Patrick Crosby's Internet Presents

Create new git repository with gitosis

2009-11-03T00:00:00-05:00

Assuming gitosis already set up and working…

Edit gitosis-admin/gitosis.conf and add the new repository.

[group company]
members = jackblack
writable = examproj

Commit this and push it.

git commit -a -m "added examproj"
git push

In a local repository (you’ve already called git init and done your initial commit), push the repository to the server.

git remote add origin git@code.example.com:examproj.git
git push origin master:refs/heads/master

Then pull it to where you want it.

cd ~/git
git pull git@code.example.com:examproj.git

git tags

2009-11-03T00:00:00-05:00

Some notes on how to use tags in git:

You should always use the -a switch (or sign it). Explanation here.

To tag and the push to remote:

git tag -a v1.0.0 -m "version 1.0!!!"
git push --tags

Then, in the future, to get the code at the tag point and do stuff with it:

git checkout -b fromtag1.0 v1.0.0
<do some stuff>
git commit ...

And then back in the master, you can merge that branch back in:

git checkout master
git merge fromtag1.0
git push

That’s enough for now…

Max OS X Animated GIF Editor Champion -- Pixen

2009-10-30T00:00:00-04:00

I needed to edit an animated gif on Mac OS X today…tried Acorn, but it doesn’t seem to support them. Tried Gimp, but it was unusable…could be user error, but every tool I selected would not stay selected and I couldn’t paste between documents.

Then I downloaded Pixen and despite it crashing the first time I tried saving the GIF, it worked great. And it’s free.

One note: if you use multiple layers in the frames, you need to merge them into one layer for the output to be correct.

Authlogic, Passenger, and cookie_store Sessions Don't Mix

2009-10-29T00:00:00-04:00

There seems to be a problem with Authlogic, Passenger, and cookie_store sessions. You can read some details on this github commit.

A lot of the commenters keep saying that it gets fixed for them with newer versions of rails/passenger, but I’m having trouble with the rails 2.3.4, passenger 2.2.5, and authlogic 2.1.2 (all the latest versions as of this post). It was working fine at some point…

The fix? Use the old :active_record_store.

Add the following to config/environment.rb:

config.action_controller.session_store = :active_record_store

Then run

rake db:sessions:create

For PostgreSQL, I changed the migration it generates to the following:

class CreateSessions < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    create_table :sessions do |t|
      t.text :session_id, :null => false
      t.text :data
      t.timestamps
    end

    add_index :sessions, :session_id
    add_index :sessions, :updated_at
  end

  def self.down
    drop_table :sessions
  end
end

(column type for :session_id changed from string to text).

I imagine that :mem_cache_store would fix it as well…

Rails to_xml with procs

2009-10-15T00:00:00-04:00

Ever wanted to add something to the xml representation of an ActiveRecord object that wasn’t a method or an include? You can with procs.

respond_to do |format|
  format.xml do
    proc = Proc.new { |options| options[:builder].tag!('saved', current_user.saved?(@page)) }
    render :xml => @page.to_xml(:include => [:user], :procs => [proc])
  end
end

And now this will spit out:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<page>
  <content>So here's line 1</content>
  <created-at type="datetime">2009-10-15T16:50:57Z</created-at>
  <dictionary-id type="integer">1</dictionary-id>
  <saved>false</saved>
</page>

In this case, the model doesn’t know anything about the user and I wanted to keep it that way, but the XML api call needs to include the saved state.

Vim Objective-C Colon Indentation

2009-10-02T00:00:00-04:00

Vim’s objective-c mode has an annoying indentation issue. It tries to line colons up on subsequent lines, like so:

[self performSelectorOnMainThread:@selector(finishLoad) 
                       withObject:nil 
                    waitUntilDone:NO];

That’s nice, but it has an annoying bug that makes it try to align the colons with a previous line that is unrelated:

if ([someVariable isEqualToString:@"blah"]) {
[self performSelectorOnMainThread:@selector(finishLoad) 
                       withObject:nil 
                    waitUntilDone:NO];
}

This all takes place in indent/objc.vim (full path on a MacPorts installation is /opt/local/share/vim/vim72/indent/objc.vim, for MacVim it is /Applications/MacVim.app/Contents/Resources/vim/runtime/indent/objc.vim).

There is probably a way to fix this in a .vimrc file, but I just edited objc.vim. At the bottom of the file is a function GetObjCIndent. Change the second if statement to match the following:

function GetObjCIndent()
    let theIndent = cindent(v:lnum)

    let prev_line = getline(v:lnum - 1)
    let cur_line = getline(v:lnum)
        
    if prev_line !~# ":" || cur_line !~# ":"
        return theIndent
    endif
     
    if prev_line !~# ";" && prev_line !~# "{"
        let prev_colon_pos = s:GetWidth(prev_line, ":")
        let delta = s:GetWidth(cur_line, ":") - s:LeadingWhiteSpace(cur_line)
        let theIndent = prev_colon_pos - delta
    endif
        
    return theIndent
endfunction

There are some refinements that could be made to fix it for more cases, but this one fixes the one that was driving me crazy.

Vim ack plugin with MacVim and MacPorts

2009-10-01T00:00:00-04:00

The vim ack plugin doesn’t work if you use MacVim and MacPorts. The problem is the path (/opt/local/bin/ack). MacVim doesn’t get its path from your login shell (despite what the preferences page says) and /opt/local/bin isn’t a default path.

The way to fix it is to add a file to /etc/paths.d with one line it:

/opt/local/bin

You can call the file whatever you want. Restart MacVim and :Ack will work.

Safari Keyboard Shortcuts To Switch Tabs

2009-09-10T00:00:00-04:00

Photo by wwarby

I am so used to the cmd-1, cmd-2, cmd-3, cmd-9 keyboard shortcuts in Firefox to switch to the first, second, third, and last tabs in a window. Whenever I try to use Safari and I instinctually use these shortcuts, it goes to bookmarks (1, 2, 3, and 9), which is incredibly annoying. Apple provides no way to change this.

With Leopard, I was using Safari Commander, but it stopped working with Snow Leopard. There are hints on twitter that a new version is coming out soon that will work, but it requires Safari to run in 32-bit mode. And Firefox seems to be slower than usual under Snow Leopard.

So the solution? Fastscripts. Thanks to this blog post by Justin Blanton, I now have scripts to switch to tabs one through five and the last tab. I modified his scripts to be for Safari instead of WebKit. They are each one line long, but in case you’re too lazy to type them in, here they are for you:

Put them in ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Safari then assign them to the correct keys in the Script Shortcuts preferences pane in FastScripts.

Jekyll Script

2009-09-08T00:00:00-04:00

Speaking of jekyll, there’s a way to get git to publish using post-commit hooks, but I like running a little script to do it. It just runs jekyll to build the site, then calls rsync to make it live (it connects to the server over ssh).

#!/bin/sh

echo "running jekyll"
jekyll --no-auto
echo "rsyncing site with blog server"
cd _site && rsync -Cavz --delete . example.com:/var/www/blog.example.com
echo "done"

That’s it…

Jekyll Exclude Files

2009-09-05T00:00:00-04:00

By default, jekyll will copy everything in the source directory into _site, but there’s an undocumented feature that lets you exclude or ignore files. A configuration variable named exclude exists. Any files or directories listed will be ignored. For example, the following is in my _config.yml file:

exclude: ["makelive.sh"]

so that the script that syncs the site with the live version isn’t copied onto the live site.