooking up will probably have a lot fewer problems.

Personally, I usually find it easier to learn how to use someone else’s software than to build my own. That’s part of why I’m a big fan of open source tools like PmWiki, Drupal, and WordPress. With them, I’m able to be more productive than I ever would if I had to design, code, test, and implement everything from scratch.

Posted by Matt in business, tech | 1 Comment »