The Tortoise and the Tiger: SVN on OS X Finder

In an earlier post about Actionscript development on the Mac. It was mentioned that one of the big holes in the Mac development suite was a SVN client as good as Tortoise SVN.

Tortoise is my favorite SVN client and, as far as I can tell, the best one out. It integrates directly into Windows Explorer, so you don’t have to navigate your repository through some weird one-off file navigator. But alas, there’s no version for the Mac.

I’ve recently found something pretty close: scplugin. It integrates with the finder, so you can execute repository commands from the right-click menu. There are a couple downsides, though.

For one thing, it’s still a young software product. Right now, the latest version is 0.6, so not all of the functionality is in place. It also requires the command-line version of subversion to be installed. Still, it gets the basics right. Update, Commit, and Revert seem to work just fine.

It’s definitely shows a lot of promise.

Hawaii: day 3 through whenever…

Still in Hawaii. I love it.

I have tons of interesting and insightful things to share about my experience here, as well as amazing, gorgeous, and often hilarious photos.

…but I’m not going to — that sounds boring.

I’m going back to the beach. Thanks again for reading my blog.

Hawaii Days 1 and 2

After a grueling 18 hour trip from Denver and a 5 hour layover in lovely Las Vegas airport, I have arrived in Oahu. For the next two weeks, I’ll be living on the north shore, which is very rural. My house is sandwiched between the ocean and a farm.

Once I get a USB cable for my camera, I’ll upload some pretty pictures. Till then…

LONESTAR!

From my e-mail-box:

So Bob,

Earlier this summer I made this picture for some sort of prank or funnin’, or perhaps some joshing, but nothing came of it, so here it is. Keep it in memory of lost dreams.

Tony Hillerson
Software Architect – effectiveUI

Detroit in a (absorbent cotton) Nutshell

I’ve been working in Detroit for a month now and I’ve been trying to think of what to blog about it — how I would describe it to other people. This post might sum it up for me.

First a little background:

I work in the middle of downtown. For a downtown area, Detroit seems unusually, if not eerily empty during the middle of the day. But in front of my building, there are usually a fair amount of people hanging around and you get to see some nice “city action” every once in a while. Today took the cake, though.

In front of my building, there was a homeless guy hawking friggin’ maxi pads for a dollar. He had a bag of Kotex, enthusiastically yelling, “Maxi pads! One dollar!”

That’s all you need to know about Detroit.

Coming Soon!

I’ve been in Detroit for almost a month now and it’s hard for me to post on my blog from here, since there’s no free internet at my hotel and the last thing I want to do after sitting at a computer all day is sit at a computer all night. But I have lots of stuff to to talk about including:

• Myspace getting an interesting “award” from a major magazine
• The enigma that is Flash masking
• The enigma that is Flash letter spacing
• Mayhem in Motown

I promise I’ll write more soon.

A week without myspace

Last week, I decided to quit myspace. I deleted a large number of the friends in my account and posted a bulletin with a message saying I was quitting. This idea was partially inspired from a speech by Jello Biafra made at the recent HOPE conference in New York. He had some choice words for myspace.

From the speech…

Didn’t it use to be that living in a world of imaginary friends was classified as a mental illness…

I mean, you keep relying on smell phoning, and text messaging, and myspace-ing out, and constantly having to check your email, facebook worming in some spaz-induced fear that you might be missing something. And then, keeping up with every little detail, you wind up missing everything else — possibly things that are actually important and instead just end up living in your own virtual Las Vegas.

This resonated with me. It’s not that most of my friends on myspace weren’t really friends — a lot of them were — but the way I had interacted with them had changed, since I started myspace. I was leaving myspace comments at times when I would have just calling them up in the past.
When I’d meet somebody new, if I had their myspace account, I would just read about them on their myspace page, instead of asking them what they were into.

And myspace comments are so low bandwidth. Most of the time they’re one or two sentences. A typical one: “Hey man, how’ve you been. I went to the lake. It was cool.” Then the other person writes back: “I’m good. Just bought a new frisbee.” Whatever. Those kinds of comments would be dispensed with in the first five seconds of a phone call or a face-to-face conversation. Then, you could actually get details and feelings and meaning from the rest of the conversation. You don’t get much of that on myspace.

I’d rather have people call me, meet me, or even write me an email, than substitute an actual relationship for myspace chit-chat.

The first week has been noticeably better for me. I’ve called most of my friends up and had real conversations with them. I’ve gone out more and have gathered up a bunch of amazing and hilarious stories to tell. And I’ve spent waaay less time in front of the computer at home.

Highly recommended.

What I Live For (W.I.L.F.)

A while ago I had an idea for a magazine. The magazine would follow random people around, famous and not famous, to find out what they live for. What makes life worth it for them. It would also be filled with rad photos. Maybe someday I’ll make the magazine, but for now, here are five things that make my life worth living.

1. Air, Talkie Walkie
2. Yacht Rock
3. The theme from A Fistful of Dollars (not the song in the credits, but the main theme)
4. This fucking incredible graffiti stencil Pat and I designed:

5. Flex Builder 2

“Let Me Borrow That Top” is the new “I’m Rick James, Bitch!”

My new favorite internet radio show, Andrew Andrew’s Sound Sound, played this song in their mix a couple days ago.

It’s called “Let Me Borrow That Top.” The artist, “Kelly,” is obviously some dude doing his best San-Fernando-Valley-girl accent. He’s pleading with his girlfriend to borrow “that top,” which “she’s not even wearing.”

It’s infectious.

Last night, just about everybody at Feminist Craft Night was singing it. It’s becoming the new greeting among all of my friends, too.

It’s like the new “I’m Rick James, Bitch.”

Listen to it here.

My Blog

I’ve decided to join the 20th century and start writing a blog. This blog is going to contain technical stuff, mainly related to Flash and Flex development, but also personal stuff, like me forgetting my wallet today (which I did).

I promise to make it interesting.

More later…