Homebrew (Mac) Installation

Homebrew is an up and coming successor to Fink and MacPorts. Although a bit generically named, it works quite well for a lot of the things I muck around with these days, which tend to have that web development smell to it.

It used to be that I had to get a git binary, then grab homebrew from github, then uninstall the git through the binary, and then install git through homebrew. Then, the fun would begin.

Now, it’s even more streamlined. Just grab the installer gist from the README.md page, and it should work. Although, I couldn’t get it to work and I was in a hurry, so I just grabbed the master tarball, and just physically moved the resulting /bin, /Library, and README.md.

Note: This probably worked for me because I already did everything else that was in the install script earlier, such as chmod’ing the /usr/local folder, as well as adding /usr/local/bin to the path.

Hooray for adhering to POSIX standards (Reference here: This is an awesome read, by the way, if you ever had any questions about why directories were as such in a Linux/BSD setting.).

brew install git
brew install ruby
brew install stuff

More on how brew affects Ruby on Rails installations later.

Git, GitHub and Social Coding

via Video: Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath and Scott Chacon — Git, GitHub and Social Coding.

While I don’t use GitHub for my projects, most of the rubygems and other code bases exist on GitHub. I guess there are the few that are still on Google Code and even fewer on SourceForge.

The video, not only being extremely informative for someone who doesn’t know anything about git (but would like to know more), was a very nice overview of what I’ve been learning in the past couple months. (Especially more so the past couple of weeks.)

What I find awesome is that (at least Chris specifically) had a very personal problem he wanted to fix with version control systems (Subversion, in his case) and supporting tools (Bugzilla, in his case).

Sidenote: Chris’s presentation images are just hilarious. One comment: SVN could have been the lighthouse, not the “house”. The whole centralized repository idea?

"technicalpickles-jeweler requires git (>= 1.1.1, runtime)"

In this error statement:

$ sudo gem install technicalpickles-jeweler -s http://gems.github.com ERROR: Error installing technicalpickles-jeweler: technicalpickles-jeweler requires git (>= 1.1.1, runtime)

This is not talking about your git binary version, which at the time of this writing is 1.6.3.3. It’s talking about your git gem.

So just do a nice:

$ sudo gem install git

And you’re off. Rock on.

Now to go mess with actual rubygems problems…

Unfuddle vs Assembla: Git Support

Assembla seems to be having problems with their git service, and that’s too bad; now, I’m going to go use Unfuddle instead. The forums suggest that this has been an issue that started maybe a couple weeks ago. Of course, had I known this, I wouldn’t have spent the better part of yesterday and a couple hours today, banging my head against the wall.

I did, however, become much more well versed in the distributed source management system known as git. By the way, GitCasts is like the best thing to learn git from, I just hope that one day we’ll see all the commands that were used during the screencasts for easier consumption. Even as this project is going to most likely stay a solo venture, the saner branching/merging I keep hearing about makes my heart flutter.

But less about git, and more about the services that are providing git hosting: I liked Assembla because of their integration with Trac, one of my favorite bug tracking tools. I wasn’t familiar with Unfuddle’s or Assembla’s own milestone/scrum/chat/ticket system, and so I wanted to just keep using Trac. After tonight’s mess, I think I’m going to go and stick with Unfuddle for the time being and just try to start using their refreshingly different UI for all things project management. After all, I can move the entire repository with a single clone anyway.

3 Weeks Remain

The long four day weekend was mostly spent on one of two things: Rock Band 2 and setting up for projects. And the Rock Band 2 stopped as soon as I completed the game in solo guitar mode. And no, I didn’t count the Endless Setlist… unless I can get 3 other kids to go all out for hours and hours on end.

This weekend was a blur. I don’t remember much of it. A lot of late night talks with Dean didn’t help the project progress, but was beneficial. As a sidenote, he’s my third impromptu roommate after I started living solo (I guess I should count that Jong-Sun kid, because he was over constantly, so four).

Moving on, I’m hoping to get the whole development environments set up tonight. It seems like my forearms aren’t even happy about my typing this entry. We’ll see if I’ll sleep happy or not.

Summary Of Said Weekend

I have these artifacts as evidence to the caffeinated stupor I was in.

The Six Cans of the Apocalypse

Remember, the green one’s the most tasty.

But yeah, working ’til the week hours of the night/morning, I popped on the sysadmin hat and rocked out. Finally after having installed MediaWiki (it’s a little slow, I need something faster… any suggestions?), I started to document the insanity.

I bought a new”er” slice at slicehost. I love how close to the metal all of the insanity is. I finally got to see how Derek worked his magic during the days of StatusFix… er… more like I copied and pasted commands, all the while man paging everything that went past my eyes. Lots to learn and screw up on so that I’ll learn even more.

Still need to work on Capistrano deployment from the git repository. Hoping to get this done tonight. Still not sure where I should be developing… should I be using my computer for both dev and test? Hmm.

Lots to chew this week. But indeed, only three weeks remain.

Why I HAVE to use Git from now on…

I love seeing these technology leaders speak, even though not in person. First it was Sergey Brin, now, through the advent of YouTube, Linus Torvalds himself.

Yes, there’s an upside to the Internet video madness. All that VC money at hard work.

And man, he’s so very “strongly opinionated”. Codeword for: a jerk. He’s like David Heinemeier Hansson in this regard. “Opinionated” is the euphemism I’d use, but then again, they themselves wouldn’t tolerate that bullcrap. But they have a reason to be so opinionated… they wrote the book(s) on it. Literally.

Now, Torvalds makes very valid points. Almost… too valid. After all, he is the father of the Linux kernel, and heads one of the largest distributed open source project out there. He knows what is needed in this arena, and so I’m happy to have seen this clip.

And so… time to look into this git business.

EDIT: Version Control and “the 80%”