Does anyone have a time machine as I’d like to go back to just before the Northern Ireland/England kick off and tell myself not to watch it. The fact that England lost the game was dissapointing, however the worst part was how they played or rather failed to play. It just never looked like we’d score despite having the ball for most of the game. Northern Ireland however were playing a cracking game and as much as it pains me to say it, really deserved to score and win the game.

It’s not the end of the world though with Austria and Poland still to play, but tonights performance doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence. At least we are still in control of our qualification, still needing 2 wins. Austria should be 3 points, but then that’s what everyone said about Northern Ireland tonight. Looking at the tables, perhaps we could get one of the two runner up spots, failing that I think we’re guaranteed 2nd place in the group which puts us in the best of 6 playoffs, but judging by who we could potential be placed against, that would be a nail biter itself.

Anyhow, to cheer myself up (well its a good enough excuse :P) I thought I’d checkout the Linux release of Darwinia, the second game from the makers of Uplink. If I don’t post an update to this blog soon, you can assume its a good game, either that or we’ve had another power cut

For any team based development, not using any form of source control is a recipe for disaster. Individual developers each with their own un-synchronised copies of the code will sooner or later result in the loss of work as one developer unknowingly overwrites anothers recent changes. Then you have the situation of a recent change causing major knock on effects to the system, yet nobody can remember exactly what it was that was changed (or who did it).

That’s just two of many many reasons to use a source control system for collaborative work and yet there are still many projects that don’t take advantage of it. Source control isn’t just for team projects either, solo developers can benefit in a number of way. For many years I’ve been running cvs (and now subversion) locally for any project I develop. Once you get used to the extra steps of setting up your repository and commiting your work you’ll soon begin to reap the rewards.

Having the ability to test out new ideas then rolling back to your previous version if it doesn’t work, or jump back to a previously stable version of code when you’ve really made a mess of things is a real time saver.

Another benefit comes after releasing a build version of your code. Simply tag the source code as version1.0 and continue on developing on your main trunk of the code. Then when the inevitable bug reports start to come in, you can check out a copy of version1.0, fix the bug and issue an updated build without worrying about the version2.0 features breaking anything or been included in the build. With merge support you can also easily integrate those bug fixes into version2.0 as well.

I could go on and on about the ways source control can save time and make your life that much easier, but I’ll spare you the details and instead direct everyone to the subversion online book.

KDevelop users will find using subversion a breeze considering it has built in support. If your a Gentoo user, add “subversion” to your USES flag in make.conf and emerge subversion and then kdevelop. You should then be able to select subversion as the versioning system in your project->options.

One gotcha is that KDevelop will complain that “svn+http” is not a registered protocol when you try to use any of the subversion options if you don’t have the appropriate kde services registered. This is simple to fix (although it took a while to find out what the error actually meant) , you just need to “emerge kdesdk-kioslaves”.

If you don’t already use subversion (or another versioning system) for your projects, you really should consider doing so, especially if you plan on collaborating with other developers.

Subversion is not only incredibly straight forward to install/setup (for most configurations), stable and feature rich, it is also free. So there really is no excuse for not using at least some form of source control. Spend a little time learning how to use the tools available to you and you’ll save yourself a great deal of time and effort in the future.

Poker was one of those games that I just didn’t understand how people could enjoy it. In fact that pretty much sums up my opinion on card games in general. That is until a few friends and I had a game a few months ago and we’ve been hooked since.

Anyone whos been watching the PokerStars.com tournament will see how lucky some of the players were to stay in the running. Then you see those that had really strong hands and were robbed on the River. It’s a much more interesting game to watch than I first gave it credit for

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Although KPilot provides a lot of conduits, its (afaik) missing the ability to synchronise between open office and WordSmith. Until I can find some time to learn about coding plugins for kpilot, I’ve knocked up a quick bash script.

It’s pretty basic and not guaranteed to work You provide it with a list of files to monitor/synchronise. The script then converts and uploads any new or modified rtf files to the palm. Next it downloads the pdb’s for any files that hadn’t been locally modified and updates your rtfs. So long as you don’t change both the local and remote copy between syncs, it should work fine. If you do change both, the local version will overwrite the palm version.

The script requires “pilot-link” and “wsconv” to be installed. wsconv can be obtained from the WordSmith website and pilot-link is in portage.

I’ve not done much testing of this script, so if there are any errors please let me know.

For the script code Read the rest of this entry »