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Photosynth is now available

by on August 21, 2008 in Uncategorized

Live Labs released their Photosynth application today. We have featured Photosynth before on this blog in Mai 2007 and were already very impressed with what we saw. Photosynth takes a collection of regular photographs and reconstructs the scene or object in a 3-D environment.

Now today you can experience Photosynth yourself (unfortunately only on Windows while Mac support should be coming soon).

Comments { 12 }

Migrate from Subclipse to Subversive on MacOS X

by on August 13, 2008 in Uncategorized

For many years I have been using Eclipse with the fine Subversion plug-in. Since I have updated my Eclipse to the Ganymede release (Version 3.4) I unfortunately run into one problem after another. Especially the SVN Repository browser failed to work most of the time.

So, after putting up with this situation for the last 2 months and applying all Subclipse updates in the meantime (and still no working 100%) I decided that I will give the Subversive plug-in a go. This is not a blog post favoring one or the other, but simply what is working for me and proves to work.

I have over 20 projects in different SVN repositories and thus I was eager to find out how to migrate my projects the best way. I looked all over the web, but only found some confusing information or nothing at all (excuse me if anything is available but honestly could not find it).

Thus I thought I publish my steps here:

  1. We assume you already have subclipse installed, thus go to “Help/Software Update”. In the following window click on “Installed Software” and scroll down until you see all installed “Subversion” plug-ins.
  2. Uninstall all “subclipse”, snv and JavaHL plug-ins, except “Subclipse” itself.
  3. Restart Eclipse.
  4. Go to each project that you have in subversion and do a right click, choose Team and then click on “Disconnect…”. Make sure that you keep your project settings.
  5. Restart Eclipse.
  6. Now uninstall Subclipse.
  7. Restart Eclipse.
  8. Now you are ready to install Subversive. Do do that you open up “Software Update” again. Navigate to the “Ganymede” tree and choose under “Collaboration Tools” the Subversive plug-in. These are called “SVN Team Provider” and is a bit confusing at first, but rest assured it is the Subversive plug-in.
  9. Once that is installed you will also need to add the SVN connectors. Due to some licensing issues you will need to grab them from a different site. Within the “Software Update” window add a new site and enter the following URL “http://www.polarion.org/projects/subversive/download/eclipse/2.0/ganymede-site/”.
    Once that site is loaded you will see three categories. Open the “Subversive SVN Connectors” and select the “Subversive SVN Connectors” and the “SVNKit 1.2.0 ……..” one. The later is quite important since I could not get Subversive to work with most repositories by selecting the “SVNKit 1.1.7 implementation” one. But the “SVNKit 1.2.0″ works just fine.
  10. Restart Eclipse.
  11. Now with each disconnected subversion project do a right click, select “Team” and then “Share Projects…”. You should then get a dialog asking you some questions about the Subversion project, mostly you have to enter name and password again and you should be all set.

So far, all is well. SVN repository browsing is still not 100% working, but at least I can connect most of the time and browse it. If that happens a reboot of Eclipse will get me back in the game.

I am sure there are other ways to do it, but this has worked fine for me and worked with all projects.

Comments { 67 }

LaCie Ethernet Disk and iTunes

by on July 26, 2008 in Uncategorized

A couple of months ago I got myself a LaCie Ethernet Disk for home usage and sharing my photos, videos and of course music files. The goal was to make the Ethernet Disk available to all laptops and stream music, with Airport Express, to my home sound system.

Well, all works quite well and I have to say that Airport Express is such a useful gadget. Be it at home or on the road, it is worth every penny.

But the problem I had lately was that music files I put on the Ethernet Disk did not show up anymore within iTunes. I thought it was because I still had an older version of the firmware and thus updates to 1.1.2.1. Still, my music files did not show up in iTunes.

Further searching I found this blog post which described the same problem. I downloaded the fix (iTunes Server patch) and applied it to my Ethernet Disk. After updating the Disk you will have to rebuild the media database, but I am happy to report that the fix solved the problem.

Comments { 105 }

Scalability is the key

by on July 16, 2008 in CFML

Peter Van Dijck has a very good list of popular websites and how they manage scalability of their web application. He has presentations on scalability from websites like Twitter, Flickr, Slideshare and many others. Is it a very informative read and brings a lot of insight how it is done.

One thing that stood out is that the key lessons for most apps: Memcache like crazy, and optimize the database (the biggest bottleneck most of the time).

Looking trough the Memcache page I see that there are different API’s available for many popular languages. For CFML developers the Memcache Java API might be the most interesting one. Memcache goes beyond the cachedwithin of a cfquery and looks to be a solution for scalability. Else not all web apps would use it.

Another practive is “sharding”. Sharding is when you cut a really big table into pieces, so you can put those on separate servers.

All inall, a very good read and well worth your time.

Comments { 32 }
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