github Adventures
I've switched one of my projects from Subversion to Git (using github) and so far I love the way it works. I like the fact that my local repository isn't just a working copy, it's a fully functioning repository - I can look at the history, make commits whilst offline, etc. I often end up doing a couple of hours coding offline and it's great to be able to commit those changes as I do them rather than waiting until I'm next online and committing them all at once with a general, vague commit message.
It's early days and I'm still feeling my way. Some resources that helped me:
- Guides: Deploying with Capistrano
- Pragmatic Version Control Using Git ($22 downloadable PDF)
posted on August 03 2008
Back in Vancouver, Victoria later
I've returned to Vancouver for a couple of weeks - preparing for our move out here later this year. This time, I'm going to head over to Victoria on Vancouver Island to see what it's like. I'm going to drop by the company behind My Art Channel and see what they do. The rest of the time, I'm working out of the wonderful Workspace offices in Gastown, Vancouver.
posted on July 30 2008
Novera Energy
Novera Energy is one of the leading quoted, independent renewable energy companies in the UK. They generate renewable power at 57 sites across the UK, with a total capacity of 118 MW. Logical Cobwebs are providing an online, secure web application to consolidate engineering data from sites spread through the UK. This will give them a new way of looking at that data as well as making it easier for the engineers.
posted on July 18 2008
Logical Cobwebs in Canada
We opened our new business in Canada on May 6, 2008, based at the Workspace offices in Gastown, Vancouver BC (400 - 21 Water Street).
posted on May 15 2008
Passenger and Mongrel
I've been running my Ruby on Rails apps using Apache and a load balancer to proxy to Mongrel. It all works very well, but when I heard about Passenger (formerly mod_rails) I was very interested. I love it when things get simpler and having Apache run Rails directly seemed like a great idea. Passenger runs the Rails app with appropriate permissions in its own sandbox.
My next step is to setup SSL and see how well that works together. It always annoyed me having to setup Apache and Mongrel on my development machine in order to test SSL - I'm hoping this is going to get easier now.
posted on May 08 2008
Microformats
I saw Chris Messina's presentation on Microformats + DiSo at the Open Web Vancouver conference and then caught up with some of the background of Microformats at Gerald Bauer's presentation at the VanDev Meetup last Wednesday.
From their website:
Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging).
I like the pragmatic, "let's not make everyone start again" approach and I've sprinkled a few examples on this site (including this blog entry). It's pretty easy to implement and has got a lot of potential, so what have you got to lose? Read more at microformats.org.
posted on April 19 2008
WorkSpace
I dropped by WorkSpace yesterday to do some work. A really nice atmosphere and a good Internet connection. Views over the Burrard Inlet.
posted on April 18 2008
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor is a great way of sending out emails. I've just sent out a newsletter on behalf of Mindstretchers and it went really smoothly.
- Lovely reporting.
- Automatic inline CSS conversion (email clients are a bit fussy about CSS)
- Ethical. They ask lots of questions before letting you email people. And when I sent the newsletter to 600 people I had to get authorisation from a human, which I find very reassuring. (You only need to be authorised once).
- SPF aware. The site helped me setup my DNS so that my emails stood a better chance of being delivered.
I found out about Campaign Monitor when I discovered that 37signals use them.
posted on March 25 2008
Vancouver's Software Developers Network
From the VanDev calendar:
In April we have a presentation by Behdad on adding a search function to a website. Search capabilities can make a web site easier to use and more useful to users but how do you choose from the many search options? Join us as Behdad navigates the available technologies and considers what works best for different types of sites. Following the presentation we'll have a door prize draw, round-the-room introductions, and then open the floor for networking. This is a networking event so bring your business/contact cards and a story or two to share.
posted on March 25 2008
Script to help Subversion Merging
This is a short script that I use when merging from trunk into a branch in Subversion. It looks up the version numbers and performs a dry run merge so that you can see what will happen. It then just outputs the commands it suggests using so that you can copy and paste them. I chose not to run them automatically so I could give it a check before committing stuff to the repository. The dry run makes sense because if you mess up a merge, even though nothing is committed, it's a pain to rollback.
#!/bin/sh
if [ ! -d ../tags/production ]; then
echo "run this in trunk"
exit 1
fi
svn up .. > /dev/null
tag=`svn log ../tags/production/ 2> /dev/null |head -n 2|egrep '^r'|cut -f 1 -d ' '| sed s/r//`
trunk=`svn up |cut -f 3 -d ' '|cut -f 1 -d '.'`
echo "trunk is at revision $trunk"
echo "../tags/production is at revision $tag"
if [ $trunk == $tag ]; then
echo "No merge necessary."
else
svn merge --dry-run -r ${tag}:${trunk} . ../tags/production
echo "Run the following:"
echo " svn merge -r ${tag}:${trunk} . ../tags/production"
echo " svn ci -m \"new release\" ../tags/production/"
fi
posted on March 21 2008
