I loved this screen cast on Git and i strongly recommend this for any one. It runs for an hour and half. He goes from basics to all the way to advanced in the end. I would rate this to be one of the best screen casts. He explains it so well the internals of the git that it solidified my understanding of branching, merging and using remote repository well. Here are the links…
If you have been following my posts, you would have noticed that I made the decision on branching model for the web development. Usually ISP ‘s provide a lot of choices on VCS (Version Control System) - svn,mercurial,bazzar and git. I wanted to choose one that makes the dev process efficient and fast enough for frequent releases.
Having used powerful and popular commercial VCS which is centralized by the way, I was leaned towards going with svn because it is same as them except for lack of gui tools to admin, locking and painful multiple merges between branches. But it seemed to be the popular open source version control in the dev community now. But i wanted to step back and evaluate other options of git and mercurial which i’ve not used before even as a developer.
I was stumped when i attempted to evaluate git and mercurial. Really these two are DVCS (Distributed Version Control System) which is quite different from the CVCS (Centralized Version Control System) like cvs,perforce and svn. Honestly there are some basic fundamental difference between the distributed & centralized that you need to be aware of. Better explained here.
You need to first get some of the centralized concepts( the painful branching and merging) out of your brain for a while and look at DVCS in a pure mind. I’m planning to install and play with git on os/x as it looks promising among DVCS choices.
If you have sometime to kill take a look at this youtube video where Linus talks about Git. Key take away from this video is that DVCS is better than CVCS and not about the git vs other source controls.
Usability at it’s best i should say. I was listening to my songs on the new macbook pro. The system auto-locked since it was idle for while but i was able to play,stop and skip songs including the volume controls without requiring to unlock. Don’t know if such feature exists in windows though at least not in my windows laptop. I know some security nerds will frown upon this but i love it…
Coming from a background of desktop product development with a large team, i needed to step back and look at the branching model holistically for web development with smaller team. There is a huge shift in the development process. Small team vs large team, hosting vs shrink-wrapped, planned (patching) vs organic (small and frequent changes) etc.,
I found this excellent article and the summary of this article is the best. It answers all the questions i had in my mind. I’m going with the model2. But i still need to decide on the source control to be used. It’s tough given there are too many good choices svn/git/mercurial.
I’m not a gui person anymore as i work mostly on terminal on os/x just as in linux. Rather than doing a safe delete as in Linux i prefer to move the files to trash in OS/X and clean up the trash whenever i’ve sometime to kill.
Fugu: A very good open source (Free BSD) GUI tool to do file transfer securely. It makes life easy when you do some one time things over doing it via command line.
You don’t really need this if you are very comfortable with the OS/X built-in command line tool: sftp.
Had to setup a cron job today and had to do this via crontab file on linux today. My old and small brain does not remember the weird crontabs format anymore. Found this good this quick reference for Crontab. It covers all of what you need for modifying crontab.
In the last 2 days i’ve been researching on hosting the django app. Finally narrowed it down to 2. Signed up on both to try it out. The winner was webfaction. Here is why i loved it..
1. Set up the DAMP with the snap of finger. They have an excellent wizard to setup Django, WSGI, Apache and MySql through wizards. You can choose different version of Django and WSGI (including trunk). You don’t need to have know about installing or configuring any of these. These are done straight forward with this Wizard including serving static media files directly out of apache. Same thing goes for admin medias too. This ISP is the best for the Django. I created my site in 30 minutes.
2. You are free to install any python egg for 2.3/2.4/2.5. I needed libxml and installed with the easy_install.
3. They have plenty of choices for source control: git, mercurial, svn and bazaar which are available out of the box. Take a look at their documentation.
4. Sign up to activation was completely automated. I did the sign up over week end.
6. It is the worth the money. Comparing it to the mediatemplate which costs around 40 for django containers and have only older versions of django.
I’m still in development, webfaction has so far got 5 stars from me on this to get me started with development. I still need to find out about their performance as we make progress in the project. But it’s definitely worth to try this provider for Django hosting.
