Strange Pants - Software

SVN has been my choice of code repository and version control software since I dumped Microsoft’s abortive Visual Source Safe a couple of years ago.

One of the down-sides of SVN has been getting buy-in from Windows-based developers and admins who fear the command line. SVN, of course, thrives on the command line.

VisualSVN Server to the rescue: a WIMP tool for installing and managing an SVN server on Windows. It looks after installing Apache and and SVN, and provides a management utility for configuring repositories and users.

VisualSVN Server is free; it’s creators also make and sell VisualSVN, an SVN plug-in for Visual Studio.

Filed by Jachin Sheehy under Software Development
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Today, I installed the first beta release of Firefox 3. Very happy! Over 300 memory leaks fixed! It’s certainly performing better than Firefox 2. I’ve been hitting it hard all day and memory usage still hasn’t gone over 80MB.

I’ll be looking more closely at the changes to the rendering engine and CSS support when I have the time. There are some interesting functional updates around the browser as well: the ability to “star” pages, for instance; and the new “Places” section of bookmarks which attempts to make your more habitual browsing easier to get back to.

Very few of my favoured extensions are available for this beta release at this stage (it’s only been a few hours :-) so I went trawling for extensions that were v3-ready and made discovered Fireshot. Take screenshots and then annotate them What more could a web developer ask for? This one gets a big thumbs up.

Also due for special mention today is the Router Status extension

Filed by Jachin Sheehy under Software Development
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VectorMagic is an online auto-tracer from Stanford University.

I hate manually re-tracing work, so this suits me … and the results seem to be very good.

First I threw it a copy of the family coat of arms (click for larger version):

Very nice! Particularly visible on the motto at the bottom: smooth fonts again! Thank you!

VectorMagic also claims to be tweaked for translating photos to vector images, so I passed it a photo (click for larger version):

Again, a very passable rendition.

Infinitely scalable goodness. This one is going into the toolbox.

Filed by Jachin Sheehy under Interesting-Finds Software
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