The Bay Bridge Study

This is a story of classic government waste! As reported by the AP, the state did a year long investigation to determine whether a new bridge should be built across the Chesapeake Bay. This study included a 19 member task force. The task force held public meetings and hired engineers to examine areas for a potential new bridge. What conclusion did they come to? You're going to love this. They concluded that traffic congestion is already a pressing issue that must be dealt with, and further delay will only exacerbate an already serious problem. But they offered no recommendation for how to solve the problem. Sounds like they are exacerbating an already serious problem because they are the ones adding "further delay." Hmmm, seems pretty easy to me. Traffic is bad and expected to get worse... much worse. Rub chin... look up at the ceiling... pause for a moment... Build a new Bridge. Thank you very much, I'll send you my bill.

I have to wonder how much tax payer money went into this study. I have first hand experience with these studies-gone-wrong before. It is government waste and consultants getting a free ride. Lets hold these consultant companies accountable if they are proven to be wrong.

Many years ago I wrote a letter to my local officials explaining the safety problems we had with a local highway on-ramp. I got a reply saying their study shows that there is no problem. About 10 years later they finally closed that on-ramp and totally rebuilt the interchange. It is much safer today. It was obvious to me, but their expensive consultants couldn't see what any person with an ounce of common sense could see.

I saw it happen again in the last 5 years. A new road and a new school were built near my work. I read in the paper that their study showed that a traffic light wasn't necessary at that intersection. It was obvious to me that this intersection was going to be a big problem. Two months later there was a light installed.

Is government incompetence and waste so far our of control that the problem can never be fixed? I get so tired of the "right" and the "left" playing their own game - voting along party lines. We need a new party. We need the common sense party.

Google Spreadsheet

Google is an interesting company. Most of their products are in perpetual beta which is something that has bugged me for a long time. How long has gmail been around... and its still in beta? Google is kind of throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. I guess since their IPO they have lots of money for R&D and can afford to do things this way. Of course they make lots of money with their advertising too.

Anyway, the most recent new product/service I found on Google is Google Spreadsheet. This tool allows you to create, edit and share spreadsheets online using nothing more than your browser. Pretty darn cool if you ask me. I can see a lot of grass roots uses for such a product. Share a spreadsheet with your little league team or with a family member. You can upload your XLS files into Google Spreadsheet or create a new spreadsheet online. You can also download the spreadsheets from online into XLS files. Pretty cool.

I think overall Google has some nice tools. For the most part they seem to work well so I wonder why they can't move them from the beta stage to production. I'd use gmail but its beta and I have no idea what the cost will be when it goes to production. Competition between Google, Yahoo and MSN is a good thing. So Google can keep on creating these little test products, just think carefully before you become dependent on one because it may not survive past the beta test stage.

IBM PC Turns 25

The IBM PC was launched on August 12, 1981, which was exactly 25 years ago yesterday. It had an Intel 8088 processor, 16k of RAM and cost $1,565.

On a similar note, last week marked the 15th birthday of the world wide web. On August 6, 1991 Sir Tim Berners-Lee released the first website at http://info.cern.ch. The website provided an explanation of what the world wide web was all about.

AOL Offers Free Domain Registry Service

But AOL will be the owner of the domain. That kind of takes the excitement out of that news headline, don't you think? According to this news article at InternetNews.com AOL has announced AOL My eAddress, a free e-mail service for registered users that allows them to pick their own domain names to use. AOL will own the domain names. I think this is pretty interesting and may be a desirable free product for many people, but I want to be the owner of my domain name thank you.

You can see more info right from the horses mouth by reading this AOL press release.

As of this morning, a Google search shows this URL http://www.registrar.aol.com/ but it seems to be a dead URL. The cached snapshot from Google shows that this was/is a page with little more than a WHOIS search button on it and some links to other AOL sites. We'll wait and see if the URL becomes live again.

I want to mention that if you want free email services for your own custom domain you may want to view my earlier blog entry on Windows Live Custom Domains. This free service will allow you to host your domain's email accounts on Hotmail. They have some really nice features with this service too. You will need to purchase your domain somewhere else (GoDaddy, Enom.com, etc) but domain registry services are really cheap these days and in the end you will be the owner of the domain, not AOL.

Subversion - How Bad Can It Be?

Not bad at all! In fact, I find Subversion to be very good. We've got this setup in the office now and its working great. We really like the ability to access the version control repository remotely. All we need is an internet connection. It uses port 80, so there are no firewall issues and no VPN needed.

Google has launched their new Google Code site, which is sort of a SourceForge competitor. What version control is Google using? You guessed it - Subversion. I think that says a lot for Subversion... and Google. ;)

More on Subversion

I've been working with Subversion the last couple days. It seems like a really nice product. We're using it on a Windows server via Apache. This allows us to easily access our source control from any internet connection without having to use VPN or worry about firewall settings.

Subversion provides only a command line interface out of the box, but there are two very nice products that put a GUI front-end on the Subversion command line interface and they are great little products.

Subclipse is an Eclipse plugin that adds Subversion integration to the Eclipse IDE. I've only played with this a little, but I can already see that I'll be using this tool.

Tortoise SVN is an add-on to the Windows Explorer that adds a GUI interface for managing Subversion. Like Subclipse, Tortoise is a great little product and pretty much a "must have" for any Subversion user on the Windows platform. It provides context menu options when you right-click on folders or files to let you manage them in Subversion.

And of course you need to know the cost of this full set of version control tools. All of this is free!