Erik's Home

See https://launchpad.net/bzr-extmerge

(first blog in a looooong time)

In the latest and greatest BZR you can have tags. It's really neat and one of the features I've been waiting for. I added (with the help of other bzr people, mostly Alexander) the functionality to see the tags in the log output. That's pretty much the only thing I've done in the opensource world for almost a year

Now I just want better cherry-pick support and bzr would be the ultimate revision control system

Regarding distributes vcs'.
Since I've moved to Mac, I've started using Textmate as my main text editor. It really can do a lot of great things, and I'm very happy with it. Even if it's not opensource. Textmate has many "bundles" and they are opensourced and contained in a svn repository. Since Textmate is very popular and people want it for other platforms, multiple clones has popped up. One for windows is e-texteditor, that's even trying to stay bundle-compatible with textmate (which they have to use cygwin for). However, they have now started a e-plugins google code project/repository. Here they state that they want to contribute things back to Textmate.

This is all good except that they now have two separate svn repositories, where they get no help in merging back and fourth between each other. If they had chosen a distributed vcs instead, this would be a none-issue. To get the most compatibility between Mac and Windows, bzr is probably the best choise.

Well, they are just going to have to have fun in trying to get this to work. It is doable, but you spend much time working with merging, instead of coding.

I was asked to put up a zip file of the extmerge plugin so you don't need to branch it.

You can find it on the extmerge page.

Chris Forsythe, one of the developers behind AdiumX, has started a Weekly Cocoa application challenge. He's doing a small "stupid" application every week (or soo...) without source-code, and our job is to re-implement it. Next week, he'll show us the source of last weeks application. This is a perfect way to learn Cocoa development.

I've done the first weeks application. Took about 30 min, but I learnt a lot in the meantime.

See more here.

The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet.

A followup to the Nokia 770.
Look very sweet. I just don't have any need for it (but, then again, I had no need for the 770 either, really )
I really love my 770, and this looks even better.

Specs are not released yet, but it has a VGA webcam apparently, and two SD slots, which is much better than the RS-MMC slot that the 770 has. Very cool, can't wait for the full specs.

So, Gnome finally abandon cvs. It was quite a few years to late in my opinion. The good thing about waiting is that it let the distributed revision control system grow and become more stable/mature. Yet, when gnome migrated, they choose to go with.... subversion... Why oh why? bazaar, git or mercurial would all have been better, and it would have given them the approval they need to take over the world. We already know they CAN do it. Personally, I'm a bazaar fan, but both mercurial and git are really good and I think that in the end, any of them are better than subversion.

All isn't lost, there are ways to use DSCMs together with subversion.

SVK
from the svk web page:
svk is a decentralized version control system built with the robust Subversion filesystem. It supports repository mirroring, disconnected operation, history-sensitive merging, and integrates with other version control systems, as well as popular visual merge tools.

I tried to use svk about a year ago, with very little success, but I've heard other people using it and being happy with it.

svk stores information about merging, etc in svn revision properties, so multiple people using svk can work together.

bzr-svn
Being a bzr fan, this is my favorite. One really cool thing about it is that it uses the same svn revision properties as svk, so you can use bzr, and someone else working in the same subversion repo, can use svk. This is really cool.

There are some problems with it, however. Currently, you must always get out the entire history from a svn branch. This takes time, and eats memory. For really large repositories, this is a show-stopper. I have tried to use it on repositories that have 35000 revisions, and it just doesn't work at all.

For smaller repositories, it's great!

git-svn
I personally haven't tried this one. It looks really cool, but I cannot find anything about how it stores merges within svn. From looking at the documentation, it looks like it simply doesn't at all.

It looks like git-svn is good only if you are working with it yourself and not in a team with other people. The other options seams better in that case. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

git-svn allows you to only get parts of a repository, which should mean that it works better on really large repositories, which might not be able to work with bzr-svn.


See this blog for more information on this, and this blog for more information on git-svn.

Software for starving students is a CD with free software for Mac and Windows. I think software for starving students is a great effort, but I don't really see the point of the CD since all of them can just be downloaded straight off the net. Why not just provide a list (which they also do )?

Personally, I prefer opensourcemac.org since it's about opensource software and not just "free" (as in beer) software.

The word "free" can be interpreted in two different way. Free as in "free beer" and free as in "free speech". With opensource, you get both. This means that you (or anyone else) can modify the source of the application. If you are not a programmer, the gain from this is that there are many many programmers that might want to solve the same problem as you have, or add the same feature you want. This is a reason that free (speech) software is to prefer over free (beer) software.

I put up a small webpage about my bzr plugin "extmerge". You can find it here.

Applegazette has an article named SPECULATION: 5 Predictions for Apple in 2007. One of the predictions is that Parallels will be included in the next Mac OS release (codename Leopard). This would give Mac users the possibility to run windows applications side-by-side with mac apps.

This is not a good idea.

The reason this is bad is that this means that application developers can simply just create a windows version and that way have all the Mac users use it. This will kill some Mac developments and it is one of the reasons OS/2 died. OS/2 was able to run windows applications very well, so why create a native OS/2 version of your application?

Being able to reboot your machine into windows using BootCamp is a different thing. BootCamp doesn't seamlessly integrate into your Mac desktop like Parallels does.

Don't get me wrong, I like what Parallels are doing, but it shouldn't be included in MacOS by default.

So, there is an article on SlashDot titled Is Ubuntu a Serious Desktop Contender? There is also a blog about it here.

Basically, the whole point of the question is "Can Canonical support 6.06 LTS (Dapper) for 5 years if they cannot immediately update Firefox like Red Hat did?" Well, personally, I don't see that as the most critical thing. Rather yet, they've had another issue that makes one of the best opensource applications unusable on Edgy (6.10). Edgy is newer than Dapper and it took almost three months for this issue to be fixed. If Firefox wasn't updated immediately, I can't really see that as the most critical problem.

Another interesting thing, In the blog linked above, Daniel writes: "Personally I sidetrack the whole issue by always using the Firefox and Thunderbird from mozilla.org on my Dapper computer, but that method bring some pros and cons." I feel that this is just more proof that we need a better way to install software under Linux.

Cocotron is a MIT X11-licensed implementation of parts of the Cocoa APIs. It's almost like GnuStep but with a different licence, and code. Use it to build applications for Windows or Linux based on the Cocoa APIs.

This makes it easier to bring Mac programs to windows... Hmm.. more windows programs, is that really what the world needs?

For quite some time, I've felt that installing software on linux is ... well.. not without problems.

There is a very nice blog about this titled "Is Ubuntu an operating system?" I do agree with most of what this blog is saying.

In general there are one or several large repositories of pre-packaged software, for your Linux distribution, Ubuntu has theirs, Fedora has theirs, OpenSuse has theirs, etc. Apart from the obvious double work being done by packaging the same application for different distributions, this also gives other problems.

One very clear example is a very serious bug that made OpenOffice useless under Ubuntu Edgy. This bug was reported Sep 26 and fixed somewhere around Dec 21. That is a three month waiting for a bug that is so serious that it makes one of the best opensource applications, useless. Now, if the OpenOffice team was responsible for packaging OpenOffice for Linux, regardless of which distribution you are using, they would be proud of their product, and nobody would have to wait three months.

I'm not saying the Ubuntu team are doing a bad job, in fact, I believe that Ubuntu is the best distribution ever, but it's a lot of work packaging the world for all your users, there are bound to take some time to fix some problem. If the same problem had occurred in the Windows build of OpenOffice, it would have been fixed quickly by the OpenOffice guys themselves and there would be no more problems.

Of course, there are lot's of issues with this. For example, how do you provide binary compatibility between different distributions? How do you install? Debs? RPMS? Mac-like bundles? etc! But I'm sure these problems could be solved if the different distributions would work together. Instead, it's quite clear that no such work is going to happen soon.

After using a Mac for a while, it's quite clear that being able to go directly to the vendor of the application, as opposed to the vendor of the operating system, has a lot of advantages. For Mac there is even a very nice framework to add auto update functionality to every program, giving you automatic updates without needing a central repository like most Linux distributions need. This is called Sparkle.

And here is the proof.

MacHeist is a great thing. What they have done is that they have contacted lots of developers of none-free software, and made a deal with them, to during a week sell a bundle with a number of different applications, and sell as many licenses as possible. And they are doing it at a VERY low price.

Some people seems to think that this is not fair to the developers. It's amazing that some people can't just accept that other people have a different opinion.
1) They are getting lots of people to buy software they wouldn't buy.
2) They are raising money for charity.
3) They are raising awareness of great applications
4) They are not forcing anyone to be part of this
5) Developers being part of the heist, are saying that they are selling more licenses since the heist started (while it's still going on)

Personally, I haven't bought a single piece of software privately since 1994 (with the exceptions of games). This is because I have always been running Linux and open source software. The heist gave me an opportunity to get some great software that I don't think I would ever have tried otherwise. The heist bundle is the first software I bought in over 10 years. Don't say the heist is bad.

Coming from the Linux world, where everything is free and if someone charge for something, you don't use it. This is a big deal.

I bought a HP scanner/printer/copier in December. This is a quite nice machine and I'm quite happy with it. However, it has had some problems. When I first got it, the drivers for the scanner didn't work under Mac OS. After about two months and many calls to HP support, HP released a new driver that worked. I don't think that had anything to do with the fact that I contacted support, since they knew nothing about it.

The other problem is more fun. With the scanner there is a cd labelled something like "ReadIris 11 for PC and ReadIris 11.5 for Mac". However, on the cd, there are only windows files, no Mac software.

This has been acknowledged by HP support, and I've most likely talked to them 30+ times. They have at once given me ReadIris 7 over FTP, twice sent if burned on a cd home to me (still version 7), and twice sent me a driver CD instead.

I've gotten really tired of calling them, and have mostly given up, but I'm quite amazed over the terrible terrible support they provide.

So, after hearing nothing from them for a long time, yesterday I got a call from a guy at HP support asking me if I have received the cd. Since I was out of the country I asked if they had sent one in the last few days and the answer was "ehh... I don't know". So I then asked, "well, what cd do you think that I wan't". He was unable to answer". After 7 months, they still don't know what cd I'm missing.

Amazing.

I have the whole story here (in swedish)