Some projects provide information about how people should fork and contribute to them. This is my general approach (included here, obviously, for my own edification):
- Fork a project: Github clickity-click
- Clone it locally:
git clone git@github.com:username/project.git
- Add the upstream project:
git remote add upstream git@github.com:upstream/project.git
- Do not commit to the
masterbranch; it is to be kept up-to-date with upstream master:git pull upstream master
- Create branches that solve one feature or issue each, named whatever:
git branch new-branch-name master
- Create a ‘personal master’ named with your username:
git branch username master
- Do not merge master into feature branches, rather rebase these on top of master:
git rebase new-branch-name
- Merge all personal feature branches into your personal master branch, so you’ve got a branch that represents all your development.
My main goal is to create discrete branches, based on the upstream master, for features that I want to push back upstream.
(No doubt I’m missing obvious things, and any git-geek will see instantly the gaps in my knowledge.)
[Keywords: code, development, git, Github, Programming, version control] [No comments] [Permanent link]
I’ve just put up a little script I’ve been playing with that creates family trees from werelate.org data, using GraphViz. Here’s what my tree is currently looking like (click for a clickable SVG, if you’re using a good browser):
[Keywords: family, genealogy, graphics, GraphViz, werelate.org] [No comments] [Permanent link]
This looks great. A community Linux host for email accounts, shell access, and a pile of other uses. They stand for “free access to computers; always yield to the hands-on imperative; freedom of information; decentralization; mistrust of bogus judgement criteria, such as degrees, age, race or position; world improvement”. They seem to be keeping things personal, and human. Hoorah for ninthfloor.org.
[Keywords: beards, hosting, Linux, ninthfloor.org] [No comments] [Permanent link]
I rode again this afternoon and evening on the bike path that runs down from Hampton Road to South Terrace, and was reminded of the poorly-laid new surface that has been installed on the lower part of it. It’s rough and bumpy and looks like an amature job. Why does this happen to such a important bike route?! It’s not like whoever builds these things doesn’t know how to make beautifully smooth and well-curved paths — they managed to do it over at the northern end of the South Beach car park with that new S-curve bit, which was done at about the same time (although I’m not sure why it had to be an S-curve).
But it’s not like this bit of crap path really matters. And there’s probably some advantage in having the bottom of that nice hill a bit bumpy, so that over-enthusiastic cyclists (or just well-greased-bearing bearers) don’t feel like swooshing on into the pedestrian crossroads at the end, or onto the road.
What is most annoying is that such shoddy work would never be accepted on a motor-vehicle road!! Why must bicycle traffic be always considered second-class?! Why not build a network of bike paths with a view to people actually using them to get around (and not just for Saturday-morning pootling down to a cafe?). Why not take this stuff seriously?
[Keywords: cycling, Fremantle, South Beach, Transport] [No comments] [Permanent link]
I am ripping down a piece of 135mm tas oak for a drawer-bottom. Straight down the guts of it, I mean: the sectional cut of greatest area; the big-board-to-two-thin-boards break; if you see what I mean. The sort of thing done in twenty-five seconds by a bandsaw, but taking me an hour and a half (maybe; I’m not counting, and I don’t think you should either). I sharpened my dad’s dad’s ripsaw yesterday (well, it’s sort of mine now — and how I love the thing!) and it’s now doing it’s octagenerian best (no, actually I’ve no terribly firm idea of how old it is) to rip straight and thin and planar. My muscles are attempting to keep up with it, and not doing so well. Perhaps another few drawer-bottoms, or wardrobe-backs, or other thinish bits of furniture cladding (which don’t mind their back’s been furry) will see me back in condition. Perhaps not.
Ripping timber like this is fun. That’s why I’m doing it. I don’t really need a drawer bottom made in this way — my dad gave me a perfectly suitable panel of ply just three days ago, that he didn’t want and that I’ve not other use for — so it must be for fun. Why else would I have eschewed the much faster (and yes, certainly more structurally stable, and probably stronger) route of plywood-and-glue and have the drawer slid into its home and gone from my todo list by now?
Because this isn’t about making a drawer, it would seem. (And oh! what other new-age cliches are to come next?!)
It’s about standing at my bench, making sawdust, hearing the tools in the wood, breathing with the strokes of the saw… feeling non-analytical for once! Just doing, very slowly, and not thinking anything of the future, or how all this is meant to work. It’s time to let the programmer’s brain sleep for a while…
(Oh, and “non-analytical”?! Yes, quite; but I didn’t say “non-ironic” did I? Hmm…)
[Keywords: cutlery drawer, hand tools, ripping, sawdust, sawing, wood] [No comments] [Permanent link]
I first used a Mac in about 1993 — a Quadra I think it might’ve been, or a Performa. I’d come from DOS and Amiga and didn’t really know anything about anything — I didn’t even know there was anything to be known. I remember hearing someone talking about Windows, and assuming they just meant those rectangles one could drag about on the screen. A computer to me was a fun sort of thing which could usually be made to do (boring… but strangely compelling) things with textual input and output, thanks to variants of a ‘basic‘ language (AmigaBasic, QBasic, etc.). When I found AppleScript — and when I started using it for CGI programs (don’t ask!) — it seemed that all that one needed was an idea and some time, and the machines could be made to do anything!
Anyway, it was on System 7 that I spent most of my time (and its successors), thanks to my stepfather’s loyalty to Apples — and I loved it. I loved the whole Apple thing, really — this odd feeling that somehow, just by choosing this particular OS, one could be calmer, more focussed, write better (code or prose), and still spend one’s spare time rock climbing (as I did). That couldn’t be the case with those horrid business machines running Windows, that was for sure! I even got a reply from Douglas Adams himself once (a Mac person, as if you didn’t know), to my pedantic email with the subject “Macs are PCs too, you know” (he said, no, they’re not, that argument has been won, and Macs are something more than Personal Computers). I remember sitting in a bookshop reading the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, and thinking how much amazingly careful thought had gone in to everything — the distance between buttons in a dialog window, for example, or the algorithm for changing the length of the ‘thumb’ in a scroll bar as the content length changed.
Why on Earth was there such an element of personal identification with these computers?! I was an ‘Apple person’; otherwise known these days, more appropriately, as a fanboi! Which has lasted nearly twenty years… but I can’t keep it up. I’ve been through five or six Macs in that time — I’m typing this on my MacBook5,1 — but it’s time to move on. I’ve enjoyed them all, especially the feeling that they are reliable: physically solid and unlikely to break in my backpack. But I won’t be buying another. I’m losing faith.
No, I’ve lost my faith. I lost my faith as Apple wanted to control everything more and more — the whole ‘ecosystem’, as they say, of OS and programs and data and sources — and as my awareness of the value of open standards grew. Obviously, I’m not saying that one can’t work perfectly well with open standards on Mac OS, because I have been doing so for years and years. It’s just that the OS as a whole is not geared to helping people do that. I shudder to think of people who know no better and are tying up their entire digital archives in formats that offer no security for future access! (But don’t let me get sidetracked into that discussion…)
I’ll no longer align my computing life (which is a rather large part of my life, for better or worse) with a corporation who’s aims are less than honourable: so I’ve bought a Lenovo X220, and shall be running Ubuntu exclusively. (I would’ve done this years ago, except for the fact that my current hardware has been running well since 2008, and I hate the idea of discarding a useful machine. Also, I do most of my computing on Linux anyway; the local machine is just a gateway, really.)
Goodbye Mac OS! I’ve enjoyed the ride and learnt lots, but ultimately have been thwarted in learning on too many occasions. It’s time for a system that, should I come up against its limitations, can be changed to suit my needs.
So long and thanks for all the fish. ;-)
[Keywords: activism, Apple, Douglas Adams, fandom, free as in speech, freedom, gratis, laptops, Lenovo, libre, Linux, Mac OS, Open Source, Programming, Ubuntu, X220] [No comments] [Permanent link]
I am sitting on hot concrete near a fence and a sing that reads “NO THOROUGHFARE”. The concrete is a path (leading to the sign), the fence is pretty normal, and the sign doesn’t tell anyone anything that the locked gate doesn’t. I don’t suppose this gate is ever open; I’ve certainly never seen it so. It leads from a road to a carpark, and the carpark is accessed from a different road. I’m not sure who’s meant to walk from one to the other.
The sign, though: let me look at that. Why is it fixed to the steel pipe? That would’ve been put in for it specifically, wouldn’t it? No, on a second look, it does have a bracing function — the two parallel bars where there was no room for an angled brace down to the ground. But did they really need to put ten rivets in the thing?! And cut its corners away like that — it’s a nice touch, letting the tin lie flat on the pipes, but it seems like a lot of extra work for such a thing as this. No council did this, I think! And, once whoever it was had cut the corners and was about to drill all those holes — why didn’t they bother putting the blasted thin in the centre?! surely that’s not much extra work?
Still, some people — not that long ago — put a lot of work into a big concrete path, fence, gate, and the sign, all so that no one can go through here.
[Keywords: Hamilton Hill, suburbex, urbex] [No comments] [Permanent link]
Wikisource has begun, at long last, to be able to produce export formats for its books. PDF and Epub have been made available in the last week or so, the first via the WMF-wide book creator tool (which has just started supporting the <pages /> markup that is used on Wikisource to assemble transcribed books) and the second thanks to a script from Italy.
[Keywords: books, epub, exporting, PDF, Reading, typography, Wikimedia, wikisource] [No comments] [Permanent link]
We offered unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, for ever, for free — to anybody who has something to share that belongs in a library.
—Brewster Kahle, Entertainment Gathering Conference 2007 (republished as a TED Talk). The above quote is at 14:19.
The crux of it is of course “something that belongs in a library”. If one has something that could conceivably be held in a library, then there should be a library in which it can be held; the Internet Archive is one possibility.
[Keywords: archiving, Brewster Kahle, cloud storage, GLAM, Internet Archive, libraries] [No comments] [Permanent link]
