Good morning. This is the first year I've used software versioning to managed application development projects. And I must admit, it's the best piece of technology I've ever came across. I mean, ever. In a nutshell it allows you to develop your application from any machine in the world and always be sure you've got the latest files to work with. Once you've finished making changes, you 'check in' your work and the SVN server records the changes and increments the version.

I could go on for hours about SVN features and benefits but I wont, I'll just say this. Even if you're a sole developer, investigate and implement SVN, it will make your job ten times easier.

Cheers
Ryan Partington

Enough about money. Lets take a day out to review anti virus software. I don't have any installed because of the overhead. I always recommend anti virus to customers because it's much more difficult for them to troubleshoot virus issues. I was talking to Mark Joseph Edwards the other day and he was telling me about Best Buy who shipped digital picture frames that contained a virus. This is an authentic company, with an authentic product and yet it contains a virus. It got me thinking, no matter how careful you are on the internet, you may still get infected by your latest gadget. In August of 2007, Seagate Technology reportedly shipped a bunch of Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200 devices with spyware that snoops around the system looking for passwords and then sends them to an external site over the Internet. Even with this information I wont be installing antivirus any time soon. But it's worth being aware.

Cheers
Ryan Partington

I'm due in today to talk about the loan for those of you following that story. That aside, Friday I had a client whom was experiencing some VPN issues. After a few minutes on the phone I knew this could be resolved a lot quicker if I had remote access to the PC, enter Cross Loop. Normally I would use RDC or VNC and then talk the user through router port forwarding, which alone introduces pain for all. A colleague had started using Cross Loop and gave it a thumbs up so I decided to give it a shot. It was spicy and worked a charm. You direct them to a website were they download the software and install, then they are given a unique code that you type into your client and you're done. You're connected. No OS firewall changes, no port forwarding, they can see everything you do and it's free. You can't argue.

Cheers
Ryan Partington