This is an improvement upon my earlier post on how to keep SVN checkouts automatically up to date.

DD32 used his awesome Googling skills to find this page in the TortoiseSVN docs that talks about automation. Turns out you can launch TortoiseSVN via the command line, have it update the folder(s), and then close when done. So here’s an updated guide.

These instructions are for Vista, but they are likely similar for XP.

1. If you don’t already have TortoiseSVN installed, download and install it.
2. If you don’t already have a copy of WordPress checked out to a folder, do it. WordPress’ in-development SVN URL is http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/
3. Start -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Task Scheduler
4. On the right, click on “Create Task” (not the basic one)
5. Fill out as follows. Paths will likely be different! Click for bigger versions and hover over the images (even when the lightbox is up) to display the comment text.

Done!

To test it to make sure it’s working properly, delete a few non-custom files from your SVN’ed folder. wp-trackback.php, xmlrpc.php, etc. are good test files. Then click on “Task Scheduler Library” in Task Scheduler (it’s on the left), click once on your new task, and then click “Run” on the right-hand side. If it’s working properly, the files your deleted will be restored.

This post has been deprecated as a better method was discovered. Please see this other post for details.

Read the rest of this deprecated post anyway »

More fun experiences with iTunes today. Trying to upgrade my iPod Touch’s firmware after manually downloading iTunes 8.0 (automatic update kept failing) only to find I need to upgrade to iTunes 8.0 from 8.0 in order to upgrade my firmware.

Clicking on “Download iTunes” does nothing. Awesome.

Yep, that official WordPress App for the iPhone and iPod Touch that I mentioned earlier is now available!

You can download it right here. I’m off to do it myself!

Thought I’d share a little bit of code I use to easily translate any webpage I’m viewing into English in one click.

Open your Bookmarks and add a new Bookmark to the “Bookmarks Toolbar” folder in Firefox (sorry IE users, you’re on your own). Name it anything (I did “Translate”) and for the location, enter this:

javascript:void(location.href='http://translate.google.com/translate?tl=en&u='+location.href)

That should make a new button show up in your toolbar and when you click it, it will take you to Google and translate the website into English.

Firefox 3 came out today. It is entirely awesome and I really suggest you give it a try. I’ve been using the betas for a week or two and I love it to death.

Oh, and before you complain about the “awesome bar” (aka the new address bar), give it a few days to learn your browsing habits. It’s sorting order will greatly improve as you surf the web.

I officially hate iTunes and that I am forced to use it to manage my iPod Touch. Okay, so I can tick the manual box and just drag and drop any songs I want to be on it, but the fact that it refuses to fetch album artwork for all my CDs drives me nuts. A huge part of the thing is displaying the album artwork (you can fly through it, it displays while playing, etc.). Worst of all, even if Winamp has already snagged the album artwork and saved it as a JPEG in the album’s folder, iTunes won’t notice it and I’d have to manually add it to my bazillion albums. Why oh why…

Back in the day, I used to just use the same password (well, a couple really, but still) on all sites I had to register on. This made it easy to remember, but the problem is that if one of my accounts was compromised, that password could be used to get into all of my other accounts.

So, for a while, I used a random password generator extension for Firefox, but it was slow and relied on Firefox remembering all my passwords (what happens if my hard drive died?).

Enter the ingenious SuperGenPass. It combines the two solutions I used previously. From the FAQ:

A bookmarklet is a chunk of JavaScript code stored in your Web browser as a bookmark or favorite. There’s no software to install, so you can use SuperGenPass across all platforms and in any modern Web browser. It also makes it easy to use on public computers where access rights may be restricted.

How it works

SuperGenPass uses your master password and the domain name of the Web site you are visiting as the “seed” for a one-way hash algorithm. The output of this algorithm is your generated password. If either your master password or the domain name of the Web site changes, even by one character, the generated password will be drastically different.

For example, let’s say that your master password is “cornflakes”. If you use SuperGenPass at yahoo.com, your generated password will be “r9AQeOhBgU”. If you use SuperGenPass at amazon.com, your generated password will be “zcbEm1t32B”. SuperGenPass doesn’t need to remember this or store it anywhere, because it’s just a (very complex) math problem: the result is the same every time. And because SuperGenPass uses a one-way hash function, no one will be able to reverse-engineer your master password from your generated passwords.

Simply put, you come up with one password and SuperGenPass will generate a unique, re-creatable password for any domain name you visit. It even fills in the password fields for you. I’ve dragged it up onto my top toolbar in Firefox, so I just click it and bam, I’m done.

No more having to remember more than one password or worry about your password being stolen and used on multiple sites.

Been busy, hence the lack of posts lately and this post being a day late. ;)

Firefox v2.0 Final was released yesterday. All you FF users, go upgrade! And to you IE users out there (even IE7 ones), please oh please try out Firefox or at least Opera. Anything but that insecure piece of shit IE.

IE7 is outta beta and available for all users. So, if you just have to use IE, upgrade, but otherwise I really suggest you switch to Firefox or Opera. Both are significantly better than any version of IE.