Singapore is hostile to software developers

Posted by timgoh
on Friday, March 07

Basically the island is blanketed in transparent proxies (at least 2 of the major ISPs use them) with no WebDAV support. Which means in the default case, you cannot run ‘svn up’, ‘svn checkout’, etc. You’d have to set up an alternate proxy for subversion to use.

I’m surprised that googling didn’t turn up anyone complaining about this. Does no one in Singapore use Subversion? Some of my friends who are developers here say that they do all their development remotely. There is such a high pain factor to working over SSH/VPN/VNC/etc 100% of the time that I wonder why they have to do this.

It’s strange how a country that is supposedly so high-tech is so bass ackwards when it comes to something so straightforward.

Comments

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  1. Lester – March 10, 2008 @ 03:59 AM
    That should mean that Singapore still has a lot to learn in the field. They are after all developing.
  2. Anny – March 13, 2008 @ 02:50 AM
    PS How can I get that little cloud before the comment link on the blog? Is that Haloscan and Blog template?;
  3. Elia Diodati – March 14, 2008 @ 08:29 AM
    Hi there, surfed over from yj's blog. It's certainly annoying with the whole svn/WebDAV thing; have you considered using git? The philosophy is different but it's functionally compatible in many things - even supporting 2-way synchronization with svn - and superior in many other ways.
  4. Tim Goh – March 17, 2008 @ 07:33 PM
    Anny, not quite sure what you're referring to? I'm just using the vanilla Scribbish theme. You can find out more "here":http://quotedprintable.com/pages/scribbish (Typo, Mephisto, and Wordpress).
  5. Tim Goh – March 17, 2008 @ 07:36 PM
    Elia, yes git is an alternative. However, many open source repositories are currently only available via SVN. Try doing say "svn checkout http://rspec.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk". Not gonna work, if nothing has changed since the last time I tried.
  6. Chu Yeow – March 20, 2008 @ 12:26 AM
    Actually checking out SVN repositories over HTTP worked fine for me for a long while, until recently I couldn't svn up my working copy of Rails trunk. I just tried though, and surprisingly it worked! I reckon it's an on-off thing with our friendly ISPs (I'm on Singnet Broadband non-Mio). So it could be something peculiar to your ISP perhaps? Might be worth checking it out with them directly (and keep your fingers crossed you can get someone who knows what they are doing). I know a good number of developers who definitely checkout SVN repositories on a regular basis with no complaints, so it could be a problem specific to your ISP or Rubyforge. (PS. Send me an email if you still haven't got a Github invite :))
  7. Tim Goh – March 20, 2008 @ 01:13 AM
    Hey Chu Yeow, I was on Starhub when I was in Singapore, but I'm now spending the bulk of my time in Los Angeles anyway, so not a pressing concern at the moment... Thanks for the Github invitation, but I've already snapped up an account under the ol' ProgProg name =P