I've been using Perforce in work as a source control system for over a year now. It's the best of its kind I've ever used (I'm experienced with SourceSafe and Alienbrain also), though comes with the impression that it costs megabucks.
I've been looking for something good to use for my home projects as simply backing up older versions of files isn't good enough (can't see history, etc). I used to use a dodgy old copy of Visual SourceSafe 6.0, but in the spirit of making all the software on my machine legal I decided not to install it again after my recent upgrade to Vista. Also, it's not very good.
Imagine my surprise when looking for a freeware source control system (expecting to probably go for something like CVS with a freeware GUI) when I discovered that Perforce is in fact free for personal use. Up to two users per server can be created without having to pay for a license. Woohoo! I downloaded the latest version, installed it, and within minutes had imported my hobby projects.
The only problem is that the two merge tools it comes with are (in ascending order) terrible and mediocre. I'm used to using the excellent Araxis Merge for that purpose, though that isn't free (after 30 days). Can anyone suggest a suitable alternative for home use?
Recently in Programming Category
I've recently been writing an image gallery for my site. It's still in the prototype stage, but I thought I'd let you guys have a sneak peek.
As far as I can tell, it works perfectly in FireFox and Opera, IE7 nearly gets it right and IE6 makes a total hash of it (these browsers were all tested in XP SP2). There's still quite a bit of work left for me to do before it becomes production code.
I'm really against the idea of putting lots of "if IE, DoThis, else DoSomethingElse" type code in there, so I need to find generic solutions to the IE problems if possible.
Comments and suggestions welcome, particularly from those using other browsers and operating systems.
EDIT: Made both IE browsers work better without doing anything other than changing the CSS slightly (fixed it to work with IE's overflow: hidden + position: relative bug). IE7's only problem now is that it scrolls too far to the left which means style.offsetLeft is being interpreted differently to the other browsers. IE6 also does this and doesn't like the transparent background behind the arrows (displays as black). As IE6 doesn't support PNGs with alpha channels, I'll try to figure out how to make the background white instead.
