This evening was not devoted to…

Unlike most geeks I know around here I didn’t spend my evening mucking around Apple’s site drooling over the new (and extremely cool) iPod photo or spending obscene amounts of money on Apple’s new iTunes music store in Portugal.

The fact is that the iPod photo looks like it could very well be an alternative to the Delkin Picture Pad but I still have to look into it a lot deeper to make that decision.
Still, from what I’ve seen of the price point it came out at in the USA (and guessing what it will cost in Europe) I would much more easily fork out for one of these than for a standard (music-only) iPod. Yes, that’s right, I don’t actually own one! :-)

And as for the Portuguese iTMS, well, it is cool, but I don’t think I will be a very good customer there just yet. I still have a strong physical relationship with CDs…
Then again if that is ever going to change than this is a perfect way to go about it!

But anyway my evening was spent (the geek-side of it) playing around with Eclipse (the IDE) on my iBook (it looks so much better than it did when I last looked at it some 2 years ago!) and iView Media Pro which is looking like it will replace iPhoto as my photo management application on the desktop. The testing is underway and it is nearly finished indexing my photo storage (an SMB drive) with its 7400-plus pictures (mainly in Canon RAW format). It took something like two and a half hours but even while it is indexing everything moving about on the catalog and looking at pictures and picture information is blazing fast comparing with my 3500-plus local pictures in iPhoto. It’s not even fair!

Update: Yep, it was too good to be true, after nearly 3 hours indexing all those pictures (and doing a pretty good job of it) iView Media Pro just went bang at the very end not having saved the catalog, of course. <sigh>

CVS - Concurrent Versions System

CVS is a version control system, that is, a system you can use to record the history of your files and it’s changes.
This system is usually applied to software development in order to maintain history of the evolution of the source code.

CVS allows you to easily retrieve old versions of each file that is under it’s control.

In order to save space on the disk and for the sake of efficiency, instead of saving every version of every file you have ever created, CVS stores all the versions of a file in a single file, with some extra data in it so that it only stores the differences between versions.

CVS also helps when a group of people is working on the same project. Usually every developer works in his own directory, and CVS merges the work when each developer is done.

As good and widely used as it is, CVS has it’s limitations and it is a rather old system which already shows it’s age.

There are currently a number of systems being developed in order to replace it and a few other systems are already there for some time now. Some (but only a few) interesting alternatives to CVS are ARCH, Subversion and darcs.

Resources

• Online CVS usage and administration manual;
• Running arbitrary scripts under CVS;
• CVS Magic: bringing files back to life;
• Open Source development with CVS - The on-line version of the excellent book by the same name.