"version control" entries

Four short links: 26 January 2015

Four short links: 26 January 2015

Coding in VR, Git Workflows, Programming as Bookkeeping, and Valuing People

  1. How Might We Code in VR? — caught my eye because I’m looking for ideas on how to think about interaction design in the holoculus world.
  2. Git Workflows for Pros — non-developers don’t understand how important this is to productivity.
  3. All Programming is Bookkeeping — approach programming as a bookkeeping problem: checks and balances.
  4. Why I Am Not a Maker (Deb Chachra) — The problem is the idea that the alternative to making is usually not doing nothing — it’s almost always doing things for and with other people, from the barista to the Facebook community moderator to the social worker to the surgeon. Describing oneself as a maker — regardless of what one actually or mostly does — is a way of accruing to oneself the gendered, capitalist benefits of being a person who makes products.
Four short links: 16 June 2014

Four short links: 16 June 2014

Decision Trees, Decision Modifications, Mobile Patents, Web Client

  1. Quick DT — open source (Java) decision tree learner.
  2. Revealing Hidden Changes to Supreme Court OpinionsWHEREAS, It is now well-documented that the Supreme Court of the United States makes changes to its opinions after the opinion is published; and WHEREAS, Only “Four legal publishers are granted access to “change pages” that show all revisions. Those documents are not made public, and the court refused to provide copies to The New York Times”; and WHEREAS, git makes it easy to identify when changes have been made; RESOLVED, I shall apply a cron job to at least identify when the actual PDF has changed so everyone can see which documents have changed.
  3. Microsoft’s “Killer” Android Patents Revealed (Ars Technica) — Chinese Government required them disclosed as part of MSFT-Nokia merger. The patent lists are strategically significant, because Microsoft has managed to build a huge patent-licensing business by taxing Android phones without revealing what kind of legal leverage they really have over those phones.
  4. HTTPiea command line HTTP client, a user-friendly HTTP client.

Restructuring the Web with Git

Can version control manage content?

Web designers? Git? Github? Aren’t those for programmers? At Artifact, Christopher Schmitt showed designers how much their peers are already doing with Github, and what more they can do. Github (and the underlying Git toolset) changes the way that all kinds of people work together.

Sharing with Git

As amazing as Linux may be, I keep thinking that Git may prove to be Linus Torvalds’ most important contribution to computing. Most people think of it, if they think of it at all, as a tool for managing source code. It can do far more, though, providing a drastically different (and I think better) set of tools for managing distributed projects, especially those that use text.

Git tackles an unwieldy problem, managing the loosely structured documents that humans produce. Text files are incredibly flexible, letting us store everything from random notes to code of all kinds to tightly structured data. As awesome as text files are—readable, searchable, relatively easy to process—they tend to become a mess when there’s a big pile of them.

Read more…

Four short links: 16 January 2013

Four short links: 16 January 2013

What Matters, NetSec Game, Coding Freedom, and Pro Git

  1. Things Users Don’t Care About (Pete Warden) — every day we relearn these lessons. How great it will be once all their friends are on it.
  2. Tracer FIRE 5 — online workshop and game that teaches network security. [A] week-long hands-on computer security workshop for cyber defenders in DOE, other government agencies, critical infrastructure, and college students. The exercise consists of 2 days of intensive training on a single subject, followed by a 2½-day game in which contestants are placed on a team and must use their new and existing skills to compete with other teams for points across multiple categories. (via Reddit /r/netsec)
  3. Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Amazon) — Gabriella Coleman’s new book, which explains us. Exploring the rise and political significance of the free and open source software (F/OSS) movement in the United States and Europe, Coding Freedom details the ethics behind hackers’ devotion to F/OSS, the social codes that guide its production, and the political struggles through which hackers question the scope and direction of copyright and patent law. In telling the story of the F/OSS movement, the book unfolds a broader narrative involving computing, the politics of access, and intellectual property. (Also available as CC-Licensed PDF)
  4. Pro Git (Scott Chacon) — CC-NC-SA licensed book on mad git skills.

Inside GitHub’s role in community-building and other open source advances

An interview with Matthew McCullough

In this video interview, Matthew McCullough of GitHub discusses what they’ve learned over time as they grow and watch projects develop there.

Read more…

Jon Loeliger offers some practices to use with Git

Advice from author of "Version Control with Git."

After finishing the second edition of "Version Control with Git," author Jon Loeliger talked to O'Reilly editor Andy Oram about how to use Git effectively as changes to code pile up.

Four short links: 9 May 2012

Four short links: 9 May 2012

Version Control for Real Stuff, Educators on Food Stamps, Gestural Exploration, and Book Marketing

  1. We Need Version Control for Real Stuff (Chris Anderson) — This is pointing us toward the next step, a GitHub for stuff. If open source hardware is going to take off like open source software, we need this. (via Evil Mad Scientist)
  2. Graduates and Post-Graduates on Food Stamps (Chronicle of Higher Education) — two points for me here: the inherent evil of not paying a living wage; and the pain of market signals that particular occupations and specialisations are not as useful as once they were. I imagine it’s hard to repurpose the specific knowledge in a Masters of Medieval History to some other field, though hopefully the skills of diligent hard work, rapid acquisition of knowledge, and critical thought will apply to new jobs. Expect more of this as we replace human labour with automation. I look forward to the software startup which creates work for people outside the organisation; the ultimate “create more value than you capture”.
  3. Explore Exoplanets with Gestural Interfaces — uses John Underkoffler’s Oblong gestural interface. Underkoffler came up with the Minority Report interface which has fed the dreams of designers for years.
  4. Book Marketing Lessons Learned (Sarah Milstein) — I really liked this honest appraisal of how Baratunde Thurston marketed his “How to be Black” book, and am doubly chuffed that it appeared on the O’Reilly Radar blog. I was fascinated by his Street Team, but knew I wanted to bring it to your attention when I read this. Start with your inner circle. I had an epiphany with Gary Vaynerchuk. I asked: “Did I ever ask you to buy my book?” He said, “Yeah, I bought it yesterday.” I talked about his book, but cash on the table — it didn’t happen. He wished he had identified everyone he knows, sending a personal note explaining: “A) buy the book; B) this means a lot to me. You owe me or I will owe you. Here’s some things you can do to help: If you have speaking opportunities, let me know. For instance, I would love to speak at schools.” Make it easy for people who want to help you. Everything else is bonus. If you haven’t already converted the inner circle, you’ve skipped a critical step. “Let the people who already love you show it” is the skill I feel like I’ve spent years working on, and still have years to go.
Four short links: 7 February 2012

Four short links: 7 February 2012

Version Control, Data Tables, Developer Communities, and Reality Mining

  1. Integrated Content Editor (GitHub) — a track changes implementation, built in javascript, for anything that is contenteditable on the web, written by the NY Times team and open sourced.
  2. Data Tables — featureful jQuery plugin for tables of data. (via Javascript Weekly)
  3. Creating a Developer Community (Slideshare) — treat the problem like a channel conversion funnel: turn visitors into downloaders, downloaders into users, users into contributors. His screenshots of shitty conversions are great! (via Kohsuke Kawaguchi)
  4. Sex Differences in Intimate Relationships (PDF) — Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and others use social graph analysis to analyze communications patterns in relationships. Notice that not only does the preference for an opposite-sex “best friend” kick in significantly earlier for females than for males (~18 years vs mid-20s, respectively), but females maintain a higher plateau value for much longer. More reality mining to understand ourselves. (via Sean Gourley)
Four short links: 19 December 2011

Four short links: 19 December 2011

Version Control, Web-based ID, Mobile Design, and Node.js Tools

  1. The History of Version Control (Francis Irving) — concise history of the key advances in managing source code versions. Worth it just for the delicious apposition of “history” and “version control”.
  2. BrowserID — Mozilla’s authentication solution. BrowserID aims to provide a secure way of proving your identity to servers across the Internet, without having to create separate usernames and passwords each time. Instead of a new username, it uses your email address as your identity which allows it to be decentralized since anyone can send you an email verification message. It’s currently implemented via JavaScript but hopefully it will be built into the browser in the future. (via Nelson Minar)
  3. A Look Inside Mobile Design Patterns — Sample chapter on how different apps handle invitations, from a new [O’Reilly-published, huzzah!] book on mobile design patterns. (via David Kaneda)
  4. Node Toolbox — concise compendium of resources for node.js development.