How to setup own SVN server in 5 minutes on Mac OS X

1. Install Macports
2. Install subversion

sudo port install subversion

3. Start svn server

svnserve -d --listen-port 4000 -r /repository -T

4. Create repository

svnadmin create /repository/testPrograms

5. Configure repository
Edit /repository/testPrograms/conf/svnserve.conf
and uncomment

auth-access = write
password-db = passwd

Edit /repository/testPrograms/conf/passwd
and add users

[users]
Fakrudeen Ali Ahmed = mypassword

Now svn server is ready to serve the repository.

Create a client folder
and do

svn co svn://localhost:4000/testPrograms

and we are ready to use our repository!

Top Must have developer tools

It is a mix of Top tools and some tools won't apply to some developers.
1. IntelliJ IDEA - Best IDE in the world for JAVA. Or Resharper for C# developers.
2. Textpad - Best text editor
3. Beyond Compare - Best diff tool
4. MIT-Scheme - Rapid proto typing of simple algorthms or rapid calculation of familiar functions like n!
5. SVN - Our own version repository for versioning local test programs, docs and so on.

Screen, bash and ctrl+a

Today I was using bash and ctrl+a is very useful for going to the start of a command in bash. But it was not working in my Mac. I thouht it was a problem in Mac bindings and opened keyboard and mouse, terminal preferences etc.
When none of this could fix the issue, I realised that I was ssh'ing to my work machine and using a screen to avoid losing session when connection drops. This program uses ctrl+a as the meta key and was not passing this on to bash. So I had to use
screen -e ^xx

to change the meta key to ctrl+x and everything was fine again.

Coding horror

Nice site on software and related issues. Posts are of good quality. But most important thing is the comments. Comments give you a lot of info. It provides a forum for [intelligent, computer science] people to express themselves.
See a sample post:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001266.html

Uninstalling visual studio quickly!

I needed to reinstall it:
It helped [because normal uninstall is very slow]:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/907965

Soap vs REST

Nice comparison of REST vs SOAP for Web services:
http://www.iks.inf.ethz.ch/education/ss07/ws_soa/slides/SOAPvsREST_ETH.pdf

My take is REST is really simple and nice to build query dominating type of webservices like google or amazon. [More like automating opening an URI in a browser]

But for real enterprise type business processes SOAP is the way to go although it takes more time to build on it. It is too much of complexity for simple services.

Nice scripting Q & A

More importantly it is written with good humour! Very nice to read:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/resources/qanda/default.mspx

C# lambda expressions

It is a welcome new addition!
Mainstream languages are asymptotically approaching functional languages?
But I didn't like that I can't apply it directly without assigning to a delegate:
That is I can't do

(i => i * i)(12)

Arcane C++ and ->

Think about this - how arcane C++ looks [may be because of its C roots].

The most common operation in C++ is accessing a field through a pointer. And for that you have to type 2 characters - and >.

Such a huge waste of time for so many people who coded in C++. It may not look much, but consider over the life so many programmers.

Atleast many programmers would have saved an year of their life!

Resharper

If you program in C# this is a must have add-in for Visual studio.

It has intelligent intellisense and 'goto a class', 'code generation' and saves a lot of time. It has nice refactoring as well as unit testing integration.
You never get a compile error and gives you so many suggestions which are small but add up, like 'make a field read only', 'delegate doesn't require parameters' etc.

ReSharper:: The Most Intelligent Add-In To Visual Studio

XML diff and applying delta

There is a nice XML diff and applying diffgram to original doc. tool at:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/xml/patch/1.0/wxp/en-us/xmldiffpatch.exe

You can read more about this tool at:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa302294.aspx

looking inside library (.lib) file

If you want to see what functions are exported by a library use:
dumpbin.exe which comes with visual studio.
e.g.
dumpbin /symbols /exports kernel32.lib

it is particularly useful when you get link errors. I made the mistake of calling a stdcall function with cdecl convention and got linker error for unknown symbol. When I looked inside the library, I realized the error.

C runtime source

If you installed visual studio, C runtime source [code for strcmp etc. - most of the interview questions can be answered with this!] is available at:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\crt\src

Java source

In case you didn't know, Java source is available for public download.
You can see how each of the classes like String etc. are implemented as well as learn about many data structures like Red black tree.
http://download.java.net/jdk6/

C runtime source!

C runtime source is available with visual studio installation. It is very useful say for checking how malloc is implemented.
It also has nice and tested algos. for strncpy etc.

string comparisons in .NET

This article is very good for understanding ordinal vs invarint vs current cultures in .NET

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dndotnet/html/StringsinNET20.asp

joel on software

This is one of the sites I like:
http://joelonsoftware.com

Interesting software musings ...