Syncing an iPod Nano with Windows under VirtualBox in Ubuntu

I bought an iPod Nano (7th generation) for my son, and decided I wanted to use a Windows 7 virtual machine to house the iTunes software necessary to manage the gizmo. Apple items need to be managed with iTunes running on a Windows or Apple computer (there are options for dealing with iProducts from Linux, but since this is my son's gizmo I don't want to have to deal with them). I have been using Linux on my desktop and laptop for some time now, and the only things I use that have to run on Windows (for which I created the VM) are some tax software and the sync software for the Fitbit. And now this.

Since tax season is past and since my Fitbit split apart into a kazillion pieces, I have had little need to run the VM, so the first problem I had to deal with was the excessive number of Windows updates to be sifted through. Once that was done, installing iTunes was easy but connecting to the iPod was unsuccessful. Windows kept telling me that it could not start the device, could not find the device, could not find the appropriate driver, etc. It turns out that the problem was USB 2.0 compatibility--the iPod quietly requires USB2.0 and the current version of VirtualBox doesn't support it directly. Instead of going through the whole troubleshooting story, which would bore you to tears, I will just cut to the chase and tell you the things I did to get it running properly.

Resolving tree conflicts in Subversion

On the list of things I can never remember how to do when I need to do it: resolving tree conflicts in Subversion. Tree conflicts happen to me often when I am working in a branch of the main code and I merge from trunk to keep things current. I can't explain why they happen a lot in the system I work with (perhaps I should find out?), but I can fix them easily when they come up. But I always have to look up the simple command to do it. Well here is how it is done...

Django, Ajax, Post, and CSRF

I was having a little trouble putting together a simple ajax request and response with Django. It seems like it should be simple task—just use the jquery ajax methods in the html page to call a simple view from the Django site. How hard can that be? Well it turns out that there are three major issues I had to overcome, but taking those into account it is actually very simple.