I was recently tasked with moving a rather extensive site off of a legacy Windows server onto one of our standard Unix servers (though the same steps below should work for Linix as well). The prior person tasked with this was having to go in manually and correct the casing issues on each file including the case of the file itself, the case of any links within the file and the case of links within content entries within the custom CMS it used. This sounds like a tedious job indeed, and when I inherited it, my first thought was how I could possibly avoid doing this.

The answered turns out to be a combination of a recursive function to rename all the files on the server to lowercase and some help from Apache's mod_rewrite plugin. This would allow us to leave all the links in the documents and in the CMS alone (as well as not worry about anyone's old favorites) and everything should just work. We moved the site several days ago and are in the process of testing, but so far everything is looking good and it was only an hour or so of work, here's how it was done.

John Dvorak has written an interesting article discussing what, in his opinion, is wrong with Microsoft. Microsoft, he says, has "virtually nothing interesting or exciting happening." He criticizes upcoming upgrades for not offering any compelling features. Vista he calls "a gussied-up version of Windows XP" and he says .Net "is being killed by Open Source systems that are free and almost just as powerful." He also discusses how Microsoft is becoming distracted by battles with Google. On the plus side, he notes the Xbox 360, though he says it has been hampered by the inventory shortages.

It is important to note that he believes Microsoft will continue to make "gobs of money" despite the issues. It is an interesting perspective even if I do not agree with every point he makes.

Now I am not a Microsoft hater, nor am I a fan (except of the 360), but I do think that more than any company, the ups and downs at Microsoft have the potential to affect us as developers. Anyone who has had to fight off a move to drop ColdFusion in favor of .Net knows the power of the Microsoft name and brand image, even if that image has been tarnished lately.

In news that shocked the technology industry (j/k), Gartner Inc. is reporting that Windows Vista may be delayed further, although Microsoft is disputing the report for the moment. The release is now anticipated to be moved to "April-June quarter of 2007" from its current target of November of this year. Therefore, those of you in desperate need of translucent windows will need to suffer for another three months (at least).

For my prior CFObjective summeries, go here, here and here.

Simeon Bateman gave high-level overview of using Subversion for version control. One of the key points he emphasized was that Subversion was not a source control system, but rather it is version control for managing trees of files (any type of file can be versioned). Personally, I have heard this mentioned before and it can be sometimes unclear to me. I think what Simeon and others mean by this is that Subversion is totally agnostic to the types of files it versions. The Subversion book refers to systems that are designed for source control specifically as it relates to software development as having "software configuration management (SCM)", and the point is, Subversion does not have that. The rest of the discussion generally spoke of Subversion and some of the ways it differed from CVS.

Wired news posted an interesting (though brief) article reviewing the beta 1 of Windows Vista. What they found wasn't particularly exciting. While Microsoft is claiming alot more will be added in the next beta release, Wired found the current beta included "a lot of attractive graphical interfaces and new search-engine functions, but, so far, not too much in the way of productivity or security enhancements."