• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

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I’ve been a CVS user for years but have spent most of those years cursing its short-comings. The main reasons I stuck with CVS despite this were:

• Lock-in – there is a lot of code in both my personal CVS repository and the one for the EVE project. If it ain’t broke …….
• Maturity – CVS has been around for donkey’s years. The code is stable, people know how to use it, and there are loads of tools and tutorials out there. Subversion is a lot newer and still changing.
• Inertia – it took a lot of poking and prodding over the years to get people using CVS, people don’t want to have to start the learning curve all over again!

I’ve been reading about how great subversion is for ages but had never quite gotten round to trying it myself. The reason I hadn’t tried it was because I’d never had an excuse to dedicate scarce time to it. However, a few weeks ago people in work started voicing an interest in Subversion so I took that as my cue to finally give it a go.

[tags]Source Control, CVS, Subversion, SVN[/tags]

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Tagged with: review • software • open source • source control

When it comes to safety in the real world kids have vital safety precautions drilled into them. They are warned about the dangers of playing on the road and thought how to cross the road safely. They are also warned about strangers and told not to get into cars with them or anything like that. Hence, despite the fact that there are serious risks out there in the real world, kids generally manage to stay safe. However, the same is not true on the Internet. Many kids are not given a basic education on the very real dangers that exist in cyber-space, or how to protect themselves. As a result they are in real danger as they wander round cyber-space totally un-prepared for the nasty reality that there are very bad people out there who want to harm them. In my view the main reason for this is that many parents don’t understand computers in general and the Internet and the concept of the now all-pervasive social networking sites in particular. Without this understanding they cannot possibly prepare their kids properly so they end up wandering around the Internet un-supervised and un-prepared and become soft targets for pedophiles and cyber-bullies. In my mind this makes a very strong case for teaching children about the Internet and particularly safety on the Internet in school.

This problem was highlighted again today when two of my fellow PhD students in NUI Maynooth (and founders of www.bigulo.com) got some good media coverage for a survey they did of Irish related Bebo profiles. The press-release makes interesting reading and is full of very simple but very effective advice for parents. If you’re a parent I’d suggest you read it, and if you have young siblings who use the net I’d suggest you talk to them or your parents about it. Anyhow, this is an important issue and it needs to be kept in people’s mind so thanks Des and Andy for getting this important issue some much-needed media attention.

[tags]Bebo, mySpace, Internet, Children[/tags]

There are a lot of podcasts out there, an awful lot in fact. The hard thing can be separating the proverbial wheat from the proverbial chaff. I dedicated an entire segment of the IFAS Podcast to good astronomy/science podcasts but I’ve never done a post for tech ones here before. Of all the tech podcasts I’ve subscribed to there are only five I listen to regularly and they are all very different and have different target audiences. Unless you are pretty much my clone you’re not likely to be interested in all five but I’d be pretty shocked if at least one didn’t appeal to you!

[tags]podcast, tech, Apple, Linux, Windows[/tags]

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Tagged with: review • podcasting

This is the long over-due follow-up article to JavaScript – Much more than Java’s Mini-Me which I want to get published now because I’ve just started another JS article that I think needs to come after this article. I want to finish evangelizing the good things about the JS language before I take a look at JS’s dark under-belly. The next article has the working title JavaScript and AJAX on the Web – a Liability? and should be out within a week (at least that’s the plan).

In my previous JS article I discussed fundamental language features that JS has that give it the ability to do things many other languages just can’t. These features give the programmer extra tools that the common high-level languages like Java just don’t have. In this article I won’t be looking at anything as earth-shattering as that, I’ll just be looking at some nice features JS has that tend to get over-looked by JS programmers.

[tags]JavaScript, JS[/tags]

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Tagged with: JavaScript

If you have multiple computers I’m sure you’ve often wished you could easily sync your bookmarks between them. I know it’s happened me that I come across something on desktop at home, I book mark it, then a few weeks later I’m out on the road and I really need it but it’s not in the bookmarks on my laptop. Bookmarks Synchronizer 3 is a nice solution IF you have access to a server either via FTP, or HTTP if your server is webDav enabled (like a .mac iDisk).

[tags]FireFox, FireFox Extensions, Bookmarks[/tags]

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I just couldn’t help but laugh when I read a report on the release of IE7 on Yahoo News. MS have decided to distribute IE7 to XP users via Microsoft Update as a security patch! Never a truer word said!

[tags]IE7, MicroSoft[/tags]

CodeWeavers recently sent round a mailing about the release of the second beta version of CrossOver Mac. I didn’t have time to play with it straight away but over the weekend I gave it a go. The upgrade was not problem free but it did fix one of my problems with CrossOver, IE now seems to work properly.

[tags]Apple, CrossOver, CrossOverMac, OS X, IE[/tags]

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Tagged with: Windows • emulator • open source • software • OS X • review

If you use a laptop and you move around between multiple networks you’ll probably tire very quickly of FireFox not allowing you to store multiple proxy configurations. I have to use different proxy settings at work and at home so I set about to look for a nice proxy switching extension for FireFox. There are a few different extensions out there and after playing with the most promising looking ones I’ve come to the conclusion that the best one for me is SwitchProxy Tool.

[tags]FireFox, Proxy[/tags]

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On OS X you can run a JARed Java App by simply double clicking the .jar file. This works but it has a few downsides. For a start you can’t keep the app in your dock so you can launch it easily and you also can’t easily launch it with things like HimmelBar. Secondly it will always have the Java JAR icon and if you’re running a few Java JARs this can get very confusing. What you really want is the same Java App but wrapped inside an OS X App. Examples of this would be the OS X version of jEdit. If you have the Developer Tools (XCode) installed on OS X this is trivial to do. If you don’t have the developer tools installed you’ll find and installer for them on your OS X DVD.

[tags]OS X, Java, Application[/tags] Read more

Tagged with: OS X • Java • tutorial

I’ll hold my hands up now and say this will be a rant post. I’m annoyed. I’ve just wasted and entire afternoon at work because of pure and utter idiocy by the RedHat people. I don’t suffer fools well so that also adds to my annoyance 🙂 Read more

Tagged with: open source • Linux • RHEL

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