Unlike some of my more excitable peers, I have a rather utilitarian relationship with my computers. My machines have names, obviously, but that's for practical rather than anthropomorphic reasons. If one of them breaks, I get it fixed. I don't stroke them, or coo over them. If it breaks really badly, I buy a new one.

I have a similar utilitarian relationship with most software (I'll grant games are different). Recently though, I have developed a bit of crush on two rather cool bits of kit - VMWare and Subversion.

VMWare make virtualisation software, that is software which lets your one computer look like several computers all at the same time. Each of the virtual machines can have its own network address, disk space and so on. It's mindboggling clever. Geekily, I've been using it to run FreeBSD, Ubuntu Linux and DragonFly BSD machines all at the same time while developing my free stuff. It's been a revelation - suddenly all these platforms are available, but without the hassle of finding a spare machine, or disk partioning or any of that crap. It's ace! For the non-developer, you could do things like run older versions of DOS or Windows in VMs so you can play older games or run that version of Quicken you've had forever. You could also use it for your kids - next time they install some hideous bit of spyware, you can scrub the VM without the pain of doing a full reinstall.

Subversion? I think you need to be a developer to understand. For years, I've been a happy CVS user. Subversion was developed expressly to be a "better CVS". It is :) Grab cvs2svn and migrate your repositories now!

Somewhere deep down in his dogheart, there's still something of the wolf in Badger. While long years of failure have told him that chasing rabbits, hares and squirrels is a fruitless pursuit, he still gives it a go every now and then. Just once he caught a rabbit, a young one that didn't know how to run away, and he was so surprised that he didn't know what to do, dropped the rabbit and froze. The rabbit, learning fast, legged it and that was that.

Hedgehogs are a different kind of beast (ba-dum, tish!) altogether, and Badger gets very excited when he finds one. They are easy to catch, for a start, especially as they handily stay exactly where they are when you do find one. Annoyingly though, they roll into a prickly ball. And that's where the fun begins.

Badger's caught something. He's pleased with himself. But the animal he has caught is spiny and has no protruding limbs. So he can't pick it up in his mouth. Not having opposable thumbs, he can't pick it up in his paws either. What he can do is give it a bit of poke. So he pokes and scraps around it, ripping up the grass and gradually excavating a small depression. The hedgehog hunkers down, safe if perhaps rather alarmed, and the whole thing continues until I go out into the garden to find out why he hasn't come in for his dinner.

The hedgehog he found on Friday night was a whopper. After I'd shoved Badger back inside, I checked it was ok and best I could tell it was. I considered picking it up and moving it into the veg patch, but thought it had probably had enough excitement for one night. I'm going to build a little log pile, to encourage it to stay. Well I say build, but more likely I'll just not bother moving the pile of sticks we already have.

A couple of nights ago, Badger found a hedgehog while out for his evening constitutional. As a result, I've been accompanying him to make sure he doesn't worry the wildlife. This evening, I wandered up the garden to call him, turned round and blow me, there was a meteor streaking across the northern sky. Fab.

Borders in Birmingham sells 2600, The Hackers Quarterly. I'm not entirely sure what to make of that. 2600 (pronounced twenty six hundred) remains pretty counter-cultural. Borders is as slick a corporate bookshop can be. 2600 isn't widely known, and I can't imagine there's a ready market for it ^*, but there it was tucked up on racks next the glossy computer mags, the homestyling mags, Model Railway and Railway Modeller (now there's a tough choice), and all the rest of them. Huh.

* - Although clearly I bought it - doh! There is a local meeting (curiously not listed in the magazine itself), but I'd guess they all buy theirs direct using anonymous one-time-only credit-cards.

A week ago Wednesday, in the crowd of the Ministy gig at Kentish Town Forum, a met a man who lived on Sandford Road. The Forum is a lovely venue, by the way. Ministry were punishingly, relentlessly, top.

Herons. Large, impressive, grey bird, loiters in the shallow water, hunting fish. Nests in trees, which is slightly wacky for a water bird. You know the kind of thing. There's one that visits the park, and I often see it flying sedately from one side of the pond to other as Badger and I get too close for comfort. Saw it again this morning, standing in the water. I stood still and watched it pick its way around round the edge of the pond. It stepped into slightly deeper water. And then, suddenly, its body position shifted slightly, and it was swimming. I was stunned. I've never seen, never even heard, of herons swimming, or even that they could swim.

Using the miracle of cvs2svn, I have migrated the Arabica source from the Sourceforge CVS server to my Subversion server chugging away under my desk. I've only used Subversion seriously for a little while, but I have to say I rather like it. The CVS repository on SourceForge will remain available, but new development will now be committed to Subversion.

Anonymous access to the repository is available from

svn co svn://jezuk.dnsalias.net:/jezuk/arabica/trunk/

and the repository can be browsed at http://jezuk.dnsalias.net:/viewvc/.

• Grab the Arabica source and unpack it.
• Open the arabica.sln solution file.
• Press F7
• Wait a bit.
• Done!

• Install Ubuntu :)
• Use the Synaptic Package Manager (on the System|Administration menu) to install the gcc-4.0 and make packages. (They may already be installed, depending on what options you chose initially.) Install the libxml2-dev and libboost-dev packages. Easiest way to find them is using the Search button.
• Grab the Arabica source and unpack it.
• Open a terminal, and cd to the Arabica source directory.
• $ cp Makefile.header.linux Makefile.header
• $ make
• Wait a bit.
• Done!

Doesn't time go by?

I'm slightly surprised, but happy to announce a new Arabica release.

This release extends the XPath engine to support arbitrary strings types. It now runs std::string and std::wstring out of the box.

A new dual DOM/Streaming parser has been added. By registering a callback function, partially built DOM trees can be processed, modified, manipulated or even discarded, before proceeding to build more of the tree.

The test suite has been extended to include std::string, std::wstring and a custom string type.

The release also includes assorted minor bug fixes.

Source tar.bz2
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/arabica/arabica-2006-august.tar.bz2?download

Source tar.gz
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/arabica/arabica-2006-august.tar.gz?download

Source zip
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/arabica/arabica-2006-august.zip?download