Technology

Subversion has changelists

Several times a week I recommend to different people to actually go and read The Subversion Book. Obviously, not enough people do it. Including myself. So sometimes I have to fish out a tasty bit from that book to get people interested. Today is just such a day.

Have you heard about Subversion changelists? If you haven’t, chances are you aren’t utilizing your time properly. Here is a brief introduction.

Subversion 1.5 brings a new changelists feature that adds yet another method to the mix. Changelists are basically arbitrary labels (currently at most one per file) applied to working copy files for the express purpose of associating multiple files together. Users of many of Google’s software offerings are familiar with this concept already. For example, Gmail doesn’t provide the traditional folders-based email organization mechanism. In Gmail, you apply arbitrary labels to emails, and multiple emails can be said to be part of the same group if they happen to share a particular label. Viewing only a group of similarly labeled emails then becomes a simple user interface trick. Many other Web 2.0 sites have similar mechanisms—consider the “tags” used by sites such as YouTube and Flickr, “categories” applied to blog posts, and so on. Folks understand today that organization of data is critical, but that how that data is organized needs to be a flexible concept. The old files-and-folders paradigm is too rigid for some applications.

As wonderful as they are, changelists do have some limitations.

Subversion’s changelist feature is a handy tool for grouping working copy files, but it does have a few limitations. Changelists are artifacts of a particular working copy, which means that changelist assignments cannot be propagated to the repository or otherwise shared with other users. Changelists can be assigned only to files—Subversion doesn’t currently support the use of changelists with directories. Finally, you can have at most one changelist assignment on a given working copy file. Here is where the blog post category and photo service tag analogies break down—if you find yourself needing to assign a file to multiple changelists, you’re out of luck.

But even with this limitations, changelists are extremely handy. So I urge you once again to read the book. Or just the changelists section.

Morning news and Cyprus technology

While having my morning cup of coffee and going through the Cyprus Mail articles, I caught myself pausing and thinking a few times. That doesn’t happen that often (thinking, not pausing), so I thought I’d share the bits that halted me.

The first articles was titled “TEPAK goes Wi-Fi“. WTF is TEPAK? Not everyone knows, especially in the morning, with the full cup of coffee. TEPAK is of course Cyprus Unviersity of Technology. Once again, with proper use of capitals: cyprus University of TECHNOLOGY. So, they have some Wi-Fi there now. Good. Welcome to the 21st century! No, seriously. Let’s read a bit of the article.

LIMASSOL’S technology university, TEPAK, yesterday went wireless. The Wi-Fi connection was inaugurated by Limassol mayor Andreas Christou, the president of TEPAK’s administrative committee Elipida Keravnou and the Vice President of the Electricity Authority (EAC) Loizos Papacharalambous.

Wow! That sounds a bit odd. Why do they need a whole mayor to inaugurate the launch of a commonplace technology?

On behalf of the EAC Papacharalambous said the network had 40 points of access and covered areas of historic importance in Limassol including Heroes Square, Anexartisisas Street and part of the beach front.

Here it gets a bit funny. I understand that the university is located in the old part of town and things are tight in there. But when I think of the students who scattered between the beach front, the Heroes Square, which is famous for all the cabarets and prostitution that goes on there, and Anexartisisas Street, which is a shopping center of sorts. Anyway, that’s not important. The important comes later and it actually puts the whole article in to perspective, so it makes sense.

Papacharalambous said all Cytanet users would also have free access through the Cytanet Wireless Zone service by using their own access codes while other users would be able to use the service by using access codes acquired through pre-paid cards, credit cards or by sending an SMS message.

So, all of that is just a publicity stunt for Cytanet – one of the island’s Internet Service Providers. Now it all makes sense. It wasn’t about the Cyprus Unviersity of Technology at all. It was about Cytanet covering part of the old town with a Wi-Fi network. Which they will charge you for.

By now I obviously lost all interest in the article, even if it was almost over. But the next one I came around puzzled me too. It was about “Two officers injured directing traffic“. In particular this bit:

One of the officers, who was hit while on his motorbike, escaped serious injuries after the airbag in his uniform deployed and broke his fall.

Say what? An airbag in the uniform? That’s the first time I hear about something like this. Google search for “police uniform airbag” returned 53,000 results only and nothing looked interesting, not even the pictures. Anyone can shed some light on this? Cause I am all out of coffee by now.

Custom background for Google search

The Next Web points out:

Starting this afternoon, and rolling out over the next few days Google is releasing the ability around the US and the world to upload a custom image as the background of your Google.com.

Obviously, there will be a lot of noise about it around the web. I though have no idea why that is such a big thing. I rarely ever see the front page of Google at all. I always enter my search terms into the search or address bar of my browser and it takes me directly to the results page.

Office wars are back

It’s been a while since I heard something from the office applications front lines. And today, while catching with news in my Google Reader, here is what I saw (or almost what I saw, since I am reading in Expanded mode, and not in List):

Three articles in a row, and all are about the office applications. Either it’s an unlikely coincidence, or TechMeme is doing something wrong, or … the office wars are back and that’s the most exciting and hyped about topic in the tech industry right now. Which one do you think it is?

P.S.: Here are the links to the articles: one, two, three.

Missing main menu bar in Gnome applications

I had this problem for quite some time now. It’s been haunting me from computer to computer and from account to account. I went through all configuration options I could find. I started my Gnome and GTK profiles from scratch a few times. And nothing seemed to help. I even abandoned Gnome over this and switched to KDE and other desktop managers for some time – that’s how annoying it was. And the worst thing, whenever I tried to Google for a solution – a totally different problem was coming up in the search results.

The problem was that in all of my Gnome applications main menu was missing. The menu bar, which has File, Edit, View, Help, and such – never showed up. Be that a video player or GnuCash or anything else. Today I finally found a solution to this major annoyance. Just in case the original will disappear, I quote for generations to come:

The problem was not in the .gnome or .gtk sub-directories, as I suspected. Instead two packages installed were the problem. gnome-globalmenu-common and gnome-applet-globalmenu were the culprits. There are two options if these are installed. The first is to use the applet on one of the Gnome panels either top or bottom of hte screen. This interesting applet will insert the ‘missing’ menu bar from the currently focused application into the bar the applet is a part of. This will be VERY handy on the netbook, where real estate is an issue. The other option is to remove them.

Thank you, Daniel and mutk from #fedora IRC channel. You sirs have saved my sanity.