<p>I’m really far behind John on all this.</p>
<p>John, my downstairs neighbor, runs a <ahref="http://audiointuition.com/">recording business</a> on the side, being primarily a programmer for HP’s Open Source dev team. Merging the two, he came up with the idea to keep all of his projects for Audio Intuition on his huge-ass RAID array using SVN, a type of version control (it works by checking out a copy of whatever’s in the repository, letting you edit it, then committing the changes to the repository after making note of the changes, so that you can revert to an old version if you screw up, sorta like Wikipedia). I listened to all his woes on getting that to work, such as finding a way to do suitably small binary <code>diff</code>s and a few scripts to keep everything orderly and whatnot without even thinking of how useful it all really is.</p>
<p>I, meanwhile, struggled with USB drives (surprisingly easy to lose), having multiple computers, needing to bring stuff to school, and all sorts of problems.</p>
<p>Which, oddly enough, are easily fixed by just LISTENING TO JOHN.</p>
<p>Now, all of my scores will be under SVN that only I can access on an outside, regularly backed up server. This means, whenever I want to work on a score, I need only check it out from the repository on <em>whatever computer I want<em></em>, work on it, commit it, and then, when I access it (via checking out the file from SVN) from <em>any other computer</em></em>, it will be as I last worked on it. No more worrying about drive failures, losing my USB keys, anything like that :D</p>
<p>Of course, in the process of setting it up, I realized that I had only 901MB free on my MacBook, which was strange - I was using only about 20GB of a 75GB drive. Apparently, FileVault took a holiday and stopped reclaiming free space when I logged out. Again, John helped by finding a tool that would look at the disk image FileVault makes and forces a space reclamation. If ever you need it: <pre>hdiutil compact <em>username</em>.sparseimage</pre> Of course, you need to be logged in as someone else (which, in my case, meant creating a new user) because the image is mounted when you’re logged in as yourself. Think of it as defragmenting a file, which sometimes pretends to be a hard drive.</p>
<p><small>* Where ‘computer’ is defined as a Windows or Mac (I have yet to see if Sibelius will work in Wine) box with both some form of SVN and Sibelius.</small</p>
