find your php version

Ya, so I'm totally clued out on this PHP stuff, but I do know that I want to use a Subversion module that requires PHP version 4.3 or later.

So throw this bit of code

< ?php phpinfo(); ? >



into a page named info.php (or whatever) in your /var/www/html directory and point your browser at it and it will let you know more than you ever wanted to know about your PHP installation.

source linkage

SVN's future

The conflict over the future of SVN seems to be: support the average Joe programmer who has flocked to SVN, or try and out do the existing distributed version control systems? The full post makes for interesting reading.

Apparently he and his co-developers were surprised when they developed SVN that the great masses of regular Joe programmers would adopt SVN,


Now distributed version control systems like Mercurial and GIT are all the buzz right now with those on the bleeding edge of tools. That these systems are supposed to make branching and merging trivial situations sounds like a great idea to me.

Cap Touch Dev Kits

I consider myself somewhat of a connoisseur of development kits.

Here are a few I've seen for capacitive touch.

Cirque - GlideSensor Development Kit: I give it a B at first glance

Omron- B6TW workbench another B looking entry.

Interesting Company: Sigma Designs

Fabless semi company in Milpitas. UWB, cable set top box chips.

Sigma Designs, Inc. - Powering the Digital Media Generation

pesky popup blocker

How do you allow popups for a site that pops them up into a really teensy-tiny window that you can't resize to get to the in context "allow this popup window" button.

Why, like any rational individual you'd look under Tools->Options to manually allow popups for this site. But where did they hide that setting under Options?



It's under the content tab!? It only took me ten minutes of googling to find that stupid one!

more fun from Start->Run

I'm a huge fan of running devmgmt.msc, notepad, and calc from the Start->Run prompt, but here's a list of how you can call most any control panel applet

My faves:

main.cpl to change mouse properties
ncpa.cpl to see network properties
control sysdm.cpl,@0,3 to bring up the page for changing environment variables
control main.cpl,@0,2 to bring up the mouse gain slider

Electronics books for software guys

Interesting post on Slashdot today: Slashdot | Books On Electronics For the Lay Programmer?

There was a good bit of collective wisdom spread throughout the 264 posts that I thought was worthwhile to distill here.

Despite it's awful cover and stupid title, There are no electrons: electronics for earthlings helped me put 3 quarters of circuit analysis into context way back when I was getting my computer engineering undergrad. Several other people on slashdot also recommended it.

I found Physics guys taught electronics so I could understand the subject. The canonical electronics text for those guys is The Art Of Electronics. This is the book the best tinkerers I know have on their bookshelves.

Some people like the old-school Forrest Mimms lab notebooks published by Radio Shack. I recall they didn't immediately grab my interest when I perused them a few years ago.

A former Navy Electronics tech recommended their series of training manuals: NEETS

Scanning the contents of this book with a ridiculous title that someone recommended, it looks to be a decent overview that could get you familiar with all the different words people use. If you have a Computer Engineering degree this should all be familiar; if you have a Computer Science degree, this is some of what you missed ;)

After making a mess with a soldering iron for years and saying "Ya, I know how to solder" I finally asked someone how to *actually* do it the right way when I found my primitive techniques couldn't solder surface mount components. I wish I would have found this intro to microcontrollers + learn to SMD solder kit from Spark Fun. Techni-Tool has less exciting learn to solder kits.

Physical Computing, Practical Electronics for Inventors, and Electronic Components for project builders look promising enough to take a closer look at.

I liked the look of Analog Interfacing to Embedded Microcontrollers so much that I bought it the last time I was between jobs. However, it is languishing on my bookshelf waiting for me to have more spare time.

svn: change log messages

Fixing mistakes in SVN log messages isn't something it offers right out of the box.

As an admin you can change any log message you want:

svnadmin setlog --bypass-hooks c:/svn/myrepo -r 1234 1234-new-log-msg.txt


As a regular user your admin has to setup certain things so you can do it. Full details are on the SVN faq.