iPhoto Archiving

When I bought my MacBook Pro a couple years ago, I didn’t get the largest hard drive available for it (in retrospect, a mistake). Between my music collection, digital photos, and Parallels PC disk image, 150 GB got close to full quite quickly. As a result, I’d been looking around for a way to archive some content (at least some music and photos) to an external drive to make more room.

I came across this old post that gives you a quick-and-dirty way to archive the photos (even if it doesn’t preserve the libraries).  What’s especially convenient about Time Machine in this case is that if I find a better way to do it, I can recover the old setup from it and then archive properly.

Hello WordPress 2.5.1

Finally upgraded to the latest version, so I figured I’d change themes too.  The upgrade process turned out to be far easier than I expected.  If I remembered any UNIX scripting from undergrad, I’d automate it.

Strongly-typed DataSets in Subversion

Strongly-typed datasets are the default option for creating a data access layer (DAL) with the various .NET versions of Visual Studio. From the XSD file that defines a strongly-typed dataset, Visual Studio generates a [XSD].Designer.cs and [XSD].xss.  They’re regenerated every time you change the XSD, even if you just change the layout.  This can become a problem when working in teams and it’s necessary to merge changes.  If your Subversion repository is configured to version the generated files, they’ll be marked as conflicting when you update.

These are the steps I’ve taken to merge changes in the situation above:

  1. Delete [XSD].Designer.cs and [XSD].xss.
  2. Resolve conflicts in the XSD file (and mark them as resolved).  This will generate new versions of [XSD].Designer.cs and [XSD].xss.
  3. When resolving conflicts in the files generated in step 2, use the whole file that was just generated.

This will be much easier than trying to resolve conflicts in generated files.