Git requires some learning, and you might as well spend the time doing it rather than wondering what just happened after running a command. Learn.github is a good place to start to learn the basics.

But even after spending some time learning git, there are going to be times that you’ve to painfully search the web/manual for basic stuff like working with remote branches or more complex stuff like handling a failed merge.

For the same reason, I’m creating this post as a reference point for myself to avoid repetitive searches. I’ll keep adding new commands here if and when I use them.

This is no way near to a complete reference for git and there might be better ways to do the things listed here. These are just the commands I use the most, in the manner I prefer to use them.

Basics

Commit & Stage all changes: git commit -am "log-message"

Push Changes to remote repo: git push

Pull Changes to local repo: git pull

Check current status of working tree: git status

View diff: git diff

Discard local uncommitted changes to a file (in this case, abc.txt): git checkout -- abc.txt

Branches (Branch name is assumed to be ‘abc’)

Working with local branches

Create a branch: git branch abc

Switch to a branch: git checkout abc

View all existing branches: git branch

Remove a branch: git branch -d abc

Merge a branch :

#In this case, merging abc into master
git checkout master
git merge abc


Working with remote branches

Push a local branch to remote repo: git push origin abc

Delete a remote branch: git push origin :abc

Setup a local branch to track a remote branch: git --track branch abc origin/abc

Create a local branch, push it to remote repo. and then pull changes from it:

# Creating the new branch and switching to it
git checkout -b abc;

# Pushing the changes
git push

# if you want to simply use 'git pull' to get the changes, do the following
git config branch.abc.remote origin
git config branch.abc.merge refs/heads/abc


Alternative methods listed here.

Tags (Tag name is assumed to be v1.0 here)

View all tags: git tag

Create a tag referencing a particular commit using its checksum (annotated):

#here commit checksum is assumed to be 98eda02.

#to view the checksum of a commit, you can do
git log --pretty=oneline

git tag -a v1.0 98eda02

Push tags to remote repo: git push --tags

Useful git references:
Learn.github
Github’s git cheat sheet

gleeBox started out as a weekend hack project for me and Sameer. But, we ended up spending a lot more time working on it. Not that I’m complaining, I think we managed to build a tool that is really useful once you get used to it. We made our last major release (1.0) a couple of weeks back. From now on, gleeBox development will be carried out at ease (and not the 20 commits/day rate at which it was being carried out earlier ^^ )

If you’re not familiar with gleeBox, you should take a look at this screencast or read the user manual.

After continually using gleeBox for some time, I’ve discovered several ways in which it makes browsing and doing stuff on the web quicker and more fun. Here are some of them:

ESP Visions:

This is my favorite feature of gleeBox. What this means is, you can specify jQuery selectors for specific URLs and when you visit that particular page and open gleeBox, that selector will automatically be executed and all the matching elements will be highlighted on the page. You can TAB through them and press enter to execute a link.

This is especially useful on pages like the Google search results page, where all you would ever want to do is to go through the results. You don’t need to scroll using the mouse. This makes searching a lot more fun and less tiresome for the fingers.

This is also really useful for automating stuff, especially for pages where you have to click the same link everytime you visit them.

Several useful ESP Visions are listed on TipJar.

Default Link Search:

You start typing something and gleeBox highlights all the links on the page that match the text. This means you don’t need to take your hands off the keyboard to navigate the web.

Page commands and bookmarklet execution:

You can execute any bookmarklet by typing in [cci]!bookmarklet-name[/cci]. There are also some inbuilt-commands. A couple of examples are:

[cci]!rss[/cci] – opens the RSS feed of the current page in Google Reader so that you can easily subscribe to it.
[cci]!share m/g/fb/t/..[/cci] – share current page through mail, gmail, facebook, twitter, etc.

All of them are listed in the user manual.

Bookmark Search:

If turned on, gleeBox searches browser bookmarks if no links are found matching the entered text. This is useful, instead of manually going through a long list of sites in the bookmarks menu.

Yubnub commands:

You can execute yubnub commands preceded by [cci]:[/cci]. Some of the ones that I use a lot are

[cci]:tw gleebox[/cci] – Search twitter for gleeBox
[cci]:imdb avatar[/cci] – search imdb for avatar

I haven’t really explored these in detail yet.

Scraper commands:

With these you can select headings ([cci]?h[/cci]), linked images ([cci]?img[/cci]), etc. You can also define custom scrapers. An example of a custom scraper  is:

[cci]?t – a.web [/cci] will select all shared links on twitter.com

If you’re an advanced gleeBox user, you should go ahead and share tips on Tipjar. You can login using your Twitter/Facebook/other accounts and start posting right away from the main page.

I’ve deleted my Wakoopa account (sorry Wakoopa!), since I didn’t see it help me in any way besides maybe me taking a look at it every now and then to look at an abstract graph of how I spent my last week on the computer.

I am not going to all together delete my Facebook or Orkut accounts since they let me stay in touch with friends with whom I’m not in touch with in real (non-internet) life and share stuff ( photos, links, etc. ) with friends with whom I am in touch with in real life. I would instead be limiting my use of both these social networks to a trickle. At least that’s the plan.

It wasn’t until I heard Conan O’Brien joke around about the “attention deficit disorder” on The Tonight Show that I realised that I was actually suffering from a minor form of it. One of the culprits is Twitter, where one follows so many people that it actually pushes you to skip through information. I will gradually start to unfollow people who create a lot of noise and tend to feed my habit of ignoring information. I’m also going to avoid running a Twitter client in the background ( in my case, Tweetie ). On a more positive note, Twitter, for me, is useful to keep up to date with the latest news in areas of my choice ( Design and Technology ) and have conversations with interesting people on the Web. And yes, ofcourse, it lets me rant about me.

Google Reader and Friendfeed are useful and almost my main sources of news and information (along with Twitter) and since I use them in proportion, they don’t really hinder me. I like Last.fm as it allows me to listen to its radio and I’m not addicted to it so it doesn’t eat up my productivity.

So, what led me to the brink? Over the past few weeks, I had been overtly commenting on Facebook and checking my Gmail. It made me realise how much time and energy I was wasting doing nothing.
Then, I asked myself the following questions about each social app I use frequently:

• Does it generate content that is meaningful and useful to me?
• Does it connect me with people who are interesting and like-minded to me?
• Is it a time-sucker?
• Does it make me less productive?

Social Web does have a lot of Pros in favor of it, that is if you keep your usage in check.

• It allows you to have conversations with interesting and like-minded people on the Web, no matter where they may be physically located, eventually expanding your intellectual horizons.
• It lets you stay up-to-date with what is happening in the world.
• It allows you to collaborate with other people on creative projects.
• It lets you create your own individual presence on the web.
• It allows you to share content with your friends and family.

If kept under a check, the social web will continue to be useful to everyone instead of making everyone unproductive.

So, if I don’t reply to your Orkut scrap or Facebook comment, and if it is really important, @reply me on Twitter or email me.

You can download the extension from JED.

Installation

1. Install ‘com_frontendeditor’, ‘plg_frontendeditor’ and ‘plg_articleeditor’ from here.
2. Enable the plugins “System – Frontend Editor” and “Content – Frontend Article Editor”.
3. Go to “Components->Enhanced Frontend Editor” at the backend and click on “Apply Changes”. You can modify the settings there to suit your template and needs.

Hacks ( applied when you click on “Apply Changes”)

1. Adds the module chrome “modChromefreditor” to the “html/modules.php” file of the current template. Before doing this, it creates a backup file ‘html/modules.php.backup’.
2. After creating a backup of “index.php” as “index.php.backup”, it modifies the following statements in the “index.php” of the current template:
   • All the jdoc statements get the style “freditor”. Eg.:
     [cc lang="html"][/cc] gets changed into [cc lang="html"][/cc]
   • Surrounds the jdoc statements with a DIV that has class in the format [cc lang="html"]frpos.position-name[/cc] Eg.: [cc lang="html"][/cc] gets changed into [cc lang="html"]

     [/cc]

3. Replaces the existing “/html/com_content/article/form.php” file with a custom “form.php” ( after creating a backup file i.e. “form.php.backup”)

The backup files are created so that you can undo the changes anytime by clicking on “Revert Changes”. You would probably want to revert the hack if you choose to uninstall the extension.

You’ll also need to apply the hack separately for each template you want to use.

Dependencies & Limitations

1. Mootools 1.2
   Perhaps the biggest limitation of this extension is that it uses mootools 1.2 instead of 1.1 which is used in Joomla! 1.5. Consequently, some of your javascript that uses mootools 1.1 may not work properly when you’re logged in. Mootools 1.2 will only replace 1.1 when you’re logged in at the front-end and have the plugins enabled. The reason I chose 1.2 is that Joomla! 1.6 will use mootools 1.2.
2. Menu-item title editing
   The menu-item titles must be enclosed in LI elements with the class in format [cci]item[/cci] Eg.:
   [cc lang="html"]
3. Joomla! Documentation

[/cc]

If your template uses a different layout, you may want to modify it a little to support menu-item title editing. In case you don’t, you need not worry as each of these features degrade gracefully, without affecting the functionality or presentation of your site.

4. Default article edit icons are hidden
   The default edit icons are hidden and the extension displays its own edit icons. You can specify their selector in the admin component. In case your template uses a different selector than the default one and you don’t specify it, a pair of edit icons can appear for each article which will lead to confusion.
5. Selectors for article and page titles
   If they are not the default, you can modify them in the admin so that editing of article and page titles works.

Future Versions

You can report any bugs here. Since my college semester has now begun, any updates to the extension will probably come slowly. I plan to remove any trivial withstanding bugs, add new features with time and improve the extension in general. I would love to spend any free time in fixing bugs of the overall Joomla! project as well.

As far as Joomla! 1.6 is concerned, I did create a patch for 1.6 but due to time constraints, it wasn’t included in the feature-set for 1.6. So, when a stable version of 1.6 is released, I’ll port this extension to support 1.6.

I will love to know if the extension worked for you and any suggestions or feedback you want to give. You can either contact me via the Contact page or send me an @reply on twitter.

Update:

This is a common recurring problem for version 0.3.7 of the extension. If you’re getting the following error:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘&’, expecting T_VARIABLE or ‘$’
in your-install/administrator/components/com_frontendeditor/controller.php
on line 99

it means you’re probably using a version of PHP earlier than 5. Unfortunately, this piece of code only works in PHP 5. You’ll either need to update to PHP 5 or get the patch from here. You’ll need to apply the patch to [cci]your-install/administrator/components/com_frontendeditor/controller.php[/cci]

In case you’re not familiar with applying a patch, you’ll have to execute the following command from the shell:

patch -p1 -i 99line.patch controller.php

Update 2:
If you would like to promote the development of this extension and make a contribution, please go to the project page.

1. Displaying user tweets in the Orkut profile page (deployed): I had to rewrite the whole code for this due the new server-side templates and data-pipelining standards enforced by Orkut. It has certain limitations in that you cannot click on any link that links to any external source. Clicking on the user’s pic or username leads you to the application page.

2. OAuth Support: Twitkut will now enable you to authorize it with your Twitter account via OAuth. Doing this will enable you to post updates from Twitkut, add your Orkut friends as your Twitter friends and many more things (listed as separate features). I chose OAuth since then you won’t have to worry about me storing your Twitter passwords.

3. Post updates from Twitkut: If you enable OAuth, you’ll be able to post updates to your Twitter account from within Twitkut.

4. Follow your Orkut friends on Twitter: Enabling OAuth will enable you to follow your Orkut friends on Twitter from within Twitkut.

5. Selective Updates: This will be similar to the “Selective Twitter Updater” Facebook app. You will able to selectively display updates on Twitkut by adding a hashtag to the end of updates similar to “#orktw” or “#orkut”. I’ve still to decide upon the hashtag. Only the updates containing the hashtag will be displayed on Twitkut.

Unfortunately, the popular demand for automatic updates to the user’s activity stream ( without the user having to visit the application page ) won’t be possible due to the limitations enforced by Orkut. If Orkut ever allows it, it’ll be the first feature I’ll add.

I cannot promise if and when I’ll add all these features. There are too many variables, time being the biggest one. You can keep abreast with the latest updates to Twitkut by following @twitkut.

You can also suggest features that you’ll like to be added to Twitkut as comments to this blogpost or as @replies to @twitkut.

Enabling Twitkut with OAuth has been/will be a complicated task. I’ll probably write a separate blog on writing an Opensocial OAuth Gadget.

The music used in the movie (in the same order):

Eye of the tiger by Scorpions
Bebot by Black Eyed Peas
The Hill by Markéta Irglová
Enter Sandman by Metallica

Mussoorie-Rishikesh ‘09 Trip from Ankit Ahuja on Vimeo.

We began our journey early morning on Friday. The plan had changed a bit, we were now going to Mussoorie and possibly Haridwar and Rishikesh on the way back. It was also ironic that the route to Mussoorie went scarily close to our college. We had a chance to kiss it goodbye and see what it felt like. Trust me, it felt very good to actually see everything you’ve learned to hate pass you by.

When we were about to enter Uttarakhand, the state to which Mussoorie belongs, we suddenly got pings from everywhere that our University Result had been announced. At first, we were resolute and decided that we will check our result after we came back. But then, one of us was too eager and he checked his result. And guess what, he got a very good result and then we were all scampering for our mobile phones to know our results via SMS. A couple of us had to wait a wee bit longer ( Jatin and Vishal ). But we all now had a reason to celebrate. All of us had got a decent result!

Thanks to someone really awesome, we got a chance to stay at the ITM Hostel in Mussoorie. It is located right at the top in a very scenic place. The most wonderful thing about the place was the silence. All we could hear was the wind and our voices. It was the peacefulness any city inhabitant could only dream of. Our trip had now officially touched its first milestone that was to reach Mussoorie. We visited Mall road, had dinner at Udupi (a south indian restaurant) and I increased my winning streak in Air hockey by +1. We then had hot tea at the hostel and I slept the most peaceful sleep I had had for a while, without all the traffic noises and dog barks.

The next morning was beautiful. Abhishek and I decided to go out for an early morning self-professed hike. After walking along the road for a bit, we took a kuccha path into the valley. It was the pleasant feeling of adventure that I’ve always loved. It felt like it had been picked right out of a Ruskin Bond story.

That day we decided we were going to go to the Kempty Falls. We went there and took a dip into the chilly water. It was refreshing and fun. We then made our way to Company Park. It was beautiful and I got a chance to practice my photography skills. After that, we made a short tour to Gun Hill. Unfortunately, it was foggy and so we didn’t get to see much. We did, however, get a chance to practice our shooting skills. Tired after a third of the day, only Vishal and I had the will to walk the entire length of the Camel Back Road. And boy, was it worth it. It was the most scenic and peaceful walk I have ever undertaken. Luckily, the clouds drifted away for a bit and we had a chance to glimpse the amazing landscape of Mussoorie. While on our way back to our cab via Mall road, we also saw a Sikh procession. It ran the entire length of Mall road and we saw the talented students of schools in Mussoorie march and play music. We gave a visit to the almighty and headed back to the hostel. Our stay at Mussoorie was nearing an end.

The next day we all woke up early and got ready to go to Rishikesh. The journey was a sleepy downhill ride across Dehradun to Rishikesh. We then took a bath in the Ganges. It was wonderful! We had breakfast at Chotiwala and headed back. After another round of dwindling decision making and heading in the opposite direction, we decided that 4 of us were keen to go rafting. All of us are glad now that we made the right decision. It was the dash of adventure that our getaway had always needed.

Our awesome instructors guided us through the whole rafting experience. We rafted in still water as well as rapids and whirlpools. We even took a dip in the middle of the river! At the end, we were all pretty tired after covering a distance of 12 kms, but the tiredness felt good.

It was then the way back home. Our only stops were some fried maggi at Roorkee and dinner at Chital.

Now, it is back to the daily drag that is normal life. I wish my home was in Mussoorie. I wish my academic institution was in Mussoorie. I wish I get to stay at a place as scenic and beautiful as Mussoorie on a permanent basis. I wish I could’ve lived the adventure longer. But, for now, I’ll hang on to the memories and make it through the monotony of life until the next adventure!

You can take a look at the photos of our trip over at Facebook or Flickr.

Yes, I’m in (yay!) and I will be participating in Google Summer of Code this year with Joomla! For those of you who don’t know what Joomla! is, it is a Content Management System ( CMS ) used widely to create and manage websites. I will be working on an Enhanced front-end editor for Joomla! Ashwin will be mentoring me for the summer.

I am thankful to Sameer for inspiring me to take part in GSoC. I also thank Elin, Sam, Toni and all the other mentors and community of Joomla! for helping me better my application into something practical and at the same time useful. It has been a great experience interacting with the Joomla! community for the past 1 – 2 months and that is something that has really inspired me to work on the project.

Things have been moving very quickly since I got to know that I got selected on 21st April at 12:30 am. But, the journey has just begun. I will be coding this coming summer to complete my project and to validate my selection. At present, I have been getting myself familier with the Joomla! framework, finalizing the implementation details of my project as well as sorting out a few issues in my mind. I plan to give my best effort to the project so that it becomes a useful feature for all Joomla! users.

I see this as a terrific opportunity to work in collaboration with talented people from all over the world. I see now why people love open source so much. It feels great to be a part of the Joomla! as well as the opensource community and to contribute to a project that is used by so many users.

My heartiest congratulations to everyone who got selected for Summer of Code. You can have a look at the list of students who got selected for Joomla! here: http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/joomla

This post’s title makes my obsession with use of hash-tags in twitter updates pretty clear ;)

My college wanted us to do a project as part of a “Bridge Course” this semester. In a way, I liked the concept as it was at least trying to convince some people to do something besides curriculum. Personally, it’s always good when you are working towards some objective like completing a project you have to submit. An example is last summer, when I had to create a project for the summer and I ended up doing a lot of fun stuff.

So, I thought, why not build a solution for a problem I have been facing for quite some time now. Those of you who know me personally or follow me on twitter, know that I am particularly unhappy about my college’s attendance criteria. It’s always been a headache for me trying to keep track of when I went to college and when I didn’t. I tried using Google Calendar but I thought it was pretty cumbersome to use for this particular purpose.

So, I thought, why not create a simple, easy-to-use and nice-looking webapp for exactly this purpose. That’s when ProxyCal was born. Even at the beginning, I had the idea in my mind of a calendar which used colors like green, red and yellow to denote the status for the day i.e. whether you went to college, took a leave or college was off. One more thing I wanted to do was to avoid anyone from creating a new account for using ProxyCal. So, I decided that I was going to store all the data regarding the attendance in a separate calendar ‘ProxyCal’ in the user’s Google Calendars.

So, all you need to use ProxyCal is to have a Google Account. This simplified things to quite an extent form the development point of view as it avoided me from maintaining a separate database for tracking a user’s attendance. I wanted my app to be ajaxy so I used the Google Calendar JavaScript API which meant I didn’t have to go through the tedious process of making XMLHTTPRequests to a proxy on my server which in turn used the Google Calendar Data API.

The entire app is almost completely developed using JavaScript. There is a bit of PHP to store some settings related data.

Some of the fun and useful features of ProxyCal are:

1. By default, it assumes you went to college on weekdays and college was off on weekends i.e Sat and Sun. This means, when you visit the app after some time, it automatically assigns the default statuses to the previous days in the month.

2. It uses the following color scheme:
Green – You went to college
Red – You took a leave
Yellow – College was Off

3. It allows you to set the cutoff percentage i.e. what percentage of attendance you are supposed to meet on a monthly basis.

4.  It also gives you an estimate of the no. of days you can take a leave in the current month.

5. You can edit the status for any day by simply clicking on it. It display’s a popup where you can simply set the new status.

For those of you wondering where the name came from, it does have some logic behind it. This app, in essence, assumes that once you went to college you either attended all the lectures or atleast had someone call a proxy for you :)
You cannot set attendance for all lectures separately. That would have made the app a little too complicated which was exactly the opposite of what I was striving to achieve.

ProxyCal is currently in beta. That means I am still working on it. Here are some features I would be adding soon:

1. Ability to store your weekly timetable so that ProxyCal can give you an estimation of your attendance in each subject.
2. A screencast demonstrating use of ProxyCal. Even though it is very simple to use.
3. Ability to download a PDF of the attendance log for any selected time period.
4. ProxyCal does not work on Internet Explorer.

I have developed ProxyCal in an agile manner. I wanted to get it done quickly for two reasons. One, I couldn’t wait to start using it :). Also, I have to look up things for the coming summer so I don’t want to be stuck up on what I already know how to do.

And so, ProxyCal is yet another example of an app I have built as a result of my personal needs. Maybe in future, I may think about creating something ( similar to ProxyCal ) which will be useful for a wider audience, like highlighting deadline for events.

You can start using ProxyCal by going here : http://ankitahuja.com/apps/proxycal

And as the footer of this app so prominently says,

“Thou shall not run short on attendance ever again!”

Here is a screenshot:

Be free to suggest me any features or report back any bugs or just comment. You can use the feedback tab on the left on the app page for this purpose.

Update: Unfortuntely, Google modified something in their Data API that is causing some problems in authentication with the users’ Google Account. I’m working on getting this app functional again.

I have an Orkut filter setup on my Gmail, so that all the emails notifying me of scraps skip the Inbox. Today, however, I decided to check my Orkut emails. And guess what, the first mail I saw was from the Orkut guys giving me the weekly statistics of my Opensocial application!

Here it is:

Here are the statistics for your OpenSocial app twitter.xml on orkut for the week of 2008/12/30: 

App submitted to orkut on 2008/11/04
Number of unique users who installed the app this week: 77
Total number of unique users who currently have the app installed: 532
Number of times profile pages of users who have installed this app were viewed: 16395
Number of times this app was viewed in canvas view: 446

Wow, and until now I thought that less than 100 users were using my application!

I think the Orkut team only recently started mailing developers weekly stats. I think it’s a great idea and hopefully they will continue to do so.