Matt Croydon::Postneo

Day: February 24, 2004

  • My Subversion DUH Moment

    So I’ve been wanting to play with Subversion for awhile now.  It looks great, I’ve skimmed the Subversion book, and I’m ready to rock.  Getting and installing the subversion client has been no problem.  There are binaries available and I’m pretty sure that I installed the subversion client from source.  The major pain has been getting a local subversion server and repository set up.

    I’ve never managed to make it past the complex (but well written) installation instructions.  It involves some bleeding edge stuff that depends on some bleeding edge stuff.  This installation from source complaint is probably one of the most common among newb Subversion users.  I remember reading that there is a Debian meta-package under unstable called subversion-server.  Installing a Subversion server should be as simple as apt-get install subversion-server, but I’ve not had a disposable Debian box kicking around nor enough free time to do a quick network install on something.

    On to my Subversion DUH moment.  I’ve got SUSE 9 installed on my laptop, which is with me pretty much all the time.  I was vaguely familiar that there were binary packages available somewhere (linked directly from the Subversion site of course), but had kind of written them off as being client binaries only.

    They’re so not.  This directory at suse.com has freaking everything I need to get started including an RPM for Subversion server.

    The binaries currenlty lag behind the 1.0 source release, but should be up to speed real soon now.  I’ll probably wait until the binaries reflect the 1.0 release, but once they do, *BAM* I’m going to start mucking around with Subversion, no painful install from source neccesary.

    Mad props to Olaf Hering at SUSE for maintaining a binary release for SUSE Linux.  By the way, there are packages for 9, 8.2, 8.1, 8 PPC, and UnitedLinux x86-64.

  • Text_Wiki 0.8.2

    Via freshmeat, there is a new version of Text_Wiki out.  I’ve mentioned it in the past, but I have not had a chance to play with it yet.  Here are the changes in the new version:

    There is a major change to the Wiki class property $rules definition which breaks backwards compatibility with 0.7 alpha and earlier for any user-defined rules. The $rules property is now an associative array (‘rule_name’ => ‘/path/to/classfile.php’). A bug where marked up numbers would sometimes be mistaken for delimited token numbers has been fixed. Rules are now loaded in the constructor method, not on-the-fly as part of the parse() method. This corrects the “can’t parse twice” bug. There are many other bugfixes and feature additions.

  • Programming by Contract with Web Services (in Python)

    Via the Daily Python URL, Georg Bauer talks about programming by contract with web services in Python.  The next version of the Toolserver Framework for Python will have support for the concept, which itself has been around for quite some time.

    I think that a lot of people would love to program by contract using web services, but I don’t think that we’re there yet.

  • LiveJournal FOAF

    A quick heads up from the gang in #FOAF: LiveJournal FOAF is live.  I even wrote up a quick entry in my stagnant journal about it.  FOAF data ends up on /users/username/data/foaf.  My LJ FOAF is here.  My geek FOAF is here.

    Carry on.

  • 3GSM Phone Roundup

    Lots of new phone models are being announced.  Here’s a quick rundown of the ones that I’ve found this morning:

    • InfoSync World: The Motorola A1000 (PDF fact sheet) (Symbian [UIQ], 3G/GSM/GPRS available Q42004) and the Motorola E1000 (PDF fact sheet) (similar form factor, less capability, proprietary OS, sometime in 2H2004).
    • Mobiletracker: Motorola MPX (PDF fact sheet), a big bad flippy super phone running Windows Mobile (assuming 2003) with Wi-Fi, bluetooth, 2.8 inch display.  Availability: 2H2004. Brighthand has a nice pic of the interior of the MPX.
    • MobileTracker: Motorola MPx100 (PDF fact sheet), a candy bar running Windows Mobile (howardchui says Smartphone 2003) has Bluetooth, IR, Java, and a 1.3 megapixel camera.  Availability: 2H2004.
    • Phone Scoop: Panasonic introduces the X700, a flippy Series 60 smartphone with IR, Bluetooth, MiniSD (gah! another format!), Class 10 GPRS, and MIDP2.0.  Availability: this fall in Europe.
    • Sendo: The M570 clamshell has 4MB of free memory and MIDP2.0.
    • Sendo: The S600 has MIDP2.0 and a digital zoom.  Thanks to Dave for the Sendo links.
    • PCPro: GSPDA unveils the Xplore G88.  They claim it to be the world’s smallest Palm-powered phone.  Brighthand has a picture of it.  I honestly don’t see this phone coming to mass market.