I’m away for work at the moment, I’m actually in Dubai – which is very cool, and I’ve come out a few times this year. And every time I travel I get really excited about the flight. Even with the knowledge that, after having your testicles removed with a rusty spoon, actually getting on a plane is the most painful and frustrating experiences in life.

It doesn’t help that regardless of how I plot, plan and organise merely arriving at the airport I still manage to cock it up somewhere. I have had to cope with forgetting that the M25 is occasionally a *bit* busy – that time I checked in with merely minutes to rush through security and leg it to the plane; I’ve stuck the car in a ditch on the way, had to get a friend to tow me out and I checked in with merely minutes to rush through security (got picked out for a random search this time) and leg it to the plane; then there was the time I thought the plan took off at 9:30 and it took off at 9 – see above…..

This time I had the brain wave that I’d get the train to London and the blue line on the tube over to Heathrow.  In retrospect the previous sentence seems to sum up quite clearly what my mistake was this time. Which wasn’t helped by some poor bloke fainting on the tube ,requiring that the train was stopped in a station for 1/2 an hour. That little episode clearly sums up my opinion of London, the guy had fainted, keeled over, bashed up his nose, cut his head and NO ONE offered him a seat, and all of us (I have to include myself) stood around tutting and looking at our watches while the poor sod tried to work out where and who he was as he came round.

Anyway – mindful of my previous mistakes I’d given myself loads of time so I didn’t have to worry too much. Got to the airport finally and went to check in. I was quite interested as Virgin had sent me an email letting me know that they had a new check-in system which promised to make the whole process much easier. Cool. I walked into the check-in area.

Chaos! There were people everywhere – sorry – extremely stressed people everywhere. Basically the new system involved everyone checking themselves in and then dropping off their bags. In theory, great, in practice…. The main problem is that people where required to weigh their bags them selves and were trusted to fess up if they were overweight. Yeah – right. Trust had broken down by the time I got there and really pissed off Virgin staff were marching up and down the lines singling people out, “Is that bag 23kilos? Is that bag 23kilos? It doesn’t look like 23kilos, does it? You need two trolleys for it!” I don’t know what happened to that chap. Didn’t see him again, he was probably taken out the back and shot.

I was teachers pet, I’d already checked in online and had a little bag so actually got through this bit quite quickly as people in the queue in front of me were culled for being overweight by the various Virgin staff. (Not actually overweight, their bags were overweight – if that was the criteria, I’d still be in Blighty, waiting for a boat barge, to get me out here)  So the system worked for me.

My fastest check-in and journey to security ever!  At this rate I was going to have time for a beer and buy a book that I’d never read at any other time than when on a plane – something by Andy McNab no doubt.  Even the long queues for security were moving through well, terrific.  Weighing up the people ahead of me I could see the only problem was a family with a pram, who after a little eavesdropping, I ascertained they had no idea how to fold up the pram.  Armed with this information I peeled off to follow the sensibly dressed business man, who’d obviously been through the process before.  I thought.  First off he put his bag into the machine.  It was sent back as he’d forgotten to take his laptop out.  Computer problem fixed he walked through the gate that goes beep.  It went beep.  He was asked if he had any metal on him.  Offering his glasses he tried again with them off.  It went beep.  He checked his pocket and pulled out about twenty quids worth of shrapnel and went through again.  Beep – I noticed the family had smoothly collapsed the pram and were strolling off into duty free.  Beep.  Now he remembered he had a mobile phone.  Beep.  Finally a penknife.  At this point we were ushered through past him, never saw that bloke again either.

Then I checked the time, sighed and legged it to the gate.

I love flying…..

I’m just going to quickly talk about how I use SVN. That doesn’t mean it’s the right way, or even remotely the way it’s supposed to be used, but I’ve noticed on some forums and mailing lists that the SVN ‘getting started’ step seems to have been left out.

What you’ll need for this is a computer (what a wag!), Eclipse downloaded and installed (basically unzip into a directory) and that should be it. Apologies to Mac users I don’t use a Mac and these steps are for a Windows PC. Also this is not going to be about connecting to remote repositories, this is about creating a local SVN repository and connecting to it. So this is for developers who are just starting out with SVN and source control and want to manage their projects locally.

OK, disclaimers out of the way, lets get going.

Then go and get Tortoise SVN from here.

Run the installer, this will probably require a reboot after it’s installed.

Once you’ve done that and the machine is back up if you right click you’ll see a few extra options.

This is the nice thing about Tortoise, you don’t need to open another application, it’s there in the file menu.

Go to where ever you want to create the repository and create a folder. I’ve just called mine ‘myProject’.

Right click on myProject and select ‘Create Repository Here’.

Select ‘Native filesystem’ (Should be selected by default) and hit OK.

(Hopefully!)

Open Eclipse. Go to Help -> Software Updates -> Find and Install.

Select Search for new features to install and click next.

Click on New Remote site.

Give the site a name of Subclipse and in the URL field put the URL to the Subclipse update site, currently http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.2.x.

Hit OK and follow the install instructions. (If you’re anything like me just keep clicking on OK or I agree until its down and installed.) Eclipse will prompt to be restarted, let it do it. If there are any problems at this point close eclipse, go to the command prompt and navigate to your eclipse install directory. Type eclipse – clean and hit enter. This launches eclipse with a clean cache and also lets it know to look for the new plugins.

This is the bit where it is a bit Irish (and I’m half Irish, so I should know). For these purposes I’ve created a new project in Eclipse called – wait for it! – myProject. (But what about the repository? Hang on…) Just FYI, it’s a flex project, but that doesn’t matter.

Delete the project, making sure that you have selected not to delete the contents!

Navigate through the file explorer to the project created by Eclipse (not the repositorty).

Right click -> TortoiseSVN -> Import.  (Import?  But…. Yes I know – that’s the Irish bit.  The best way I can get my head about it is to think in reverse a bit.  Forget about the fact that you’ve just clicked on your project, we are actually at the repository.  So we are pulling the project in,  not pushing the project out.  Yeah – that makes sense.  Sort of.)

If you don’t see the repository you created click on the drop down icon on the right and select it from there. As you can see Captain Clever (me) has smartly placed the repository in New Folder(3). No matter, probably better for a real application not to copy exactly what I’ve done. I think it’s a good idea to pop a message in, so I’ve just added ‘Initial Import’ to the message area. Hit OK and hopefully : -

So now we’ve added the project to the repository. Now delete the myProject project folder (not the repository……). Just in case – make a copy first

Now we need to make a note of the URL for the location of the repository. As it isn’t on a server per se, the repository location is a bit different from a normal URL, and this is the easiest way to find it. Right click anywhere select Tortoise -> Repo Browser. This then opens a dialog where you can select the repository you want to look at. We are not interested in looking at a repository through Tortoise, but clicking on the drop down lists the repositories,normally with the newsest at the top of the list.

Write down, or copy the location of the repository.

Back to eclipse.

Open the SVN Repository Exploring Perspective. Do this either through the quick link on the right, or through Window -> Open perspective -> Other and select SVN repository exploring from the list.

Right click in the SVN Repository window and select New -> Repository Location.

This launches the add repository dialog box. Type or paste in the repository location.

Hit OK. You will now be connected to your repository and can explore it in the SVN Repository window.

Right click on the repository and select Checkout.

These setting should be fine, but just check, then DON’T HIT FINISH! It will create the project in your defined workspace. This my be OK for you, but I rather keep my projects saved somewhere else than the workspace as I flit back and forth in workspaces as is my wont. Click next.

Uncheck use default and browse to where you want your project to be saved. Hit finish.

Navigate back to the programing perspective you use – in my case Flex – and you will see the gleaming project, now under SVN source control in the Navigator window.

The silos icon indicate the file/folder is up to date in the repository and numbers after the files represent the version the file is at, the name afterwards is the person wot done it.

To commit changes back to the repository right click on the project folder Team – > Commit.

Right – I’m going to stop here, the repository is created and now you can have fun playing with the extra functionality of SVN gives you.

P.S. If you are working to a local repository and your machine blows up – don’t blame me…

Normally I get a pile of spam, like everyone, with offers of cheap and inexpensive ways to extend my pen!s (don’t know what’s so exciting about a pen) and various women who have apparently picked up my male ardor over the very essence of the interweb and are keen for us to meet up, or at least check out a few of her photos. And I also get the phishing mails. The “I’ve got to get a few million quid out of Iraq/South Korea/Afghanistan/Croydon please send us your bank details.” type of emails, and I have to confess the first time I received one I was chuffed. It was like I’d joined some sort of club, one which after a while I would have happily been black balled from. But this morning, after an early start yesterday and today what was it that brightened my day but a piece of spam.

It starts pretty normally

DEAR FRIEND,

PLEASE READ CAREFULLY

Ok

My name is  Chan  I work with the  Hang Seng Bank Hong Kong
Before the U.S. and Iraqi war, our client Colonel Sadiq Uday,
who was  with the Iraqi forces and also businessman, made a
numbered fixed deposit for 18 calendar months, with a value of
Nineteen Millions Five Hundred Thousand United State Dollars
only in my branch

Hi Chan, glad you put your name in, now we’ve some sort of connection. You work for some bank, OK. And this bloke Uday, sounds familiar – I shall read on. Never know – might be something in this.

Upon maturity several notices was sent to him,
even during the war which began in 2003.

Again after the war another notification was sent
and still no response came from him.

Surely not, that nice Uday can’t have been…No!! Not Uday!

We later found out that the Colonel along with his wife
and only daughter had been killed during the war in a bomb
blast that hit their home at Mukaradeeb -

And this is the corker – ready?

where his personal oil well was.

!  Spammers of the world!  Come on – I know you’re trying to prove he’s got money, but a personal oil well?  It’s like me claiming I’ve got a Nuclear Power Station in the shed! (Don’t tell anyone about the gold mine in the garden tho)

When you are working on a large project sometimes Flex Builder sill take ages to save a file  If you are anything like me you have probably had the blue screen of death moment when you’ve lost important work because you haven’t saved regularly enough, so now save nearly every time you finish a line of code.  This means that a rather irritating pause becomes a real productivity problem.

The reason Flex Builder takes so long to save is probably because you have the ‘Build Automatically’ preference selected.  This means that when you save Flex Builder will automatically build the entire project for you.  This is great when you are teaching yourself Flex as you’re probably only working with a few files.  After a while though Flex projects do end up with lots of files and it takes a bit of time for them to compile.

What I suggest is uncheck the ‘Build Automatcially’ preference, found in the Project Menu.  This stops the compile, BUT will also not automatically check your project for errors.  To do this you must build the project, the short cut is ‘Ctrl – B’ (on Windows, not sure on a Mac).  This compiles the project and checks it for errors.