The Thing About Git — One man’s workflow with some debate in the comments about the utility of the index.

Another man’s git workflow.

git awsome-ness [git rebase –interactive] — All about git rebase –interactive.

Git merging by example.


require 'rexml/document'
include REXML #namespace convenience
doc = Document.new File.read("chiquita_shipments.xml")
doc.elements.each("//fruits/fruit/color") do |el|
puts el.parent if el.texts[0].to_s == "yellow"
end


Let’s say chiquita_shipments.xml looks like…

<pallet number='1'>
<fruits>
  <fruit>
    <name>banana</name>
    <color>yellow</color>
    <round>no</round>
  </fruit>
<fruits>
<pallet>

• Flex
• Adobe Illustrator
• Eclipse (I’ve played with it occasionally, but I’ve never had a reason to leave VIM)
• Our internal, uh, ‘asset format’

Flex is particularly cool because bundled with AIR, it lets you take web-centric UI concepts and apply them to desktop applications. Out of the box, the GUI builder is easier to work with and creates prettier interfaces than just about any other GUI toolkit I’ve played with. You can use CSS rules to style the appearance and layout.

Flex/Eclipse tip. The following error…

initial content not found

is probably due to your having mucked up the workspace\[PROJECT_NAME]\.actionScriptProperties file. In my case, a libraryPathEntry had gone missing. (Google has yet to learn this trick, which would have saved a piece of my Friday.)

In short, restore from an Eclipse project backup or regenerate a new project.

When I see this guy pop up in my RSS feeds, I tend to stop everything else I’m doing.

Here is a diagram of the architecture I ended up with (component explanations are below)…“

Best of all this contains a sighting of the elusive hoverchuck…

…so you know it’s going to be a computational success.

The case of the 500-mile email

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“We can’t send mail more than 500 miles,” the chairman explained.

I choked on my latte. “Come again?”

Wordpress has some neat little bits to it. If this weren’t mostly experimental, I might feel silly not using something more Rubyish, like Mephisto, except I already maintain several mongrel clusters at work and frankly, I don’t want to do it here also. There’s a lot to be said for mod_php being just mod_php and not some terrible many-moving-part combination of [mod_proxy, mod_proxy_balancer, pen, pound, mongrel, thin, nginx, lighttpd]… each piece of which then requires an entry or routine in monit or whatever.
To sum up: as demonstrated, no, there’s nothing of interest here.

I recently looked up an old friend and realized all over again how difficult it is to find people on the net. The name ‘Daemian’ is unusual enough that it shouldn’t be impossible, assuming you’ve somehow managed to remember the actual spelling; on the other hand, Google shows a bunch of references to people who happen to spell their name similarly. Thus, this.

I plan, without any actual expectation of updating this ever again, to use this as a means for people to find me on the net, and while serving that noble purpose, there may be a couple semi-nifty search-related things I could do with it, like seducing Google into finally containing a few of the more obscure problems I end up researching multiple times, like this one…

Q: What does it mean when Apache reports

Unknown DAV provider: filesystem
?

A: It probably means…

/etc/apache2/mods-available/dav_fs.conf:DAVLockDB /var/lock/apache2/DAVLock
The file referenced there doesn’t exist. /var/ is mounted as tmpfs in at least Gentoo and Ubuntu, so it gets wiped out at every boot, which doesn’t make a lot of sense when you think about it.

Fascinating, yes. Stay tuned for further jaw-dropping excerpts.