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

Het blokkeren is geen enkel probleem, maar de toegang toestaan voor specifieke users is heel wat anders.

Standaard zal Apache (met basic authentication) de gebruikers namelijk anoniem doorgeven aan SVN. Wanneer die dan ziet dat er authenticatie nodig is voor een bepaald pad, dan is de verbinding al open en is het te laat om nog te authentificeren.

De domme workaround is dan om anonieme access af te zetten op heel de repository, zodat iedereen geauthentificeerd binnenkomt. De betere oplossing (de ‘Satisfy Any’ truc) werkt helaas enkel met svnserve en niet via Apache om bovenstaande reden.

Voor degenen die nog niet zijn overgeschakeld op iets beters, that is.

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

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…

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.

• Firefox bookmark keywords / keyword searches
• Alt+F2 mini-shell command widget on Linux
• Launchy on Windows
• A text replacement tool like Texter

I really liked it because it ‘just works’, and has a lot of potential for extensions. In a way, it’s more of a platform that a tool. However, since platforms tend to get ignored if they have few users, I felt Enso could use some freeing up (of both price and source code) to get the ball rolling.

Seeing it just disable itself after the trial period was a real disappointment, also from a usability point of view.

Luckily, the Humanized team has been thinking in the same direction. From now on, Enso is free (the source code is still closed but this could change in the future).

What’s more, Humanized is joining forces with Mozilla. In terms of building a platform and reaching lots of users, this is a major announcement.

I was thinking about comparing Enso with KDE’s extensible krunner, Katapult or (the Quicksilver-like) Gnome Do, but this announcement indicates that Mozilla might be planning something even broader in scope. I’m looking forward to Firefox 4

It was not a page-turner like “iWoz”, but just as interesting to read.

Just like with the book by Woz, I already knew some of its contents — this time by accidentally browsing the folklore.org stories that form the basis of the book.

The anecdotal structure of the book makes it easy to read in pieces, but it tends to not ‘draw you into it’ as much. Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading about this exceptional computer system and its uber-geeky creators.

I figure that the book would be perfect for Mac users and fans, but even for a Linux/Windows guy like me I’d heartily recommended it.

Het gaat niet.
Het is onmogelijk.
Aaargh!

Een bijzondere eigenschap van dromen is dat cijfers en tekst erin veranderen als je even wegkijkt. Bovendien gedragen technische apparten zich zelden naar behoren in de droomwereld.

De ervaren dromer leert zulke eigenschappen te herkennen en er gebruik van te maken, om zo tot een lucide droom te komen.

Uw dienaar, daarentegen, bleef dapper naar de code staren en op het toetsenbord rammen.

Tevergeefs, of wat dacht u?