Month: August 2016

Sir Paul – NY Times

Last weekend’s Paul McCartney concert went well. The commute into (and out of) MetLife Stadium via NJ Transit was a bit of a hassle, but it all worked out. (I stayed in NYC overnight, rather than try to get all the way back home, so that helped.) The show was about three hours long. The set list wasn’t much or a surprise, but there were a few oddball songs thrown in there for weirdos like me who want to hear more than just the greatest hits.

Here’s an article about the show, from the NY Times, with a short McCartney interview.

When you’re an artist who started releasing albums in the 1960s and never stopped, you face a decision when going on tour: How do you select a set list?

Source: Sir Paul on Fans, the Beatles and Himself – The New York Times

Paul McCartney

I’m going to go see Paul McCartney tomorrow night at MetLife Stadium, with a friend. This will be, I think, the fourth time I’ve seen him live. I just went hunting through my blog, email, and Evernote to figure out all the times I’ve seen him previously.

(I might be missing one, but I think that’s it.) I imagine this will probably be the last time I see him live. (Though I probably would have said that about the 2011 show too.) He’s always full of energy and always puts on a great show.

TFS and Git

I recently started working on a new C# project at work. I’ve mostly been doing Dynamics AX (X++) work recently, so it’s been a while since I had a big C# project. With AX, TFS is pretty much the only viable option for source control. So, I just use what’s there, and don’t think about it too much.

With C#, though, it’s pretty easy to use Git too. I’m using Visual Studio 2013, which supports Git directly. I decided to start this project off in Git, just as an experiment. I knew that I’d have to put it into TFS eventually, since our department uses a TFS 2012 server, so I would need to get the source code into that server at some point. But starting off with Git seemed like a good idea, since I knew I’d be making a lot of changes early on, and possibly even discarding the whole project at some point and starting over. So I figured doing all that in a local Git repo would be an efficient and flexible way to start off.

So that’s what I did. I started off with the built-in VS 2013 Git support, which hides a lot of the complexity of Git, and makes it look more like TFS. At the same time, I started reading Pro Git, a pretty hefty book on Git that’s freely available on the web. I’ve used Git before, of course, but I’ve never really spent enough time learning the ins and outs. Pro Git is a pretty good book, and I’m learning a lot from it.

Meanwhile, I also started looking into ways in which I could use Git and TFS in parallel. My idea was that I’d keep using Git locally, allowing me to commit frequently, branch and merge, and just generally manage my work in an agile way. Then, whenever I got to a good stable point, I’d do a TFS check-in.

Skipping ahead a bit, I’ve now switched the project to TFS-only, and have a backup of my .git folder that I’m ignoring for now. I had hoped that I’d be able to switch back and forth easily, in VS 2013, but that’s really not the case. I’ve found that VS 2013, if it sees a .git folder, assumes you’re using git, regardless of any TFS info in your solution file. I had hoped that getting the TFS info into the solution file would cause VS 2013 to use TFS, while I could use Git from the command-line (or via SourceTree).

Alternately, I’ve looked into the possibility of using Git from VS 2013 and doing the TFS commits via the command-line. That actually looks like it might be a possibility, using tf.exe. I might give that a try next week.

I’ve also looked into git-tfs, which is a “two-way bridge” between Git and TFS. I think that would let me keep one branch in a local Git repo synced with TFS, while letting me work locally in a dev branch in Git that I could just merge into the main TFS branch occasionally, or something like that. I’m not entirely clear.

And yes, I know that if we could upgrade our server from TFS 2012 to TFS 2013, I could use the native Git support in TFS 2013. But that’s not something we can do right now, largely because it might not be compatible with Dynamics AX 2012, and doing the upgrade would be too much of a distraction and risk right now. (Similarly, Microsoft’s hosted TFS would be great, but almost definitely wouldn’t work with our current AX setup.)

Why JMS Is Leaving Comic Books

Quite an interesting essay from J. Michael Straczynski, about why he won’t be doing any more comics work. This was interesting to me on several levels. I too have some vision problems which may get worse, though hopefully not to the level he experienced. And I too make my living by staring at computer screens and typing on a keyboard. So that’s a bit scary.

And his compulsion to shake things up whenever he gets too comfortable is admirable. That’s something I really don’t have, at least not to the extent that he has. If I get comfortable at something, or in some place, I usually just try to hang on. Though I do try to learn new things often, and my last job change was largely motivated by a desire to shake things up a bit. So I guess I’m not a total “stick in the mud.”

I’ll miss his comic book work. I enjoyed a lot of his stuff, including Rising Stars and Midnight Nation.

Then one day, that same voice, the voice that keeps challenging me and kicking over the apple cart and forcing me to start over, said “You’re done, move on, find something else to do, stretch yourself as a writer, take chances, risk failure.”

Source: Why J. MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI Is Leaving Comic Books, In His Own Words