Category Archives: General

Filezilla 2 Cuteftp

I’ve been using Filezilla alot lately but it has been messing up a few transfers (to live servers no doubt) so I decided to try a new FTP client. I hade used CuteFTP Pro before and like it alot. I have a huge list of sites in my Filezilla site manager though and I was not going to re-enter all of them. I had a look at what CuteFTP could import and decided I could convert Filezilla settings to text and then import them to cute ftp…. So I added
[code lang=”xml”]

[/code]
to the Filezilla.xml file which can be found @ “C:\Program Files\FileZilla” (usually) . I then wrote XSLT to transform the xml to text so I could import it.
[code lang=”xml”]









Site Label:
HostName:
Username:
Port:
Default local folder:
Uses passive mode





[/code]

I copied the ouput to a text file and imported it to cute ftp. No passwords mind you but it saved me a lot of time – hope it helps you 🙂

SVN explorer.exe slow down

Over the last few months my SVN working directory has grown to about 11Gb. I use TortoiseSVN client which works great but recently my machine (3GHz P4 with 1.5Gig Ram) started to run super slow any time I accessed a file or tried to browse a directory. I thought I had a virus at first but after running countless scans, I was sure I hadn’t (half scans really as I got bored waiting but I’m confident I didn’t have anything). Some research last night revealed that large working directories can slow down explorer as Tortoise is trying to recursivley look through all the directories to see if any of them are under version control.

You can disable this in TortoiseSVN->Settings->Icon Overlays->disable “Show overlay status icons recursivley”.
TortoiseSVN icon overlay settings

Once I did that, things sped up alot. If down the line it starts to get slow I can dsable icons completely and it should run as explorer should without any TortoiseSVN interference.

I also deleted a ton of directories in my working directory which I wasn’t usng anymore which might have helped as well.

What a pillock

Damn Dan Brown and his “The DaVinci code“. This morning I started to get an earlier train as they have changed the timetable, meaning it is dark when I get to Abergele. With it being dark and the fact that I was so engrossed in my book, I missed my stop. I jumped out of my chair “Bollocks” just as we pulled away. I managed to get a train back from the next station but man do I feel a pillock.

OSX and Ubuntu- dual boot

After playing around with Ubuntu Live (PPC) on my ibook, this weekend my mission was to get OSX and Ubuntu dual booting on my ibook. Here’s how it went.

  1. Backup some of my important Docs and data from my existing OSX install
  2. Start clean install of OSX, creating 3 partitions, one shared, one for OSX and one for Ubuntu
  3. Continue OSX Clean Install
  4. Once OSx is installed insert Ubuntu Install CD
  5. Choose all default options but when it comes to partitioning, dlete the Ubuntu partition you created earlier. go back and choose to use maximum free space
  6. Ubuntu will continue it’s install and will install a boot manager so you can choose between OSX, Ubuntu or CD on boot
  7. To view the files in the shared partition, I used the following
    sudo mkdir /media/share
    and then
    sudo mount -t hfsplus /dev/hda5 /media/share
    I still can’t write to this disk but I am working on it

I now have OSX and Ubuntu running very smoothly alongside each other… let the development begin 🙂

Update
To get the shared partition working you can to sync the two users’ (my OSX user and my Ubuntu user) user ids and group ids (You can change the ID in OSX netinfo manager). Once this was done and the drive was mounted correctly (in /etc/fstab)
/dev/hda5 /media/share hfsplus user 0 0
I could write to the shared drive in both installs but it caused havoc with permission in OSX as the user ID had changed. I reckon I can just give world write access to the drive though and it’ll still work.

Aardvark’d DVD + Karova.com

I bought Fog Creek‘s (Joel on Software) “12 weeks with geeks” DVD about a month ago and it arrived the other day. I was expecting a DVD with plenty of interviews about a software project’s lifecycle. This was not really what I got but what I did get was very entertaining and well worth the few dollars. The DVD followed 4 interns over 12 weeks while they developed Fog Creek’s new remote assistance software CoPilot. It looks like a very well organised workplace with devoted and very intelligent employees (much like Karova really 🙂 ).

KS2.0
Speaking of Karova, we have just released our new Karova Store e-commerce software, branded KS2.0. After weeks and weeks of hard work and tons of test harnesses, we have locked down the code untill we start working on the next release. The Karova.com site was also re-designed for the occasion (Good job Andy and Matt). I don’t appear on the more about Karova yet though :(.

ln for windows

While working on a C# project, having to copy the built dlls to the working directory to test the application was doing my head in. Now if I was in linux I would just

ln /dir/sourcefile.file /otherdir/targetfile.file

But can I do something similar in windows?, I didn’t think so but with some digging I found the fsutil comand which I had never used before.

fsutil hardlink create /otherdir/targetfile.file /dir/sourcefile.file

Now when I build my project my working directory is also updated…

Command-line reference A-Z

Google Analytics

What is up with Google Analytics, so bloody slow, it forgets about stats it should have, it takes a day to get new stats. Is it just me?. Nice and snazzy but I wish it worked. I hope to God that this isn’t what the Urchin customers got for their money. Sort it out Google…. ps, I am banned from Google Adsense due to “illegal clicks”…. my arse.

Python and UML

It’s been a good while since I’ve used any formal methods to plan any coding so it’s been a great using some UML again. It just shows that all that stuff I thought was fluffy bullshit realy does make sense when developing large projects. A few links I’ve found while looking around at Python and UML.

pyIdea is an IDE that generates Python code from UML diagrams.

Lumpy a UML generator for Python.

PyReverse is a set of tools for reverse engineering Python code.

ArgoUML is a modelling tool that helps you do your design using UML.

BlackAdder is an application development environment.

PyUt is a little UML1.3 diagram editor.

Wing IDE is the most advanced Python IDE available today (supposedly).

Stani’s Python Editor with built in UML and auto-completion.

Boa Constructor is a cross platform Python IDE and wxPython GUI Builder.

wxDesigner is a visual development tool for the free cross-platform GUI library wxWidgets.

Version control tips

Using CVS/SVN is great but it can be a right pain in the ass if it goes wrong. I’ve been using it on an off for a few years now. I always stick to these simple rules and very rarely run into any conflicts or difficulties. On the same note, I managed to get CVS working on my Dreamhost account with TortoiseCVS on my machine and viewcvs web front end hosted on Dreamhost. A very nice set up indeed. I’ll post how I went about getting it working another time.

  1. Update frequently
  2. Always update before committing
  3. Always add a meaningful comment to each commit