- Check out this really interesting lecture by Linus Torvalds on Git, the source control system he started for the Linux kernel. Its an interesting talk, where he compares Git with other version control systems. (0)
- I’ve created an account at mon.itor.us, a free web site monitoring tool I found in Cote’s Flickr feed. Looks interesting. (1)
Mac Software I’m Finding Useful
I thought I’d take some time to sit down and document the tools I’ve been using lately as I continue my acclamation into the MacIntosh world. These are tools that I’ve found really useful over the last six months or so.
- The Camino Browser - hands down the best browser I’ve found for the Mac so far. It’s my default browser.
- Ecto - Mac Native application for writing blog entries and posting them to your blog. Supports Blogger, Blojsom, Drupal, MovableType, Nucleus, TypePad, and WordPress among others. Doug referred to MarsEdit as another alternative, but Ecto fits the bill for me perfectly. It includes spell checker, Amazon Web Services integration, templates, preview - really everything you would want in an offline authoring tool.
- Vienna Newsreader - Vienna is an open source RSS reader for the Macintosh. It is quite comparable to FeedDemon, which I used on Windows, but I like it a lot better. This tool has become one of the things I use daily in order to keep up with things
- Snap N Drag - Screen capture utility I mentioned in previous posts. I use this all the time as well. Excellent tool.
- BBEdit 8.5 - BBEdit is an HTML editor for the MacIntosh platform. Its the only thing I’ve found comparable to HomeSite for the Macintosh. I’m using a trial version of this application right now, but there is a good chance that when the 30 day trial ends, I’ll be buying a copy. It makes HTML authoring a hell of a lot easier than Emacs.
- UberCaster - This is podcasting software. I have a license for it, but I haven’t had the time to muck about with it. By far the easiest podcasting software I’ve seen so far for the Macintosh. The software is currently in beta.
Some additional software I’m looking at that looks useful, but I don’t have need for it yet:
- Xyle Scope - CSS exploration tool. I’ve messed around with this a bit and it looks really interesting. I haven’t found another tool like it so far. Allows you to explore CSS and how the styles are resolved on your page.
I’m still looking for good image editing software that doesn’t cost a bajillion dollars (like Photoshop) and doesn’t require X-Windows to be installed. If anyone has any suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them.
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Tagged with: apple, Macintosh, software, tools
Subversion 1.4 Released
The Subversion team has released version 1.4 of its popular version control software. You can check out the release notes over at the official site get the the details, but here’s a summary of the changes, pulled directly from the aforementioned release notes:
- svnsync, a new repository mirroring tool
- Huge working-copy performance improvements
- Support for BerkeleyDB 4.4 and its “auto recovery” feature
- Size improvements to the binary delta algorithm
- A handful of new command switches
- Many improved APIs
- More than 40 new bugfixes
I was going to post about this yesterday, but I wanted to make sure I had the software built and installed here at the Labs before throwing the link out there. The upgrade went relatively well. Since I still use Berkeley DB for some of the repositories here, I build my own software to minimize the amount of dumping / loading I have to do. Currently I am still running Berkely DB 4.2. Referencing this during the build allowed me to avoid some problems people have reported using pre-packaged distributions that upgrade Berkeley DB for you, rendering your repository useless. Building my own also allows me to get the software without waiting for the binary distributions to become available.
One note on the upgrade. I’ve been a little lax in upgrading my Apache server (also custom built) and was running version 2.0.48 or so. The new release requires an up to date version of the apr libraries, so this also forced me to upgrade Apache to 2.0.59. Overall, the upgrade was painless.
As mentioned above, this release also includes the svnsync tool, which is a repository mirroring tool. From what I’ve read so far, the destination mirror must remain read only - there is no synchronization between two duplicate repositories (at least from the limited reading material I’ve found around so far), so this release by no means invalidates the SVK tool. Nevertheless, the working copy improvements and the mirroring capability shows that the team is still on the right track.
Also noted in the release notes:
… the new working copy format allows the client to more quickly search a working copy, detect file modifications, manage property metadata, and deal with large files. The overall disk footprint is smaller as well, with fewer inodes being used. Additionally, a number of long standing bugs related to merging and copying have been fixed.
I’m going to reserve judgement on these improvements until I get the Solaris boxes at work upgraded. The working copies are really an Achilles heel on Solaris environments, where 20 or so developers use one machine to do all development. We’ve had a number of inode-maxouts over the last year or so. When I get these machines upgraded, I’ll post a follow up on the performance on Solaris.
One other enhancement I’m glad to see, the diff and merge commands now support a -c option which you can use to merge one revision between branches. This allows you to avoid using a revision range for a simple one revision merge. This should simplify things a bit …
Subversion is still, overall, the best version control tool I’ve worked with thus far (and I’ve worked with quite a few of them). Kudos to the team on the new release. I like what I see so far …
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Tagged with: Linux, source-control, Subversion, tools
Screencast Demo of Castblaster Podcasting Software
If you’ve been looking for a tool to make podcasting much easier than using Audacity, you might want to check out Castblaster. I’ve used it for quite some time and each release it just gets better and better.
While browsing the Castblaster forums, I came across this screencast put together by Troy of the Rutters Ramblings podcast that shows a pretty complete picture of what Castblaster does.
If you don’t feel like downloading the software, but are curious as to what you could get from it, check out the screencast. Yes, it can be that easy.
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Tagged with: podcasting, software, tools, windows
Dabble DB - WOW
Back in June, Tom the Architect posted about something called Dabble DB that he said was pretty impressive. He described it as “collaborative data management, authoring, and publishing web application”. I made mental note to check it out (Tom doesn’t normally recommend stuff on his blog unless its exceptionally cool) but as most mental notes go, I forgot about it. That is, until I saw Tim Brays post from yesterday talking about how he invested in the company.
After reading this, I remembered Tom’s post and went over to check it out. I watched the seven minute demo and was completely blown away.
As you watch the demo think about the amount of data in any large corporation that is managed in spreadsheets. I had recently made a comment to someone that Excel seems to be the largest Enterprise Data Management tool used after seeing the number of extremely large spreadsheets in a meeting we were attending together. All of this data is passed here and there, modified, forwarded on, until there are so many versions of it you have no idea which one is correct anymore.
That is the beauty of Dabble DB. It allows you to pull this data into a centralized repository, refactor it into a normalized format on the fly, and even calendar the data if you have timestamps in the data model. The benefits of unifying all of that data tracked in spreadsheets is just too much to even comprehend given the pricing model that the company is offering the service for.
I do see one small problem though. Everyone talks about “software as a service” as the next “big thing” and I agree - in an ideal world. However, in the “not so ideal world” that most large corporations live in I see this model (or, more specifically, providing this model only) as a huge detriment to adoption in large companies who do not like to have their data hosted by a third party vendor. Given the volume of data tracked in spreadsheets of a confidential nature, I see this as a huge barrier for adoption. Until large businesses go through a major cultural shift in which they understand that they do not have to own and maintain all of the systems that their data resides, the audience that Dabble can have a huge effect on is limited to those “new companies” who get the “Web 2.0″ thing (or whatever we are calling it these days) - and quite frankly, this is not the audience that needs them the most.
The fact that Dabble does not offer an option to host the application internally for a customer (that I could find on their web site anyway), in my opinion, may be the one thing that keeps them from actually providing the huge benefit they could provide to the user base that needs them most.
All that rambling aside though, this is one cool application. I think to really appreciate it you need to see it. Check out the demo and tell me this isn’t one of the coolest things you’ve ever seen!
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Tagged with: data-management, database, enterprise, spreadsheets, tools, web2.0
- I was going to write about the Buildix product released by Thoughtworks but Keith woke up from his blogging hibernation and beat me to it. It looks like a cool product. Comments Off
- Cote’ has written an extremely informative article on using del.icio.us to share links with others. I think I’m going to be using this quite a bit. It certainly beats emailing links all over the place. Comments Off
- From Slashdot: “Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch has an article up on a new Flickr competitor called Zooomr. The interesting thing about all of this that it was developed in only three months by a 17 year old and to top it all off, the site is currently localized in 16 languages”. The site is “experiencing high volumes” since appearing on Slashdot and is being moved to a larger data center. I’m looking forward to seeing it. Comments Off
- I posted about the initial release of this software a while back, but I’m really getting the urge to see what it would take to use JavaSVN, a 100% Pure Java implementation of Subversion as the beginnings of a content management solution. Version 1.0.1 was announced yesterday afternoon. Comments Off
- John Udell explains how to create semi-private bookmarks in del.icio.us. Comments Off
- Google throws bodies at OpenOffice - News.com. Comments Off
- VMWare, Inc. offers a free virtual machine player according to this article. Download the new free player at the player download page. Comments Off
- Google Talk gets mixed reception - ZDNet UK News Comments Off
WebSVN - Easy to Install Web Based Subversion Repository Browser
If your looking for a web based Subversion repository browser that doesn’t take a rocket scientist to install, you might want to check out WebSVN.
WebSVN is a web based Subversion browser written in the PHP programming language. It took literally minutes to install. All you have to do is untar (or unzip) the installation on your web server, rename the include/distconfig.inc to config.inc and edit the config.inc file per the instructions contained in the module comments to add repositories to browse.
WebSVN supports templates, so its very easy to change the look and feel of your browser. For those used to ViewCVS, it may take a little getting used to, since the UI isn’t as intuitive at first. However, it supports the blame command, which ViewCVS does not.
Back in the beginning of the month I wrote a note to myself about a tool that creates RSS feeds from a Subversion repository. Most of these solutions require setting up post commit hooks to generate the RSS file. You get this functionality free with WebSVN — just click the “XML” button.
I need to play a little more with it, but overall from the 10 minutes I spent with it this morning (including installation), I’m liking it.
To see WebSVN in action, you need look no further than the Debian SVN repository.
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Tagged with: Subversion, tools
Online Code Reviews with CodeStriker
One of the most difficult processes to implement in a development environment is the code review process. That’s not to say that code reviews aren’t done, but they are often done informally and there is no documentation that a review existed. In order to get this documentation often a paper based solution has to be devised, causing more manual work and less time to cut code.
Codestriker is an application originally written by David Sitsky that allows web based code reviews. The tool can talk to both Subversion and CVS repositories and will produce a diff based display in which you can enter comments on a line by line basis and track their progress through the review process.
There are two ways to get a diff file into the system. The first allows you to talk directly to a Subversion or CVS server in order to grab a range of revisions from the repository. For repositories that CodeStriker cannot talk to natively, you can produce a diff file to upload to the server. This functionality allows the tool to work with source control systems such as RCS, Clearcase, or Perforce.
A few of my collegues and I have been using Codestriker to do code reviews amongst ourselves for quite a few months now and the tool makes the process much more manageable (and visible!). Having the tool online allows an author to receive immediate feedback via email when a comment is added to a review topic. This allows you to implement (or reject) review input as it comes in rather than getting a ton of work at one time that you have to finish before release time.
The Codestriker tool is written in PERL and runs as a CGI script over a MySQL database. The installation process is pretty straightforward and a full user manual exists on their web site.
Some of the features of the application that I really like consist of the following:
- All review comments are in a centralized place that is accessible via a browser
- Reviews (or topics) can be generated from a live CVS or Subversion repository
- If the review was generated from a live repository, you have “parallel view”, which shows you the full file differences so that you can see all of the changes in context
- Comments are added per line
- When a comment is added to a particular line, the person who initiated the review is notified via email
- and finally, all review comments are in a centralized place that is accessible via a browser!
The best way to get an idea of what CodeStriker can do for you is to take a look at some screen shots. If you like what you see, download and install it for a test drive.
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Tagged with: Subversion, tools
100% Pure Java Subversion Client Libraries
As a note to myself, I have to look at JavaSVN when I get a chance. Its a pure Java implementation of a Subversion client.
Some things I have to research:
- What would it take to integrate this into CruiseControl to eliminate the need for the Subversion client being installed on the box?
- What would it take to integrate this into Apache Ant for the reason listed above.
- Finally, has anyone actually already done the above two things?
I’ll post the answers back here when I find out.
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Tagged with: java, Subversion, tools
Trac: Integrated SCM and Project Management
This post is more a reminder to myself than anything else. As I was browsing the wordpress plugin repository I saw they are using version 0.8 of a product called Trac that integrates with Subversion and provides basic project management and defect tracking.
The site says the software does the following:
- An integrated system for managing software projects
- An enhanced wiki
- A flexible web-based issue tracker
- An interface to the Subversion revision control system
This looks really interesting and I need to remember to check it out. I tried to download it this morning, but it seems the download area of their site is down.
Update: Edgewall.com is not down. For some reason, FireFox was giving me zero reply error. When I went to a Windows machine with IE, I was able to download the software.
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Tagged with: Subversion, tools
