"svn: No repository found" error with svn+ssh on the same host

Gary McGhee - Monday, March 02, 2009

I had a strange problem where a SVN working copy was working fine on one machine, but after file copying it to the same machine that the svn server lives on, any server accesses would fail with "no repository found". The breakthrough came when I tried to ssh in as the svn user, which should connect directly to svnserve and give some gibberish back, but instead was logging in with a waiting shell prompt. 

Why was this happening from the same machine and not another machine ?

The problem turned out to be how sshd authenticates. Somehow it wasn't trying the correct key in the .ssh directory, and defaulting to a password login.

The solution was to specify which key to use on the client side when connecting as the svn user for the svn server.

eg. in ~/.ssh/config :

Host your-svn-server.com
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/your-svn-key.ppk
    User svn

Flash on the iPhone hypothetical solution

Gary McGhee - Monday, November 10, 2008
It seems to me it would be possible to get Flash applications working on the iPhone now, without Adobe or Apple's cooperation.
Flash and Air apps are distributed as swf or air files containing bytecode for the Adobe Virtual Machine 2 (AVM2) (documented here) calling its APIs for graphics, window management, file system etc, and so the challenge is to execute that bytecode andimplement those libraries. iPhone apps are written in Objective C with some subset of the MacOS X libraries, and some new ones.
So my proposal is :
  1. write a translator from AVM2 bytecode to Objective C. This kind of thing has been done many times before. HotRuby takes Ruby bytecode output from the Ruby interpreter and translates to AVM2 to run a Ruby program on the Flash player.
  2. Implement the Flash and/or Air system calls (eg. play a sound, create a window, open a file) in Objective C and OS X libraries.
  3. Write a compiler to take a .air or .swf file and convert its code and assets into a form useable in Objective C/OS X.
  4. Output a fully native iPhone app, ready for upload to Apple. They don't even need to know it was written in Flash/Flex!
Issues :
  1. Apple wouldn't like it. You might even find your name blacklisted in the OS X EULA !
  2. Adobe might be OK with it. They get more Flex customers, and you become the bad guy (not them) in Apple's eyes.
If an investor wants to make this happen, I'm available !