I’ve been good over the past few months about stashing all my working documents into a Subversion repository on my MacBook Pro. It’s actually saved my bacon a couple of times, so it was totally worth the initial ramp-up time.

Unfortunately the Apple iWork Apps — Keynote, Pages and Numbers — don’t play well with Subversion. They are really directories, not files, so anytime you save the “file,” it clobbers everything in the directory, including the .svn file. When you try to commit, you get “~” status, which no one likes.

So, this is my brutal workaround:

- Save your initial file where you normally would. Add it, and commit.

Next time you need to work on it, don’t work in that file.

- Copy the file to your Desktop, or a tmp directory, and work in the copied file.

When you are done with your edits and ready to check it in:

- Fire up the shell,
- cd into the whatever.numbers (.pages, .key) directory,
- cp -r * to the whatever.numbers directory of your svn working files.
- Then, you should be able to commit the changes as normal.

Hideous, I know, but it seems to work. Please drop a note or a comment if you have a better way to handle this.

[tags]Mac, svn, iWork, Pages, Numbers, Keynote[/tags]

I been a huge fan of Tinderbox over the years, using it since I got my first Mac in 2002. It has revolutionalized the way I conceptualize, the way I organize information, and the way I handle tasks as disparate as planning a new search engine and automating my weekly Shaw’s list. I’ve evangelized it here a time or two; I even bought The Tinderbox Way.

I upgraded to Tinderbox 4 over the weekend. Unfortunately for me, my spam filter chomped the email containing the license key, so I was SOL for the project I was working on. When I called Watertown’s Eastgate Systems, Chief Scientist Mark Bernstein answered the phone on the second ring and helped me out immediately.

Amazing things here:

1. A person answered the phone
2. The man who wrote the software personally helps the users

I make a living selling information and software, so I’m always happy to pay for software for my Mac. I’m glad to be able to help support people like Mark who keep putting out great tools.

[tags]Tinderbox[/tags]

We went on vacation last week, down to Eastham for a week in the cottage. Sadie came down last fall, but now that she’s twenty-one months old, she actually understands a lot more of what’s going on.

The cottage is on a sand road, just a ten-minute walk down the road and over the dune to Cape Cod Bay. The first morning, Sadie made her way down the road.

At the beginning, she wasn’t sure about the water, but she really enjoyed running along the beach. She got to wear her pretty blue cover-up and her purple hat.

She will eventually learn that it’s not too smart to run with your tongue sticking out.

All the running on the beach can take a lot out of a little girl. After a while, she needed to refuel.

Eventually, we got her to walk into the water. She soon found out that it’s not quite the same temperature as her bathwater.

Oh, but it’s really fun to splash.

Sadie spent some time acclimating to the cape, embracing the culture and the icons.

She was also very helpful, watering Grammie’s tomatoes.

The tides shifted so that most of our beach time later in the week came at low tide. Sadie could run on the sand flats forever, leaving her sad father to trudge behind, carrying her tiny pink rake.

Sadie had a great week, and can’t wait to go back next summer. Hooray for Cape Cod!