I've just put together an installer for Wildcat BZR on Windows. This includes everything that is required to run the application - no previous installations of Bazaar or any other python-related things are required.

wildcatbzr.exe MD5: 32c87c37a11f27a8834f6e98b7125f87

Earlier this week, I attended the Oracle Partner Network day in London. I got attend many interesting presentations, and learned a lot about what's going on in the Oracle world.

As it has been a long time since I've used Oracle, this morning I decided to install Oracle on my iBook G4 with 512mb RAM. Officially, Oracle on OS X is only supported on OS X Server, so I was prepared for this to be a bit of a challenge.

The Oracle 10g Installer

I spent the afternoon playing around with the Oracle setup and got it working in the end. While I was running the Oracle Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA), the virtual memory usage on my laptop peaked at over 15 gigabytes, and things were getting pretty slow at this point. Having a gigabyte or two of RAM would have helped a lot here.

Processes ordered by VSIZE, and VM size peaking at over 15gb.

I had to change some things in init*.ora to get the database working. Each of the things I changed was in response to an error message thatI got while running 'startup':

• ORA-00205: error in identifying controlfile, check alert log for more info
  To correct this, I set the correct paths in the CONTROL_FILES parameter
• ORA-01103: database name 'SANDY' in controlfile is not 'DEFAULT'
  To corret this, I set the DB_NAME parameter to the name
• ORA-00201: controlfile version 10.1.0.2.0 incompatible with ORACLE version 10.0.0.0.0
  To corret this, I set the COMPATIBLE initialization parameter to 10.1.0.3

Success: Oracle 10g running on Mac OS X Tiger

Tonight I did some work on Wildcat BZR's diff and merge preferences. The preferences dialog now has a list of diff and merge tools that it know about, and can be chosen from a drop down list. Additional diff and merge tools can be supported by specifying the executable and what parameters must be supplied for diffing and merging operations.

At the moment, the following tools are know about, and I will be expanding this list when I have more spare time:

1. SourceGear DiffMerge
2. KDiff3
3. Apple opendiff

Today and tomorrow, I'm on holiday from work. After having a pretty lazy weekend, I've decided to make my short holiday productive. I've installed Common Lisp and Ruby on Rails on my iBook, and have been playing around with Lisp, getting to know its syntax.

I've been cleaning up various directories full of text files on my iBook and have come to the conclusion that I have so many notes scattered around the place that I'm probably losing track of some things. The solution? A wiki. I'm playing with Instiki. It seems to meet my requirements, and was pretty simple to set up on OS X. Here are the steps I took:

1. Installing Ruby 1.8.5 from here
2. Installing rubygems from here
3. sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies
4. sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby --include-dependencies
5. unzip instiki 0.12.0
6. Run ./instiki

Then, pointing a browser at http://localhost, you'll be prompted to specify some details about the Wiki, and then be forwarded to the wiki's homepage:

The source of Wildcat BZR is now available on Launchpad and there is a homepage which has a list of features, screenshots and a roadmap. It has been tested on Windows XP and OS X. It should also work on Linux. The external diff and merge support is somewhat limited at the moment. Everything is explained on the project page.

Last week, I set up the Bazaar version control system on Solaris 9. I installed the following packages:

• python-2.5.1
• pycrypto-2.0.1
• paramiko-1.7.1
• bzr-0.90

I got the Python package from the Sun Freeware site, and installed it using pkgadd. The two python modules - pycrypto and paramiko - were installed using these commands:

python setup.py build
sudo python setup.py install

Bazaar, being written in python, was also installed using the setup.py script. I discovered a small problem when building Bazaar on Solaris 9: _dirstate_helpers_c.h attempts to #include stdint.h, which doesn't exist and results in a "No such file or directory" error. To get around this problem, I changed that line to include <sys/types.h> instead. Building Bazaar after that went smoothly.

When using Bazaar on Solaris 9, make sure that /usr/local/lib is in your LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

I set up the Bazaar distributed version control system on three machines today (two Macs and one Debian), after Kevin mentioned it a couple of weeks ago. Iplayed around with merging and branching - it seems pretty similar to Git, and I'm not sure what all of the advantages and disadvantages are. Git seems marginally faster, but Bazaar seems to be simpler to install on different platforms (it has a native Windows version, and doesn't need Cygwin like Git does). On OS X and Linux, Bazaar's installation was as simple as Git's.

To get SSH support in Bazaar, it needs the pycrypto and paramiko Python libraries installed. They're available from Debian's repository, but on OS X, I had to install them manually.

I plan on using Bazaar for Wildcat COBOL's version control, so I'll be able to give a more detailed account of how good I think it is and compare it to Subversion later.

I installed git on my iBook today as some of my projects are starting to become rather large, and in desperarate need of some form of revision control. Installing git was simple. I used fink to install expat first, then installed git from source, which went flawlessly.

I've played with branching and merging, and it all works nicely. This is the first time I've seen merging go 100% smoothly with no human interaction. No more Subversion for me, apart from at work.

If you've not tried git yet, give it a shot, and if you don't know why it's better than everything else, watch this video.

Ever wondered how to get screenshots of web pages that show the whole page, exactly as it would be viewed in your browser, even though the page is too big to fit on your screen?

Today I found the perfect application for doing that...

Paparazzi!.

It even creates thumbnails by itself like this one...

Paparazzi! was inspired by webkit2png, and for those of us running Linux, there is a khtml2png available as well.

Version 0.1.12 of the Wildcat COBOL compiler is out now, with bug fixes in the handling of complex IF statements, and support for all relation operators.

Pieter Baele has been working on a COBOL syntax highlighting bundle for TextMate and I have started putting together a COBOL syntax highlighting definition file for Smultron.

To make Smultron use this syntax highlighting, you will need to put this file into /Applications/Smultron.app/Contents/Resources/Syntax Definitions and add the following text into /Applications/Smultron.app/Contents/Resources/SyntaxDefinitions.plist:

<dict>
  <key>name</key>
  <string>COBOL</string>
  <key>file</key>
  <string>cobol</string>
  <key>extensions</key>
  <string>cbl cob</string>
</dict>

I installed the ShortStat Dashboard widget today as a handy way of viewing the amount of hits and recent referrers that my website is getting. It's a Dashboard widget that connects to the web server and retrieves information generated by ShortStat which you need to install on your web server.

Apple released the Safari 3 web browser for OS X and Windows today. Download it here.

I put together a CCNet Dashboard Widget for OS X. This is a dashboard widget that shows the status of CCNet automated software builds. Here's a screenshot:

I realise this widget has a very limited target audience as it's for OS X and CCNet traditionally runs on Windows, but I found some information relating to running CCNet on Mono recently: here and here.

As Twitter is becoming the latest cool way of keeping touch with friends and generally yapping or moaning about stuff, I decided to take a look at a few desktop client applications for Twitter. I looked at four - two on the Mac and two on Windows: TwitterPost, Twitterrific, VisualTwit and Twitteroo. I thought Twitterrific on the Mac was the nicest of them all:

Twitteroo was the best Windows one I found:

When I logged into my computer at work this morning, Windows decided to protect me from itself, and presented me with this:

My desk as it look right now, taken on a Sony K750i.

Today I've been doing some work in preparation for going to Montenegro tomorrow. I've been given a Dell Inspiron 4150 laptop with required software installed - compared to my iBook it seems like a desktop PC - Pentium 4, 1GB RAM, every PC legacy port you could think of, but only 1 USB port.

I'm trying to get my contacts transferred to it so I only need to take one laptop with me. My contacts are in Apple Address Book. One of my friends said last night that "Windows is better than Mac becuase Windows is compatible with everything". I'd love if Windows would be compatible with my Address Book backup file, my bluetooth mouse, forwarding X11 applications through SSH (yeah I know it can be done but it's a pain in the ass) and my iSight camera. I'd be happier if it even worked with my Logitech Quickcam which I've lost the CD for. I'm surprised a supposedly modern operating system doesn't work out-of-the-box with 4 year old hardware. What happened to just plugging something in and it works with no human intervention?

Here's the best I've found so far for transferring my contacts from Address Book. It exports Address Book's database to CSV (Comma Separated Values in a text file). This works, but Thunderbird on Windows seems to b0rk at the first unicode character it sees, and Outlook 2007 refuses to open it at all. So I tried opening it in Excel, thinking that importing CSV is a standard feature in spreadsheet applications. Excel's version of importing CSV today seems to be making a spreadsheet with lots or rows and one colum that contains text with lots of commas. So much for the commas separating the values!

Next random thought: Can anyone tell me where the lyrics "I'm a locksmith with the key to fame" came from?
A quick google search will reveal the answer, but I'm surprised there is only one relevant result on Google from the two it vame up with.

And Trevor McDonaldly, the thing that's been annoying me all week... Reduced Fat Crisps.

If I wanted to reduce my fat intake, I certainly wouldn't be eating crisps. However, I eat crisps when I feel like having a snack, but I'll consider cutting crisps out of my diet if confectionery companies continue producing these reduced fat crisps - they taste horrible. 70% less fat and 70% less taste in my opinion.

Find out more about 70% Less Fat crisps on the Walkers website.

I spent a little time this evening beginning to write my .Net COBOL compiler. After that, I played around with software for recording what I'm doing on my desktop and saving it as a Flash movie. Click on the image below to view a quick preview of the compiler in Flash...

Today I decided to include an image in a blog post, for the first time even in my blogging history.

While reading a recent article about user interface inconsistencies in Vista by Paul Thurrott, I began thinking of UNO, which I installed on my Mac Mini and iBook earlier this week (and has the excellent catchphrase of: "Several ways to skin your Cat").

UNO fixes some user interface inconsistencies in OS X applications. It takes the smooth silvery-gray appearance featuring the unified toolbar and title bar that Apple Mail has in Tiger, and gives you the option of applying it to all applications. Alternatively, you can take the "Polished metal" UI that iTunes has and apply that to all applications.

I thought Microsoft was bad for user interface inconsistencies, but looking at a computer without UNO after using it for a few days make me realise how bad Apple are for this too. I guess it was originally hidden by the shininess of the Aqua and [Brushed|Polished] Metal UIs.



UNO is good - you should try it.

(To get Firefox looking that good, you'll also need the GrApple theme from the bottom of this page)

Today I decided to include an image in a blog post, for the first time even in my blogging history.

While reading a recent article about user interface inconsistencies in Vista by Paul Thurrott, I began thinking of UNO, which I installed on my Mac Mini and iBook earlier this week (and has the excellent catchphrase of: "Several ways to skin your Cat").

UNO fixes some user interface inconsistencies in OS X applications. It takes the smooth silvery-gray appearance featuring the unified toolbar and title bar that Apple Mail has in Tiger, and gives you the option of applying it to all applications. Alternatively, you can take the "Polished metal" UI that iTunes has and apply that to all applications.

I thought Microsoft was bad for user interface inconsistencies, but looking at a computer without UNO after using it for a few days make me realise how bad Apple are for this too. I guess it was originally hidden by the shininess of the Aqua and [Brushed|Polished] Metal UIs.



UNO is good - you should try it.

(To get Firefox looking that good, you'll also need the GrApple theme from the bottom of this page)

I've switched to using Flock as my primary web browser at work now, mainly due to its close integration with del.icio.us. I have almost 700 bookmarks, and keeping them organised without a service like del.icio.us would be a nightmare. Flock is a slightly larger installation than Firefox, but it seems quicker. |

iTunes 5 is out, go and download it from Apple if you have Windows or OS X. It looks kind of squareish compared to the 4.x series: screenshot. The iPod Nano, and the Motorola ROKR mobile phone have also been released. ROKR is the first mobile phone with iTunes support. It's available on Cingular in the US and I'm not sure about the UK details yet as the site doesn't seem to be fully updated. On MacOS X, it has introduced yet another GUI style - like the brushed metal one, but smooth. GUI inconsistencies are one of the things that annoyed my about Windows when I used it, and Apple seem to be getting just as bad. It does looks more like Mail.app I suppose, with the smooth look and utilising the full horizontal width of the window instead of have a huge space-wasting border. Functionally, I've not noticed anything different yet, and OGG Vorbis is still not officially supported. |

I've added a couple of new desktop screenshots to my website. There's someone new leeching the same large JPEG image from sorn.net again. I'll need to think up something more subtle to do to the image this time! Also, Loudounacademy.org.uk had a page of photos from the school. It seems to have been taken down now, but it's mirrored here on sorn.net now. Does anyone know where these pictures came from? We all know that the real Loudoun Academy website is here though ;-)

My new toy this week is Konfabulator (which you can see on my screenshots page). It lets you add useful little "widgets" to your desktop on Microsoft Windows or Apple OSX. It's similar to Karamba on KDE. Being able to import widgets between Karamba and Konfabulator would be nice.

Have you got a spare computer? I'm looking for a cheap (and quiet) second hand computer to use as a router between my network and GlasgowNet and BackNet. If anyone has a spare that they're willing to sell (something like a Pentium 166 is more than adequate), then please post in the guestbook.

I discovered that Sara and Aaron have a blog: http://glasgownews.blogspot.com... then I discovered a photo of Tina and me on it among lots of other good pics.

I found this in my notes today at work. It is a simple way to get a list of people who have edited a file in a CVS repository:

cvs log | grep author | awk '{print $5}' | sort -u

We use CVS a lot at work. I've started playing around with Subversion at home, but have found that the database needs rebuilt sometimes, which I don't like the feeling off. I'm worried that the corruption that happens sometimes could lead to data loss. Reminds me too much of Source Safe :-(

Today I read that SHA-1 encryption has been broken.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/sha1_broken.html

I also figured out that half the reason I thought one of my routers was broken was actually an error in the routing table in the Sun server. It seems to lose it's default route if I restart it. It took ages for me to find that since it hardly ever gets restarted.

Other than that, I titied up my desk at work. Woohoo!

Oh, and I've noticed that blogger.com's editor doesn't work well in Safari. It's ability to do fonts, links, etc isn't there.