New Cartoon ‘Mike is dead!’ from iPad Cartoon Studio

New Cartoon ‘Growth’ from iPhone Cartoon Studio. Look at that! I can post directly to my wordpress blog from here now.

Installing and setting up Trac

Trac is written in the python scripting language, also requiring a number of other third party libraries. While a compatible version of python comes pre-shipped with OS X 10.6, these prequisite libraries do not. However its extremely easy to install trac along with all its prequisites by using python’s great ‘easy_install’ feature. Simply fire up a command line by launching Terminal.app and run the following command:

sudo easy_install trac

This will download and install everything you need for you without further input, so let it do its thing and when its finished we are ready to create our Trac environment. Because I had previously set up my subversion server under a dedicated OS X user ‘svn’, I wanted to run trac under the same user. Thus I was going to create my trac environment in the /Users/svn/trac/newproject directory and do so by ensuring it was created with appropriate permissions for the svn user. This can be done by prefixing any command with ‘sudo -u svn’, which will run the command as the svn user. For steps on setting up a dedicated user for this purpose see my previous subversion howto. Run the following command (after ensuring /Users/svn/trac/ has been created) in the terminal:

sudo -u svn trac-admin /Users/svn/trac/newProject initenv

This will create a whole bunch of directories and files and you can then run the standalone Trac server manually to check that these first steps have worked:

sudo -u svn tracd --port=8000 /Users/svn/trac/newProject

This will make the trac server listen on TCP port 8000, so we can then browse in Safari or the browser of choice to http://127.0.0.1:8000 and see that we have a trac server running. Its not terribly useful yet however, as we still need to create users, assign administrator privileges to somebody and setup our components and milestones. Press control-c in Terminal to kill the currently running server.

Adding Users

Even if you’re the only one who will be using your trac environment, its a good idea to set up a proper user for yourself. The easiest way to do this is by using tracd with Apache .htpasswd files. We can create a .htpasswd file using the htpasswd command.

sudo -u svn htpasswd -c /Users/svn/trac/newProject/.htpasswd username

This will then prompt for a password to set for the user. For any additional users we can run htpasswd again, just leaving out the -c switch (which tells it to create a new file):

sudo -u svn htpasswd /Users/svn/trac/newProject/.htpasswd another_username

Now that we have configured users and passwords, we need to tell the trac server to use them when running. We can do this by adding the –basic-auth paramater to tracd when we launch it:

tracd --port=8000 /Users/svn/trac/newProject --basic-auth=newProject,/Users/svn/trac/newProject/.htpasswd,/Users/svn/trac/newProject

Now we can browse to http://127.0.0.1:8000 again and see that this time we get prompted to login first. We can do so, but we still can’t administer our project yet. We need to give at least one of our users administrator privileges so they can define our project’s components, milestones and such. We can do this using by running the following command (this can be done while our existing tracd is still running, so there’s no need to kill it first):

trac-admin /Users/svn/trac/newProject permission add username TRAC_ADMIN

This will give username full administrator privileges to your trac environment. After running the command you can just refresh your browser and see the admin tab appear on the page. For a comprehensive guide to the various privileges you can give to users, see this page. You can now configure all aspects of your project directly from your browser.

Integrating with Subversion

Trac can integrate with your local subversion repository, to configure this we need to edit the trac.ini file for the project. In my case this can be found at /Users/svn/trac/newProject/conf/trac.ini. With your favourite text editor find the line that says

repository_dir =

For me this was line 172 of the file, it will be under the section labeled

[Trac]

Simply put the full path to your svn repository here, so in my case its:

reposistory_dir = /Users/svn/repos

and ensure that the line beneath it reads:

repository_type = svn

Restart tracd and refresh your browser to see that the “Browse Source” tab now lets you do exactly what it claims to do.

Automatic Startup
The final step in our trac server setup is to make the tracd service run automatically at system startup. To do this we can create a launchd service using Lingon. You can grab the latest version from Sourceforge. For more details on using Lingon see this previous article I put together, but for this task we just need to add a new User Daemon. Run Lingon, click the New button and select User Daemons. Fill out the dialog as follows:

Name: org.trac.tracd What: /usr/local/bin/tracd –port=8000 /Users/svn/trac/newProject –basic-auth=newProject,/Users/svn/trac/newProject/.htpasswd,/Users/svn/trac/newProject

and be sure to tick the “Keep it running all the time” and “Run it when it is loaded by the system” checkboxes. Click the save button and restart your Mac. If everything has been done right you should be able to instantly load trac in your web browser. Now you can focus on managing and implementing your project.

Firstly my full time job of the last 12 years is still keeping me busy, managing my small software team producing Windows and Windows Mobile software for the retail market. 12 years of working with barcode scanners. Still, I have been pushing the sales team towards these babies, because it would be immensely more fun writing software for a well designed platform, as opposed to Windows Mobile.

I know this because most of my after-hours time lately has been spent deep within XCode cooking up Cartoon Studio for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. We are currently in version 1.0 feature freeze and are a brewing up something that is hopefully full of spit, polish and shiney. Speaking of spit and polish, I have a post about just that over at HawksBed Studios. HawksBed studios is the company founded by myself and my good friend Bort (of Twitter and FARK fame). We make a good team since I can implement things, but have no ideas, while he can’t implement anything but is full of ideas. The first (of many) ideas is Cartoon Studio and we think that so far we’re on track for something exciting. Check us out and if you’re interested in joining our wider (but still private) beta release let us know.

Meanwhile, back in March, an old friend was resurrected: PCW Entertainment. When I first discovered them in 2001 they had a big impact on me. Sure, Professional Wrestling is not a legitimate competitive sport, it is theatre. But it is physical theatre and very much so. As I trained to be a referee, learning how to take bumps and flip around I found a great respect for all of these athletes and new found ability within myself that I could do anything I wanted to, if I wanted it badly enough (even become a local tag team champion being thrown off the top of the ringpost through a table and loving it; me, a geek who avoided all exercise at all costs). So when PCW announced their return I gladly got in touch and asked “what can I do?”. They’re a good bunch of people and if you’re like me and avoid the politics, never a drama. I was back doing commentary with the excellent Christopher Bayliss in March and had a great time. The next show is coming up on the 15th May – if you’re in Melbourne Australia, enjoy WWE or TNA and have never seen local independent pro wrestling – you’re missing out.

Finally, coming back to geeky stuff, I thought a small analysis of the sales figures for Photo Rotate over the last year would be interesting. Obviously such a small utility app was not going to let me retire, in-fact I would have been happy to have recovered the cost of the iPhone developer program. But as you can see it’s been some OK pocket money. What’s more interesting is that even with tiny daily sales, where the ‘sales spikes’ occur are pretty clear:

Click to make larger

Nothing surprising, but interesting. And on that note I need to stop writing and get back to doing what I’ve been doing most lately, putting spit and polish on Cartoon Studio.

Read more at The Apple Blog

Wake On Demand is a relatively new feature that arrived with Snow Leopard. It allows your Mac to be put into sleep mode and then be woken up on demand when one of its services is required. This feature requires a compatible Apple AirPort Base Station (or Time Capsule) and OS X 10.6 running on the Mac. Most of the standard system services (File Sharing, Screen Sharing, Scanner & Printer Sharing etc.) will work automagically with this setup, but custom services such a my subversion and the built-in web sharing do not. However it’s not hard to make these services compatible with Wake On Demand with only a little bit of work to set it up. Here’s how I did it. Read more at The Apple Blog

Read more at That Apple Blog

Here are my 21 favorite games to wait around with. The key common features for these games are that they’re quick to start playing and that you can achieve goals quickly with available playtime of as little as a minute. There are no long drawn out strategic battles, epic adventures or quests to get absorbed into.

Read more at The Apple Blog

There are a number of ways to have your music scrobbled to Last.fm from your Mac. Which one you chose depends on which fits into your music workflow the best. Read more at The Apple Blog

• abednarz.bandcamp.com

Two recent news headlines, seemingly separate, are intrinsically tied together and the synergy of them have made my eyes dislocated from the continued rolling they involuntarily perform.

Read more at The Apple Blog.

With the EyeTV app, you can watch, record, and enjoy live and recorded TV on your iPhone or iPod touch. At last, you don‘t have to leave all your great TV shows at home; the EyeTV app puts the power of award-winning EyeTV in the palm of your hand.

The EyeTV app accesses EyeTV running on your Mac at home to deliver these great features to your iPhone:

• Watch live TV and change channels anywhere (Wi-Fi connection required)
• Watch your EyeTV recordings
• Browse the comprehensive Program Guide
• Start recordings back home on your Mac immediately or schedule them for later
• View and edit your recording schedules

The iPhone/iPod touch is more than powerful enough to handle these games and it seems that there are many people like me who are keen to experience these classics again. So, here’s a roundup of modern ports of classic games. Only official ports of classic games are detailed here — clones and the like do exist but I had to draw a line in the sand. I’ve also included links to Wikipedia for those interested in the history of the games

See the list at The Apple Blog

In iTunes 8 and earlier you could create all of these multiple rules and have them applied with a ‘match operator,’ which could be ALL (all rules have to match for a track to be included) or ANY (if any of the single rules apply the track will be included).

iTunes 9 has quietly and substantially expanded the level of complexity that you can create in these rules by allowing you to create nested rules. This lets you build up substantial logic with multiple ANY and ALL match operators being applied.

Read more at The Apple Blog

Read more at The Apple Blog

They’ve also added some new core functionality and optimized the backend. To me, this feels like more than a 0.01 update. With every update of Sequel Pro, the open-source project continues to close the gap between itself and commercial competitors such as Querious.

Read more at The Apple Blog