Thursday, 20 October 2011

Irony

Yesterday I thought about the irony of Steve Jobs passing and the anti-brigade who decried him as an evil capitalist. I found this to be a sad viewpoint. Steve helped to shape computing and software development in a way which is good for society in a similar way to Henry Ford who made the automobile accessible for nearly everyone who lived in his society.

I see the advent of the $1.00 application as being the on the same level as Ford, who made it some sort of policy to ensure that the workers who built cars could also afford to own one. The $1.00 application has/is helped/heling to empower those who live in less developed worlds to not only purchase the software, but, to also develop it and derive a decent income from it.

Software developers in wealthy countries are the only real losers. Unless these developers and their studios can sell a million $1.00 applications on a regular basis, they won't make enough money to survive and grow as businesses. This hands the advantage to the less wealthy who are intelligent enough to successfully develop software. All that is needed to make money developing software is a basic apple computer, ~US$100 make the software available on iTunes and access to the internet.

Nice one Steve.

RIP.

Tuesday, 13 September 2011

Setting up a localSubversion with OSX Lion and Netbeans 7.0.1


Setting up a local Subversion with OSX Lion and Netbeans 7.0.1

I've just recently found that my projects are starting to get large and I'm having trouble containing and editing all the scripts in my head. Including all the required libraries, bitmap files, associated widgets and doodads, my project has ballooned out to approximately 80 Meg. I'm still not sure if svn is the best tool for the job, but, it's been around long enough and a few random blogs seemed to suggest that it would be fine for my purposes. I will explain how I setup a local svn repository on my local MacBook hard drive.

A wealth of information is located www.netbeans.org however, some of it is slightly dated with reference to Netbeans 6.0 and not personally relevant (at the moment) with reference to Ubuntu. A great tutorial is located at http://netbeans.org/kb/docs/ide/subversion.html from where I gleaned a great deal of the information in this post.

The very first step is to use a terminal and create the local repository. The repository directory will be where svn will store all the files on the local machine. Issuing the following command will setup the repository on your computer:

svnadmin create /Users/norman/Documents/workspace/seams.svn/

The folder name can be anything you desire. Just don't go messing around with the internal files after you have created it, unless you know why you are playing with them.

Now we can fire up netbeans.

To set the path to the Subversion executable file in the IDE:
  1. Choose Tools > Options (NetBeans > Preferences on Mac) from the main menu. The Options dialog opens.
  2. Select the Miscellaneous icon along the top of the dialog, then click the Versioning tab. In the left pane under Versioning Systems, select Subversion. User-defined options for Subversion display in the main window of the dialog:
  3. In the Specify the SVN Home Folder text field, either type in the path to the executable file or click Browse to navigate to it on your system. Note that you need not include the Subversion executable file in the path.
  4. Check “Prefix Repository Location with Repository Url”.
  5. Click OK, then restart the IDE to allow changes to take effect.

Importing the working files.

The next step is to import your working files into the repository. Whilst you are actually exporting files from your system, the term 'import' is used in version control systems to signify that files are being imported into a repository.

To import a project to a repository:
  1. From the Projects window (Ctrl-1), select your unversioned project and choose Versioning > Import into Subversion Repository from the node's right-click menu. The Subversion Import wizard opens.
  2. In the Subversion Repository panel of the Import wizard, specify the protocol and location of the Subversion repository as defined by the Subversion URL. Depending on your selection, you may need to specify further settings, such as repository username and password, or, in the case of svn+ssh://, you must specify the tunnel command to establish the external tunnel. See the Subversion User FAQ for further details. Click Next.
  3. In the Repository Folder panel, specify the repository folder in which you want to place the project in the repository. A folder containing the name of your project is suggested for you in the Repository Folder text field by default.
  4. In the text area beneath Specify the Message, enter a description of the project you are importing into the repository.
  5. Click Finish to initiate the import, or optionally, click Next to continue to a third panel that enables you to preview all files that are prepared for import. From this panel, you can choose to exclude individual files from the import, or identify the MIME types of files before importing.
Thats it! All I need to do now is work out how to merge trunks, setup svn+ssh:// and get the project finished!

As I noted earlier, my project is ballooning in size and complexity, so I'm also looking at getting a UML-CASE tool, such as Visual Paradigm, working with my project. That, however, shall be left for another day. I've only so much time on my hands.

Wednesday, 8 June 2011

Python, OSX & Libraries.

Sometimes the installer does not cover all versions.

Please remember to use:
/usr/bin/pythonX.Y setup.py install
When installing a new library such as PyOpenGL.

That is all.

Thank you.