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I have experienced an annoying bug with switching my projects between SVN branches in eclipse.

It tended to freeze eclipse at the end of the swtich - forcing me to crash eclipse and restart.ﾠ

When I restarted eclipse I would generally find that the swicth had actually happened.

Anyway I have upgraded the subclipse plugin to the latest version 1.4.8 (update site here) and have now done 4 big switches with no freezing, hoorah!

It also seems faster - so thanks subclipse guys.

I use the free version of Aptana - an eclipse plugin. I use it mainly for CSS and Javascript editing. One day I will delve more into its support for various Javascript libraries - including JQuery (which is the only one I bother with these days....).

Anyway I had a large site to ftp to a remote host from home and my uplink speeds where rather slow. I left it running. When I came back the laptop had decided to hibernate at some point during the process!

It looked like most of the site had transfered, but how to be sure?

I used the Aptana Sync Manager. You can setup the two sides to sync one being over ftp, and it will merrily run through all the files and inform you of any mismatches. There are plenty of options to configure exactly how this works. I just wanted to know if any files had been missed and sure enough there were a handful missing.

One of the many extra Aptana goodies.

I decided to get back to some blogging and while I was at it change blog software.

I was using blogcfc and the main reason to move to different blog software was that anytime I wanted to make changes to blogcfc, I was a bit frustrated finding my way around the code and always wanted to restructure it. However blogcfc has served me well and I thank Ray Camden for providing such a great tool, but I began to look around for an alternative.

It had to be CF based and needed to be extendable if I need to tinker.

If you search for coldfusion blog engine, mangoblog is the top of the list, and I also found this endorsement from remote synthesis. I thought that the software has probably improved since this post and so far I have not encountered any big problems.

The installation was very easy with a wizard leading you through each step. I was expecting to have some pain with the migration of existing posts but found that the migration wizard did it all with no hitches!

I look forward to trying out the themes and plugin API to really customise this blog.

There is only one downside. This blog makes extensive use of objects and in some shared hosting enviroments it can be slow to load initailly - in fact this one often fails on the first attempt (I'm assuming if the application has timed out). For a busier site I guess this would not be a problem, but for humble bloggers such as myself may be a reality sometimes :-(

Others have mentioned this on the mango forums.

I'm planning to have a scheduled task that pings this blog say once an hour to get round the problem.

Mango Blog is available here

One of the snippets of advice in the Neal Ford's Productive Programmer (reviewed here) was to use the Selenium firefox plugin to speed up repetative testing processes

To paraphrase Neal Ford....

So imagine a wizard like set of screens and you are testing step 3, you have to repeatedly fillout the forms for steps 1 and 2 to see the latest change you have made for step3.
With each change and test you think - 'ah just one more change and I'll be done....' ten changes later you are still working on this!

I found myself in just such a loop and eventually downloaded and installed the Selenium plugin to firefox and created a macro to run through steps 1 and 2.

No setup is required. You will find the plugin under the tools menu and it opens a popup window already in 'record' mode for the current site you have open. Go through the screens as normal and Selenium records all clicks and key strokes.

Next time you need to test just click on play in the Selenium popup window.

This was a really big time saver - I wish I had done it right from the start!

This is coming up for us and just wondered if anyone out there has already done this and has any pointers, gotchas, tips, tricks or anything else to contribute to our happiness.

I understand that SVN 1.5 is a fairly major release which incorporates new merging facilities.

We will also need to update the eclipse plugin 'subclipse' that we use to a compatible version. I have started looking at the version we need but think just the latest (1.4.5) will work best. Currently we are using 1.2.4 because we are pointing to our pre 1.5 repository.