Accidents HappenTypical programmer has had an interview with Linus on Linux and Git.
Git has taken over where Linux left off separating the geeks into know-nothings and know-it-alls. I didn’t really expect anyone to use it because it’s so hard to use, but that turns out to be its big appeal.
Of course the interview is imaginary, but it’s worth a read 🙂
About one and half years back, I wrote about installing SCID in Ubuntu. (SCID is a free chess database application). For those who abhor building from source, Duncan Rosales has left a comment on that post saying that SCID is now available in the Ubuntu Software Center. Good news indeed! Just install by going to the Software Center and searching for SCID, or simply by typing in the terminal:
sudo apt-get install scid
This friend asked me on twitter to write about cherry-picking. In essence, cherry-picking a basic git concept which lets you create a copy of any commit and apply it on top of your current HEAD.
For example, say your repository has branches for different versions of the app. If you make a bug fix on one branch v2.0 and you want to apply that bug fix to v3.0 as well, you can cherry-pick the commit with the fix in v2.0 to v3.0. Checkout v3.0 and type
git cherry-pick <SHA-of-bug-fix-commit>
If you’re lucky there will be no merge conflicts and you’re done. If you get any conflicts, resolve them and type git cherry-pick –continue. You can also cherry-pick several commits at once as well. Some useful options to cherry-pick command include -e (edit – which lets you edit the commit message prior to committing) and -n (no commit, which applies the changes but does not make a commit). You can also use the merge strategies you use in git merge.
That’s just cherry-pick in a few words. Do checkout the man pages. Think-like-a-git has a good visual explanation of the concept.
Was going through the git log man page and noticed that there is a –reverse option. Guess what cool thing this could be used for? To find the commit in which a certain file was introduced in!
git log --reverse -- somefile.c
The commit on top is the first commit in which somefile.c appeared.
Do you commit your .gitignore files? (Do you even use a .gitignore file? (Do you even use git? (Do you even write code?))) IMO, the best practice is to add a set of commonly ignored files to .gitignore and commit it. Saves time for everyone. If anyone using the repo needs his private list of ignores, he can use the .git/info/exclude file, which won’t affect even those who fetch straight from your local repository.
Gentlemen don’t have untracked files in their repos. Find some tips about ignoring files in git here.
As far as to-do lists go, Do It (Tomorrow) is one of the simplest and effectivest (just made up that word). And the interface is eye candy. You can add to-dos for today and if you don’t feel like or it’s not possible to do them today, you just put it off for tomorrow. In fact, one of the main concepts about the app is putting stuff off for tomorrow. Procrastinators’ heaven.
How this works is that once you get tired of putting it off you eventually get it done. I’m currently using the web app and the android app. There are iPhone and iPad versions available as well.
Evernote doesn’t have an official client for Linux. It isn’t likely Linux will get any in the near future either. NixNote (formerly NeverNote) is the popular alternative available. But I just don’t like the interface and all.
I installed Ubuntu 12.04 yesterday and found out about this Everpad which seems to be pretty neat. Not a feature-full client, but it has Unity integration, so you can search notes from the Unity dash etc. There’s an icon in the gnome panel which gives you the latest notes, lets you create new notes and such. At the moment I’m using Everpad and have an Evernote Web tab opened in Chrome as well. Sadly, this seems to be focused on Ubuntu only (at least that’s my guess, not likely it’d run on other distros without major changes).
Find reviews, screenshots and installation instructions in WebUpd8 and Omg!Ubuntu.
I’m considering setting Google as the default search engine again. They have added the bacon number game to google.com. Just type in
bacon number <em>movie-star-name-here</em>
to Google and it’ll calculate the Bacon number for you.
Both Priyanka Chopra and Jim Parsons have a Bacon number of 2, while it’s 1 for Ellen Page!
Chocolatey is the topic in the town these days. When it comes to installing software, Windows is far behind most Linux distributions. Chocolatey is a package manager like apt-get on Debian and Ubuntu. Install it by entering the command
@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Command “iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString(‘http://bit.ly/psChocInstall’))” && SET PATH=%PATH%;%systemdrive%chocolateybin
(yes, in a Windows command prompt) and you’re good to go. The list of available packages can be found here. There’s no huge list of apps like in apt-get as yet though. If you want to install, say, expresso, just type
cinst expresso
in the command prompt. It’s said Chocolatey works in Cygwin as well, but I’m yet to try that out.
System of a Down is famous for its themes on war and politics. Huffington Post has a short interview with the band’s lead singer Serj Tankian on, well, politics. While expressing his favor on Obama over Romney, Serj expresses that he has no intention to run for the office.
“I hate injustice, and I can’t help but speak against it,” he says. “But I don’t want to get involved in politics. I have a more direct avenue to expression as an artist than I ever would as a politician.”