I recently received a request that I start a “Dear Jacob” advice column for git, and thought that it was a pretty nifty idea. I needed a good excuse to post more frequently, and I do end up answering a lot of questions about Git for the people that I know.

Welcome to the first installment of the “Dear Jacob” Git advice column!

There’s always another yak that needs shaving. Since creating posts with WWW::StaticBlog wasn’t fast enough for my tastes, I made a small script to make it even faster!

A while back, I’d ditched WordPress in favor of Mephisto. I’d grown tired of constantly being under attack from spammers, and really disliked that it was one gigantic PHP app.

Once I was on Mephisto, I really liked the syntax highlighting I got with the [Ultraviolet Gem][Ultraviolet], but it requires Oniguruma, which was a pain to setup on my shared host (they have since added it to their hosts). Life was good.

Except that it wasn’t. It was a little annoying how long it took pages to come up in the “cold cache” case, and I’d actually gotten a few complaints about that. After this, I decided that I was just going to do away with “dynamic blog engines” entirely.

The upcoming Git 1.7 has a lot of really nice improvements, and new features. One of the big new features is the --autosquash argument for git rebase --interactive.

I’ve decided to try out zsh for a while, and while I already get completions for most everything I want, out of the box, I am missing completions for Capistrano tasks.

I had been using brynary’s Bash Capistrano completion script. I was able to find a mailing list post about setting up Capistrano task completions for zsh, but it didn’t quite work for me. (show_tasks isn’t a valid task.) I also didn’t like throwing the .cap_tasks file in the top-level of the project. I already had a ~/.zsh_cache/ directory for caching zsh’s completions, so I decided to modify the script I found to put the cache file there, instead.

While looking at how to get syntax highlighted source back up on here after switching to Mephisto, I kept running across references to the Ultraviolet gem. Some of the dependencies are a little old (Oniguruma: Gem, Library), but the output looks very nice, from the examples I’d seen.

The problem comes in, that the Oniguruma gem won’t install without you already having the Oniguruma library installed (in a standard system location). This is a pretty well documented problem, with a simple fix.

Recently, I’ve decided to start learning Ruby on Rails (2.3.4). Things have been going along more-or-less smoothly (I’m still not sure whether or not I hate ActiveRecord, or can tolerate it, but that’s a post for another time.). That is, until I started looking into the various plugins/frameworks for doing Authorization in Rails.

I’ve been playing around with Git, CIA.vc, and Lighthouse on a project of mine that’s recently been resurrected.

There is a pretty good update hook for CIA.vc integration called ciabot.pl that I’ve been using, without any complaints. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find anything to integrate Git with Lighthouse that hasn’t needed modification out of the box.

We wanted to be able to close a ticket, without actually “closing” it. Thus the “pending” ticket status was born. We can set a ticket’s status as “pending”, and have it automatically marked as “closed” n days later, if there haven’t been any replies in that time.

I have received permission from my employer to release this under the GNU GPLv2.