Another one bites the dust Another one bites the dust

Just found out that the iPad cable I left at the office was dead.  Great that I always have a spare cable with me.  But now I probably need to buy a few more of those iOS cables when I am in Hong Kong next month.

Continue forcing myself to use OSX

Now that I continue forcing myself to use OSX by leaving the MacMini booting up on the OSX side help forcing me to resolve some Mac issues that I used to have.  Like, for instance, I used to have problem running XBMC on my Mac.  It was version 9 back then.  Now it's version 11, and it seemed working pretty OK on my Mountain Lion OSX.  I even get the Traditional Chinese character showing up on my menu by using the same setting as on the Windows side (set the Character set as Hong Kong Chinese and such... see my another blog).  So how far I can keep doing this.

My latest Mac Development workflow

Continuing my journey of setting up a casual software development environment on my Mac, I spent most of my time today messing with XCode 4.4, following the "First Mac App" tutorial on Apple web site, and making sure that any code I created are:

• Version controlled
• Fully backed up AWAY from my development machine.

I encountered my first hiccup when I tried to use a network drive as the development directory.  While the code compiles, I have serious problem committing changes to the git repository.  Obviously this is NOT the right way to develop.

Then I tried to copy that folder to a local but external hard disk, and found that the problem still exist.  Obviously, something has already been corrupted.

So I decided to incorporate cloud solution.  I created a Google Drive account and set the local location to the same external drive I used before.  Then I create a new project in the Google Drive folder.  This time, the commit seemed to work.

I will continue to keep changing, to make sure that the version control and backing up to the cloud really works.

Stupid crashing Mountain Lion

I was working on something in the morning on my newly installed Mountain Lion on my 2009 Mac Mini.  I need to walk away from a while so I closed the screen.  And then suddenly I heard the sound of reboot, and found the OS rebooted itself.  Like what the freak!  Start to wonder how stable this Mountain Lion environment is.

Forcing myself to develop for OSX

I was trying to create an environment which, whenever I feel like doing development in whatever platform (WPF, Android native, HTML5, Windows 8 Metro, MacOSX, iOS ...), I can do that at ease, have everything backup, version controlled and unit tested.  I pretty got the Microsoft dev and Android dev environment working.  Now I need to figure how how to do that with Mac OSX.

The first hichup I encountered was that Eclipse on MacOSX didn't work well with the Subversion server I set up on my server box.  I tried hours and finally gave up.  I got messages like "a known bug" or "Mountain Lion removed some critical subversion access required files ...".  The bottomline is that I don't have time to fight with the environment.  I only wanted to causally write some MacOSX stuff with XCode once in a while.  I have no time to fight with this bullshit.

And then I found that XCode subversion didn't work too.  Again, hours of fighting, lots of fustration.  Not worth the time.

Finally I found out that the best way to do it is by using self-contained, git support that comes with latest XCode 4.x.  That way, all I need to do is back up the whole folder of the project, and I have both the project and version control backed up.  So my final test is to if it's possible to have the Mac OSX project resides on the network server instead of the local file system.  Otherwise I need to set up some file sync mechanism to make sure that everything got backup properly.