RubyGeek

I’m watching the Git peepcode by Geoffrey Grosenbach and as usual with other peepcode it is very good. This is the ultimate in geek-tv. I swear, i will burn these to a DVD sometime so i can watch them on my tv!

Things I like about git so far:

- branching, since I am often on the road without internet access.
- clean, just creates one .git dir in your project root. I just found a bash command that will clean out my .svn dirs from a project I’ve modified so much on the road that I’ve borked up the svn process and I’m going to convert it to git

BTW here’s that bash command if you are interested

from: http://www.anyexample.com/linux_bsd/bash/recursively_delete__svn_directories.xml

its simply:

rm -rf `find . -type d -name .svn`

Haha, I remember I wrote a perl script I think to do this like 4 years ago for someone. Who knew it was just a rather short bash command…apparently not me.

Branching is freaking awesome. But what is even more interesting is the stash. Geoffery said it was like a clipboard. You can be working away and you have some changes you are in the middle of but you don’t want to commit yet, so you stash them, then go do something else, then later get that stash and apply to your code. Interesting.

There is a progam gitk that will give you a GUI look at your branches and commits. Thats cool.

get-svn lets you use git locally and then check back into svn.

BTW I keep typing get instead of git! … grrr.. I am about ready to make an alias!

I like! .. and the Peepcode screencast is great, as usual. I will need to watch the branching again but I highly recommend getting this screencast if you are interested in learning git. Its only 9 bucks!

I’ve been doing a variety of things lately:

Playing with Android
I got the “Hello Android” beta book from Pragmatic Programmers — I am trying to remember its beta but its sort of hard to follow. Be prepared to download the source code for the book and compare to what the book has to see what is missing, so you can get your thing to run. I am going to look at some other tutorials at the moment to get more familiar. Maybe the author assumes the reader knows more than me! Which is possible since I haven’t done much java programming.

Wordpress 2.5.1 and EngineYard
The DevChix.com blog is a wordpress blog and hosted at DreamHost. We got a free slice for DevChix from the kind folks at EngineYard. They were nice enough to set it all up for us with wordpress and giving us a deploy.rb file ready to go! Their support is pretty fast too and I was able to get some help from the irc chat as well. The new wordpress has some neat features and looks nicer. I want to install a captcha though for blog comments, even with Akesmet I get tired of sorting through them! I was able to get all our plugins installed and seems good.

Playing with App Engine
I worked on this last week while on an airplane. I wasn’t sure it would work offline — but it did. Even the database…err..yeah whatever it is. I was able to add data ..but where is that data?

Django your mango
Yes, been checking it by doing the bundled tutorials. I haven’t gotten back to it since my last post. Need to get back to it before I forget what I was doing. haha.

Git ‘er done
Finally, I am going to learn git and try it on a project with a friend. I am hoping it proves useful since I often code on the go with no internet access. I sometimes have to do a poor mans cvs and save things as myfile1.rb myfile2.rb to try out things and then able able to “go back”. Rock and roll.

I’ve been hankering to try out programming for a device. I did a hello world app for my pocketpc with c++ years ago. Apparently it didn’t hold my interest cuz I never did much with it. I am not enthusiastic about the iphone and its developer requirements and restrictions (way to piss on the developers Apple). So I’ve been wanting to try out Android for awhile now.

I was excited to see a new beta book out by Pragmatic Programmers — on Android! hot dog! I bought it the same day and installed the SDK, Eclipse and the Eclipse plugins on my macbook. I installed an emulator too. It worked without a hitch — which I kinda expected there to be some goofy java error or some nonsense that would frustrate and discourage me. Nope — worked real easy.

The intro was real easy to understand and explained the different components. The book tells you about a soduko game that you will develop over the course of the book. I like that idea and I think its an excellent way to learn.

I do the Hello World application following the instructions in the book (yeah I know there are hello world tutorials on the google site). Whoo hoo! It worked! Excited I move on.

The next example I had some problems with. I think some code is missing from the book. I looked high and low and emailed the author and logged a issue at PragProg.com … no response yet, but I figured out if I just removed that part of the code then it worked. Just didn’t have a background color set. Oh well — I’ll be patient to see if someone gets back to me or its fixed in the next version of the book.

Moving on, I see code snippits that should be in certain files but not sure where in the file they go and I think sometime they are missing some import statements. I get errors and I poke around to figure it out ..and I give up for the moment …

Its a beta book.. so.. guess we’ll have to wait till the next version comes out..

Meanwhile I checked out some of the examples that Google has on their site.

The author got back to me and told me to check out the source code for the sample program….and he’d try to make it more clear about the background color.

I will keep plugging on!