DIVID Technology Riffraff & Whatnot

Here’s a quick and dirty way to clean particular items from Git history. In our case it was large files that were being scattered throughout capistrano deployments. We symlinked the folder and now treat it as content, and all is well. I read about a project called git-annex that I want to look into further that may be better suited for handling large files.

$: git filter-branch -d /dev/shm/scratch –index-filter “git rm –cached -f –ignore-unmatch ‘filename.ext‘; –tag-name-filter cat — –all
$: git push –force –all

courtesy @lautis

Working with the Rails 3.2.1 has been a great experience for me, but not everyone shares this sentiment. Here are some interesting insights from Rob Connery about the state of things after the Rails 3 dust settled regarding the asset pipeline. I share this because, in short, I agree and believe upgrade struggles are likely well worth it. Users ultimately benefit, and I appreciate the rails team pushing Rails engineering in this direction.
http://wekeroad.com/2012/01/12/understanding-the-rails-asset-pipeline/

Have you ever wanted to run the nightly version of Webkit inside Coda? This used to be possible with an app called CodaKit, but it no longer works in OS X 10.7, so I made a quick replacement in automator.

http://dividtechnology.com/filechute/CodaKit.rar

(Bear in mind, this won’t do much if you don’t already have both Coda and Webkit nightly installed.)

Great piece on how and why we should review the current state of things as responsible web developers. Getting rusty – we need new best practices for a different development world

The Digital Color Meter utility in Mac OS X 10.7 no longer converts hex colors or copy to clipboard. The global utility color chooser palette does, and can be made more readily available. Just open Applescript Editor and type the words “choose color” and save as an application. Thanks to macosxhints for this tip.

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20060408050920158

For early adopters that want to test webkit2 without upgrading OS X 10.7 Lion developer preview, here’s a way to build it from source and run it from the webkit nightly app. Before we continue, a little background on webkit2, from macrumors:

“Starting in Mac OS X Lion, we’ve learned that Apple has started utilizing WebKit2 in their Safari web browser. The advanced version of Apple’s Webkit engine was first announced in April of 2010. WebKit2 is described as a new API layer for WebKit that offers both speed and security improvements:

WebKit2 is a new API layer for WebKit designed from the ground up to support a split process model, where the web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process from the application UI. This model is very similar to what Google Chrome offers, with the major difference being that we have built the process split model directly into the framework, allowing other clients of WebKit to use it.

For the end user, the result should be a faster and more stable browsing experience. If a webpage crashes or hangs, only that single tab is affected rather than the whole browser. Subjective reports from early end users have indicated that the new Safari seems to run smoother.”

Before we start, a little disclaimer. This build will not show the new 10.7 UI changes that feature multi-touch and disappearing scrollbars, zoom to text, etc. because those are handled in the application interface and probably rely on frameworks only available in the developer preview version of Lion. As far as I can tell, downloading a nightly binary is the same as building it from source, but this is just for those who want to do it anyway.

1.) Download the standard webkit nightly build as an application. (you can stop here, or go on to build from source and we’ll use this application to run the compiled result)

2.) Run this in terminal, or use an SVN client. “svn checkout http://svn.webkit.org/repository/webkit/trunk WebKit”

3.) Run the “build-webkit” script, which builds webkit2 by default: “./WebKit/Tools/Scripts/build-webkit” —This takes a while

4.) Make an Automator action, choose “run shell script”, paste this code, and save as an application: “

#!/bin/sh
~/webkit2/WebKit/Tools/Scripts/run-webkit-app /Applications/Webkit.app
exit 0

5.) Enjoy the fruits of your compute cycles. You can verify it worked by checking your user agent string at a site like http://whatismyuseragent.dotdoh.com/

Feedburner is now (again) handling our subscriptions.

Friend got an evo and showed me live 4g streaming on Qik, so I had to try it. This is from an original iPhone on wifi: http://qik.com/video/6959319

Danube posted this on their blog, it’s got a bit of insight to clarify how scrum works for planning software projects.

http://blogs.danube.com/scrum-is-not-something-“it-does”

A recent onslaught of meetings has brought me to suggest “No Meeting Monday”, Inspired by this article. I’ll also add a personal productivity booster for me is to put on headphones and fire up Blitz. This little app helps me work faster in two ways, by blocking fast access to applications and boosting performance to what you’re working on, which helps me stay focused. For instance, I can focus on a graphics app and a code window, which pauses mail, IM, browsers, etc.