P4 Blog
May 11, 2012
It's good to be back in Chicago! I spent a lot of time here in college; I'd drive down from Michigan with some friends to enjoy the food and nightlife. If you've never been, Chicago has a really vibrant downtown. When the sun is shining on Lake Michigan, it's hard to beat the scene on Lakeshore Drive. It was also good to catch up with some of the crew working on Chronicle; they gave a talk at CMS Expo today.
I had a great chat with someone who works at a firm that makes very cool modeling and analysis software. I got my degree in electrical engineering, so I have a soft spot for image processing geeks. We were swapping some stories about the early days of our careers. It is strange how rapidly the software development field is changing. Aside from a few grey hairs, and the fact that I really enjoy talking about the weather sometimes, nothing makes me feel old like telling war stories from ten years ago. But the whole development ecosystem has gone through a wrenching transformation in a fairly short amount of time. We've...
May 10, 2012
The Perforce Road Show rumbled through Austin this week, running smack dab into a Texas-sized spring thunderstorm. You know you're flying into Texas weather when your drink flies off your tray from the turbulence. But that didn't stop us from enjoying some of Austin's great restaurant and nightlife scene.
Two interesting questions came up during the networking hour. During my talk I had introduced some of the 2012.1 releases's great new solutions for coordinating distributed development, including replication improvements and P4Sandbox. The first question is, what's Perforce doing to make the administrator's job easier as all of these new solutions are put into a real environment? That's certainly an active topic back in the office. Quite a few of us have done the "Perforce guy" job, so we know what it means to deploy proxy servers with Windows registry configuration. We're conducting some research to figure out what the next generation of Perforce administration tools needs to look like. That could involve improvements to P4Admin, different interfaces...
May 09, 2012
Foreword by QA Manager Archie Mitchell
I felt like I was hit by a ton of bricks while attending the 2011 StarEast Conference in Orlando, Florida last year. I was sitting in a huge conference room with thousands of other QA managers and professionals listening to the keynote speaker. In the middle of his speech, he says, “Test by Change is a known testing methodology”. For some reason, I had to contain myself from jumping up in the middle of this crowd and screaming "PERFORCE."
After mulling the statement: “Test by Change”, I thought, who knows about changes better than Perforce? In fact, we use this methodology at Perforce to test our software. When a developer makes a change to the code, QA does a verification of the change. But unfortunately this is not an automated process; this is where the light bulb went off in my head. What if Perforce created a test utility that all Perforce customers could use to automatically test by change? What would Perforce need to provide? And this is where the story gets interesting.
After returning from my trip, I presented the idea of a Test by Change utility to a few peers. Everyone I spoke with could see how useful a...
May 04, 2012
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We wrapped up the second stop on the Perforce Road Trip yesterday in beautiful San Diego. If you've never been there, you're missing one of the most scenic downtowns in the world. Just standing at the foot of Broadway you can see cruise ships, aircraft carriers, a naval air station, Coronado, and Point Loma. And that's without turning your head.
Mark Harrison gave a great talk on the interesting things that Pixar does with Perforce. Mark's a very funny speaker, and he had some great lines. Paraphrasing a personal favorite: "We reached back to high school math and realized that downloading a terabyte would take about 1,000 times longer than a gigabyte."
I think the custom application that Pixar built to support their artists is a great illustration of why Perforce is building Commons. As Mark said, their artists need version management: Pixar is on a 50-year planning horizon for keeping their data safe. But of course an artist isn't going to use the same tools as a software...
May 02, 2012
Whew, busy day! Today well over a hundred Perforce users joined us at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View to get a taste of new Perforce products and solutions, including Commons, Chronicle, and P4Sandbox.
What really struck me is how much everyone can identify with the problems we're seeing. Emails, network drives, all these different places that make it easy to lose track of important data. Pretty much everyone starts nodding their head when they hear about Commons: a simple, safe place to store files and collaborate with a team. Coming as most of us do from a software background, that sounds prosaic in a way. Using a good version management system for source code is part of our DNA now as an industry.
But the tools and the process that we take for granted in software just doesn't exist yet in other parts of the company. I can say this from experience. When I first started working in the marketing department, I was frankly shocked at how hard it was to collaborate on documents, slide decks, and spreadsheets. We have plenty of...
Apr 30, 2012
“Trying to find key information” is listed as the second highest time-waster on the infographic “5 Things That Waste Your Time at Work”. In this article, I’ll describe version management’s role in organizing a subset of that key information, which I describe as the problem of variant copies.
When you have multiple, differing, related, and unmanaged copies of a document, you have what I call variant copies of a document. Version management tracks the relationships between all the variant copies, at which point we can call them versions of the document.
But enough with semantic hair-splitting! What I’d really like to talk about is how we often think of a document as a single entity, when typically it actually exists as a number of unmanaged variant copies. Those variant copies are a source of trouble: not the least of which is they form an impediment to...
Apr 26, 2012
As multicore systems become more prevalent, system architects are hard at work trying to provide functionality that allows applications to use those cores effectively. One proposal that is moving from the theoretical stage to the practical stage is known by the terminology "transactional memory" (TM), or "Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM).
Recently, Intel have announced support for transactional memory in their new "Haswell" line of chip architectures, and they've additionally provided some examples of how the new features work, as well as a complete and detailed specification (see chapter 8, in particular).
Intel describes the new functionality in the specification as follows:
Intel Transactional Synchronization Extensions (Intel TSX) allow the processor to determine dynamically whether threads need to serialize...
