• git gets easier once you get the basic idea …
• The Thing About Git
• Think Like (a) Git

OpenSky’s engineering and product teams have an ongoing lunchtime presentation series called Lunch and Learn. A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk entitled Lunch and learn2git. This article is an expansion on that presentation, and covers lessons learned from using Git in the open source community.

I’ve been sitting on this one for way too long, and for that I apologize. I really have no idea how you folks have been living without it all this time, but maybe it’s because you have no idea what you’re missing out on.

Exactly what it says on the tin.

10. 9. 8. 7. 6…

Think of it as a late Christmas gift from me to you (all).

So you develop PHP 5.3 on a Mac? Mebbe you, like me, are a fan of Symfony2? Then you might have noticed a few deficiencies in the pre-loaded version of PHP 5.3 on your computer.

I just released a minor update to PHP Docblock Generator for Coda.

Colors make me happy, so I made some things for you.

I just released a brand new version of my GitX plugin for Coda.

Work and life has been keeping me crazy busy lately, so I’ve been sitting on this release far longer than I’d like. By way of apology, please accept version 1.0 of my PHP Docblock Generator plug-in for Coda. I promise this guy was worth the wait.

How to install Apache, PHP, MySQL, MongoDB and a whole bunch of other useful packages on Mac OS X 10.6.

Given that:

You’ll be needing this:

This post is mostly pretty pictures. I just ran some really quick benchmarks on a couple of of the YAML parsing options available for PHP. The blue line is the Spyc YAML library. The green line is the syck PECL extension. The yellow line is a standard PHP include(), and is on the chart as a reference point.

Doctrine is usually pretty rad. And sometimes it’s really really dumb.

I’ve been using Pukka — a Mac client for Delicious — for a bit, and it’s pretty great. (More on that later, it’s already the subject of a half-finished Technophobe review).

I’ve enjoyed working on the Zoop Framework’s Lunar branch, and it’s gotten pretty rad in the last several months. I wanted to compare it with some of the other offerings.

I set up super-sweet fuzzy “submitted by” timestamps on my blog a couple of days ago. They’re quite a bit easier to grok at a glance, and they show the full date when you hover over them.

Everything you need to know to make the switch.

If your Drupal site says things like Fatal error: Unsupported operand types in [...]/drupal/includes/common.inc on line 1376, this is just the post for you.

I needed the ability to disable certain HTML <select> options in the Smarty {html_options} plugin so I whipped up this version which allows just that.

If someone makes a digital version of your popular board game, don’t sue them. If someone ports your software to a new platform, or creates a wildly popular knockoff, don’t sue them. Don’t instinctively reach for a DMCA notice or a lawsuit. These developers aren’t your competition, they’re your fans.

Panic’s Coda is my current favorite editor. It’s not perfect yet, but they just keep making it better. Coda 1.6 and later support a great plug-in architecture that allows users to tweak the editor’s functionality to match their own needs and coding style.

Most geeks are enthralled by Swiss Army knives. “Look at all these features!” they say, “It even has a spoon!” … But the Swiss Army knife is, by definition, a compromise. When compared to actual silverware, a Swiss Army spoon falls far short of the mark. Fanboys and apologists accept this “Swiss Army” compromise because of the convenience offered. They no longer have to carry the right tool for every job, because they have one tool that’s good enough for most jobs. In the limited capacity of pants pockets, convenience wins over suitability almost every time.

In which our hero carries on the time-honored tradition of posting some random snippet to his blog because he might wish to reference it later.

You should check out “Use the Best Available Ampersand” from SimpleBits. I love me some ampersands, and that post is a great resource for prettifying your site’s ampersands with a little CSS typography.

I’ve noticed that the vast majority of problems people have getting multisite Drupal to work comes from not understanding this one concept…

TinyURL is amazing. They shortify any URL, so you can change from something long and heinous — think Google Maps addresses — to something far more palatable (ala http://tinyurl.com/2h5z5m). The end result is short, pithy, and emailable. They magically redirect it to the real URL for you, and the Internets are a better place for all of us. Check out their example:

In the interest of more attractive Internets, here’s a quick little javascript “widon’t” snippet — written in jQuery — that I’ve been using. Now go do something cool with it.

iTunes’ iPhone backup is absolutely horrid. I’ve just about decided to completely replace it with rsync, so I figured I’d give it one last go. It’s been 2 hours since I plugged my phone in and iTunes auto-synced. It’s been over a week since my last rsync backup. How do they compare?

What does your phone look like?

One of the most amazing and annoying things in Drupal 6 is the menu system. Thanks to a bunch of JavaScript magick, you can drag menu items around to reorder them, create submenus, and so forth…

Every once in a while someone asks me what cool software they should install on their computer. Invariably, I say something like “check out the OS X tag on my blog.”

Apparently I’ve been lying to everyone, because I looked at the software categories on my blog the other day and realized that I haven’t been posting much there at all. So I decided to do something about it.

Dan from todaywasawesome just asked me to help him with a weighted randomization function in PHP. I thought my solution was cool, if a bit simplistic. Like everything else I want to keep around, I’m posting it in my blag. Enjoy!

Like most Drupal hackers, I love to hate jQuery.

A few weeks ago I purchased the MacHeist II bundle, a program that hooks up Mac users with great deals on software and earns money for charity in the process… This year they donated almost half a million dollars. I’ve got no beef with MacHeist. I do, however, have a problem with Yazsoft, the vendors of Speed Download, which was included in the MacHeist bundle.

I threw together a fancy little JavaScript bookmarklet to create redirects in Drupal, and figured I’d share.

I love Firefox. Really, I do. It can be speedy. It can be extensible. But apparently it can’t be both at the same time… All my development plugins make it slow, and all my browsing plugins make it even slower.

Answers to a few questions from my server logs:

Conversation snippet of the day:

I reworked the feed reading signature images I made a while back and added something to trim the strings to a decent length without breaking words. So here you go. A one-liner that will trim a string to a decent length, and break it on whitespace:

I just finished a fresh Windows XP SP2 install… Now it’s doing the 65 critical security updates that have been released since SP2.

When I get frustrated or stressed, justin hileman dot info gets upgraded. On that note…

My roommate just got a new laptop for his trip to Cambodia, and we were talking about what he needed to do to make Windows XP usable. A few quick downloads and he’s well on his way.

justin hileman dot info has been updated.

If you’ve visited my MySpace profile recently, you’ve noticed that it doesn’t look much like a standard MySpace profile. Which I’m pretty stoked about, since the hideousness of most MySpace profiles approaches obscenity.

I love the Drupal CMS. One of my favorite features of Drupal is the ability to do a multisite install. Several sites can share one codebase. Updates are easily rolled out to every site simultaneously. Overall, it’s a wonderful idea. But I have some problems with the implementation…

I find myself firmly in the camp of the Open Source Pragmatists.

I worked on a project a while back that never quite solidified into a clear design plan or development goals. This was my first real experience with “feature creep,” or the tendency of a project to increase in scope and requirements beyond those originally foreseen. In this case, we were making changes to the project requirements up to the day before the product was released. Feature creep delayed the release by several weeks. Feature creep cost me six consecutive nights of sleep.