I was watching Walt Mossberg’s iPhone Review Video and one thing that caught my attention was the bit where he says that the iPhone will auto-switch from an Edge data link to a WiFi link when it detects an open WiFi network.

That’s not a whiz-bang feature I know – heck my Nokia N800 allows for that, but it’s a manual step so I *know* when the switch is made.

Now of course I haven’t seen the iPhone so I don’t know if you get some sort of alert when it happens. I can’t help but think that if it does not alert you, how many people will be streaming their potentially confidential email or web auth information across an open WiFi link without realizing it.

WiFi sniffers get your skillz up – the iPhone could be a huge source of info if that’s the case. I’m hoping the Apple devs are smarter than that.

Update: I see from the iPhone WiFi spec picture (can’t really call it a spec page) that it will auto-switch to “trusted” networks so may be this is a tempest-in-a-teapot point on my part.

Back when OSAF was looking into replacing CVS about the only stable and wide-spread option I found was Subversion and while it had some flaws, compared to CVS it was much better. At the time I had heard of other projects using things like BitKeeper and Perforce and other commercial apps., but that’s the kicker – they were commercial and as an Open Source shop we really wanted to use Open Source tools.

So we went with Subversion and really haven’t had any regrets. Merges and branches were much saner and after the Subversion team released the FSFS (filesystem storage) the server side repository issues went away.

Recently tho people have been asking me about distributed version control systems like mercurial, bazaar and darcs.

The first two I’ve been following indirectly by keeping track of the work the Mozilla build/release team have done in trying to pick their next system. See J. Paul Reeds blog entry Version Control System Redux Redux and also their wiki page for details. The short-form result is they haven’t chosen one yet.

darcs I’ve been following more directly because I’ve started using it to try and help the Buildbot team with some patch and bug work. So far, while it’s been different, I haven’t had any issues but I also haven’t gotten much beyond the more basic operations. I plan on posting a more detailed look at it after I do some true distributed operations.

One of the newer programs (for me that is) that has hit the nets with some force is GIT but I think that is because recently Linus Torvalds recently gave a talk at Google about it and seems to be on a tear promoting it :)

But it really seems to be worth looking into. A recent article about it’s design, GIT for Computer Scientists, really showed some interesting internal concepts and I like what I see. So I need to figure out how to work it into my project space to give it a fair look.

There are a couple other distributed systems I haven’t talked about, Monotone and Arch, but that’s because I know next to nothing about them. If you want to find out details on them I would recommend reading the Version Control Blog for articles about them – it’s a great read.

Kosso is one of my favourite twitter friends and I’m loving his latest post:

FEED MANTRA: OPML is the TREE – RSS is THE VINE – CONTENT is THE FRUIT. TAGS and META DATA are the LEAVES

Except for me I would s/OPML/XML/ and s/RSS/Atom/ :)

After the slew of little posts I did earlier I sat down to write a more thoughtful set of comments but found out that Ted has already written one.

So instead I’ll just point you over there while gesturing: what he said!

:)

k, I promise this will be the last WWDC related post… honest!

The technology behind WebClip looks very snazzy – heck you just pick the div or iframe your interested in and it places that into a HTML widget framework and, to paraphrase the Steve, boom!

Nice except for two things: the anti-deep linkers will be going ape-shit over this and kiss any ad related revenue you may have been getting goodbye.

Why? Well, the widget will be scanning for updates often and that could be construed by the ad people as being bot-driven page impressions or worse. And many sites may just block WebClip if they find a way of tagging it.

I really hope not – this kind of consumer driven data use is exactly the kind of thing a lot of us have been dreaming of for years.