SonicChicken blog

I’ve been using Delicious Library to catalog our DVD’s, CD’s, and books for almost two years. It’s great for keeping track of your library, especially if you loan your books and such out to your friends–just drag the item being loaned onto the person to whom it’s being loaned.

DL will also keep track of video games, which doesn’t do me a lot of good since I don’t own any. But I do have a modest collection of boardgames that I’d like to catalog (and track!) in DL. I sent this feature request to Wil Shipley soon after I started using DL. Lo and behold, this morning I read the following (from “Transitions and Epiphanies”, about 1/3 of the way down):

…I start asking if the world even needs an app that catalogs books and DVDs and now boardgames when we could all be under five feet of water in a few years.

(Emphasis added.)

I’m running the current version (1.6.6) of DL, and there’s nothing to support boardgames in there, so I think this is a new feature being added to the upcoming version 2. I’m firing off an email to Wil begging to beta test the new version.

I love Mac OS X, but every once in a while I manage to screw up one (or more) of the network folders I dropped into the sidebar. (On this particular occasion I changed my mind after I started opening a network folder and clicked “Cancel” on the keychain access prompt.) Now every time I click on the network folder in the sidebar of Finder I’m getting the following message: The volume for “network-folder-name” cannot be found.

I’ve had this happen before, but I can never remember how to fix it. A quick search turned up this thread which suggests blasting the entire com.apple.sidebarlists.plist file, but that’s a bit harsh if you have a dozen folders in the sidebar and only one or two of them are broken! Instead I chose to edit the plist file and delete the broken folders.

Double-clicking on ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.sidebarlists.plist should open the Property List Editor. (If it doesn’t, see “to Diana” comment on this post.) Click on the exposure triangles for Root, useritems, and CustomListItems. Find the broken folder–they’re in the same order that they appear in the Sidebar. You can click the exposure triangle for a numbered item and see if the Name property matches your broken folder. Once you’ve selected the correction Dictionary item, click the Delete button:

Now if you open a new Finder window you’ll notice… That you still have the same problem. Doh! You need to restart Finder. Click on the “Apple” menu (top left of the screen) and choose “Force Quit…” (or just hit Apple-Option-Escape on the keyboard). Select the Finder application and hit the Relaunch button.

This doesn’t really fix the problem–the broken folder is gone, not repaired. But it’s better (imo) than whacking the entire Sidebar preferences file.

On some earlier posts (tagged scplugin) I was trying to get scplugin working on my Mac (OS X 10.4.6). It seems like the problem may be due to subversion (svn) failing to communicate with my SMB-based repository. To test that, I made a local repository and created a test project within it.

First, let’s make sure DarwinPorts is up-to-date:

$ port sync Error: /opt/local/bin/port: port sync failed: sync failed doing rsync

Doh! I always forget to sudo that command…

$ sudo port sync Password: $ sudo port selfupdate DarwinPorts base version 1.200 installed Downloaded DarwinPorts base version 1.211 Configuring, Building and Installing new DarwinPorts base selfupdate done! $ port version Version: 1.211

(Just because I’m paranoid…)

Okay, now let’s see what version of svn I have installed, and compare that to what’s available from DarwinPorts:

$ svn −−version svn, version 1.3.0 (r17949) compiled Apr 4 2006, 11:47:42 $ port info subversion subversion 1.3.1, devel/subversion (Variants: mod_dav_svn, no_neon, no_bdb, mac-os-x-server-mod_dav_svn, tools)

Yep, the 1.3.1 version has made it into DarwinPorts so let’s upgrade that:

$ sudo port upgrade subversion −−−> Fetching subversion yadda yadda yadda −−−> Installing subversion 1.3.1_0 −−−> Activating subversion 1.3.1_0 −−−> Cleaning subversion $ svn −−version svn, version 1.3.1 (r19032) compiled Apr 20 2006, 15:31:38

(Paranoia again…)

Cool, the tools are up-to-date, so now it’s time to make a new local repository.

$ svnadmin create /path/to/local/repository $ svn import -m “Creating testproj” testproj/ file:///path/to/local/repository Adding testproj/some_file Committed revision 1.

Now let’s checkout a copy of the project and see how it looks in Finder.

$ svn checkout file:///path/to/local/repository/testproj svn: URL ‘file:///path/to/local/repository/testproj’ doesn’t exist

Oops, looks like I screwed up the repository import. I’ll just check out the whole repository for now, and rtfm for help with project importing later.

$ svn checkout file:///path/to/local/repository/ A svn_repository/some_file Checked out revision 1.

A quick perusal with Finder doesn’t show any visual svn status indicators, but after I made a change to the file I got to see scplugin’s “red bang” over the file icon, indicating that the file was out of sync with the repository. Woo hoo! Right-clicking or control-clicking on the changed file presents me with a Subversion context menu, from which I selected commit:

Sending some_file Transmitting file data . Committed revision 2. Process finished with exit status 0.

That looks pretty good. Unfortunately, scplugin hasn’t changed the status indicator in Finder–it’s still showing the red bang, even though the working copy and the repository are now in sync. Relaunching Finder doesn’t change this. Hmm…

Well, that’s some progress–at least subversion is working! I’ll play with scplugin some more and see what I can find out.

I just applied the Mac OSX 10.4.6 update, hoping that it would solve my problems viz a viz committing changes to an SMB-based subversion repository. Alas, I still have the same trouble with svn commit. In addition, the new update undid scplugin’s changes to Finder which indicate a file’s svn status (e.g. current, newer working copy, etc). I guess that’s not such a big deal, since the svn status is useless without the ability to commit my changes.

Version 1.3.1 of svn came out a day or two ago, so let’s see if that does the trick.
Downloading Mac binary svn client v1.3.1…
Installing…
Testing…


515$ svn –version
svn, version 1.3.1 (r19032)
compiled Apr 4 2006, 00:30:54

Copyright (C) 2000-2006 CollabNet.
Subversion is open source software, see http://subversion.tigris.org/
This product includes software developed by CollabNet (http://www.Collab.Net/).

The following repository access (RA) modules are available:

* ra_dav : Module for accessing a repository via WebDAV (DeltaV) protocol.
- handles ‘http’ scheme
- handles ‘https’ scheme
* ra_svn : Module for accessing a repository using the svn network protocol.
- handles ’svn’ scheme
* ra_local : Module for accessing a repository on local disk.
- handles ‘file’ scheme

516$ svn commit -m ‘Changed script to be user-independent’ my_script
subversion/libsvn_client/commit.c:873: (apr_err=5)
svn: Commit failed (details follow):
subversion/libsvn_subr/io.c:2199: (apr_err=5)
svn: Can’t write to file ‘/Volumes/svn/grading_system/db/transactions/4-7.txn/rev’: Input/output error


ARRRRRGH!

Oh well, I guess it’s time to try the (old) patch for SMB access, which means building Subversion from source. Darwin ports collection, here I come!

I had a strange problem with my Mac (OSX 10.4.4) this morning–the Dock wouldn’t “unhide”. Normally I keep the Dock hidden to save screen real estate, and when I need to fire up one of my usual applications I just drag the mouse down to the bottom edge of the screen and voilà, the Dock pops up with all of my favorite apps. But this morning the Dock was being shy and wouldn’t reveal itself. I tried toggling all the preferences, but nothing helped. I finally found this suggestion on Apple’s Finder, Dock & Dashboard discussion site (registration required, or read my version of it here):

Delete (or move/rename) the com.apple.dock.plist in your ~Library/Preferences Folder, then log out and log back in. This worked for me, but I lost my Dock settings, in particular the applications that were in my dock! It seems obvious in hindsight, but I suggest that you make a list of your docked applications before you whack the preferences file, so you won’t have to repopulate your Dock from memory.