Fast forward to 2007. I’ve upgraded to a much more reliable, commercially available lighting system. Using a light that I’m not worried about breaking during the ride frees up my mind quite a bit (even while riding in the dark), and I found myself drawing comparisons between riding at night and building my business on a recent sojourn.

One of the trails in the local town forest has an extremely steep hill with some loose rock and lots of slippery oak leaves in the fall. I generally have to use my granny gear (24×32 for you gear ratio freaks) to get up this monster.

I’ve now ridden up this hill a few times during the day and a couple of times at night. Strangely, I’ve been more successful at getting to the top without dabbing during the night rides, and I rode it clean once at night. I let out some whoops after that one!

I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon and have decided that it has something to do with the restricted amount of visual input that’s available at night. My light is mounted on my helmet, and it tracks where my head goes. 85% of the time, I’m focused on a spot 3 to 6 feet in front of my wheel. Ten percent of the time is devoted to last-minute steering corrections necessitated by a submerged rock or root unearthing itself in front of my tire. The final 5% of the time, I’m looking further up the trail out of habit, then suddenly realizing that I can’t see much more than 30 feet ahead anyway.

While riding during the day, there are many other distractions: a log across the trail 200 feet ahead, a rut to avoid, the odd Sasquatch crashing through the underbrush (yep, they’re on the rebound in New Hampshire). Invariably, while I’m riding up the steep trail during the day, I see something else other than the immediate maneuvering problem to solve and that changes my pedal stroke, braking or steering just enough to cause a stall, a spin-out, or one of those Benny-Hill-falling-over-on-a-tricycle accidents.

I believe that this “riding at night” phenomenon applies very well to my business operations and perhaps to those of other businesses. One of my constant challenges while building and operating SourceHosting.net is resolving the nearly daily decision of “What should I work on next?” In a 24x7x365 SaaS operation like this, there’s always a tricky balancing act between important and urgent tasks.

To be continued…

Dear readers,

I participated in a CM Crossroads webinar on Wednesday that discussed new features appearing in Subversion 1.5. There are some excellent bits on the way, and the release is currently predicted for Q1 2008.

First and foremost, the new release will support Merge Tracking. This means that you will no longer have to manually keep track of which merges you’ve applied and which ones you’ve intentionally skipped. Recording this information becomes harder and harder the longer a branch lives.

The new Merge Tracking feature will also support querying of the merge history. I hope this functionality is similar to the cleartool findmerge command from IBM/Rational ClearCase. I began using CC in the early ’9os, and the findmerge command seemed like magic at the time. It was a huge time-saver when preparing complicated releases based on the work of multiple developers.

Subversion 1.5 also optionally launches a graphical resolver when a conflict is detected within a merge operation over a large number of files. This allows you to manage conflicts as they happen instead of waiting until the very end of the operation to go back and manually edit the markers within each problematic file.

WebDAV write-thru proxies is an interesting new feature for SaaS providers (i.e. SourceHosting.net!). It allows us to set up a number of repository proxies at various locations around the globe. Users point to the repository closest to them and perform read-only operations on it. When a write operation is performed, the proxy forwards the request to the master repository. Changes are mirrored back to the proxy for future read-only operations. I personally look forward to experimenting with this feature to increase performance for our world-wide user base.

One final important change also concerns service providers or those of you who operate your own repositories. If you use the FSFS repository format, it stores all revision files in one monolithic directory. The more revisions you have in your repository, the slower certain repository operations work. UNIX filesystems perform much better as trees of directories and files instead of one enormous directory with thousands of files in it. Subversion 1.5 supports a hierarchical directory tree repository format, removing the performance bottleneck as the number of revisions grows.

I hope that gives you a taste of what’s arriving in Subversion in 2008. For the latest details, keep an eye on the Subversion project status page.

Hello everyone and welcome to the first SourceHosting.blog posting! I plan to use this forum to dive into various topics of interest to folks who are involved in entrepreneurship, software development and methodology and/or release engineering. I hope you like it, and please feel free to post comments and suggestions.

And so we begin…

Some of you may have noticed that it is getting dark very early these days, especially here in the frozen wilds of New Hampshire. I believe that it’s pitch black around 4:40pm. For a dedicated endurance athlete like me, this does not leave a lot of time to go outside for a nice workout during the day, so as a resourceful sort, I’ve been using the after-dark hours as an acceptable time for recreation.

To give you some context, in the mid-90s several of my friends and I stumbled across the idea of combining mountain biking with darkness. One problem with that idea turned out to be that none of the lighting systems we had at the time (flashlights, laser pointers, matches, jar of fireflies, etc.) were very good at illuminating a narrow dirt track in the woods that was rife with roots, rocks and various eye-poking branches. As dedicated geeks and unable to find affordable illumination options in the market, we each created our own homebrew lighting system, typically consisting of the following:

• PVC plumbing tubes of various sizes and shapes
• 12V halogen bulbs, typically 20W each
• Silicone caulk to hold bulbs in place
• Lots of wire and solder
• 12V lead acid motorcycle battery (4+ Ah preferable)
• Bicycle seat bag with reinforcements to hold a 5lb+ battery in place while bouncing over aforementioned roots and rocks

It was generally difficult to get through a ride without laughing our heads off due to the novelty of riding in the woods at night. It was also difficult to get through a ride without one or more systems breaking down, forcing the unlucky cyclist to ride at the front of a group of folks with enough light to make up for the loss.

To be continued…