New tripod

Mon, Feb 24, 2003

Ordered one of these bad boys today. I can't wait. I'm also going to order one of these pretty soon too.

My old tripod had a bent leg and was super heavy. With this combo I'll be set to carry the tripod on longer hikes. Things should start warming up soon and I can start exploring the environs around Boise.

WWCDD?

Mon, Feb 24, 2003

Michael Winser suggested that I should think about taking the same approach that citydesk uses. They do two things differently than Radio:

  • They use a CRC instead of a byte for byte comparison. Apparently they use this instead of filetimes altogether. I could compute the CRC (or do the comparison with the file on disk too, I guess) by wrapping the stream that the transform is writing to and doing the CRC/comparison on the fly
  • They also post a list of files and CRCs as an xml file on the server. This makes it easier to synchronize files across machines

I definitely want to enable the cross machine case, and file times do seem a little fragile to me. This is something I'll have to think about a little more.

Two way synchronization is really hard though? What happens if the same file changes on both the client and the server? How do you handle deleting a file? (Do you care about deleting a file?)

Another problem comes up when you have multi-party authoring and syncing and that is with respect to item numbers. Right now I have an item number count that I store in a config file and update every time I create a new entry (it is currently at 49). ChrisAn solves this problem with a good old fashion GUID (I have a bunch cheap if you need them ;) I might be able to switch over without killing my RSS feed and perma links if I just treat the item ID as a string.