berlios outage

berlios, the hosting service of this project, is suffering from another outage. This time I'm counting 16 hours since yestarday afternoon. Over the course I've seen many small outages that last minutes or a few hours. I should get very serious about finding alternative provider, especially now that sourceforge offer subversion finally.

For now, I hope berlios will get back to life soon.

Fixing TortoiseCVS's shattering glass sound

TortoiseCVS plays an irritating sound when it encounters an error. It is downright embarrassing when you are sitting in a cafe and from your laptop comes this
shattering glass noise.

What's annoying is I couldn't find a way to change it or turn it off. I tried the usual places and searched the web. Still I couldn't get the noise to leave me alone. Finally I found the right place to do it. Go to Windows - Control Panel - Sounds and Audio Devices - Sounds Tab. Change the TortoiseCVS Error sound to something more gentle.

Upgrade notification with Atom

One of the biggest advantage of building a web application over a desktop one is the ease of upgrade and bug fixes. For MindRetrieve I've been looking for a mechanism to notify user for upgrade. At the same time I have to keep the mechanism non-intrusive and respect the user's privacy.

After looking at different mechanisms like CGI and Javascript on browser, it just dawn on me than upgrade notification has a lot in common with news syndication. All I have to do is to publish a news feed and then put a mini-newsreader into the application. Of course the user can always opt out or even choose to fetch it using their own newsreader.

It is a good day to find a satisfactory solution to a nuisance issue.