As I mentioned early I've been working on a SVN post-commit script. We've got a SVN repository that will be modified by several remote developers and I really need to keep an eye on this repository and I need to closely monitor changes to this repository.

There are two major functions that I needed in my post-commit script:

1. I needed to update the working copy on my server
2. I needed to e-mail the changes to myself, so I know when developers are making changes

There are an abundant of examples showing off how to do this in various *nix flavors, but I couldn't find any good Windows-based solutions that didn't require Perl to be installed on the server. That led me to create the following post-commit.bat script.

I've been working on a post-commit hook for our Subversion install and was running in to a number of issues. The post-commit.bat file would run fine from command line, but I just could get things to work as I expected from SVN. After much debugging and scouring Google for answers, I've found a few tips that will hopefully help you to troubleshoot your own SVN repository hooks.

1) Subversion executes all hook programs with an empty environment

This was the biggest issue I was running in to, because I was expecting the my script to be able to find any programs in my %PATH% statement. That's the main reason my scripts were working fine from command line, but were breaking when executing from my SVN hook.

Whenever the topic of my employment comes up, everyone's first reaction when I tell them I work from home is: "Wow, that must be really nice!" While working from home definitely has some benefits, it has some cons.

As Cameron Childress mentions in his post on Coworking in Atlanta, the two hardest things to adjust to are the lack of socialization and self motivation—both are issues Cameron and I have talked amongst ourselves about in the past.

Scott Stroz (who's always up for a round of golf) today asked How Do You Set Up Your Development Environment? In his article, he has an excellent tip for restarting your local install of Apache using an Ant script. This is a great tip and something I quite frankly never thought to do.

But what if you're using Windows and want to stop a service on remote server?

I have to admit, I only use a small portion of the features that are in Eclipse. That's because there are so many features that I often miss things, even buttons that stare me in the face everyday. I love Eclipse, it's a really powerful IDE and one of the most impressive uses of client-side Java that I've ever seen.

Yesterday Michael Henke posted a nice entry (complete with screenshots) on some of the features of the Eclipse Navigation Toolbar. I've used the "Go Into" feature quite a bit. If you have a large project that you're going to be working in exclusively, it's a nice way to keep your navigation tree to just the relevant files and folders.

However, I must admit that I've never taken the time to figure out what the "Link With Editor" button does. I've clicked it once or twice, but never saw an immediate purpose for the button. Thanks to Michael's post, I know now that the clicking the "Link With Editor" toggle button will cause the Navigation pane to automatically jump to the active file open in the current editor tab.

Since I often have many tabs open at once (sometimes even dozens) I can see this feature being useful. Especially since often related files are grouped together in my project.

Adobe always seems to like releasing things to Adobe Labs in mass. They've also just released Flex Builder 3 (Public Beta 3). I actually found beta 2 to be pretty stable and have even rolled out a project into production based on beta 2. I plan on upgrading as soon as I have some time.

Adobe Labs just released BlazeDS as a new Open Source project (released under the LGPL v3 license.) Essentially BlazeDS is the remoting and messaging technology behind LiveCycle Data Services. For people familiar with Adobe Flex, they know that this is the "push" technology that allows you to build interfaces that are updated automatically when the data on the server changes. This means you can make data on the screen change in realtime as changes on the server occur.

I spent a few minutes looking through the BlazeDS documentation, but didn't see any real good information related specifically to ColdFusion. However, according to the Release Notes it looks like you can integrate BlazeDS directly with ColdFusion 8.

All the sudden today I started getting a weird problem when trying to edit files in Eclipse. I could save the file once, but on a subsequent save I was getting the following error:

If I closed the file and re-opened the file, I could save it again but only once.

This had me really scratching my head. My projects actually exist on my LAN as I save the files directly to my personal Dev Server. I thought the problem might have related to some kind of network problem, so I went through a bunch of steps—including rebooting both my Dev Server and my Workstation—but nothing was working.

Finally I got the bright idea to disable ESET Smart Security (which is the new version of the NOD32 scanner.) What do you know, things started working again. I had to play around with things for a while before I was able to figure out what exactly was causing the problem.

It turns out the "Real-time file system protection" was causing the problem. I'm not sure why it's causing the problem, but the fix is easy enough.

1. Open up ESET Smart Security
2. Make sure you're in the Advanced mode layout
3. Go to Setup > Antivirus and antispyware
4. Click the "Configure..." option
5. Click the "Setup..." button
6. Un-check the "Scan all files" option
7. Keep clicking the "OK" button until you're back to the ESET Smart Security window

NOTE:

If you prefer, you could just add the specific extensions you're having problems with to the "Exclude" filter list, the option is up to you.

I'm going to open up a ticket with ESET's support and see what they have to say about this.

Adobe has just posted Brio—the next generation of Adobe Acrobat Connect—to Adobe Labs for downloading. The new beta version allows you to:

• Host unlimited online meetings with up to 3 meeting participants.
• Interact with easy-to-use screen sharing, chat and whiteboards.
• Access your meeting instantly with a personalized, easy-to-remember URL.
• Distribute documents and files to meeting participants.
• Use integrated VoIP, teleconferencing and multi-point video.

I've had interest in Adobe Acrobat Connect (which is a horrible name,) but it was way out of my price range. Now that they've opened it up for free for up to 3 participants, it looks like it's time to check it out!

Nathan Strutz posted a cool tip using regular expressions to speed up coding which uses a regular expression to convert a single line list of variables into something actually useful.

You have a list of values on lines and you want to want to apply some code to each:

first_name
middle_initial
last_name
phone
country
state_province
city

Select the lines, and use your IDE's find/replace tool with the regex option. In Eclipse, this is just CTRL+F and check the checkbox. Use this as the search pattern:

^(.+)$

This regex says to select any line with at least one character in it and store it in a character group.

Some code like this would be the replace pattern:
querySetCell(myQuery, "$1", "");

Replace them all and your code will be generated in an instant. The regex will drop each line's content into the $1 backreference.

That's a tip I'll have to remember.

DryIcons.com has released 5 free icon sets. I'm a terrible artist, so the more free icon sets I can find, the better off I am when I'm designing an interface. Here's what DryIcons is offering:

Ruby Multimedia Icon Set - 13 High Quality Web Icons
WYSIWYG Sapphire Icon Set - 47 High Quality Web Icons
WYSIWYG Classic Icon Set - 47 High Quality Web Icons
Blue Velvet Icon Set - 86 High Quality Web Icons
Aesthetica Icon Set - 160 High Quality Web Icons

As many of you know, Flash Player v9.0.115.0 was released yesterday. I've been using Flash Player v9.0.64.0 since I recently completed a project using the Flex 3 beta. I see from the list of fixes, that issue #212379 (audio playback in swf off sync) has been addressed—which I'm hoping fixes the problem I've seen in lots of streaming video recently.

I always have trouble finding the Flash Player Content Debugger downloads so I wanted to make sure to provide a link. You'd think the page would be easy to find, but I always have to search for it. You'll only find the page in Adobe's Support section for the Flash Player.

Here are the links directly to the Windows versions:

• Download the Windows Flash Player 9 ActiveX control content debugger (for IE) (EXE, 1.59 MB)
• Download the Windows Flash Player 9 Plugin content debugger (for Netscape-compatible browsers) (EXE, 1.56 MB)
• Download the Windows Flash Player 9 Projector content debugger (EXE, 3.69 MB)

I've just installed the updated versions, so hopefully I don't run into any problems!

I was trying to find an Eclipse-based color picker that worked as a view this afternoon. I can't believe nobody has created one, but from the looks of my Google searches no one has. It would really be great to have a color wheel with the features of Adobe's Kuler available right from Eclipse.

If anyone knows of a really good color swatch/picker for Eclipse, please let me know.

However, I did come across ColorCop in my search—which I'm going to try out and see how it works for me. There's no installer and it's free, with an option to donate via PayPal if you find the program useful.

In the past I've blogged about some free Windows-based Diff tools—like ExamDiff. However I recently came across WinMerge—an "Open Source visual text file differencing and merging tool for Win32 platforms."

I've only been playing around with it for a couple of days, but I'm very impressed so far. It does a very good job visualizing the differences in files and has a lot of configuration options (such as how to interpret whitespace.) You create patch files, merge the changes together and even compare folder contents.

The feature I really like is Windows Explorer Context Menu integration. The context menu allows you to select two files in Windows Explorer and right-click and select the "Compare" option and instantly get a diff from those two files. There's also an option called "Compare To" which allows you to select a single file and then you can explore to another folder highlight a second file and select the "Compare" option to compare those two files. I really like this option. For me this is generally much more convienent than open the program and using an "Open" dialog to compare two files. I just find when I need to compare two files and I'm not already in Eclipse, then I'm probably looking at the files in Explorer—so the context menu integration is extremely convienent.

My brother sent me this link just a few minutes ago. This has to be one of the most impressive pieces of Flash I've seen in a long, long time. Kudos to the firm that did this work for the California Milk Processor Board (aka Got Milk?)

Click to Play