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Finally found a fix to an svn+ssh issue I was having on Mac OSX.  Great replacement for ssh_askpass on macos:

Place this in /usr/libexec and then chmod +x

#! /bin/sh

# An SSH_ASKPASS command for MacOS X

# Author: Joseph Mocker, Sun Microsystems

TITLE=${MACOS_ASKPASS_TITLE:-"SSH"}

DIALOG="display dialog \"$@\" default answer \"\" with title \"$TITLE\""

DIALOG="$DIALOG with icon caution with hidden answer"

result=`osascript -e 'tell application "Finder"' -e "activate"  -e "$DIALOG" -e 'end tell'`

if [ "$result" = "" ]; then

    exit 1

else

    echo "$result" | sed -e 's/^text returned://' -e 's/, button returned:.*$//'

    exit 0

fi

Those of you that have heard me rant about my love for the Eclipse IDE, you may want to turn surf over to another page.

Its no secret that I've been a diehard Eclipse developer for a long, long time.  I've even gone as far (as many of us have) as to get in arguments/fights at bars with NetBeans developers about the long-term success of their platform-of-choice.  I've spent days of time swapping out plug-in update sites so I could use Eclipse for everything.  But today, I come to you with a different story.

I've been using Netbeans 6.1-6.5 over the past 8 months, and I have to say, they were pretty good.  The ease of the refactoring tools, the tremendous support for JavaEE, and the tight interoperability with some of the more popular, amazingly useful libraries make it a great competitor to Eclipse.  Support for other languages (Python, PHP, etc) have brought the platform into my everyday use even outside of the Java world.  It is a great product, which I can admit having used it, and dug into its features, and issues.

The reason I choose to write this up now, is that I've been using NetBeans 6.7 Beta for the past week on Mac OS X. The changes made to this product are compelling, and the few features I found still lacking in prior versions are fixed here.  This product is ready for mainstream consumption and heavy use.  As far as Java and Python development, I can completely say without any reservation that I see NetBeans as the superior product.

I'd love to hear some opinions on this one.. 

This morning I was thinking on my drive down to Somerset, that if a car broke down anywhere near as often as a typical computer application, people would see it as an issue.  Not just an issue that they could restart and forget, but an issue that would permanently stain their reputation with that auto manufacturer.  Since people have learned to expect that computer applications crash occasionally, the problem is often overlooked and played down.  However, the fact is that computer applications are running on a generic device, making them much akin to physical appliances, separate from the entity that hosts them.  The lesson is that as programmers and professionals we need to start demanding the same reliability for our applications (especially mission-critical ones) that we expect from a diesel engine. 

Instead of just fitting the model as it exists, expand beyond it and make something amazing.

Just a quick note on some problems I had with WebDAV on MacOS 10.5

When using the "Connect To Server" function of the Finder, certain WebDAV connections will put 0kb files to the server when attempting to upload by dragging files onto the connection window.

This is apparently a problem with Transfer-Encoding settings, but a nice workaround is just to mount the drive, and copy files via Terminal (ie: cp filename /Volumes/home).

That said, I'm a huge fan of Transmit ($) and Cyberduck (0) which support much better WebDAV integration.