I know there will be people out there who totally disagree with me on this but sometimes proper source control is overkill.
Recently I’ve been working on a lot of small projects and with the addition of another computer to my ever increasing collection and I’ve increasing found that working between the laptop at uni and the desktop at home has been hard.
Keeping a track of all the changes and additions I’ve made, when I’m using proper source control I’ve got to remember to check in code from either machine when I’ve made these changes. This often means that if I’ve forgotten to commit my changes and the version I’m working with isn’t the latest what is the point in working on it at all?
The main problem I have with the proper source control approach is that I have to do a full commit with a commit message, this is great when I’ve got a new feature working or when I’ve fixed that Heisenbug, it gives me a point in time where I can go back and have a proper working copy of my code – this is awesome because I know that everything committed will be of a certain quality. But having to commit every time I swap machines means that this all goes out of the window, it’ll get a quick “Latest version” message and sometimes if I know something is broken it’ll have “x is broken” but at most that is what’ll have.
So where is the middle ground here? I wanted something that wasn’t manual, copying and pasting a folder around, which could be easily forgotten when moving machines and offers no protection from me being an idiot and copying an old version over a newer version. Obviously I think the proper source control path is overkill and eventually dilutes the usefulness of it so I found a better way to keep my source on ALL my computers up to date and available anywhere.
That solution is Dropbox and for me its easily the best solution for keeping things synced across computers. I keep a symbolic link of my work folder and it sorts the rest for me. Really its that easy. Sign up, install, sign in, create symbolic link and you’ve got all your work across all your computers.
Version control obviously has its place and is a wonderful tool that I push on all my uni friends as a great tool to use, and I use it myself to make sure I have another offsite backup and a set of steps (and working versions) of my work. But from now on Dropbox will save me time and headaches.
As I’m sure lots of you have heard there have been rumours of VLC for OSX being deprecated because of the lack of active developers for it. On hearing this and both having recently learnt Objective-C and being quite a hardcore user of VLC (I use it to play fullscreen videos on my second monitor while working) I felt that I might be able to jump in and help out. I know I won’t make any groundbreaking changes but it would be nice to give back something to a product that gives to me.
So I trundled off to the VLC main page to try and get some more information about what is the current state...
Although thats an awfully complex title to say fast 10 times its also my solution to a problem that I’ve been having with SQLite databases on the iPhone.
While developing both TEC and Tagger (yes thats my highly unimaginative name for my dissertation app) I keep running into threading issues with the SQLite database I use to store all the data. This is partly because of my use of many threads to keep the UI fast and useable. Because of these many threads there is occasionally a collision between the normal getting the details of the local area from a MAC address and the adding of a new...
As I mention on the about page I’m currently developing things for the iPhone and at the moment I’ve got 2 projects on the go that make use of the iPhone SDK. One is my dissertation which is making use of the iPhone platform to demonstrate my research (location based information using tag vector location techniques) and a more personal application for keeping archery scores during both practice and competitions, the point of the scoring app is to make it easier for people to record their scores because I see a lot of archers mess up the scoring of arrows, the totals for the ends and the...
I’m going to take a little bit of time out from working on my dissertation to talk a little about my dissertation.
The research area that I’m looking at is location based information but rather than using GPS or some other type of lat/long coordinate system to provide the location I’m making use of the prevalent wifi that is in pretty much every business, home and place of learning in the country. By using this mass of radio signals it is possible to triangulate a position and then provide information relevant to it by using tags. These tags are (currently) simple strings associated...