My Mercurial Workflow
About a year ago, I wrote an article on this website about Version Control. In that article, I touted the glory of Subversion, and mentioned:
“I’ve since tried other VCS systems like Mercurial, Git, and Bazaar, but have not found any compelling reason to switch.”
Well, I’ve since found my compelling reasons to switch. SVN lost some of our files, and it was a pain to do all sorts of stuff (get setup, keep clean, branch, merge, etc). I won’t get into; there are enough rants about Subversion on the ‘net already. We use Mercurial now, and boy has our workflow improved.
Mercurial is my new favorite child, because it’s easy to setup, easy to use, easy to branch and merge, and easy to teach to my students. Oh, and it just works. Sometimes I think it runs off magic. Read more
Backups and Disaster Recovery Kit
It’s the perfect time to think about it. With disaster on everybody’s mind, and this being the season of resolutions, it’s time to think about your disaster recovery strategy.
Recently, a major department right here at FSU suffered catastrophic loss to their servers, with scant means of quick recovery. Their site was down literally for weeks as staff from all over the University scrambled to assist them in recreating the critical pieces. They lost of a lot of time and money.
I’m absolutely sure they’ll be super-prepared next time, but you don’t have to wait until something tragic happens to be prepared!
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Teaching PHP: Course Curriculum
The problem, succinctly stated, is: How do you best organize 14 weeks of study to teach PHP to a group of motivated College students?
I know they must be pretty motivated, because they’re signing up for the class despite the fact that it starts at 8 am.
This Fall, I will be teaching a course in Web Application Development at FSU. The topic will be server-side scripting, and the focus will be PHP. Since I’ve taught this course before, developing the curriculum won’t take months, but I am nevertheless spending a fair amount of time updating and tweaking for the next go-around.
I am an IT Professional in Tallahassee, Florida with a degree in Information Science.