antiprocess.net

Lately I’ve been staying up more and more, almost so early I could see the sun come up again. This would be, more or less, ok if I would actually stay in balance between the waking hours and the times in deep sleep. The reality is different, I’ve started to keep myself more and more awake.

It’s not that healthy, I know, but…

The nights have become somewhat strange time to me. It’s my time to really focus, and in a weird way I’ve never been able to before. I’m more capable of solving problems, been more active in all areas of life and achieving this without damaging my daytime life.

the work frontier

I’m out of them right now, again. But fear not, everything should be worked out soon and if everything else fails, I should be starting out a work+school=diploma -thingie (we call it oppisopimus in here Finland) where, at best I’ll be working fully paid as a designer/coder for my friends company and getting the paper that states I officially know my shit. I’m really, really looking forward to it. Got my fingers crossed. Really.

the personal frontier

as people might have noticed I’m not the greatest person to express my mental and physical whereabouts in the realm of internet, but as I stated last time, life is good. Sure there’s some friction sometimes, but it’s all part of the package deal I made some 3 years ago. I’m trying to keep my head together now that I don’t have work to focus on, but I’m trying to find other areas of interest as I write this. Reading has turned out a nice way to unplug.

Managing projects

For some time I have been doing projects with various people. It’s hard to keep together a project of multiple contributors using just plain IRC and eMail. Then I started thinking how the process could be made easier for everyone AND to keep backups of all the projects.

After some time it really hit me; Revision Control is the solution. I’ve read about Subversion before and knew that many big open source projects use it as their choice. I’m a fan of easy solutions so I decided to take a closer look at it.

I wasn’t able (yet) to install Subversion server on Valontuoja, our little own space in internet, but that didn’t stop me. Learning about something without all the tools constantly makes you creative. As I started to prepare my old home server to the job I started to look on the other side of the whole thing, the clients, and the amount of choices was quite good. Coding on OS X hasn’t really been the most sexiest thing ever, so I was kinda worried about finding anything.

Here are the choices I found:

• Versions — The sneak peek on the site looks promising and fancy, but I’ve been waiting for my beta invitation for more than 6 months. Not much progress has been seen since the discovery of the site.
• svnX — SvnX is an open source GUI for most features of the svn client binary.
• Build in Subversion Bundle in TextMate — But I’ve been reading a lot of worried posts that it’s not working really well. I haven’t been able to commit any changes (no svn server to commit to) yet, so don’t believe me.
• ZigVersion — My choise for the job! Looks and feels awesome, there’s a screencast to get everybody started and you can get free license if you’re doing non-commercial work with it (Open Source, Personal, Educational, etc…)

Other essential tool could be SSHKeyChain.app (Use SSH key pairs instead of typing in your password a million times), help to generate those key pairs and how to use em can be found somewhere else, but remember to use passphrase if your keys so the access still has some level of security.

If you are like me and want to know everything (head first diver to the dark water) you can learn everything about Subversion by reading the free O’Reilly Media book “Version Control with Subversion” as a convenient PDF-book.

Before this entry falls everywhere discussing the world news, I’ll publish it. It just might be time to do some work on the home server (to get the Subversion server running, remember?).