May 04 2011

Cornerstone SVN – Phantom Folder Changes

Published by under Coding,Computing

I use cornerstone to manage my SVN repositories at work and I was getting frustrated that it kept detecting changes in folder but showed no files changed in that directory.

The problem I eventually discovered was that the .DS_Store file in the folder was changing and Cornerstone was picking up that change (but not showing the file in the interface).

To avoid this in the settings go to the Subversion tab and in General add *.DS_Store to the Global Ignores.

Save and the problem goes away ;o)

Comments Off on Cornerstone SVN – Phantom Folder Changes

Dec 10 2010

sessionStorage & cookie’s not disappearing in Firefox

Published by under Coding

Something that had me staring at my screen in exasperation recently is Firefox’s behaviour with cookies. Specifically cookies with no expiry date, which should disappear when the session ends – however I was closing Firefox, reopening and the cookie was still there. In all the other browsers things were working as expected with the cookie being deleted, just not in Firefox.

As it turns out the culprit was the ‘save my current tabs’ option, if you have this turned on, Firefox saves all your cookies (& now sessionStorage) so you can resume browsing where you left off – essentially it treats it as if your session never ends.

If you turn this option off you’ll see the cookies & sessionStorage being removed as you’d expect.

Comments Off on sessionStorage & cookie’s not disappearing in Firefox

Dec 10 2010

iPhone headphone remote not working

Published by under Uncategorized

Recently I’ve been having issues with the remote buttons on my iPhone headphones, the headphones were working fine but the volume control & call answer buttons would only work occasionally and eventually stopped working completely.

This led me to worry that either the headphones were broken or there was something wrong with my phone, fortunately the fix was much simpler. The issue was fluff collecting in the headphone socket, all I had to do to fix it was get a twist & tie and fish the fluff out, voila everything working fine again. If I can get hold of some pressurised air (as used for cleaning keyboards) I’m going to give that a go to give it a more thorough clean.

Thought I’d write quick post in case anyone else is having the same issue.

Comments Off on iPhone headphone remote not working

Sep 07 2009

iPhone – inspiration enabler

Published by under Uncategorized

It’s something I’ve been after for ages, something that I’ll carry around without thinking about, that I can add notes on. Add ideas as I think of them and save them where they won’t get forgotten.
The last is critical, I’ve previously had a palm and various phones or smart phones with note taking capabilities, however they all fell down on one or more criteria, the most common being notes getting lost.

Syncing is all very well but that only works if you reference the sync location regularly. With the iPhone I can make notes in a relevant place, to my Blog, to my mail etc.
The more apps that I find the greater the scope for me to capture ideas. I can even draw sketches of concepts that will automatically sync with my mac. Suddenly I have the ability to capture Ideas and concepts as they occur to me. It not only makes me more productive, it also makes me blog more (as demonstrated) and less stressed as there are less things I’m focussing on keeping in my head.

For all those who have an I phone I’ll be preaching to the converted, for the rest of you I’m probably one of a miriad of voices going on about it – I can only urge you to take the leap, you won’t look back.

One response so far

Aug 20 2009

Western Digital Sharespace – Rebuild Raid

Published by under Computing

I’ve got a western digital ShareSpace (4TB) at home to store all my photo’s and music. It’s a bit of overkill as I only use a fraction of it at the moment but having a series of usb drives that have become redundant as they’ve got too small I decided to go for the biggest I could get with the hope it would last a bit longer. I’ve got it set up with RAID 5 (it’s default setting), which means if any of the drives fails I don’t lose my data. I recently had a bit of a scare when I got a ‘DataVolume degraded’ message when I logged into the share drive (I logged in as there was a blinking red light on the front of the box).

The first thing I did was look at the status of the drives, they were all showing as good but drive 3 was showing as not being part of the RAID array any more (hence the degraded situation). I did some internet research which brought back a load of horror stories with people having lost all their data e.t.c. I then spoke to Western Digital (full credit for having a global support line with the number easily findable from the web site), who advised to clean the disk (there is an icon next to it in the advanced / volumes section of the interface) then rebuild the RAID. Mindful of the horror stories I’d read I backed up my photo’s to a usb drive (not enough space or time to take the music as well) before starting. As it turned out it was a very simple process, all I had to do was click the clean drive icon and the ShareSpace cleaned the drive, then turn the ShareSpace off then on again. It automatically began re-building the RAID and within about 15 minutes was back online.

It’s worth noting that the quick turn around was because I don’t have much data on my drive at the moment, the more you have the longer it’s going to take to rebuild the RAID array. Also if there is a problem with the drive (the status doesn’t show as good) you’ll need to replace the drive with an identical Western Digital drive (turning the system off first) then when you turn it on again it will automatically rebuild the array.

Hope this helps someone, happy to respond to queries about this if anyone’s worried, I know I was as the prospect of losing all my photo’s doesn’t bear thinking about. I’m very please with how the ShareSpace worked and dealt with the problem and feel confident about the preservation of my files.

3 responses so far

Aug 19 2009

Word Press iPhone App

Published by under Computing

Just a quick post to rave about the word press iPhone App. It’s fantastic, allowing you to compose posts offline (whilst on the tube for example), then push live once you’re ready & have connectivity.

Like most good things it’s very simple yet powerful. I intend to be blogging a lot more frequently as a result.

And it’s free =o)

As an asside – there are enough people raving about the iPhone that I don’t think I need to add my voice to the throng, except to comment that there’s no way I’d go back to my old phone….

Comments Off on Word Press iPhone App

Aug 18 2009

Why I’d take google over Phorm any day

Published by under Computing,Privacy

So there was a lot in the news about Phorm a while back, several commentators comparing their information capture to that of google’s and commenting that their business (tracking your web usage at your ISP), is no different privacy wise to google tracking your searches. I disagree with this for a number of reasons the main being user choice.

As a user I can choose whether or not I use google as my search engine, I can choose to use they’re services or not, choose if I want to sign in thus sacrificing some of my privacy. With Phorm however there is no choice, it sits silently over your internet connection tracking your every move. There is no opt out procedure, short of changing service providers, a complicated and potentially costly procedure. This also assumes you know your ISP is using Phorm in the first place. A knowledge which is not guaranteed, just look at BT’s track record of trialing Phorm without informing the customers being monitored. There’s no way to be sure other ISP’s are any better.

Phorm is a far more Orwellian system where the user has no choice but to participate, potentially unknowingly. With google on the other hand users have the choice to sacrifice some of their privacy for a better level of service with the option to get out at any time ( all though they can’t clear their existing data). I’m happy to use google, for me the trade off is easily worth it. Phorm (or similar), on the other hand would make me change ISP’s.

See BT’s current stance on Phorm
here, you’ll notice they don’t rule out implementing it in the future.

Comments Off on Why I’d take google over Phorm any day

Apr 16 2009

Governments New Electric Car Scheme

Published by under Uncategorized

So I don’t want to be negative about any scheme to cut carbon emissions, but there are some quite major flaws in this as a stand alone program. For those of you who haven’t seen, the government are offering a £5,000 incentive to anyone buying an electric car. This looks great on the surface but I’m wondering just how much the environment will really benefit from this scheme.

My initial concern is with cost, electric cars are expensive, I suspect £5,000 isn’t going to tip the balance towards one unless you had pretty much already decided. Regardless of that however the main problem I can see is that this incentive looks like it’s doing something but doesn’t actually change the amount of Carbon being emitted. Even if everyone switched to electric cars tomorrow we’d still need to get the power to charge them from somewhere – which means power stations and our current infrastructure couldn’t stand the load. Unless we make our power generation greener switching to electric cars will make no odds to the environment, (aside from making people feel better), whilst distracting people from solutions that would make a difference.

To my mind the money would be better spent investing in renewable energy and enforcing cuts on industry but then that doesn’t make as good press…

Comments Off on Governments New Electric Car Scheme

Jan 22 2009

Adobe CS3 Updates Failing on a Mac – Solution

Published by under Computing

I’ve had Adobe CS3 installed on my Mac for a while now with automatic updates switched on, however whenever it tried to run it failed with no usefull error message. I finally switched one of the preferences so that it downloaded the dmg first and then got a sensible error message.

The issue I had was with file permissions in <User Folder>/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Update5/Install. Adobe update needs to have permissions to write to the folders in this directory to update the relevant applications and it my case it didn’t (not sure if this is related to me having File Vault turned on).

The solution was to right click and ‘get info’ for each of the folders and change the permissions to allow anyone to read / write to the folder. If you’re worried about this you can change this back once the update is complete but I don’t see it as a problem.

Once I’d done that all the updates worked perfectly and my copy of CS3 is now completly up to date.

Comments Off on Adobe CS3 Updates Failing on a Mac – Solution

Nov 28 2008

MacBook Docking Station

Published by under Computing

Why don’t apple do docking stations? The setup seems perfect, my macbook has all the connections, power socket etc on one side, it could easily slide into some kind of dock…..

…. but no. Instead when I set up at home or in the office I have to plug all the cables in, including the adapter to connect to my monitor start up my macbook then close the lid and wake it from my USB keyboard so I can work off my main monitor.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my mac, but there are a couple of things that would make life a lot easier.

Update:

Just found these, quite expensive but look like they should do the job. Still don’t know why Apple don’t make them…

Comments Off on MacBook Docking Station

Next »