astradele

I was reading a Slashdot article about Google reaching its apex, and I agree in some ways – it’s hard to imagine where Google can go from here. I’ve been disappointed recently by some of Google’s products. GoogleTalk is definitely subpar, and while Google’s Desktop Search was a great first, MSN Desktop Search eclipsed it (I haven’t tried Google’s v2.0 yet). Orkut hasn’t made any waves either.

On the other hand, GMail took me completely by surprise. I regret not pestering people for an invitation sooner. The invitation mechanism itself was incredibly brilliant; at a stroke preventing the Slashdot effect, preventing automated signup, generating buzz, logging useful networking information, etc. Google’s original search algorithm of using the links between webpages was obviously a star, too. In both cases, Google thought of ways to use natural human behaviour to their advantage, using human minds to do the “hard” work, and computers to put it all together.

The final deciding point for me is that Google has a lot of really smart people. Not just PhD holders – that’s only proof of dedication, concentration, and academic “smarts”, though sometimes correlated with useful “smarts”. Google’s culture also seems to be more freewheeling and open than Microsoft, another place with a lot of smart people.

Have you ever had a discussion with others (one or more), where the discussion sparked idea after idea that would never have appeared while separate? That’s a great thing about working with smart people who can communicate. Unfortunately, as you add more and more people, little things creep in, diminishing returns appears in the form of politics (in its various guises).

From what I can see of Google, that hasn’t set in yet. There hasn’t been time for people to rise through the ranks and carve out tiny kingdoms, for seniority to appear to discard good junior ideas with the bad ones. That’s why I still believe that Google has more to go: they appear to have the people, and they appear to have a culture where these people can collaborate on problems and ideas that would never get done alone.

While no secret, it did take some effort to dig up the solution. One drawback of using Subversion is the smaller amount of information and anecdotes available, compared to older products like CVS.

I accidentally committed my changes without a log message. Silly me, click, click, oops.

After due diligence in Google, the Subversion Red-Bean docs taught me that there is a class of properties, like svn:log, that are special.

Some time with svn help propedit showed me that the form I wanted was svn propedit svn:log --revprop -r# PATH.

The error message from that, asking to “define a pre-revprop-change hook”, led me back to Google, and to eventually find that every Subversion repository has a hooks directory that initially carries skeleton versions of the hooks. Copying pre-revprop-change.tmpl to pre-revprop-change (Linux box) and chmod u+x was the last stretch to filling in that gaping hole that I had left in the logs.

All in all pretty painless. If I had been trying to modify another special revision property (e.g. svn:author), I would have had to modify the hook to exit 0 (i.e. exit without error) for properties other than just svn:log.

The last struggle was deciding whether this blog entry qualified as “tinkering” or “development”. Let’s call it “development”, since I think some developers would want to know how to correct that embarassing comment broadcast to the commit mailing list.