Chris Weldon’s Blog

So, I encountered a weird problem earlier tonight while trying to merge changes from our trunk back into a branch I’ve been working on. The merge went successfully and I could see all the changes locally. However, when I attempted to check in the changes, I got the following error message:

svn: File 'path/to/file' is out of date

This wasn’t terribly unusual, with the exception of the case I just checked out the branch from the repository. When I performed an update, nothing was updated which further complicated the situation. When I used the --force switch, only then did one of my folders update and indicate that it was in a conflicted state. When I resolved the conflict and attempted to check back in, guess what? The same error message.

This is when I started Googling to see if I could find someone else who had this problem, but alas found no answers. I then started trying to compare the differences between the versions, including what was available in the most recent trunk release and found something interesting. The most recent trunk didn’t have any properties named svn:mergeinfo. This was despite multiple merges already taking place in the past. Yet, when I looked at the merge that I am attempting to perform, the following mergeinfo appeared:

/branches/timelog-and-multi-speaker-ui:430-526
/trunk:532-533

I had specified only to merge versions 532-533 - nothing before then. Thus, the previous merge version was extremely unusual, and likely was what was causing the conflicts upon checkin. Sure enough, when I deleted that line in the svn:mergeinfo property, I was able to checkin successfully.

So, the lesson to be learned is if you try to merge and find you’re blocked because something isn’t really out-of-date, check your mergeinfo.

Software Development development, programming, subversion

Last Friday and this morning I had been trying to deploy the latest changes to my WCF application. As I started doing this the manual way (e.g. copying all DLLs, configs, and service endpoints into a directory to zip and send up to my web server), I took a step back and realized I needed a NAnt build target because I’m going to be doing this over-and-over again. However, after creating the build target and deploying the resulting Zip to my web server, I received a strange error message when trying to invoke my services.
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Software Development, Systems Administration automation, c#, nant

I’ll admit, I’m a bit of a JavaScript n00b when it comes to doing UI development. One of the outside consulting projects that I’m working on is asking me to push the limits of my JavaScript knowledge, and I can definitely say the past couple of days have given me a sad realization that there are some strange oddities to JavaScript development. Once you understand that Prototyping is much like Extension Methods in .Net, that part’s pretty easy. What’s not easy is trying to figure out how to do event handing with Object Oriented classes.
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Software Development javascript

One of the side projects I’m working on involves having users listen to audio files and fill out information in response to the audio files they listen to. Some audio files will be short (e.g. 5 seconds or less), but others may be long, say a few minutes to an hour or longer. These audio files are typically voicemails or ditcations, so people can have a tendency to leave long breaks between words, will talk slowly, etc., thus slowing down the listening process. The goal: figure out a way to allow the users to speed up (or slow down) the audio files as much as they would like without having to process the audio files on the server ahead of time. The possible solution? HTML5
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Software Development chrome, firefox, html5, safari, webkit

As I’m trying to finish up one of my consulting projects (and enhance other active projects), I decided to take a nice long hard look a PostgreSQL permissions - the correct way of doing it. PostgreSQL applies the commonly accepted principle of assigning permissions to resources. They’re moving away from the concept of users and groups and more to roles. As of PostgreSQL 8.3, the primary command to create new users OR groups is CREATE ROLE. The existing CREATE USER / CREATE GROUP commands still exist, but are becoming non-existent in hopes of replacing the user / group permissions model with a strictly role-based model.

In an attempt to move my projects towards this model, I ended up running into several problems.
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SQL postgresql, sql

Recently I upgraded one of my projects from 1.6.1 to the latest in branch-1.8.x of the Zend Framework. This resulted in most of my 1200+ unit tests breaking for that project. After several hours of trying to figure out the cause of the break, I managed to stumble onto the differences that is causing the problems I was experiencing.
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PHP PHP, zend framework

PHP PHP

While working on one of my consulting projects, I was having a difficult time finding documentation anywhere online on how to use the Dojo Drag-n-Drop (dojo.dnd) features with forms. I wasn’t too keen on making JSON calls or writing a whole-lotta JavaScript to solve my problem. Well, luckily I managed to derive a solution rather quickly. Read on for more details.

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PHP dojo, javascript, PHP

When you ask most people, the common perception of the role of a university is to teach students, perform research, and help the community. The latter is certainly one that I find many people (especially in university roles) don’t throw up as an answer, despite it being an important role of a university. It’s clear that this mentality runs rampant amongst individuals, especially software developers, at universities because of the lack of open source (or freely licensed) software that is provided by universities across the nation. Certainly, some have contributed more than their fair share (Virginia Tech, University of Washington, just to name a couple). However, many others, especially those who pride themselves on being one of the world’s most premiere research institutions, fail to meet up to the same standards as others. It’s about time that developers start banding together and becoming more creative and collaborative across the campus so that we can keep things moving forward.
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Political, Software Development

This was an article I began writing several months ago. I didn’t want to abandon it, so I’m finishing it up now. It’s merely an informational and doesn’t contain a lot of depth. It’s meant for the introductory users.

For those PHP developers who have been frustrated with how to create a standard layout for pages other than having to remember to put an opening div block after the header includes and a closing div block before the footer includes, listen up. Things are about to get much easier. In fact, those PHP developers who have done ASP.Net programming in the past, you’re about to get much more pleased with PHP. The only drawback, which is more of a gain anyways, is you have to use the Zend Framework. Note that this topic is for those people who are not blessed withing already using a layout or template engine and are forced to do things the old way. Those of you who are using something like Smarty may not benefit from this, but keep reading anyways.
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PHP, Software Development layouts, master pages, PHP, zend framework