In a previous entry I spoke negatively about Visual SourceSafe 2005, in particular regarding the internet functionality (functionality that promises the HTTP transport accessibility of a limited number of source control options, in a client/server fashion. This is critical if you want to use SourceSafe functionality over a firewalled connection, or a limited bandwidth connection, and brings a limited amount of SourceOffSite-like functionality to the vanilla SourceSafe).

While my remarks about the server-side configuration of this functionality still stand (it's a terrible setup that fails on anything but a clean OS install), I finally took a few moments and figured out why I couldn't do source control operations with the internet plug-in (e.g. it was reverting to SMB, thrwarting my ability to get some throughput metrics) - The problem was that I had failed to select the Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (internet) plug-in as the current plug-in provider. After setting that, the internet option works smoothly. I'll have an entry about the results of that soon.

To explain how this confusion could happen, consider how you setup a connection in Visual Studio 2005 (which is the only place where this remote option works).

First, or so it appears, you choose which technique you'll connect with for this new source database entry.

Then you tell it where to find the web service, and what database for the web service to use.

Don't worry about that UNC path there - the help tells us...

Note: Because the Web service can serve multiple databases, you must specify the known path of the Visual SourceSafe database. You do not need local access to that path, it is used by the Visual SourceSafe Web Service to communicate with the database.

Great! Easy peasie!

Not quite. Everytime I tried open the new connection, it was working -- but then I looked on the other "machine" (a virtual machine) and noticed all of the SMB connections from my machine. That tricky devil was opening the database the old fashioned way. So I blocked network access to the share (still allowing it locally), trying to force it to use the internet connectivity that it appeared that I was configuring, to get this error when trying to add an internet database.

Of course this is nonsense - it isn't the web service that's having the problem, as the web service on the remote PC can access the files fine. The problem is that the SourceSafe plug-in on my machine was trying to open the files through the file share using old-style SMB.

Finally I came across the provider setting, choosing..

Now the functionality works. On the bright side the same SourceSafe database entry can be used for both SMB and internet connectivity, switching the plug-in depending upon connection, however it would have been nice if the brain-dead configuration and help were a little more helpful with this.

Motion activated lights are a fantastic way to see nocturnal creatures on the prowl.

Last night, for instance, the lights triggered. My wife looked out to see a skunk on our patio, casually partaking of some delicious French bread (when we have fresh bread I often toss the leftovers out back. Between the birds and the nighttime creatures it's gone by morning, and it's infrequent enough to be unanticipated and non-habit forming for the neighbourhood friends).

Sensing an opportunity to educate our awake-far-too-late Sr. Toddler daughter a bit, I brought her over to look out at the skunk. She burst out crying.

"My toys are outside! Bring my toys in! My toys!" (there was a little plastic bicycle, and a couple of toy gardening implements outside)

After finally getting her to settle down a bit, I got her to tell me what was upsetting her.

"The skunk is going to poop on my toys!"

I took a few moments today and rolled out some improvements to yaflaColor.

• There are 10 color "save" positions. Drag the appropriate eye dropper to a color you want to persist. The save panels, like all other color panels, can be used to select the current color. Single click on the appropriate eyedropper to clear a position.
• If you want to "persist" your settings, click on the linked Red/Green/Blue link beside the hex string and it'll capture your selections in the URL - you can then bookmark or share this URL
• There have been some speed/robustness improvements to the object handling

http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/yaflaColor/ColorRGBHSL.aspx

Again, I have to add the standard disclaimer I add everytime I mention this: It is a very simple little tool that I created primarily to scratch my own itch, however hopefully it's useful to someone else.

BTW: Why did I "publish" this tool? PageRank. I've gotten a lot of inbound links to it from people who appreciate the usefulness and ease of use, and those inbound links help my pagerank cause. So if you like it and enjoy it, I'd appreciate if you linked it. Thanks!

Today we took advantage of the gorgeous, barely below freezing temperatures, and the fresh snowfall (which is one of the few snowfalls before Christmas in recent years that actually stayed on the ground more than a few hours, though it'll be washed away as temperatures go to 14C+ in the coming days), this time visiting Crawford Lake again.

It was a beautiful day, with some beautiful scenario. To contrast, the following was Crawford Lake on the Canadian Thanksgiving.

Earlier today, while perusing the meme sites to see where the groupthink arrow is pointed today, I came across links to the following highly-ranked (at least by anonymous numerics) page.

http://microformats.org/wiki/rest/ahah 

I checked the calendar to see if it was April 1st, but alas it does not appear to be. This actually appears to be serious.

This is where the AJAX-trend has brought us - people who have contributed nothing to the global knowledge pool are rushing to remora off of the creations of others and claim it as their own. Every obvious potential use for a programmatic element can become a cheap acronym that someone can append their name to, desperately hoping that they earn some fame for their heroic act of sitting on the sidelines and naming things years after they've entered common use. The fact that the linked page uses the term "discovered" to describe the "discovery" of the most obvious and prevalent use of the XMLHTTPRequest (and friends) object is mind-boggling.

In two prior entries (on October 6th, and also on October 2nd) I commented on EXIF and GPS, and how the inclusion of the latter will dramatically improve the value and utility of the former. A reader left a note about a site covering this sort of issue - http://geo.novelviews.com/. Thus far it appears to have a limited amount of information (though it did point me to a couple of GPS-integrated or -enabled cameras that I didn't know existed), however the importance of that technology pushes me to give it some link goodness.

Firefox 1.5 has been released, and is available for download at http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/. While superficially it looks like nothing has changed, there are some huge improvements hidden just below the surface.

• Native, albeit incomplete, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) support (finally!)
• Memory-cached back/forwards
• An improved extension model (already the most powerful part of Firefox)
• A variety of CSS3 additions, including multi-column layouts (huge for those blogs that insist on a 10 character wide text area)
• A tremendously powerful <canvas> element that allows for programmatic "drawing"

All of these are fantastic to see - Firefox really is blazing its own path now, no longer caught in the no-win situation of simply following Microsoft's lead. Of course Firefox has been better at standards conformance and nuances of CSS for some time, but that doesn't really inspire a lot of end-user adoption - it's the features that matter, and in that domain it has taken a hefty lead (including over anything I've seen with IE 7).

I've been using Opera 8 as my primary browser for several months, after a couple of years with Firefox as my mainstay. Given some of the improvements I think I'm going to switch back.