Infinite State

I took my kids to Lake Placid last week on their school vacation. The real focus of the trip was something we’d all read about and decided we really wanted to do: ride the Olympic bobsled run there. So we did.

The ride lasts about 48 seconds, you hit a speed around 51 mph, and it costs about $70 per person with a long wait to actually get on. That said, it’s a spectactular experience, with a rushing force that is hard to describe. A professional driver and brakeman sandwich you into a somewhat worn-looking fiberglass sled, and you are told to keep your head straight so you don’t smack your helmet against the curves. You only need to be told once. On some of those curves, the g-force was so strong I couldn’t even lift my head. Mostly I remember the color of the bluish ice, the sudden whipping upwards into the turns and the sheer relief when the brakes kicked in and we came to a halt in one piece at the bottom.

It was great, but once was enough. I’ll stick to snowboarding.

I was looking into Trac, which led me to finally get SVN installed, which led me to futz through the basic steps and finally discover there’s a 1-click installer for Windows after I got it working…

But the trick is getting it to run as a service under Windows. Turns out the newer versions can be installed as a service. It took a little more futzing to get the invocation right, but here it is, using the built-in SC command to create a service (my repository is in c:\svn-repo):

sc create svn binpath= "C:\svn-win32-1.4.6\bin\svnserve.exe --service -r c:\svn-repo" displayname= "Subversion Repository" depend= Tcpip

The real problem, of course, is that I don’t want all this junk running on my laptop, but that’s another issue.