About a year ago, my maternal grandmother passed. Early this week, I got a call that my other grandmother (my father's mother) took a turn for the worse and that the doctors were essentially just going to make her comfortable; that there wasn't anything else they could really do for her. The "hours" she was expected to live lasted until Thursday morning, when she was finally released from the ailing body that had her trapped for decades.

When I was just a kid, the tremor in her hand was confirmed, along with other symptoms, as Parkinson's disease. She was told she had 10 years to live. However, true to her hardy nature, she lived double that, and the disease consumed her, bit by bit.

I and the rest of my family watched as the tremors became worse. When she could no longer hold a crochet needle, my grandpa learned how to crochet and finished her projects, continuing to make afghans for the grandchildren. Eventually, her ability to move around suffered, as did her speech and her mental clarity.

For the last 5-10 years, she's been in a wheelchair, rarely able to communicate. She often suffered from hallucinations and eventually ended up in a nursing home, under fulltime care. Along the way, expensive drugs and nursing care consumed nearly all of the money they had (I've been sending money monthly for quite a few of those years) just as the disease itself consumed her.

It's really hard to watch Parkinson's take someone. And, someone else close to me has been diagnosed with it this year. Because they don't know exactly what causes it, and the symptoms usually don't show up until someone is 50, it can be a ticking time bomb in those you love. Like Alzheimer's (which Shelly's grandmother has), it affects an increasingly large percentage of the aging population.

The funeral will be on Tuesday and I'll be a casket bearer. I did the same last year and it definitely makes saying goodbye easier: more definitive closure. 

At about 5:00 tonight, this server went AWOL. Nothing on he web side, no responses to pings, no DNS resolution, etc. What was particularly scary was that I also couldn't reach the support pages necessary to submit a trouble ticket. Being prone to an active imagination, I was suddenly envisioning my server admin packing up and shuttering the service.

Of course, that was unfounded, as was revealed when I got through. It was little more than a network switch going out and rendering everything behind it isolated from the greater network.

Things are now back up and running. Let me know if you see leftover problems.

Photo: borghal

About a month ago, Aaron and I had a conversation about that evil little voice in your head that makes all kinds of impulsive suggestions. It was prompted by the episode of This American Life that I'd listened to the day before.

While not literal enough that I need psychiatric help (just to clarify), I often feel like I've got a virtual pantheon of evil little guys hanging out in my head that suggest all kinds of stupid things. I certainly can related to Ira Glass' intro to that episode.

The conversation quickly focused on one particular voice from the gallery that pretty much embodies my lust for gadgets and neat tech. I call him Steve.

I call him that because that's the part of my brain that reacts to the presentations that Steve Jobs puts out. My inner Steve sees the iPhone and goes,

"Hey, that's neat. J, we *really* need one of those. It's shiny and stuff."

Fortunately for my pocketbook, my inner economist Eugene is pretty vocal himself and manages to put Steve in his place,
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Photo: Tatiana Sapateiro

A while back, I mentioned how .NET Reflector can save your hide if you, say, compile a .NET DLL and then accidentally lose the associated source code and need to retrieve that new method you added. Then, today, I solved another messy problem by using Reflector and I thought the solution might be of use to others as well.

Here's the basic scenario where this problem exists. I had a DLL from production that I needed to modify. I went to the SVN repository to get the source, built it and tried running the application locally, only to run into all kinds of problems, even without making any changes.

I swapped out the production DLL and things worked OK (or at least *more* OK than the one I was building). Theoretically, the latest version of the SVN trunk should have been what was used to build the DLL that I grabbed from production.
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Over the last few years, I've worked with quite a few different file versioning systems, including the most common one: nothing. SourceSafe, PVCS Dimensions, Team Foundation Server, CVS, Subversion, etc. Whenever working on a personal project or if asked for a recommendation, I end up back with Subversion.

However, I've found that lots of other developers have had little to no experience with any versioning system. The basics of checking files in and out and even merging rarely cause problems. A quick session at a new developer's desk and people are up and running.

Merging, branching and tagging, on the other hand, nearly always ends up causing enough confusion that teams I'm on ask if we can do a more elaborate training session. As I've done a few of these before, I usually end up leading them.

Exactly that is happening on my primary project. They've got a bunch of old code in SourceSafe with newer stuff in Subversion. We're migrating everything to SVN (since the SourceSafe repository is crumbling and getting corrupted) and working to leverage SVN's branching and tagging for production and dev branching, etc.

So, I set up a training session to help everyone get up to speed, but wasn't looking forward to putting together my own diagrams to explain this stuff again (as I never seem to hold on to anything I put together from before).

I figured that there had to be some diagrams out there to help explain the conceptual parts and maybe some "scripts" to work through as exercises.

Even better, I found an entire set of SVN training materials under the CC-BY open source license. It includes both the admin and the user end of things and includes lots of Powerpoint slides, complete with nice diagrams. This is certainly going to make preparing for the session much easier.