Slapout Tech

You know, somewhere out there, there's probably a guy who works in technology and has the last name of "Wire". I wonder if he cringes every time someone talks about the 1394 standard and mentions "FireWire". :-)

StarTeam uses the MD5 hash of a file as the filename in its vault. (Pretty clever if ya ask me.) The top level folders in the vault all have a two letter name. These names correspond with the first two letters of the MD5 hash. Each folder also has a one letter folder inside it for each letter and number. These correspond to the third letter of the hash. StarTeam uses this scheme to determine where to place the file. So, for example, if you had a file whose MD5 hash was 0D0909082EF668C63FCD4437B9C787F7 then StarTeam would put it in its vault in the folder: /0D/0 Of course, you shouldn’t go messing around with the files in the vault. You should let StarTeam manage them.

I downloaded the new Netflix Manager (or Mobile Mgr for Netflix as they call it) for Windows Mobile today. I've only used it a little, but here are my initial impressions. After you log in you're presented with two options: "My Queue" & "Search". The former, of course, takes you to your DVD Queue. Here you can use the menu options to move items up and down the list or select it to see a synopsis. Several movies have a "See Preview" button that let you see the movie's trailer. Playback on this wasn't bad, but it was a little choppy on full-screen mode. The other option on the main screen, "Search", does what you'd expect. It doesn't have the "search as you type" feature that the Netflix website has, but it's not that big of a deal. Once you find a movie you can use the menu to add it to your queue. When you're in your DVD queue list, you can move between your other queues ("Instant Queu...

Background I recently had a need at my job to programmatically check out some files from a StarTeam repository, modify them and check them back in. Note that I don’t mean the regular use of a source code repository where you check things in and out from your IDE as you work on them. I’m talking about writing a program that checks the file out, modifies it and checks it back in. I knew that StarTeam had an SDK that would allow programmatic access to files under source control and after looking around I found that it could be used with .Net. What I couldn’t find was anything telling exactly how to check files in and out via the .Net SDK. So after playing around with it a while I finally figured it out and decided to post this so that others wouldn’t have to go through the trouble I did. What You'll Need To access a StarTeam repository from .Net you need to download and install the StarTeam SDK for .Net . Currently you can find it on the Borland StarTeam Download page. (I also ha...