But everyone else has been using git for ages (GitHub is hugely popular, and projects like Drupal have also made the switch). Added to that: the few times I’ve tried branching in SVN, the ensuing merges ruined my day — completely.

So I decided to learn git, for professional work (superior branching/merging) and for personal stuff (working with Drupal and GitHub code, among others).

I started at home, archiving my /home/flo/data/ documents in git and syncing it on multiple computers.

Next, I made the jump in a big way at work: I’m now using git-svn for new projects. So I’m using git, while also still publishing the commits to (remote) SVN.

For using this workflow and still knowing what you’re doing, you need to advance fairly high on the git learning curve:

• adding and committing (obviously)
• branching
• stashing changes
• merging branches
• rebasing branches

So far, so good: working with git-svn is going quite smooth.
It turns out git’s merging is nice, but the interactive rebasing (rewording, reordering and squashing commits) before publication is even nicer.

Online resource I’ve appreciated along the way:

• Hg Init, to un-learn the limitations of Subversion
  • Read it twice if you suffer from CVS, Visual SourceSafe or worse symptoms!
• The Git Parable by Tom Preston-Werner
  • Conceptually explains why it’s a good idea to have full-history commits.
• New artisans’ Git from the Bottom up
  • Explains the hashes, trees and blobs that Git is built on.
  • It’s only a pity that this detailed technical approach is given up halfway through the document, where the usual high-level “let’s-draw-some-trees” approach takes over.
• Some nice rants (not always correct though): Steveko 10 things I have about Git, Reinvigorated programmer Git is a Harrier Jump Jet

So here goes:

Make a file available without HTML extension:

RewriteRule ^article$ article.html [nocase]

Redirect to another path:

RewriteRule ^nice-article$ /articles/nice-one [nocase,redirect=permanent,last]

Remember to start the redirect path with a slash!

Redirect users ‘guessing’ an archive URL to the correct URL:

RewriteRule ^(20\d{2})$ /archive/$1 [redirect=permanent,last]

Redirect users to the domain name with www. prefix added:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Remember that you can combine multiple RewriteConds by adding them before the RewriteRule.

And finally, these are the flags shortcuts:

nocase|NC last|L ornext|OR redirect|R =[HTTP redirect status code] or [temp|permanent|seeother]

There I was, searching a way to migrate content from Nucleus (version 3.3x) to Drupal 6.
Some ‘migrate’, ‘import’ or ‘xxx2drupal’ modules for Drupal could be found, but none of them were suitable for Nucleus source data. It also seemed like some HTML fiddling was required to really make the content ready for publication on Drupal.

I decided to learn some Ruby and a bit of Drupal’s database scheme by processing exported Nucleus tables and transforming them into INSERT statements for Drupal’s tables. Countless hours were wasted learning how to preserve articles, comments, authors, categories and more…

The little Ruby script eventually did the trick. Now that it’s practically too late to be of any use (it’s been almost two years!), I’m nonetheless enticed to release nucleus2drupal.rb v0.1 onto the pipes.

If you want to try, here’s how it goes:

• Unpack nucleus2drupal.
• Export your Nucleus tables (category, comment, item, member) using phpMyAdmin into the queries-source directory (nucleus_category.sql, etc).
• Modify the query templates in the queries-insert/ directory so that they’ll work for your Drupal database.
• Take a look at nucleus2drupal.rb itself and the settings (and warnings) therein.
• Execute ./nucleus2drupal.rb.
• If the resulting SQL files (directory queries-insert/) look okay, then execute them against your (test!) Drupal database.

I’ve tried to clean up most hard-coded specifics, but your mileage may vary. Remember to pay close attention to text encodings along the way if your content is beyond plain ASCII.

Should you eventually fail, let me know how you’re liking that Migrate module instead

I did, and became curious. It seemed worth the try, and after a couple of times of usage it turns out to be a nice shopping bag.

It can store a lot of volume (making it look very funny) and quite some weight (if distributed evenly).

The advantages are definitely that it keeps your arms free, and that it stays small when carrying small things.

It sets you back about 8 Euro if I remember correctly.

And believe me, the sight of people watching in awe when you pack 20 liter of groceries into a flower-themed double-sided stretch condom is truly priceless

However, this input format is very complex and not very flexible.

An existing ‘link component’ patch to flexifilter is much more compact and easier to configure.

In my view, that’s the nice thing about flexifilters: you don’t need to dabble in code if you want to change or configure an input format. Instead all parts are small and self-contained, configurable units.

In this case, a dip in the code was unavoidable because of a known bug. While at it, I also built in support for clean URLs trough the pathauto module. The result is in the issue queue.

For easy installation, you can download the filter here as an installable module: flexifilter_wiki_url.tar.gz. Feedback is welcome…

Dear writers, please reconsider. And if you must, Please use small caps. They are lighter on the eye, and properly distinguish between UPPERCASE and lowercase Letters.

Since it is a layout trick, you are still free to revert to normal casing later on without the need to modify the source text.

The CSS involved reads like font-variant: small-caps.

• koli900: ku je mor shtet
• me: broa dog flimpets
• koli0900: fol shqip mor kar
• me: alli harvod dobeng
• koli0900: ma ha karin
• me: bollem pratka ovordeks
• koli0900: pidhi satam

I’ll be attending FOSDEM this weekend (albeit not the full weekend).

Unlike previous editions I was hardly involved in the speaker interviews — the very capable K.V. handled those this year. I did contribute to the questions in Brion Vibber’s interview though.

The organizers are once again making a nice leap in quality. Case in point: the cloakroom, the sunday bus home, and of course BDA v3.1.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx/Feisty_No-Fluff

When the network is up and running, use it to send a message to Broadcom to demand some hardware specs for the b43 driver authors.