Objective: Objective-C

Since I’ve recently decided to study iPhone programming and and since Starcraft II is still a few days away, I was able to spend some time learning Objective-C, the programming language of choice for iPhone development. Since, I’ve gone through quite a few programming languages (LOGO, BASIC, Pascal, C, some C++, Java, and more recently Flex), picking up the syntax and the basics was a relative breeze. I expect, as usual, things will get exciting once I start working with the iOS APIs. Haven’t felt this excited in a while!

Setting Up Subversion

Every developer should have version control. It can be a simple process or a process supported by tools. One of the best version  control tools is Subversion or SVN. Here’s how to set up your own SVN server on a Linux box.

Install or update Subversion: If you’re using Red Hat-type Linux: yum install subversion or yum update subversion. If you’re using Debian-type Linux: apt-get install subversion or apt-get update subversion. Others Linux flavors should have something similar.

Create your repository: svnadmin create /svnroot

Configure access: vi /svnroot/conf/svnserve.conf. In the [general] section, add:

anon-access = none
auth-access = write
password-db = passwd

Add users: vi /svnroot/conf/passwd and add:

<username> = <password>

Start Subversion as a daemon: svnserve -d.

Open up TCP port 3690 on your Linux box’s firewall.

Connect to your SVN server with the URL svn://<server name or ip>>/svnroot

Start using your SVN server. Here are some useful tips:

  1. How to structure your repository
  2. How to fix bugs properly
  3. How to release software properly

That’s it!

Downloading Adobe’s “Flex In A Week” Videos

Adobe, in it’s arguably self-serving pursuit to make Flex more popular offered an online training module called Flex In A Week. Admittedly, it’s quite good. I’ve been using it but watching it online just doesn’t work for me since I don’t have continuous Internet access.

I tried their suggestion for watching the videos online. Unfortunately, it means installing Adobe Media Player (which is yet another sucky media player) and adding the RSS feed http://sessions.adobe.com/FlexInAWeek/feed.xml to My Favorites. Problem is that AMP sucks and it can cache only a few videos at a time.

Fortunately, there is a better solution. Simply go to the RSS feed in Firefox (click the link or copy-and-paste it into the address box) and download the media files from the links on the resulting page. You can now watch it with your favorite media player such as VLC. That’s it!