Posts from Notes from a messy desk...
Coming back to git-svn
When I first started with git, like most folks, I suspect, I came from a subversion background. And most of the repositories I interacted with on a daily basis were subversion repositories which weren’t going to change any time soon. To be honest, I didn’t get a great impression of git and git-svn from that experience. What really convinced me [...]The joys of having a willing subject
I’ve decided that one of the best things about having kids is that now I’ve got a willing subject for taking photographs. While his mummy was off getting a haircut on Saturday morning, we both decided it would be a great idea to play around with the camera and an off-camera flash. I’m rather [...]Tags: photography
History meme
I see from Mark and Tim there’s this history meme floating around. So, let’s see: mathie@tullibardine:~$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf “%5d\t%s \n”,a[i],i}}’|sort -rn|head 636 git 63 cd 55 ls 42 rake 27 mate [...]Tags: uncategorized
Objective-C message passing semantics for Ruby
While I was writing a bit of code today (which smells a bit and so I suspect needs revisiting in the future, but anyway) I found myself writing the equivalent of: object.respond_to?(method) ? object.send(method, args) : nil that is, if a particular object implements a method then please call it and let me know what it returns, [...]Some new git techniques for your arsenal
I may seem somewhat git-obsessed lately. That’s probably because I am. It’s awesome. But mostly it’s because I have finally made the jump and I’m having to re-learn the techniques I have been making use of for years in subversion. First up: looking at the changes between two branches. I often work with a ‘master’ branch, which is effectively [...]Using git submodules to track vendor/rails
In a previous post, Using git submodules to track plugins I introduced the idea of using git submodules as part of your workflow in developing Rails applications. At the time, Rails itself wasn’t using git, but that has finally happened. You can find the official Ruby on Rails source code repository at http://github.com/rails/rails. So, how to we track Rails [...]Tags: geekery, ruby_and_rails
Read-only clones and commiting changes to submodules
Hopefully this will be a shorter article, but I thought I’d get the tip into Google before I forget it and have to Google for the answer. Imagine the situation. You’re using Git submodules to manage your external dependencies, for example Rails plugins. Since not everybody on the project has push access to some of the plugins, [...]Timestamps that can behave like booleans
I often come across this particular use case and it’s probably easiest to explain with an example. Take an ActiveRecord model called Book which represents a book in Amazon’s catalogue. In addition to books which are already published, we collect information about books which are going to be released at some point in the future. We store the publication [...]Using git submodules to track plugins
Since the core Ruby on Rails team is finally actually moving to git, and a whole slew of other projects are following in their wake, now seems like a good time to write up my experiences with using git sub-modules to track external dependencies. Back in the world of Subversion, I had been using Piston to track external dependencies. [...]Using git to fix up other projects
One of the huge wins for me with git is that it’s very cheap to set up a repository, even for a small, transient task. Here’s a story of how I used git this morning. I was having trouble installing the oniguruma ruby gem on my laptop. Oniguruma itself was installed on [...]links for 2008-03-18
furbo.org · Brain surgeons (tags: apple development programming iphone sdk mobile)Tags: web_surfing
Ruby on Rails IDEs
I’m in the process of developing a new Ruby on Rails training course. While I personally abhor every full-blown IDE I’ve tried (intelligent code completion’s all well and good, but it has to be faster than just looking up the documentation!), I can see a few advantages for basing it around an IDE: Everybody is [...]links for 2008-03-01
Simpltry Rails (tags: activerecord ajax javascript plugins rails)Tags: web_surfing
Scotland on Rails Registration Open!
Registration for Scotland on Rails has now opened! With Keynotes from Michael Koziarski (nzkoz) and David A Black, along with another 15 Rails luminaries doing talks on bleeding-edge topics, it’s set to be the best Rails conference this side of the pond! The conference is on Friday 4th April - Saturday 5th April, with a [...]Tags: geekery, python, railsconf_europe, ruby_and_rails, work, rails, railsconf2008, ruby, rubyonrails, scotlandonrails
Moving to a new host
The Notes from a Messy Desk blog is currently somewhat in a state of flux. I’ve moved across to a new host with the latest version of Wordpress, but I haven’t yet installed a new theme, installed some plugins and ported my existing posts across to work with the latest set of plugins. [...]Tags: meta
Rubaidh plugins subversion repository downtime
It turns out that I made a slight mistake with my subversion configuration when I was moving all the subversion hosting across to another machine. I didn’t allow public read access to a couple of repositories I should have, including my plugins! Anyway, it’s sorted now and, for bonus points, you can now access the [...]Tags: uncategorized
links for 2007-11-18
Add a ‘recent things’ stack to the Dock Neat trick for having “recent applications”, “recent documents”, “favourite servers” and others as stacks in your dock. (tags: apple howto osx [...]Tags: web_surfing
Authentication plugins
I’ve been a happy user of acts_as_authenticated, and its lazy cousin restful_authentication for, well, it must be years now. But lately it hasn’t quite satisfied me. (Which is a good reason auth shouldn’t go into core, BTW: there’s more than one way to do it and it’s not a one-size-fits-all situation.) Anyway, so I’ve [...]Tags: geekery, ruby_and_rails