Friday, August 15, 2008

Call me homophobic - but this is too much ...

Usually I do not care too much about politics, etc.
And in most cases I agree that people have their right to live their own way as long as they do not affect the way other people live.

Call me homophobic - but I cannot stand when I head more and more countries in Europe allow homo-couples to adopt children? This does affect other peoples’ lives, i.e., these poor children. It hurts. That is for sure.

I could probably write hundreds, if not thousands, of verses showing how irrational is this behavior of some governments, but today I simple wanted to write about two cases that really gave me a hearth attack:

1) Recently a catholic adoption agency in UK announced that they will have to consider adoptions by homo couples; otherwise the government might close them. It is surely against the teaching of the Church - but they can either accept that or close down and eventually, let down all those catholic (hetero) couples that would like to adopt children.
Many people say about dividing church from the government; but they usually mean that the church should not try to influence the government. First of all - church is the people - who elect and are elected to the government. How are you going to separate that? Second of all - isn’t that the governments are just trying to impose their rules over the moral rights preached by the church ?

2) UPDATE: Apparently the URL that was provided by one of the contributors is outdated (see comments); it only proves my case that some people are trying to sell a picture that is suppose to convince everyone that they are homophobic.
I am just putting together a web page promoting our book on semantic digital libraries. Part of the task is to prepare a list of all online references in the book. While processing them I have stumbled upon the digital library of The Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC). The first page greets you with only few links, almost like Google. But, among those - it is hard not to spot those marked below. I will simply leave this without a comment .....


Tuesday, August 05, 2008

On SVN, sf.net and MacOSX

Just a short note to everybody who is struggling with either (or both) problems:
* since only recenly was unable to use your sourceforge.net hosted subversion account with strange response 403
* was trying to use SCPlugin for MacOSX with https:// repositories without success

The solution to the first problem is pretty simple - you are probably using http://...sf.net/... address for your repositories - this is no longer supported.
To solve your problems - do

svn switch --relocate http://...... https://.......

The second problem might (as in my case) arise from the SSL certificate problems with the subversion server. If you enter your repository URL to the web browser and it asks you to confirm the certificate than this is exactly the problem I was facing, and ... good news - here is the solution for you. Apparently SCPlugin still cannot ask you to confirm the certificate through GUI, so you have to do it yourself manually.

The easiest way is to call

svn ls https://.....

and answer (p)ermanently to the given question.

However, since neither MacOSX (Leopard 10.5.4) nor Fink provides subversion in the new (backward incompatible!), endorsed by sf.net version 1.5 you might consider using the one (1.5.1) provided by SCPlugin at the following location:

/Library/Contextual\ Menu\ Items/SCFinderPlugin.plugin/Contents/Resources/SCPluginUIDaemon.app/Contents/bin/svn

The new SmartSVN 4 is also compatible with SVN 1.5 so your command line SVN might soon be incompatible with your repositories (if you use SmartSVN 4 at least once with this repository!)