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This is good, and I will be endeavouring to tidy up my commits in future. I'm good at the "little and often" mantra, less good at leaving all my typos/dodgy moments in.
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"The (for now) final end product seems incredibly obvious. And popular.
Yet it took decades of iterative innovation, from some of the cleverest minds in the field, to make something so apparently simple yet powerful.
And every step was astonishing." This is great stuff from Francis.
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"So, as some of you may know, the old shrine got re-activated as a working shrine a few days ago, and the Church classroom cleared away for meditation and contemplation, led by Fa Zang (Rinpoche), the guy in the buddhist monk robe who has been doing a lot of sewing in the craft area recently." I love mailing lists. And this is a remarkable post.
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"Using vim is like talking to your editor in ‘verb modifier object’ sentences, turned into acronyms." Which is a good way of thinking of it.
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"Calepin reads Markdown-formatted, plain-text files stored in your Dropbox and converts them into blog posts for you." Which is pretty clever.
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"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.
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"I'm not going to lie to you; fugitive.vim may very well be the best Git wrapper of all time."
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"Today, we wanted to give you a heads-up about a new service now in development that will let players access the Auction House directly through the Armory website or Armory App for iPhone or iPod touch." And bingo, that's the killer out-of-world application for WOW players. (This is something I suggested in my talk at Develop last summer; glad to see Blizzard do the obvious. Which I really ought to put online).
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""Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." is a grammatically correct sentence used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated constructs." And: what a URL.
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Some good stuff here; the tips on the stash were new to me, and particularly handy.
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"In this post I present the development model that I’ve introduced for all of my projects (both at work and private) about a year ago, and which has turned out to be very successful. I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while now, but I’ve never really found the time to do so thoroughly, until now. I won’t talk about any of the projects’ details, merely about the branching strategy and release management." It's a detailed strategy, but well thought-through; I'm certainly going to bear some of this in mind in future (and, indeed, the way the release branches are handled is familiar).
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More brilliant data-analysis and writing from OkTrends – perhaps my favourite data-blog out there, and one of my favourite discoveries in 2010 so far.
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"I suppose there are multitudes of people to be 'drawn' by promising to show them what the city of a hundred years hence will be like. It was, I thought, an unresponsive audience, and I heard no comments. I could not tell from their bearing whether they believed that Metropolis was really a possible forecast or no. I do not know whether they thought that the film was hopelessly silly or the future of mankind hopelessly silly. But it must have been one thing or the other." He did not like it too much.
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"Unless your surname's Coren you're going to need some help getting into the journalism industry." Great advertising from the Press Gazette
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"All yeahs in a baby are always the same height." Crazy markup preprocessor of the day, with suitably entertaining documentation.
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"It seems to me that Transgaming have done more to hurt the Mac gaming world than anyone else. The idea that you can turn your product into a Mac game OVERNIGHT, without employing ANYONE WHO SEEMS TO CARE ABOUT THE PLATFORM is an absurd thing to peddle."
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"Tig provides a simple command-line yet visual interface to Git." An explanation of what Tig does, and why you might find it useful.
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"Tig is a git repository browser that additionally can act as a pager for output from various git commands."
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Marvellous – case study of all the packaging concepts for the bonkers House Of The Dead: Overkill. Lots of gnarly, grindhouse-inspired graphic design going on here, and many things that are as good as the final version.
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"When it’s just you, the rooftops and Faith’s slim repertoire of jumps, shimmies, slides and rolls, it’s something like the urban Tarzan game we all hoped Mirror’s Edge would be. Time Trial mode rewards practice and it rewards perseverance, and it’s the only reason to buy Mirror’s Edge." An interesting take on Mirror's Edge, which has a lot of truth in it.
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"Thank you to everyone who emailed asking about a World of Goo Soundtrack. This is probably as close to an "official" soundtrack I'll ever make for the game World of Goo. I'm making it available here on my personal portfolio for free." No, thank you, Kyle.
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A useful guide, although perhaps more detailed than you'd normally need. Still, clear instructions for handling reverting changes in git.
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"Afterwards, we came to refer to certain types of accomplishments as “black triangles.” These are important accomplishments that take a lot of effort to achieve, but upon completion you don’t have much to show for it – only that more work can now proceed. It takes someone who really knows the guts of what you are doing to appreciate a black triangle."
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112 different games1 It's amazing to think that "Moving Shields" and "Zigzagging Laser Bombs" could be counted as different game-types, though, and presumably that number comes from all possible combinations. The videogame industry's obsession with bullet-points on the box is deep-rooted, it seems. (From Simon Parkin's lovely "Box Art" blog).
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"Mr Aygun once said: "I thought how much easier it would be if they could take their food with them." The first of the new snacks was served on March 2, 1971, at Hasir, his restaurant in Berlin. It was called a doner kebab after the Turkish word "dondurmek" which means a rotating roast." So now you know.
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Olly Moss has now moved from movies to videogames, pastiching classic Penguin covers; the Goldeneye one is superb.
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Daily git tips. So far, they've all been rather handy, and given they're nice and short makes recommending this as a subscription easy.
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A "museum" of Flash site loading screens. Not sure what to say, really.
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"Picking out political buzzwords from 2008 is like shooting moose in a pigpen. The fundamentals were so dizzyingly strong, it could be tough to keep them all straight." Good selection, though, both political and non.
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"Waveform Series is the laser-cut shapes of the waveform of the sound in sound editing software environment. I used some human sound such as yawn, atchoum, giggle, wow, and the sound of church bell." Utterly, utterly gorgeous.
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"A Mac OS X Leopard developer tool for debugging HTTP services by graphically creating & inspecting complex HTTP messages." Oh, that could come in handy.
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Lovely way to generate pages for your github projects – and to do so as a branch of said project. Clever.
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"CCP Games has uncovered an exploit in Eve Online that survived in the game for 4 years and may have had a massive impact on the game and game economy." Read the links for more details; suffice to say, EVE is going through a major economic upheaval right now; exploits that have lasted for four years are no longer viable, and everything's getting very expensive. Sound familiar?
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"Semi-jestfully I would talk with my friends about how stupid it would be to get an I <3 Helvetica tattoo… an even stupider idea would be to get it as a tramp stamp. Well, I got good reviews from my posse and impulsively I got it last night…" Oh boy.
Pulling from Git over a non-standard SSH port
13 October 2008
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.