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Understanding Tracking Branches in Git
03 July 2014
Read moreHere's a topic that took me a while to understand in git, and now (I think!) I do, I thought I'd write it all down while I can remember!
Some branches in git (such as your origin/master branch) will usually track the remote branch that they are related to. But what if you want to create a relationship between local and remote branches? Or stop them from tracking? Here's some pointers
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Running Pull Request Builds with Jenkins
01 July 2014
Read moreThe joind.in projects are set up so that the build process runs on pull requests when they are opened, which is great! It means that contributors don't have to wait for one of the maintainers to look at it, only to reject the contribution on something that could be picked up automatically. I've had a few questions about the setup so I thought I'd share how it works.
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What Got You Involved in Open Source?
12 June 2014
Read moreI did a very unscientific twtpoll recently regarding what brought each of us into open source. Plenty of people took the time to vote or retweet, so I thought I'd loop back around and let you know how it looked overall when the poll closed.
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Colourless Git Output
02 June 2014
Read moreI teach git and often have issues with bad projectors where you can't see the colours. Recently I had a setup where even white on black was more or less invisible, but using black text on a white background worked okay. There's lots of documentation on how to turn on …
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Copy/Pasting and Vim
02 April 2014
Read moreI'm a vim user and I somehow completely missed this excellent feature until much more recently than I care to admit! Usually vim has its own clipboard, but it doesn't share with the operating system. You will need a vim-gtk install, this isn't available in really basic vim (I'm a …
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Quick Switch Between Git Branches
31 March 2014
Read moreToday's little-known git feature (or maybe everyone knows but me? I only found this a few months ago) is for quickly switching between branches. Usually I would switch branches with:
git checkout [branchname]
However if you switch from one branch to another and want to switch back again (this happens …
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Wireshark Capture on Remote Server
25 March 2014
Read moreThe joind.in project uses a really nice vagrant setup for its dev platform - which is much needed these days as we move away from a single LAMP stack install to a website plus another website, which talks to an API and caches in redis and deploys with .... you get the picture :) This is great but having everything on the VM can make it a bit trickier to debug what's going on - and with a website that talks to an API that talks to MySQL, that all lives on a VM with port forwards, you can see the problem :)
To get an insight into the traffic going around the place, I've been using Wireshark and it's ability to capture remotely, it's really simple so I thought I'd write down my "recipe" on how to do this in case it's useful.
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What Does URI Stand For?
05 March 2014
Read moreI get a lot of complaints about an API that I maintain (http://api.joind.in) which is "missing" the ID field. This ID field is the database's primary key; if the user doesn't have access to the database (they don't), then it seems to me that the primary key …
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Getting Started with Beanstalkd
27 February 2014
Read moreI had a good experience implementing beanstalkd for the first time last week, so I thought I'd write down how that went and what I learned.
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Git Log All Branches
03 February 2014
Read moreI can't be the only person who always seems to be switching between multiple development branches. Sometimes I get distracted for a few days (I'm also part time, which doesn't help!) and then I can't even remember what I was doing or what the branch was called.
The remedy for this situation? The --all switch to git log.
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Ubuntu and the X220T Touch Screen
30 January 2014
Read moreI have a thinkpad laptop with a touchscreen and a swivel so it can fold up and pretend to be an oversized tablet. I like it a lot, but the touch screen interface hasn't been all that useful since I normally use this machine docked and then it maps the …
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Splitting And Combining Odd/Even Pages With Pdftk
20 January 2014
Read moreI'm working on a fun printable project at the moment, but part way through I realised I would need to process odd and even pages of the document separately. So separately, that I split the doc into two separate ones, with odd pages in one and event pages in another - and then had to recombine them. Here's the commands that I used, with an excellent tool called pdftk.