Subversion : free repository hosting and client tools

I recently tried out the subversion hosting offered by opensvn.csie.org.
Setup took me about 10 minutes and it works as a charm.  My only concern is about confidentiality : how can you be sure that your source code is not copied and used by the owners of the site?  My guess is you can’t and you simply need to trust the guys…  or set up your own webserver of course 🙂

For the rest I’d like to congratulate and thank the people of opensvn for their offered service which is completely free.

As a subversion client on windows  I use tortoisesvn, a shell integrated svn tool that works very well.  On linux the tkcvs tool version 8 has a lot of features and is easy to use, you can always use the command line as well :-).  A vim/gvim plugin is also available at www.vim.org

The sacred elements of the faith

periodic_table.png (PNG-afbeelding, 1609×884 pixels) – Geschaald (56%):

Periodic Table of Design Pattern Elements

Huston design patterns is the very nice site were I found the picture.

Ajax design patterns

Ajax is the new buzz word, find out about it at ajaxpatterns.org

A world without mouse clicks

If you ever wondered if it possible to use your mouse without clicking, stop wondering and visit dontclickit
I wonder if it would be possible (and usefull) to develop other kinds of user interfaces also without using clicks…

Python and design patterns – an example using pygame

A very usefull guide I recently discovered can be found over here.  It teaches multiple things at the same time : using python, introducing some design patterns ( the ones found in the model view controller pattern ) and at the same time developing a game using pygame…  What do you want more to get you started?  I will keep you informed about this guide.  I wish to thank the author for the nice job he did so far.

Quotes on programming

Very funny and some are also very true -> quotes

How to be a programmer

I just stumbled upon a very good article called ‘How to be a Programmer‘.  It covers about every programming aspect you can think.  Check it out!

My first pygame experience

This weekend I tried out a little tutorial with the pygame python library. Everything worked ok except for the window size on startup. On WinXP you have to do some extra trick before the pygame initialization. It isn’t documented explicitly but I figured out it had to be the reason that my window size was minimized on starting up, only after dragging and clicking the window it got to the normal size. But when you add the following extra code you get it right immediately :

if sys.platform == “win32”:
os.environ[‘SDL_VIDEODRIVER’] = ‘windib’
pygame.display.init()
pygame.init()
screen = pygame.display.set_mode((200,100))
for event in pygame.event.get():

# and so on …

Anti-pattern overdose and bad smells

Today I was doing some occasional code reading.  In fact it was a colleague that let me read some source code he stumbled upon.  We never saw so many anti-patterns in one code read session : magic numbers, middle man, spaghetti code, very long functions with huge switch statements, code duplication, it was all there.  I was wondering what to do with this discovery : go to the author of this marvelous piece of code and explain our objections or refactor the code ourselves?  The former options seemed attractive but after reflecting a while I chose not to bother because, after all, the code worked and management does not care about clean, maintainable and optimized code.  So my colleague decided to refactor it himself…  I decided to do some research and write a tutorial, both for beginners and advanced programmers on how to properly design and write clean code using design patterns and be aware of bad smells in code…  The only problem remaining then will be on how to motivate people to put the theory into practice.  To be continued…