MorphLabs, the Meta-Cloud Vendor?

Fascinating!  I just got an email from G2iX, the parent company of MorphLabs, inviting me to a webinar (Wed, Dec. 9, 2009 from 11AM - 12PM PST) in which they plan to demonstrate how to "Morph your Data Center into a Cloud Vendor":

Traditional data center and co-location vendors are under tremendous threat in the face of Amazon EC2 and related Web Services, and those providers who’re unable to adapt to some sort of cloud computing model face extinction as competing Infrastructure as a Service products become even more prevalent.

This webinar will demonstrate how the Morph Cloud Computing Platform can help regional data centers transform their business using their existing assets with minimal cost and hardware investments so that they can provide a cutting edge cloud solution to a broader customer base with rates that are more than competitive while still maintaining great profit margin.

For those who are unfamiliar with the company, MorphLabs provides a hosting platform that runs on top of Amazon's EC2 web service.  So, assuming I'm not mistaken, G2iX plans to help data centers other than Amazon's set up the Morph platform to run on their own servers.  My first thought was, "Why would they do that?  Won't this just create competition for MorphLabs?!"  However, once I mulled it over, I realized that if they structure things right, it could be quite beneficial to MorphLabs.  What if these Morph platform deployments simply became new pools of servers to which Morph apps could be deployed?  Viewed that way, it actually sounds quite clever.  I'm almost tempted to attend the webinar, even though it has no direct relevance to me. :)

Great Star Trek:TOS Quote

My wife and I recently started watching Star Trek: The Original Series episodes via Netflix's Watch Instantly streaming service (they're also available on YouTube Shows).  Although it's a fun show, I still prefer The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine series.  I did, however, come upon a line that made me laugh out loud:

What makes you think you're a man?  You're an overgrown jackrabbit, an elf with a hyperactive thyroid!
Kirk intentionally trying to irritate Spock in This Side of Paradise, Season 1, Episode 24

JavaScript Date Library Advice?

I've been doing some work recently with the Google Maps API, something I'll try to describe in a future post.  While doing that work, I've realized that I need (or would at least find very handy) a JavaScript library that provides more sophisticated date/time support than the standard JavaScript Date.  Searches have led me to two libraries which look plausible.  Datejs takes the approach of ornamenting the existing Date class with numerous additional functions.  I really like the coding style demonstrated in their tutorial, which is a point in their favor.  In contrast, Fleegix provides a Date class independent from, but interface-compatible with the standard Date (yay for duck-typing!).  They clearly view timezone support as critical for Dates, which I'm very happy to see, since dealing with them and daylight/standard time can be a real pain.  So, from a functional standpoint, both libraries look pretty strong.  I'm concerned that they're not particularly active, neither having any check-ins in 2009, but perhaps it's because they've been around for a while and work well already.  I can't say I found this discussion in the Datejs group very encouraging. :(

Any thoughts?  Anyone out there used either of these libraries or another one they'd recommend?

Update (May 26 2010): I just looked again at Fleegix and have some excellent news!  The projects are now hosted on GitHub and the timezone-js project has some updates from April of this year.  I'll have to give it a closer look soon.

Subversion – Odd Problems and Funny Solutions

I've been using Subversion and TortoiseSVN since 2005.  They're both great technologies and I'm very happy they exist.  However, I think anyone who's been using them for a while has periodically encountered some weird problems and has had to come up with a few strange (and even funny) solutions.  I certainly have.  In this post, I describe one example.

Earlier this week, a developer I work with saw the following in a TortoiseSVN window when he ran update on a working copy:

Error: Couldn't do property merge 
Error: Unable to make name for 'C:\tempfile'

Not knowing how to proceed, he asked me for help.  We tried my typical first approach: running cleanup via Tortoise on the working copy.  That didn't fix it, so we ran a "Check for modifications" and discovered that there were a few temp files scattered through the directory tree.  We deleted those and tried again.  Still the same message, so on to Google.  I searched for various permutations of the error messages, but was unable to find anything other than code check-in comments for Subversion itself, which appropriately enough uses a Subversion repository.  For some reason, I wish I remember why, we next tried updating just one child directory within the working copy.  It worked!  We tried updating all the other child directories and those worked as well.  So, that suggested that there was something wrong with the Subversion metadata, but only at the top level.  We went into the .svn directory and started browsing through the files.  When we looked at the entries file, we noticed a few lines starting with "incomplete".  I tried moving the entries file out of the .svn directory to a totally different location in the file system, hoping that when we updated or ran another cleanup, the file would simply be recreated.  Unfortunately, with that file missing, the directory was no longer considered by Subversion to be a working copy.  Disappointed, I moved the entries file back into .svn and started thinking about what to do next.  On a whim, the guy I was helping tried updating again and it worked!  Somehow, changing the directory from a valid working copy to an invalid one and back again was enough to fix everything.  Who knew?!

Have any good Subversion/TortoiseSVN troubleshooting stories or troubleshooting tips of your own?  Please leave them in the comments.