So a few weeks back Seapine released Surround SCM 5.0, the first ever SCM system that not only tracks code but also washes your car, cooks you lunch, and if you buy the premium support that goes with it, will hunt down and kill telemarketers just like a Terminator.

All right, that’s not entirely true. Actually, it isn’t even mostly true. Surround SCM does keep track of your source code though. And to that end there is a cool new feature in Surround 5.0 that doesn’t get as much love as the fancy schmancy configurable workflow, the Address bar. Here is a practical demonstration of this new functionality.

So let’s say Yan sends me an instant message that goes something like this:

Yan: d00d, u need to c this l33t code i jst chekD n.

Me: What the hell are you talking about? And where are your capital letters? Back in my day we had shift keys and we liked them.

Yan: wutevA grandpa, jst chek out d code

Me: *Sigh* Alright. What do you want me to see?

Funny side bar to all this IM speak, on my birthday last year we were meeting up with a friend of mine at an outdoor festival that had a local band playing. I get there and my cell phone gets a text message asking where I was. Thinking I’ll be all cool like the kids these days I decide to text back and use the fancy T9 interface.

I figure saying something like “I’ll be right there” would suffice so I start typing away only to send the following:

“Biscuit”

Nothing confuses a text message recipient faster than replying to a question with a type a breakfast pastry. And yes, it was my 30th birthday and my wife made me promise to never try to T9 text again lest I embarrass myself further. Back to the IM’s…

Yan: sscm://localhost:4900/MacMainline/MacMainline/Cybertron/optimus.cpp

I fire up the Surround client, paste that line into the address bar, and it shows me the file in question:

This takes me straight to the file’s location in the system, the branch, the repository, everything. It’s a little pointer to where we are right now without the confusion of where we’ve been. It’s us and the file looking into the future that is unwritten, just like the end of Terminator 2 taught us. That is until Terminator 3 came along and said, “Yeah, about that unwritten future business, sorry, we lied. You’re basically hosed, enjoy the nuclear winter.” Darn killer robots.

A quick view of the file let’s me see his changes:


if (autobots.transform() && rollout())
{
   driveToKickDecepticonAss();
}
else
{
   cutToCommerical();
}


Nodding, I send a message back to Yan…

Me: I like it. It’s subtle, but there is more to it than meets the eye.

All right, today I have a little experiment for you. Open up a new tab or browser window and head over to eBay. I have a feeling that is experiment is going to be very timely, meaning if you are reading this post three years from now it probably hasn’t aged well. That just rewards all the first day readers, all five of you.

Enter the following in the search field and click search:

ps3

Now take a quick look through the first page of results. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

*Checks email*

*Ties shoe*

*Whistles*

Everyone back? I’ll bet it comes as a surprise that there is a pile of PS3’s going for thousands of dollars. I wonder if there will be any buyer fraud today…

What’s more fun to me though is looking through the lower priced auctions of PS3- related (and I use this term VERY loosely) items. For instance:

A .com domain name that has PS3 in it.

What I really love about this one is that it has been “Professionally appraised for $125,000.” This of course has given me an idea for a can’t-miss TV show. I can see it now, in five years PBS is going to start running Domain Name Roadshow, just like Antiques Roadshow. People will bring in 3×5 cards with their domain names on it and the appraisers will give all kinds of back stories before getting to what the people really want, the “how much is this piece of junk worth” moment.

Regular Person: “Yeah I was cleaning out my grandfather’s attic and I found this domain name in an old trunk.”

*Holds up card that reads “playstation2rockstheworldbigtimesuckers.com”*

Appraiser: “Ah, what you have hear is a beautiful example of early 21th century domain squatting. Notice the liberal use of letters and the beautiful, even whimsical, story that is told by the words. Really a fine example.”

Regular Person: “Yeah, that is really neat.”

Appraiser: “Do you have any idea what it would it go for at auction today?”

Regular Person: “I have no idea, but it must have been really special to my grandfather to keep it all these years. I couldn’t see myself selling it.”

*Regular Person’s eyes dart around to see if anyone has bought that line*

Appraiser: “Well, it is a wonderful period piece, but I’m afraid that a domain that long is going to take a very specialized buyer, which is going to drive the price down. That being said, I can comfortably say, after talking it over with the other appraisers, that at auction you could get upwards of 15 cents for it.”

*Regular Person gives stunned look at camera as graphic comes up on screen*

“Domain name worth practically nothing”

Now I just need to find someone in the TV business. I can’t see how something like this can stay off the air for long.

After months and months and months of work Surround SCM 5.0 and TestTrack 7.6 have shipped. You can download them, you can buy them, you can buy two, and they make lovely Christmas presents. This ends the shameless corporate plug.

Speaking of being hungry (yeah, well, sometimes transitions just aren’t that smooth) the other day I called and ordered a pizza for takeout from a local pizza place. When I got there they looked me up in the computer, I paid for the pie, and then they said it was still in the oven and would be out in a couple of minutes. Ten minutes later the guy behind the counter begins searching through the oven and the pizza boxes. I know already this isn’t going to be good.

The counter guy goes and gets the pizza making guy who confirm that they did indeed make the pizza but that it is nowhere to be found. The pizza making guy asks the very poignant question:

“How do you just lose a pizza?”

Another round of searching resulted in nothing, nothing except a very obvious look of fear on the faces of the counter guy and the pizza making guy. They both come up to me and say, very apologetically, the my pizza was indeed made, but that the pizza delivery guy took it by mistake when the counter guy should have had it to give to me. The pizza making guy said he’d make a new one right quick and it would be ready in seven minutes.

Now it’s my turn to talk, I wait just a second to let the drama build, stand up from my chair and in my best “I’m the customer and you darned better well treat me like the king unless your idea of king more resembles King Louis XVI then I’d just as soon pass” voice:

“That’s alright guys, I used to work in a pizza and I know how it goes.”

This does three things for me.

1. I get to see the looks of relief come over the counter guy and pizza making guy’s faces. This of course is quickly followed by them changing expressions to the more devious “Should we slash the pizza driver guy’s tires or just dump a vat of sauce on his head” face.

2. I get a handful of free pizza coupons for my trouble and the fact that I didn’t yell and jump around like a crazed baboon.

3. I get seven more minutes to watch the counter guy answer phones and type feverishly into the pizza order taking computer.

Now, item #3 doesn’t seem like a great benefit, but what it did was it took me on a trip down memory lane to my days in the pizza business. Back in those days our “computer” was really a dumb terminal connected to some dumb mainframe somewhere. Unlike this pizza place though I was a hybrid, I was both the counter guy and the pizza making guy. You could say I was the counter-pizza making guy, except well, I was actually for making pizza. All right, that was my last French Revolution joke, I swear on Robespierre’s severed head. Ooops.

Anyhow, I remember when taking orders over the phone you had to steer the customer in a direction that the computer could handle because the user interface had a very specific order that it wanted things entered in.

It broke down like this:

Quantity + crust type + size + half and half or full + specialty type + toppings + coupons.

Which basically means if someone called you up and said:

Customer: “Um, yeah, I want one supreme, but only on half with the other half being triple anchovies, on the pan crust in the medium size and I have a coupon that says here it will cost me $4.99.”

That meant you had to work it backwards into the format the computer liked. A pain, for sure, and you got real good an interrupting people like this:

Customer: “Um, yeah, I want one supreme…”

Me: “What type of crust?”

Customer: “Err, uh, pan I suppose. But I only want that on half…”

Me: “What size?”

Customer: “Um medium I guess.”

You get the idea. That system more or less worked until you got to the coupon stage where no matter how you prepped the customer the whole thing fell apart. Way up at the corporate level it was decided that you needed to enter the coupon code for a given coupon so that they could track the effectiveness of different advertising campaigns. I suppose its purpose was to tell them that a coupon for a $4.99 pizza did better than a coupon for a $5.99 pizza. What it worked out to in the field was a dozen or so screens of coupons codes that weren’t listed as numbers or something easy to find but rather a helpful “description”:

MedHalfSupXAnch - 4.99

Sacre bleu! It took forever to track down the right code, when it happened to be in the system, and forever when you had some guy holding on the phone and three other phones ringing is not a good thing. To solve the problem we all just kept calculators next to the terminals and would subtract the amount of the coupon from the regular price and then add that value into the computer as a discount, not a coupon. The end result was the customers were happy, the phones got answered, and the corporate guys didn’t get their fine tuned data telling them that people prefer cheaper over more expensive when it comes to pizza.

I’d say it was a win situation for everyone, except for the corporate guy. But at the end of the day he drove home in a BMW and I drove home smelling like anchovies so I wasn’t going to feel too sorry for him. To finish a theme, it was exactly like the common man standing up to the aristocracy in 18th century France. Well except using a calculator isn’t exactly the same as The Enlightenment and being starved out in western Europe doesn’t quite map to a part time job in western Ohio. But other than that it was exactly the same. Sort of.