Options +Indexes

That’s it.

Meanwhile I develop an iPhone game and wanted to setup a website for it. At this point I stumbled upon RapidWeaver and I must say, I love it. There are so much possibilities and tons of themes and plugins. And it’s so easy to create great looking sites for the web. Thats much better then hacking your code for a website in an simple editor or even eclipse.

I have a lot of home videos I filmed with my Digital Hi8 camcorder and after editing I encoded most videos in xVid. So I wanted to watch those videos on my new iMac. Apparently there is no out of the box playing that kind of videos on a Mac, so I had to search for something I also knew from the PC-World. I needed a codec pack for video and audio to playback.

And I didn’t had to search long, I found one Codec Pack that fits my needs on the official Apple site. It is called Perian, it’s free and it works quite well.

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/video/perian_christopherforsythe.html

So if you have any probelms with video or audio playback try Perian. If you know another one, feel free to post a comment.

All you need is mentioned in a requirements list.

You have to do is enable Tasks  in Google Mail Labs. If you do, you can view tasks, add new tasks, and also check them off as all taken care of. Any changes to Tasks you make via your mobile phone are reflected in your Google Mail account.

You can watch a little Tutorial for the iPhone from googles youtube channel.

The first question that comes in mind is, is there an Adobe AIR for linux. Lucky me there is one at http://www.adobe.com/products/air/ . So here we go and follow the button that says “Get ADOBE AIR” and we will be prompted for the right thing. Download the binary file and open up a console window.

In the console we go to the place where we downloaded the binary file and type in:
$ chmod u+x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

This changes the mode for that file, so we can execute it. Now typing
$ ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

and we will be prompted to enter our password for a root privileged user to install Adobe AIR on the linux box.

Ok the first step is made to use Twitter with thwirl on linux. In the next step we install thwirl. Therefor we download the thwirl AIR application from http://www.twhirl.org/ . The rest is easy. We just have to install it after downloading with a double click.

This one is so hot, that even thwirl.org does not know that it works on linux too. So enjoy and follow me on Twitter @mayads.

Create the repository

Creating a Subversion repository is an incredibly simple task. The svnadmin utility, provided with Subversion, has a subcommand for doing just that. To create a new repository, just run:

$ svnadmin create /path/to/repos

This command creates a new file-based project svn archive in the given path. If you wanna stick with the old and good database version which uses the Berkeley DB, just type:

$ svnadmin create --fs-type bdb /path/to/repos

Configure the repository

After you created a new repository, you will have to setup access rights, because the standard option is set to read only for everyone. You can find the configuration file in

/path/to/repos/conf/svnserve.conf

To restrict the access only to authenticated users, that also get write permission, edit the configure file like that.

[general]
password-db = passwd
anon-access = none
auth-access = write
realm = My new subversion repository

Additional you can set a realm to identify your svn repository between other ones.

After restricting access to authenticated users, you have to add some users with password in the above given file

/path/to/repos/conf/passwd

Put in something like this.

[users]
username = password
user2 = secretpw

Now your configuration is done and you only need to start the svnserve daemon like that:

$ svnserve -d

The svn server is now listening on port 3690 for incoming connections.

Now you can use your new subversion repository from every place you can access your server. Just remember to forward the mentioned port  and that svnserve process has the rights to read and write in your file system.

Backup and Restore a repository:

Having all your files from your projects in the svn repository gives you the ability to get you old versions of your stuff, but if somethings goes wrong with your machine, you should backup your repository.

Here is how to do that:

$ svnadmin dump /path/to/repos > /tmp/repos.dump

And restore your data with

$ svnadmin load /path/to/reponame < /tmp/repo1.dump

Ok that’s it, now have fun and happy coding.

The lack of new Android phones being announced, such suggestion come all way long. With barely a rumor to sate our thirst for Android exclusives, CES was a bitter disappointment. No new phones were announced during the biggest gadget trade show in North America.

But now we have some juicy spy shots to look at. The images show a phone  that looks very similar to the HTC G1, but has major differences.

The phone is much thinner than the G1, because the slide-out QWERTY keyboard is gone. This is definitely a good thing. It keeps the track ball below the touch display, but re-arranges the buttons a bit. The back is smooth, and shows a 3.2 megapixel camera. The image that shows a screen shot reveals a home screen that is nearly identical to that of the G1.

The pictures look like they could be legit, but you never know. You can see the pictures four yourself.

Maybe we can see it in about 4 month, this is the suggested arrival for this device.

Give it a try.

You are new to Ruby ( on Rails ) and wonder what those different looking symbols for variables and methods in Ruby mean?

@name,  name,  self.name

or

def self.foo,  def foo

What’s the difference and why does it seem like no one else is being confused by this stuff. That stuff doesn’t seem to be explained well anywhere: So here I wanna try to explain it from all I figured out so far from so many different websites.

def self.foo is a class method. For example like:

class User …
def self.login(…)
login = User.login(…)
end

whereas
def foo is an instance method named foo.

@foo is used inside a class definition to mean “foo variable”
self.foo means “calling foo method” of this object.
The confusion may come from the fact that instance variables and getter methods have the same name.
Remember that an instance variable is always prefixed by ‘@’. Anything else is a method call.
Another subtle place to get confused is a local variable. Suppose we have:

def foo
cow = 1
end

What is cow? It is a local variable. cow will exist until foo returns. Actually… that gets confusing too. Because Ruby has closures. Lets not think about that just yet.
An instance variable @foo will live as long as the object does. A local variable foo lives as long as the function does.

That’s pretty much it for the first episode.

Not just testing the Windows 7 version is interesting, the included license agreement also should get some attetion. Here are some special points I found.

• You can install as many copies as you want. The agreement specifically waives any restriction on the number of copies you can install:
  

  You may install and use any number of copies of the software on your premises to design, develop and test your programs for use with the software.

  As good as this sounds, I think this will change in the next official releases.

• Don’t use it in a production environment. I expected that in a beta release and it’s a good advice for any product with a beta label on it.
  

  You may not use the software in a live operating environment unless Microsoft permits you to do so under another agreement.

• The software expires on August 1, 2009. Their are other date mentioned on the internet t0o,but I had a copy with that date. The “Time-Sensitive Software” clause that reads in part:

The software will stop running on August 1, 2009. You may not receive any other notice.”

That timeout date adds further credence to the notion that the final release will be ready in May or June.

• Installation in a virtual machine is posssible. The license agreement for the original release of Windows Vista includes some truly opaque wording about installing in a virtualized environment. This wording was significantly cleaned up for the Vista SP1 license agreement, and this same language appears in the Windows 7 EULA. The “Use with Virtualization Technologies” section is straightforward:

Instead of using the software directly on the licensed device, you may install and use the software within only one virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system on the licensed device.

• You’ll need to take a few extra steps to lock down your privacy. In section 4, the license agreement specifically notes that some features that normally require you to opt in are instead turned on by default:

Because this software is a pre-release version, we have turned on some internet-based features by default to obtain feedback about them […] You may switch off these features or not use them.

Most of the services on the list are fairly benign and involve little risk of divulging personally identifiable information. However, if you work with sensitive data files you might want to turn off the Customer Experience Improvement Program and automatic error reporting options.

• Activation and validation are alive and well. Anyone who was hoping that Microsoft would back off from its hard-line antipiracy initiatives might be disappointed. The license agreement specifically describes activation and links to a privacy statement that says activation is required for Windows 7. The lengthy section on validation is identical to the one in Vista SP, including the bold-faced warning:

You are not permitted to circumvent validation.

• Benchmarking not allowed. Microsoft prohibition on speed tests is included in the license agreement, as in previous beta releases of Microsoft operating systems:

You may not disclose the results of any benchmark tests of the software to any third party without Microsoft’s prior written approval.