Kevin's Weblog

By now, I’ve switched most of my version control working copies over to subversion. The one major exception has been my websites. The obstacle was that when I compared a new subversion working copy to an old CVS working copy, I found that all my binary files had been corrupted.

The explanation seems to be that while SVN does have a binary file detection heuristic, somehow cvs2svn bypasses it. Supposedly if you have ‘-kb’ set on your binary files it does the right thing, but I’m usually too lazy to bother. The reason this causes problems in SVN is that in addition to keyword expansion, subversion also does end-of-line translation, which CVS doesn’t. Clearly, this will cause badness if applied to binary files.

It seems like I might have been able to avoid this with appropriate config file voodoo for cvs2svn, but it’s not really documented. Alternatively, had I known, I could have set the binary flag in CVS before I did the conversion. Alas, at this point, short of running the conversion again from scratch, I was stuck fixing things up somewhat by hand. In essense, this is just a matter of running something like:

for f (**/*.jpg) ; do
  svn propdel svn:keywords $f
  svn propdel svn:eol-style $f
  svn propset svn:mime-type image/jpeg $f
  cp ~/old_cvs/$f $f
done 

but, in practice, I had a bunch of other media types that also needed to be dealt with, and also I had to deal with some pain related to case-insensitivity on my old (Mac) server vs case-sensitivity on the new (Linux) server. Overall, not a fun couple of hours. But, now it’s done, and I can declare the migration complete.

A couple days before our current trip back to LA, I picked up one of these:

I’d been eyeing the D70s for a while, somewhat grudgingly. I’ve got enough Nikon lenses that it would be quite expensive to switch, although Canon clearly had the lead in bodies. So, I was quite happy when the D80 appeared, putting Nikon back on more-or-less equal footing.

One of the first things I realized was that this camera is much more complicated than either my old N60 film camera or any of the point-and-shoot digitals I’ve had. Fortunately, it’s possible to ignore a lot of that if you want, but sometime soon I’ll want to sit down with the manual and figure out what all the buttons and menus do, and experiment with different settings.

I’m also probably going to need to buy a real wide-angle lens. With the film camera, I’ve usually been happy with the low end of my 28-80mm zoom, but the smaller sensor on the digital makes that effectively 42-120mm, which doesn’t really suffice to take many pictures inside. Unfortunately, it looks like it’ll be somewhat expensive to address this, since you need what was traditionally an ultra-wide lens in order to get normal wide-angle on a digital camera. But, at least I can console myself with the fact that my $500 70-300mm lens just turned into what would have been a $5000 lens before.

So far I have not actually taken many interesting pictures with the camera, having been stuck in mostly boring parts of LA. But, I expect to do more on the drive back to Oregon, so I should be posting some of the products before long.