• "Robert Downey Jr really sells the idea of being a design engineer. To be fair, the Iron Man script does him the great service of having him have to build himself a new heart in a cave in Afghanistan, thus having to make imperfect things and fettle them to fit. That feeling gets slightly lost later in his super-engineer pad where apparently nothing needs filing when it comes back from the rapid prototyping machine. But he still manages to exude a kind of mad joy at making things, a fundamental character trait in the way that having nice breasts is not." Sophie on the emotional truths of storytelling.
  • "I'm not going to lie to you; fugitive.vim may very well be the best Git wrapper of all time."

I must have lost about six or seven hours trying to get a Rails application deploying from Git in the past week. I could push and pull from the repository, but could I get the thing to deploy via Capistrano? No, I could not.

The problem, as far as I could tell, was not with Capistrano. It was a simple SSH problem. I block port 22 for SSH on the server in question, for security reasons, and use a different port. But, no matter how I specified it, Git was insistent on trying to pull over 22. I did a lot of Googling, and found lots of conflicting answers, none of which worked.

And then I learned my lesson. That lesson is: when Linus tells you what to do, you do it:

Use the “.ssh/config” file ;)

So I configured a hostname in .ssh/config on the server, and everything worked instantly.

A lot of problems tend to come down to SSH, it seems. After that point, everything went swimmingly.