You're away from your computer and something tragic/awesome happens in Campfire. Someone pings you, but you're not there to get it. You come back to your desktop with 100 growl messages of people pinging you in Campfire, and you missed something tragic/awesome. Eff that. Thats what happens to you. Here's what happens to me:

I'm on the couch, someone pings me in Campfire: "Maddox, we're adding an instance because of load". I immediately get that message pushed to my phone and can then open Ember on my iPhone to immediately drop into the campfire and find out what's going on. That means at the airport, in bed, or at a bar. It's a really amazing flow.

With Prowl you can get all your growl notifications pushed to your iPhone. It's a simple plug-in that pushes every growl message you get, to your phone. But we don't want every message sent to our phone. So here's the quick lesson on my awesome strategy for keeping the noise down while getting the important things.

• You need to purchase Prowl from the app store
• You need sign up with the prowl service. Register here
• Read installation instructions or just skip ahead
• Download the plug-in
• Install it
• Now you have to set it up which is the TRICKY part
• Go to the app that you want to Prowl, because you don't want EVERY growl notification going to your phone. Just the apps that you choose.

• Set the display style for the app to "Prowl"

• Butttt the trick is, you dont want it to always use Prowl. That would be annoying. You want the app to use Growl while you're using your computer, but Prowl when you're away. So... you trick it out.

• Go to the display options tab and configure Prowl
• Add your username and password
• Now, this is the most crucial step:
• Set Prowl up to only work if your computer has been idle for a set amount of time
• And tell it what growl style to use when you haven't been idle.

And you're all set up. So all day long as I work, Campfire (via the awesome Propane.app) will growl to my screen. But, the second I'm away from my computer for longer than 5 minutes, all the growl notifications from Campfire will be sent via push notification to my iPhone.

This is an amazing flow, especially when you know everyone is using it. It means you can page them remotely anytime you really really need them. It's the future.

• AddTrustExternalCARoot.crt
• MY.DOMAIN.COM.crt
• NetworkSolutions_CA.crt
• UTNAddTrustServer_CA.crt

The two certs we care about here are MY.DOMAIN.COM.crt, my site's ssl cert, and NetworkSolutions_CA.crt, Network Solution's intermediate key.

Ok, now the tricky part. With old Apache, there was a specific directive for defining the intermediate cert. Nginx participates in no such thing. With Nginx we just need to cat our two certs together.

cat MY.DOMAIN.COM.crt NetworkSolutions_CA.crt > combined.crt

Now just add this to your conf with:

ssl_certificate /usr/local/nginx/certs/combined.crt;

Summizer allows you to search Twitter and save your searches. Saved searches are basically trends. No one really wants to search Twitter, not in the way you search Google. What you really want to do is track what people are saying about a certain topic. This might be your company, your company's product, your favorite band, or even you.

Just like Twitter, Summizer is a bit tough to grok its usefulness, until you use it. Once you get it, play with it, and add your own trends, you are addicted to it. Its the ultimate 1 minute use app. Waiting for the train? Bust out Summizer and see what people are saying about the election. Waiting in line for food? Bust out Summizer to see what people are saying about your new Rails plugin.

Once you start using Summizer, it will become as useful as your feed reader. And thats a promise!

My newest client project just launched! playlist.maxfm.fm is an app for a radio station to allow its user's to create playlists to air on the radio.

More details here

Comments are welcomed as always.

But really, its not that installing RMagick sucks, its installing ImageMagick that sucks. Its hard. But the only thing worse than hard, is stupid ass MacPorts. Which is ********.

So all I hear is people complain over and over about having to install it. Meanwhile there has been a script to install ImageMagick and RMagick on OS X forever, but people just don't seem to know its there.

I tell people about it and they just ignore me and then complain about installing RMagick to me later on!! WTF?!

So, I've had it. When you format or get a new computer go here: http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=12&release_id=21634

Download rm_install

That old script isn't maintained and never works. I've decided to post one myself on GitHub with the hope that people will not only use it, but make sure it never gets stale. Grab it here: http://www.github.com/maddox/magick-installer

Now, once its downloaded. Do this:

sudo ./magick-installer.sh

and let it run forever. Done. Pretty easy right? There. PLEASE USE IT. Its a fantastic script that works really well. Its not hard to install ImageMagick anymore! Dance!

BeCamp 2008 is this weekend in Charlottesville, Va. I'm pretty excited since this will be my first BarCamp. It seems that every time I have a chance to go to one the timing has been bad.

If you're in the area, defiantly come up for what is going to be a great time. I'm planning on doing a demo of my sweet barcode scanner integration.

Mustache is sponsoring breakfast on Saturday morning. So if you see me, come say hi.

Bouncing around branches can be pretty common, and I know I've messed some things up pretty bad not knowing what branch I was on.

So set up your shell to always put the name of the current branch into your prompt.

function parse_git_branch {
  git branch --no-color 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/(\1)/'
}
 
function proml {
  local        BLUE="\[\033[0;34m\]"
  local         RED="\[\033[0;31m\]"
  local   LIGHT_RED="\[\033[1;31m\]"
  local       GREEN="\[\033[0;32m\]"
  local LIGHT_GREEN="\[\033[1;32m\]"
  local       WHITE="\[\033[1;37m\]"
  local  LIGHT_GRAY="\[\033[0;37m\]"
  case $TERM in
    xterm*)
    TITLEBAR='\[\033]0;\u@\h:\w\007\]'
    ;;
    *)
    TITLEBAR=""
    ;;
  esac
 
PS1="${TITLEBAR}\
$BLUE[$RED\$(date +%H:%M)$BLUE]\
$BLUE[$RED\u@\h:\w$GREEN\$(parse_git_branch)$BLUE]\
$GREEN\$ "
PS2='> '
PS4='+ '
}
proml

Pastie Link

Put this at the top of your .bash_profile and you'll be pimping your branch all over.

Thanks to @defunkt for this.

I will be giving a talk on GIT at tonights CVREG meeting.

If you've been reading about GIT lately and haven't had time to get your feet wet, come by to learn a little and see how it works. I'll be going over the benefits of GIT as well as doing some live demos to show how nice its silky smooth features work.

More info on the upcoming page

Luckily it's not that hard. For this example I'm going to use my_blog as the application name you're porting to a GIT repository. We're basically going to just initialize a new GIT repository, point it at your SVN repository, and suck in your code and history while remapping the users to GIT users. We'll then just clone THAT repository to have a clean GIT repository free of SVN clutter.

The first thing we need to do is create a users file that maps all your SVN users to your GIT users. Just make a file on your Desktop named 'users.txt'. Map the users using this format:

jmaddox = Jon Maddox <jon@gmail.com>
bigpappa = Brian Biggs <bigpappa@gmail.com>

Simple. Now here are the commands you'll run. I'll explain them below.

mkdir my_blog_tmp
cd my_blog_tmp
git-svn init http://code.yoursite.net/my_blog/trunk/ --no-metadata
git config svn.authorsfile ~/Desktop/users.txt
git-svn fetch

The first two are self explanatory, we're making a new directory for the temporary repository. The second command initializes the directory as a git-svn hybrid thing and points the origin at your SVN repository. The flag, --no-metadata, tells GIT to leave all the SVN details behind (not the commit log). The fourth command tells GIT to remap all the SVN users to GIT users when it sucks down the source and history. The last command actually does the fetching.

Ok, so now after a few LONG minutes, your source is all there. Do a git log to see that your users have been mapped. Sweet!

Now you just have one last step. You need to clone this repository. Why do we do this? When doing a normal git clone it will take everything we want from the temporary repository, while leaving behind all the SVN cruft that was there to support the git-svn stuff.

git clone my_blog_tmp my_blog

Boom! You're done. Now you have a super clean GIT repository all ready to use.

I'm not going to sell GIT or even try to explain why it's so great. There are tons of places online that already do that. I'm just going to share a couple stories.

Who Gives a Crap, I Gotta Get Work Done

This new source code management software that seems to be gaining a HUGE amount of steam first popped on my radar early last summer. I contemplated playing with it, but like most things, I skipped it. I figured as a single developer, it wouldn't mean much to me. I code,commit, iterate. "What do i need with fancy branching?" I said. But @peterc replied with my answer. I just didn't get it then.

Months went by as I used SVN like everyone else. I was just happy with versioned code, that's about all that SVN did for me.

RubyConf 2007

As I was outside with the rest of the Ruby Smoking Crew, I got Chris Wanstrath, unofficial GIT ambassador, to try to sell me on it. He started with the normal branching pitch, and I stoppped him.

"I don't branch".

"Because you don't use GIT".

BOOM. It hit me. I don't branch because branching with SVN sucks so much fucking arse that it's just not worth it. CERTAINLY not for changes that take only a few hours. With SVN you hang out on trunk and make your thousands of commits. Forget if you want to try something wacky real fast, you'd have to branch it! And thats just a whole lot of work.

Fast Forward a Few Days.

I'm sitting in a cube at Yahoo!. I'd been given a task a few days earlier. I was working on it and hit a stopping point. I needed to make a huge sweeping change. BUT, two hours later, I had to demo it to a room full of Yahoo! people I had never even met. AND they expected it to work. I knew my changes were going to break the whole app for a little while.

Ok, so first off, this project was neither IN a repository, nor did I even have access to one. I'd only been there for like two days. So I could copy my source directory and file it away for the demo, or... I could finally throw GIT on my laptop and try it out! So I installed GIT, initialized my rep. Branched it...whoa what? Thats it. git checkout -b new_model? Thats it?! SICK.

I continued my work and when it came time for the demo I just used git checkout master and voila, I was back to my fully working copy. I finally 'got' GIT. At least the branching part. Not only is it easy to branch, you can branch locally. And by locally, I mean privately. So if you want to try something weird and crazy out, you don't need to worry about making a new branch at the central repository, just branch it locally and go to town. If it worked out, merge it back into master. If it doesn't, just dump it. Now, like most GIT users, I don't even work directly on master.

Ok, thats my story. I guess the moral is, you're never going to get why something is good for YOU until YOU use it. Everyone takes different things away from products, especially when you're talking about productivity.