03.03.08

FileMerge

Posted in Iterative Development at 11:43 am by Pablosan

One positive result of my latest debacle is that I now have a good project to work on. This, in turn, has forced me to (very quickly) make some technical choices.

The project is called CodeNotes and I will be taking an iterative approach to it’s design and development. Of course the first piece of technology I needed to choose was a good RCS. I have worked with many in the past: with CVS and then SubVersion being my favorites… until I tried Mercurial. I may share more about this later, but this whole process also pushed me to find a good diff tool. I could just use vimdiff since I consistently use gvim as my editor, but after doing some research I found a very cool tool. One caveat: it’s Macintosh-specific.

FileMerge comes with XCode and, like most Mac apps, is gorgeous. It makes me want to find reasons to view diffs just to use the tool (yes, I am a geek)! If you are using SubVersion or Mercurial, you can set up FileMerge to be your default diff viewer. This is made possible by a few helper scripts known as fmdiff. Instruction on getting SubVersion set up to use FileMerge can be found here. For Mercurial, follow the steps in the previous link to get the scripts installed, then look here.

Once you’ve installed the scripts and edited your .hgrc file, using FileMerge in Mercurial is as simple as typing something like:

hg opendiff -r1 -r5 layout.css

03.01.08

Hacked!

Posted in Journal, News at 11:29 pm by Pablosan

My wiki site (which was running on Mediawiki) was hacked pretty severely. I felt I had no other choice but to take it down. So all of my code examples are not available currently. I will get them back up as quickly as I can and will report my progress here on my blog.

I now feel duly welcomed to the Wild Wild Web! Live and learn…