Pay day
Tomorrow is the end of our sixth week at Eurocopter and our first pay day. This will be good because we have been living on a tight budget for the last few weeks, we were given an advance last month but that barely covered the rent so this month we will have some money left over. We might actually be able to go out for a drink.
As a result of this, I haven’t really done anything since my last post. I have spent the weekends in, watching TV. Boring I know, but free. I did have the media server and my Xbox shipped over last week. I installed Windows Home Server on it, upgrading from XP. I have to say that it is a really good operating system. It was Tom who recommended I get it as he has been using one for some time. The storage pool is a great idea and works really well. It is very easy to add new hard drives as space runs out or old ones die and then to remove the older ones from the pool. It is all managed for you, you just make new shared folders, set the permissions and WHS handles the rest. A useful feature is also folder duplication. This can be enabled on each share individually and ensures that everything in it is always on at least 2 separate drives in case of failure.
I was thinking about my FYP yesterday, while it might be a bit early to start anything properly, I am thinking of a few ideas for what I want to do. My problem is that I am not sure what is expected. I don’t want to do something massively over the top that takes a long time and then doesn’t work properly because it was too ambitious. On the other I don’t want to go too small and lose marks because it wasn’t ambitious enough. I was thinking about using some kind of version control though, to protect me from myself more that anything. I have lost count of the number of times I have done something, then changed my mind and deleted it all, then changed my mind again but it is too late. I also have several copies of some programs where I have changed my mind about what I was going to do, made a backup of it and worked on. The comes the problem of maintaining 2 copies of the same program. A few months down the line, I come back to it and have no clue what I was doing or why there is 2 copies of the same program, what the differences are etc. I am really my own worst enemy. As to which version control system to use, I am learning towards Subversion, I have looked at several different ones and it seems like it will do everything while be easy to use. TortoiseSVN should help there. Coupled with my new WHS server, I can store the repositories on there and enable folder duplication.
All this however, will have to wait, because if my wages do clear tomorrow I should think this weekend will be spent in a Bier Garten.
Glad the WHS is going ok. Your the second person I have made see the light that is WHS! It really is awesome though!
I use TortoiseSVN its quite easy to use! Not much experience on the back end of it though.. Does it save pervious versions of files then?
The back end is simple enough to set up, once you have the server running, which you can install as a service on Windows. running svnadmin create path_to_file will make a repository, if this is the same folder that the service is looking at then it will work straight off. A few minor edits to the config files to set permissions and your all set.
As for saving, there is 1 file that represents an entire revision, named after it’s number. This has only the changes from the previous revision, and even then if you only change part of the file then only the new part will be saved, not the whole file. This makes it really small. If you added a new 100mb file that revision file would be 100mb but if you never changed none of the ones after it would be.
I think that is how it works anyway.