Email Is Not Secure

I just got off the phone with someone who was having trouble opening a document that I sent in an encrypted ZIP file. He tried to convince me that I could send the sensitive document directly attached in the email and it would be fine. Hmmm...

For the record, email is NOT secure.

Subversion and Third Party Software

My team uses several third-party libraries and applications for our development efforts. Some of these third-party packages are downloaded source packages, and others are pulled down as a Subversion working copy. I want all third-party packages saved in our Subversion repository so that we can easily track the versions we are using. This poses a problem: if I simply copy the vendor's working copy into my repository's working copy, I'll blow away my repository's svn connection information. So how do I make this work?

Subversion's treatment of handling a vendor branch assumes that the third-party code is arriving in a tarball, ZIP file, etc. This isn't the situation in my case, so this treatment doesn't seem like a great fix.

I looked into using Subversion's svn:externals property to create a directory in my repository's space that points directly to a third-party repository. This approach would work really well, except that we quite often make tweaks to the third-party applications to support our particular environment.

In the end, I needed a way to copy the contents of the vendor working copy into my repository's working copy, without bringing over any of the .svn directories. To accomplish this task, I wrote the following Ruby script:

require "optparse"

FROM_DIR = "c:\\fromdir"
TO_DIR = "c:\\todir"

compare_only = false
copy_only = false
fromdir = "" #FROM_DIR
todir = "" #TO_DIR

ARGV.options { |opt|
  opt.banner = "Usage: Copy source from a vendor 
                working copy to an internal vendor copy."
  opt.on_head("Options:")
  opt.on("--from-directory fromdir", "-f", 
         "Directory that contains vendor source.") do |fdir| fromdir << fdir end
  opt.on("--to-directory todir", "-t", 
         "Directory that the vendor source gets copied 
          to (vendor branch).") do |tdir| todir << tdir end
  opt.on("--compare-only", "-o", 
         "Only compare the contents of the FROM directory 
          to the TO directory.") { compare_only = true }
  opt.on("--copy-only", "-c", 
         "Only do the file copy. Don't compare directories 
          to validate results.") { copy_only = true }
  
  opt.parse!
}

def crawl_dir(starting_dir, destination_dir)
  Dir.foreach(starting_dir) { |entry|
    if(entry.index(".svn") == nil && 
       entry != "." && 
       entry != "..")
      if(File.directory?(starting_dir + entry))
        if(!Dir.exists?(destination_dir + entry))
          #puts "Create Directory #{destination_dir + entry}"
          Dir.mkdir(destination_dir + entry)
        end
        crawl_dir(starting_dir + entry + "\\", destination_dir + entry + "\\")
      else
        #puts "Copy File #{destination_dir + entry}"
        `copy /Y #{starting_dir + entry} #{destination_dir + entry}`
      end
    end
  }
end

@missingstuff = Array.new
def add_missing_stuff(item)
  @missingstuff.push(item)
end

def compare_dir(starting_dir, destination_dir)
  Dir.foreach(starting_dir) { |entry|
    if(entry.index(".svn") == nil && 
       entry != "." && 
       entry != "..")
      if(File.directory?(starting_dir + entry))
        if(!Dir.exists?(destination_dir + entry))
          add_missing_stuff(destination_dir + entry)
        end
        compare_dir(starting_dir + entry + "\\", destination_dir + entry + "\\")
      else
        if(!File.exists?(destination_dir + entry))
          add_missing_stuff(destination_dir + entry)
        end
      end
    end
  }
end

if(!compare_only)
  crawl_dir(fromdir, todir)
end
if(!copy_only)
  compare_dir(fromdir, todir)
  @missingstuff.each { |item|
    puts "Missing #{item}"
  }
end

The script isn't perfect, but it got me started. It does take the FROM and TO directories as arguments, and allows the user to specify the operations desired. The user can choose to only copy files, to only compare a destination directory to a source directory, or to copy files and compare the results (default action).

Hopefully I'll be able to refine the script as we use it.

Are Software Developers A Distinct Group?

This is a terrifically loaded question. Unequivocally, the answer is YES. However, I ask this question in terms of a company that employees its own software development team.

In previous positions, the software developers (even the entire IT organization) were treated as a distinct group from the rest of the company. It's not like we were treated as pariahs, but we were not "included" in the rest of the company. We were even physically segregated from the different business units. Projects were brought to us by translators, I mean analysts, and a lot of effort was put into figuring out which business units were responsible for our cost.

I firmly believe this is the wrong approach. In my opinion, software developers (including all of IT) are another business unit within a company, much like a finance department or customer support group. We as software developers bring a distinct skill set and sometimes require different equipment, but we are most effective when we are integrated with the "business" units of a company.

This belief comes with a few tenets that must be in place. First, software developers must view themselves as part of the overall company. All too often, software developers want to be viewed as the lone heroic hacker solving the world's problems from their hovel of a workstation. This approach explicitly segregates the software developer from the rest of the company (if not the rest of the world), and makes it extremely difficult for the developer to create software that truly adds value to the company. If a developer doesn't know the business that his/her company is in, he/she can't find creative ways to create value or solve problems.

The other tenet that must be in place is that the company must see software developers (including all of IT) as a strategic advantage in the marketplace. Having an in-house IT staff makes it easier for a company to flex and change with changing markets. Internal IT staffs allow a company to more easily automate business processes or aggressively add new features that competitors can't. Without this perception of an internal IT staff, companies won't fully utilize the talent they have and they will waste a lot of energy figuring out how to expense that part of the organization.

A company that views its IT staff as a competitive advantage, and hires talented people that can do more than pound out code, will quickly differentiate itself in its chosen market. I think Clearent has done this.