Tim's Bits and Pieces

At work I recently spent some time working on getting our hosted Trac to run faster. I found one simple little trick that gave up to a 20% speed improvement, so I thought I'd share it here.

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We where talking about merging today and one of my co-workers pointed out that some of the advantages of Distributed Revision Control Systems (DRCS), are actually more of a case of "distributed rcs rules because I never read the manual for svn and drcs is complex enough that it forced me to read the manual". For example Joel Spolsky (of Joel on Software) writes about Mercurial:

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The company I work for has changed it's name from CVSDude to Codesion. I'm going to miss CVSDude, but I think Codesion is probably better.

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Today my company sent out a bunch of emails about a service update to our customers. Approximately 16,000 emails. To make things easy for customers who wanted to ask questions about the changes we set the reply to field on the emails to be our support email address. This was a mistake. The first problem is that out of 16,000 people a reasonable number are going to be out of the office a week before Christmas, but that was OK, you just delete the dozen or so new Cases with "Out of Office Auto-reply" in the subject. No, the real problem was the infinite loops of auto-replies that our case management system created with some customers ticket systems.