Subversion: Dealing with Umlaute

I had a very annoying problem with my subversion today: A file had an ‘ö’ in it. I checked it in on Windows without noticing it, and when I checked the file out on my Mac it immediately caused a conflict:

A    Life/Jeppe Family History/Old & Junk/jeppe neu
C Life/Jeppe Family History/Old & Junk/Die Köter, auch Kotsassen ge.textClipping
A    Life/Jeppe Family History/Old & Junk/jeppefamily.backup.gramps.old

Updated to revision 41.
Summary of conflicts:
Tree conflicts: 1
Nilss-MacBook-Air:docs nils$ svn up
Updating ‘.’:
At revision 41.

I attempted to delete the file, and at first this seemed to work:

$ svn delete Die Köter, auch Kotsassen ge.textClipping
D Die Köter, auch Kotsassen ge.textClipping

However, the conflict remained:

$ svn commit -m “Koeter”
svn: E155015: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: E155015: Aborting commit: ‘/Users/nils/Documents/svn/docs/Life/Jeppe Family History/Old & Junk/Die Köter, auch Kotsassen ge.textClipping’ remains in conflict

Interestingly, the file was now also missing on my local system. It may be my fault; but anyway, I was a bit lost.

In the end, the following worked:

$ svn remove –force ‘/Users/nils/Documents/svn/docs/Life/Jeppe Family History/Old & Junk/Die Köter, auch Kotsassen ge.textClipping’
$ svn resolve –accept=working ‘/Users/nils/Documents/svn/docs/Life/Jeppe Family History/Old & Junk/Die Köter, auch Kotsassen ge.textClipping’
Resolved conflicted state of ‘Life/Jeppe Family History/Old & Junk/Die Köter, auch Kotsassen ge.textClipping’

$ svn commit -m “Koeter”
Adding Life/Jeppe Family History/Old & Junk/Die Koeter, auch Kotsassen ge.textClipping
Deleting Life/Jeppe Family History/Old & Junk/Die Köter, auch Kotsassen ge.textClipping
Deleting Life/Jeppe Family History/Old & Junk/Die Köter, auch Kotsassen ge.textClipping
Transmitting file data …
Committed revision 42.

Notice the interesting double delete there…

Anyway, the moral of the story – as if I didn’t know already – avoid special characters like the plague they are.

ASUS P5QD Turbo Mainboard Not Recognizing USB Keyboard During Boot

Today I re-installed my old PC for my sister. First obstacle? I obviously had changed the boot order to put the CD Rom Drive after the harddrive, making booting from my Windows install DVD hard, to say the least. I couldn’t change it because, for some reason, the BIOS refused to recognize my USB keyboard. And unfortunately I seem to have no more PS/2 keyboards.

After a bit of trial and error, it seems that only one of the USB ports on the rear is recognized during POST. And on the Asus P5QD Turbo mainboard it’s the port directly next to the on board NIC port:

So if you have this issue with any Asus board, try that USB port first. Of course if you have a PS/2 keyboard handy, that’ll do the trick as well.