I ran across some really strange problems with rsync recently and thought I should share my experiences. First off, I have a Mac laptop and desktop and the same for the PC, a laptop and a desktop. So when I code, I often switch between platforms. Subversion is used to keep the data in sync. Rsync is then used to copy the data to my web server. When things are working, updating the blog is a snap.

So recently, I started having problems with this. When rsyncing to the server, instead of copying the files, rsync would create a new directory with a question mark at the end of the name. For example, if the directory was /home/target, the files would get copied /home/target?. Just bizzare. Unfortunately, this problem first started to manifest itself right after upgrading my Mac's to OS X 10.4 Tiger. This threw me off for some time as I thought it to be Tiger problem. But eventually, it manifested itself on Windows too.

I had recently tried out a new text editor on Windows. That was my mistake. Unknown to me this editor, which shall remain nameless, began to insert nonprinting characters into the file. This caused rsync to freak out and create the extra directory. By copying the text file to the clipboard, deleting the file, then pasting the text into a real editor like JEdit or vi, the mystery characters disappeard. Now everything works fine.

Lessons learned? Don't use Windows to develop anything unless you have no other choice! I'm in the process of getting VMWare Player setup on my Windows machine so I can run Ubuntu Linux for anything important.

Just a quick rant about using tiny fonts on web sites. In the last few weeks I have noticed a couple of sites using really tiny fonts on their main page to cram more stuff on the page. The worst case was the London Telegraph. The have really good soccer coverage, but what am I supposed to do use a magnifying glass?????

More is not necessarily more.

It has been nearly a month since I last posted. You may have noticed that in one of my previous posts that I had tried World for Warcraft but sweared off it.

Well that lasted about 3 days. Then, I re-upped for 6 months and have been playing too much every since. :-) As I stated before the game is really fun and the social aspects of playing with others online really adds to the experience. Hopefully this is a good sign that I'm cutting back a bit and will post a little more often.

Well gotta go play some Warcrack, I mean Warcraft. Later.

For some time I have been wondering if you could use Saxon with Ant. Well you can, and setting it up is pretty easy. I wrote a quick howto on this here: Setting up Saxon and XSLT 2.0 on Ant

Why in the world there are no example of this anywhere (at least anywhere I could find on Google) is beyond me.

If you do a lot of XSLT automation testing with Ant like me, it really nice to be able easily swap in Saxon and Xalan. I look forward to using this in some of my personal projects.