Rob Mensching's Blog - page 37

Tonight I was late to the Thursday night WiX Working Group (where a bunch of us get together and slam out some code for WiX) because Zac and I were rolling out the first half of our changes to the live Windows Marketplace site. We split them in two because we start in the early evening and don't want to be up too late. Of course, I'm up all night Thursday anyway... but I was supposed to be writing WiX features.

The Windows Installer team blog has a picture laden blog entry that explains why primary keys in an MSI database must not change from build to build. I suggest taking a read through it because it provides a nice example of why I caution people when they are writing tools to autogenerate WiX source files. Those identifiers are not trivial pieces of data.

A week ago at almost this same time in the morning, I was crafting my rebuttal to Stuart Yeates's blog entry titled "What is open source anyway?". A few days later, Jenny was catching up on her blog reading (which I think only includes my blog) and said to me, "Wow, you were really harsh on Stuart." Her reaction surprised me so I went back and reread my rebuttal. I decided Jenny was right.

While I was cleaning out some of the the latest weekly releases of the WiX toolset, I browsed around for the recent stuff talking about WiX. In my search, I came across this blog entry titled "What is open source anyway?" by Stuart Yeates. Go read it completely cause I'm going to chop it up here.

I'm tired.

We just did the curly-cue take off from San Jose on my way to Seattle by way of Portland (don't ask). The captain just informed us that the second pass over San Jose Airport is used to climb above the incoming traffic to SFO. That makes an amazing amount of sense and provides a nice view of the whole bay area. I just hope I don't miss my connection in Portland.

Since I started blogging years ago, I've always tried to write comprehensive blog entries. By comprehensive I mean blog entries that fully cover the topic of choice, are well organized and try to address all of the counterpoints that could be made. My intention was to create a block of information that could stand all by itself and answer any questions that might occur to the reader.

It has been two years since I made a blog post on this day exactly. In my mind and looking back that day held much more significance than today's three decade mark. But since numbers ending in a zero seem to hold special significance in base 10 it is a nice time to reflect.