work

My requests for v1.4 of the excellent Slife app:

• As well as automatically discovering what apps I use, automatically hide the apps I don't use in any given day / week / month view. It would make the information much more concise.
• Extract a sensible colour for each app from its current icon, so I can easily match the lines to what I see in my dock.
• Activities are great, if you remember to update them. Think about querying the user for what they've done in the last hour. If there's a plugin-able typing break software for OSX, talk to that.
• If not, think about making a plugin-able typing break software for OSX which does the above, because this would be soooo close to a perfect combo (in my book as well).
• If you close the distance between what you're doing and generating output that can drive invoicing, you will have a killer business app.

I may update this list ... if I think of anything else ...

i've been checking out google maps versus yahoo! maps, evaluating the best nz coverage

google gets cred for a hot flight sim built into google earth and for not lying to dutch tourists about opanuku road joining up with scenic drive. when dutch tourists are deceived, they end up breaking their rental cars on the bullbars of my clunkery old diesel, and that sux. -10000 points to some nz mapping providers for their mapping badness.

but today we're looking at yahoo!, who are predicting (note contrast between coastline in satellite pic and inlay) either severe global warming, or a catastrophic dambreak at the huia dam

what else have we learned from the mapping madness?

• yahoo has ok pics, but responds to requests for specific nz addresses with "do you mean waitakere, or waitakere?" then it sends you to waitakere township either way
• yahoo has lots of black areas across nz, and pretty much no street map ... maybe this whole yahoo!xtra thing will change that ... but would you trust xtra for directions to the corner store?
• any mapping provider gives better results than nz posts postcode finder, which still insists that piha doesn't exist, try paihia. i cannot find a single piha road that nz post know about. such a pity, given what a nice chap the postie is ...
• google maps are pretty damn good so far!

excellent screencast by victor tsaran on screenreaders, accessibility and website useability. worth watching for anyone making sites that they want people to be able to use.

check at 25:44 to see speed screenreading in action :)

i got this (apparently a corrupted repository) tonight, and found that the workarounds posted on the interweb didn't work for me - because i didn't have a representations file to dump. (are those workarounds for an older SVN?)

but the fix was relatively simple, and i figured if it saves some other folks from messing around then why not throw the relevant factoids at the giant google brain and see if some stick on under SUBVERSION gives me a CHECKSUM MISMATCH how do i FIX THIS, HELP?

here's how we check out a second copy of the relevant directory, and swap it in. optionally then copying over any other corrupted files etc. you may need to add salt or sugar to suit your specific situation (ie, in my example, there are no subdirectories blocked by the corrupted file)

1. PROBLEM: i can't check in the file 'lib/objects/blah.ext' because i get the error:
   

   svn: Checksum mismatch for '.svn/text-base/blah.ext'; expected: 'f8d45250f7df5561635854165862fdd8', actual: '644f85c4befa671150c5c6ec5fad9885'

2. first i checked in all the files that didn't complain
3. cd lib/objects # go where the corrupted file is
4. grep url .svn/entries # get the svn path of that specific corrupted file's parent dir
   

   url="svn+ssh://xris@teacup/svnpath/lib/objects"

5. cd /tmp # go somewhere we can play
6. svn co svn+ssh://xris@teacup/svnpath/lib/objects . # check out a fresh copy of that dir
7. cd - ; cd .. # go back to lib/objects, then up a dir
8. mv objects /tmp/objects.orig # move the updated files to /tmp/
9. mv /tmp/objects objects # move the fresh svn repos into your work dir
10. svn update # just to be sure it works
11. cp /tmp/objects.orig/blah.ext objects/ # move your updated blah.ext file back into your work dir

now look. you can't just copy and paste the above, you know. i'm telling you how i fixed it for me, because the other instructions linked above yakked on about a representations file that i just plain don't have .... so rather than fixing the MD5 entries in the DB, i just forced SVN to give me a fresh copy of the MD5 files for the lot.

i hope this helps. huzzah for the giant google brain!

we have been having web2.0 fun, but no not ajax

distributing everything across various apps and then overlocking it back together again ... here's the rough list so far :)

• ssh sessions are captured by a .bash_logout that sends an email to a protected wordpress log. calls and daily job notes get sent via email using the same method.
• a separate trac instance for each customer records activities per ticket - soon i will integrate email updates for this so that emails can be directed to the correct trac instance and logged on the job
• trac also collates our svn checkins and we use the wiki facility to record meetings and other whatnot ...
• meeting dates and scheduled appointments are fed into DAV-shared icalendar files via thunderbird's Lightning extension (on linux and windows) and iCal (on OSX).
• calendars are shared in a web-accessible and password protected DAV location, and parsed with phpicalendar. this generates another RSS feed for each calendar.

ok by the end of this we have lots of RSS feeds - from trac (several, on our hosted server and on customer machines around the country) and from wordpress (which is being rudely exploited just for its email and magpie facilites in this instance) and phpicalendar (cal->RSS) ... and they get bumped into an rss aggregator - lilina - and we do our end of month assessments, billing, job analysis and followups from there.

what a lot of fun. mad, but it works, and it shows real testament to how easy it is becoming to create great mashups between distributed applications.