All my technology questions are kind of low-tech, but last night I went to turn on my computer and discovered that on/off button had become stuck -- it won't pop out.

Huh. It really depends on the kind of switch. Some computer cases have the switch mounted to the case, and the computer cover has a little piece of plastic that on the outside is the button and on the inside has a piece of projecting plastic that pushes against the switch on the case.

Damn, I need caffeine. I don't know if the above will make any sense. Anyway, if this is what you have, then removing the cover should make it easy to get the switch unstuck. If this is not what you have... well, then it depends on what you do have....

::off to drink tea::

Okay, so I should try to remove the cover and hope for the best. I'll do that tonight.

so I just found a new extension for Firefox (you have to upgrade to 1.5 first) that I LOVE. It is Reveal and you can search all the tabs at once and convert all the tabs to thumbnails. It is way cool.

For a simple project Visual SourceSafe should be fine and easy to use if your tools already integrate. It's easy to get going and setup. CVS is the way to go for something that is free and will scale up to bigger projects, but I don't find it as easy to use as VSS. I really like Perforce but it isn't free.

I also like Perforce. We switched from Visual Source Safe to Perforce a while back and it was a massive improvement. But, not free.

Subversion is another free option. I think it has more of a learning curve than CVS, but it has a more up to date feature set.

If "free" and "good enough" are your criteria, then CVS will probably do. If "good enough" isn't good enough, then check out Subversion. If "not confusing to bosses" is one of your criteria, then I got nothing.

There are "Pragmatic Version Control Using..." books for both CVS and Subversion that give a decent overview.

After talking with my boss, we decided to use TortoiseCVS, just to be consistent with our client.

Right now, I'm reading Open Source Development with CVS - 3rd Edition. It's fun, as I like learning new stuff (and I especially like getting paid to learn new stuff).

Learning new stuff is cool.

It is, isn't it?

Wish I'd noticed this conversation before I broke down and bought VSS. But it was still cheap, because I got it from the super duper donated tech for nonprofits place that makes me happy. Although I've now used up my quota of Microsoft products for another year, what with having to buy new operating systems for all the donated laptops I got. Not complaining, though! Free laptops! Cheap software! Whoo!

But yeah, I like learning new stuff.

VSS really isn't all bad, it just doesn't scale up to big projects very well since it lacks a lot of features and its database isn't very robust. For smaller projects it works fine and has the advantage of simplicity.

That's fine for me, then, because I only need it for small projects. Simplicity is a good thing.