Publishing and updating with Bazaar Version Control

I've written about publishing to a web server using BZR remotely before that involves running bzr serve and then remotely branching and pulling. However I wanted to find another way. Using bzr push sftp://username@host/path/to/directory one can branch from the source to the web server. This method unfortunately does not work like one would expect.

Bazaar still needs one to checkout a working copy from the pushed branch. This means one needs to type on the remote server: bzr checkout path/to/directory www/directory The example checks out a working copy into the published directory on a web server. Yet the process is not complete. One must also go to the www/directory and do mv .bzr .xzr or something similar to disable unauthorized users from branching the source code.

To update the remote working copy one must push the branch out then in the working copy rename .xzr back to .bzr then run bzr pull again. I believe this is highly inefficient and while this is a feature that may not be required by many, and is available as a plug-in, when programming web applications a simple ability to publish and sync working copies is essential.

Quickly restarting the Dock in OS X

For some odd reason my Dock crashed today. Nothing would bring it up. Restarting Finder did not help. The solution turned out to be pretty simple and did not require grep-ing ps -a either.

To restart the Dock in OS X all one needs to do is launch Terminal and type killall Dock. Quick and easy; although I don't see how and why the Dock should be crashing at all. Just another item on the Leopard instability list.

iPhone mobile GMail scrolling

After trying to respond to an e-mail in mobile gmail yesterday I found it impossible to scroll through my reply. Turns out I was being stupid. Mobile Safari allows the scrolling of text areas when you use two fingers to scroll. While not intuitive it is okay, but I would've like to be able to activate the text area and have scroll default to that, kind of like how most web browsers work.

I found this tip on iPhone tips & tricks.

How to get off StopBadware.org FAST!

Well, 24 to 48 hours after replacing my WordPress installation with Blogger my web site is once again not flagged by Google and not blocked by Firefox 3. If Google gets more aggressive with their flagging I think they can kill all other self-hosted blog programs fairly quickly as people such as my self who cannot be bothered to constantly update my blog installation will just give up and go to a hosted service.

Other information coming soon

I realize I am losing some web site visits by starting new. However I will be either re-linking or re-publishing some of my more visited posts from the old blog. Hopefully the re-posts will not trigger another badware flag as I still have no idea why the old site got flagged.

First Post!

This is my first post using Blogger with FTP access. Since Google decided my old WordPress install was badware infested I decided to start new instead of jumping through all the hoops of requesting proper intervention.