OSLUG Planet

Just a reminder, because I always forget it: When you use git-svn on an svn repository and your code base contains empty directories (say, for temporary files, or log files), they will be ignored by git unless they contain at least one file.

Paradox? Maybe. There’s a good reason however: git ignores empty directories because it tracks (file) content, not a bunch of directories some of which happen to contain a file (the concept of tracking files might be the only thing git has remotely in common with good ol’ CVS — though git also does not deeply care about file names, only content).

The “common” way to handle this is by adding a .gitignore file to the repository. This won’t harm svn-only clients, but it’ll make git-svn clients pick up the (almost) empty directory properly.

This is what you need to do.

mkdir empty_dir
echo '*' > empty_dir/.gitignore
echo '!.gitignore' >> empty_dir/.gitignore
git add empty_dir
git commit -m 'adding empty directory' empty_dir

The .gitignore file tells git what file names not to track inside the directory in question. The asterisk means, ignore all files, but the second line makes sure the .gitignore file itself is recognized and added to the repository.

Within a week of launching the Mirwin site, we have had users giving us feedback on various bugs that we had missed. One of the bugs that really bothered me was the 'Contact Us' page seemed to not be working as well as it was suppose to be. One of the big complaints that we got that the captcha was a bit tough to read. I found this a bit surprising, as we were using ReCaptcha for our forms, but at the request of users, I decided to try my hand at making something a little easier for users to understand and see.

read more

Today at icanhascheezburger.com:

Apparently, I have my own lolcat

(Thanks for the link, Dolske!)

Well after a lot of effort, I'm very excited to announce that I've founded a new company, Mirwin Consulting L.L.C. with Michael. Woo!

</shameless plug>

Yes, yes it is. Says istwitterdown.com:

In fact, it is “too down” even to display the fail-whale. I’ve not seen that before

PS: On an unrelated side note: hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com?

Just recently, my fiancée Tara joined the blogging community with her first own blog called “Domaine de Tara”.

She started off with a nice little article on the hunt for American-style brown sugar in Germany. It also includes a yummy recipe for baking Oatmeal Walnut Chocolate Chunk Cookies which — in spite of the sugar-related difficulties — turned out more than delicious.

Her future posts are likely going to be about food (both her passion and profession) and German strangeness she’s just bound to stumble across every once in awhile…

Feel free to visit her blog, say hello, and maybe even subscribe to the RSS feed. Have fun!

The photo is from a trip we took to Provence, where a winery coincidentally carries my fiancée’s name.

Am 27. September Piratenpartei wählen.

photo credit: larskflemUnter dem Titel “Meine E-Mail-Adresse war zorn@germany” wärmt tagesschau.de heute ein Interview aus dem Jahr 2007 wieder auf, wahrscheinlich in der Hoffnung dass sich niemand daran erinnern kann.

Dennoch ist das interessant zu lesen, und es ist natürlich schon irgendwie cool, was sich aus den Anfängen der Internet-Kommunikation so alles entwickelt hat — freilich wäre es lustig gewesen, wenn die erste E-Mail in Deutschland Spam einer chinesischen Online-”Apotheke” gewesen wäre. Aber die kleinen blauen Pillen gibt es ja erst seit 1998.

Die Karlsruher Informatiker mailen natürlich noch heute — wenn auch ein bisschen weniger “romantisch”: Das Spam- (und Ham-)aufkommen der Karlsruher Informatikfakultät heute kann man sich auch online ansehen.

As always, what I am writing here is my own opinion and not a statement on behalf of Mozilla Corporation.

When I was just visiting Wikipedia, I was greeted with this temporary error note (which, luckily, does not happen too often in spite of Wikipedia’s huge popularity):

And, even if this marks me as a Web 2.0 geek, I must admit: All I was thinking was — where’s the pet?

The first company to put a recognizable, even likable, “pet” onto their error pages was likely Twitter. And due to the horribly frequent outages associated with Twitter’s “growing pain”, we got to see the littlehuge fellow quite often. In the mean time, he seems to have swam away, at least I haven’t seen him in awhile. Yet, he’s not forgotten: the fail whale even has his own fanclub.

Another place where I saw a “fail pet” was yelp, whose error page was sporting a picture of an actual dog, apparently the company puppy “Darwin” (sorry for the tiny screenshot):

Now where’s yours, Wikipedia?

Of course, considering I so provocatively ask this question, you might respond: Well, where’s yours, Mozilla?

Here at Mozilla, we are not particularly proud of software failures, because unlike your regular web 2.0 start-up (think Twitter) where every service failure means more customers than anticipated, failures in Mozilla-land usually mean a crashed browser, (possibly) lost data and certainly frowning users*). So when the Crash Reporter icon was redesigned, we could have gone ahead and hired Foxkeh as our “crash mascot”, but that would do the poor little fox wrong — and at any rate, we prefer associating mascots with good stuff here at Mozilla. So at the time, user experience engineer Alex Faaborg made sure we don’t create something too memorable, for example nothing like a second “Blue Screen of Death”. Of course, had Microsoft known at the time how appeasing error messages can become with a little help from the animal kingdom, they’d have hired the entire cast of Looney Tunes to show up in their dreaded error messages.

But this might well be one of the few things we have in common with Microsoft: No fail-pets for us, any time soon.

*) On a side note, although it won’t make a user fell better whose browser just crashed: When Firefox crashes it is most often due to binary, third-party plug-ins like Flash, Acrobat etc., and not due to a bug in Mozilla software — as evidenced by the publicly available “top crashes” list and the bugs associated with it.

Woo! We shipped an implementation of libcloud, check it out over on libcloud.org. It is a pure python library for working with a variety of cloud server providers. It is still a work in progress, but would love to get others involved!

Mirwin is an Oregon-based web design and consulting company. For a combined 17 years of industry experience, we provide a small-town feel with big city results.

With the big migration of Beaversource to the OSL complete, I've finally gotten to shift my focus back to actual coding.

One of my first projects for migrating Beaversource to the newer version of Elgg is to recreate the feature we call "Project Profiles" inside of Elgg 1.5. These profiles give all of the projects a social profile with forums, comment walls, pictures, etc. In order to learn more about how the new plug-in system works, I decided to port over the Google calendar widget I wrote for Elgg 0.9.x to the new version of Elgg. So I thought I'd toss it online for anyone else possibly using Elgg.

Its available in git at http://jiraffe.net/git/googlecalendar.git for anyone that wants it.

Cheers!

read more

Mirwin is an Oregon-based company with a decade of web development experience. We build custom, maintainable websites to the exact needs of our customers.

We specialize in building community-oriented sites that rely on heavy involvement from users.