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I listened to the IT Conversations interview with Tim O’Reilly on the way in this morning. Very interesting interview. I love the vision that Tim has for his company – it’s more about capturing knowledge (whatever that means) rather than growing their market. It’s kind of cool to see how taking the right attitude can actually lead to a strong position in the market (how many people buy O’Reilly books vs. the others? I’d bet a LOT).

The big paradigm shift is also pretty cool… PCs and their OS become less important, as applications really do move into a more decentralized space (he uses Google as an example of a pervasive network app). What he didn’t mention is that the decreased focus on the PC and its OS means that people will become more able to select their tools based on need, and not by some 95% market share domination by a single OS vendor…

It also struck me that the simple fact of my listening to a freely distributed interview, published to the web as an .mp3 file, played by my iPod while taking the bus into work might be a bit of a paradigm shift as well. On-demand content, MeTV, that kind of thing…

Why would I post about this? It was triggered by the fact that I saved the GMail Invitation entry into software/google/gmail…

Just logged into my GMail account, and it looks like I’ve got 4 invitations that I can give away. let me know if you want one. I won’t make anyone jump through hoops or anything. Karma will be involved somehow…

UPDATE: They’re all gone… I’ll post if I get more invites (but I’m not maintaining a waiting list or anything…)

UPDATE: DO NOT EMAIL ME FOR INVITES IF YOU FOUND THIS PAGE ON GOOGLE! I already regret putting the offer in an entry here. Any future invites I get will be dealt with off-blog, unless the freeloading leeches let up. Why do they have to wreck everything online?

Just ran another quick stats check on my email accounts using ComStats, and the number of non-spam emails I receive (which survive my spam filters, and which don’t get immediately deleted) per day is still growing.

I don’t even want to think about what the stats would look like if I actually saw the spam that is sent to me…

I’m getting about double the number of daily non-spam messages that I was getting last spring, but I think I’m getting my most valuable information from my RSS reader…

OK. This doesn’t kill the love-fest that is Subversion, but here’s a Stupid Subversion Behaviour that would be cool if it wasn’t needed… WebObjects database models are stored in bundles (eg., mydatabasemodel.eomodeld) which are actually directories rather than files. Subversion isn’t greatly aware of what to do with these files/collections, so it doesn’t currently do much versioning (i.e., I can’t check in changes made to a model!)

From MacDevCenter.com: Making the Jump to Subversion:

% mv MyModel.eomodeld MyModel.mine
% svn update MyModel.eomodeld
% mv MyModel.eomodeld/.svn MyModel.mine/
% rm -r MyModel.eomodeld
% mv MyModel.mine MyModel.eomodeld

A quick Google turned up some results, but no solutions:

• Collections in Subversion. Part 1 of 2: History [Long]
• Collections in Subversion. Part 2 of 2: Request for Comment

OK, I officially love Subversion. I’ve got the Subversion repository working great, and just installed the WebSVN web interface to it. It’s got RSS feeds all over the place! Now, I can keep up to date on all commits to all files in all projects managed by the source repository – in my RSS reader! This is too cool

WebSVN gives a very cool interface to browse source code trees, viewing aggregate lists of commit comments for all files in that section of the tree. Very handy. Keep up to date from 10,000 feet by viewing comments on / – or keep up to date on just a particular file by looking at just that file.

The smoke from the British Columbia and Alaska forest fires has been pouring down the Bow River valley over the last few days. It’s so thick that it looks like a pervasive fog – except that it doesn’t get burned off by noon. We took a drive just down the highway to Cochrane last night, and couldn’t even see downtown Calgary from there (usually a nice view of the skyline).

I’m having a hard time imagining the sheer scale of the fires that must be burning to spew this much smoke. A campfire, that I can visualize. Something large enough to fill the huge Bow River valley, I just can’t picture it. Here’s hoping there’s nobody in the way of these fires…

In the satellite image, Calgary is way to the southeast (off the bottom right of the image), but the jetstream is blowing it right over us. And it’s not an upper-atmosphere flow like it was last year – it’s right down to ground level.

I saw it all from the air on the way back from SFO last week, and it looked like every valley in the Rockies was equally smoke-filled. It just looked like a layer of low clouds, but more diffuse than normal. It stopped just as we entered the foothills on descent into YYC, but it has since pushed into the valley…

UPDATE: I grabbed an image from the Calgary Flying Club’s webcam:

Somewhere in there is a beautiful view of the Rockies…

After getting Subversion running, I have to say how nice it is to work with. I’d missed versioning from my previous attempt with CVS – it’s great to be able to diff against the latest version of a file, or to track changes in general. And FileMerge rocks for visual diff-ing of files.

It would be nice, though, if XCode didn’t need to commit the .pbxuser file every time I open a project… (I know – ignore the update request, but it’s sitting there with that little “M”, silently nagging for an update…

I’ve now got the entire APOLLO codebase in there, and the beginning of the Pachyderm codebase as well. I REALLY like how specific and general you can get with file checkouts. I can get a single file, a single project, or an entire repository with one command. Sweet.

My Big Task for the morning is installing a Subversion server for management of APOLLO and Pachyderm source code. I’ll be installing it onto a shiny new XServe running MacOSX 10.3.5 (just installing the latest patches now…).

Here’s a list of resources I’ll be drawing on today:

• MacDevCenter.com: Making the Jump to Subversion
• subversion.tigris.org – official subversion client – what I used.
• Version Control with Subversion – Oreilly
• Version Control with Subversion – Red Bean
• Metissian – Projects – Mac OS X Packages – Subversion – unofficial subversion client – had less luck with this.
• Bill Bumgarner: cvs2svn, Berkeley DB, and Python Bindings | Subversion on Mac OS X
• scplugin.tigris.org – Finder integration plugin
• WebSVN: Web interface for Subversion

I’ll update with more resources as I come across them, and with status/success reports, and if/how it integrates with XCode 1.5.

UPDATE: The install on the server went VERY well, thanks to Wilfredo Sanchez’ installers. The only thing that would have made it easier would have been a multi-package installer, for a single double-click installer for all packages. But that’s just gravy… The only “snag” I hit was on permissions in the /usr/local/apache/ directories – they appear to be owned by root out of the box, so other users (www, my account, whatever) can’t write to them (for config, or for log output…) Easy to switch the permissions (or, to run apache2 as root :-O )

I’ve just imported the whole APOLLO source tree into Subversion on the server, and am now checking it out again to test integration with XCode 1.5 (and with the Finder thanks to scplugin).

Hmm… svn appears to have choked on a .zip file on checkout… Might have to try checkout again… (later – that worked. weird)

UPDATE: It’s done, and running perfectly! Had some issues with installing the “wrong” client binaries – the one from tigris.org works best – and making sure XCode had the proper path to svn (if it’s got the wrong path, it appears to barf rather violently).

Looks like Subversion will be really nice to work with – easy to navigate packages via a web browser, and copy/paste the path needed for a very specific checkout. Now to get some actual work done…

UPDATE: Added link to websvn.tigris.org – after successful install on our server.

This looks like the perfect traveling companion for an iPod! It has a built-in FM Transmitter, charger, and cradle, in a single unit. And leaves the top of the iPod open for use with accessories like the remote control.

Time to start returning those Coke bottles for the deposit, to save up for the $79.99US fee. Good thing is, I’ve got until September to save up…

The iTrip is less-than-ideal for me, since it doesn’t charge, and blocks the remote. RoadTrip looks pretty darned sweet (and uses the dock connection for audio, so it’s higher quality line-level output)

I’d played with Indy Jr. before. It’s a very cool Flash app that reads an XML file listing a bunch of places, and the date you were there. Then, it renders a map, with dots on the locations, and optionally draws transit lines between the dots. Kinda like the Indiana Jones movie effect – hence the name Indy Jr.

Thanks to a post by Alan Levine, I’ve grabbed the latest version and updated my locations file.

Check out D’Arcy’s Travels – I’ll try to keep it up to date. Some of the older dates are from memory, so I’ll update them when I find exact dates. I hadn’t realized just how strongly my travels have been constrained to the periphery of North America!

As an aside, Indy Jr. is a pretty kick-ass demo of an XML-configured Flash application. Highly customizable, and dynamic rendering of data. Kinda like something in Pachyderm…

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