Mac Backup Software Harmful

Paradoxically, copying a file and being sure that all information has been copied is not easy under Mac OS X. I analyzed a variety of file copying engines, most of them command-line tools, and demonstrated how they fare in preserving file metadata.

Source: Mac Backup Software Harmful

This is quite interesting as I've never felt the need to move from Carbon Copy Cloner to something else, as I've successfully managed upgrades using it from Jaguar to Panther & Panther to Tiger.

Subversion

Andrew asked me to take a look at some JRDF work he's been working on. As I've been slack lately, I needed to check out the code to take a look, and he's recently moved it over to Subversion. I've dealt with svn before from within IntelliJ, but I usually like to check out my projects from the command line, to get a feel for what's going on. So my running commentary for all today is information on getting svn going for CVS wannabes.

• The book.
• The Top Ten Subversion Tips for CVS Users.
• Building Subversion (SVN) on Mac OS X.
• How to Use Rails with Subversion.

Gotta love the blame/praise command!

Samurai

If anyone ever needs to analyse Java thread dumps, Samurai is the Beez Neez. No more squinting at less.

Cannot Delete

The ever helpful error message, from a colleague's interactions with a remote server.

SPARQL-a-go-go

Via Dave: The DAWG (the WG I once sat on) has just released three SPARQL specifications as W3C Candidate Recommendations! This is great news for the semweb community, even if some of the decisions made are not ones I agree with. The potential upside of semweb is huge, hopefully it can be another one of those overnight success stories, 10 years in the making.