Professional Yak Shaver
I wrote an [add-on][github] a while back that would catch Cmd+Q and show a screen asking for confirmation before actually quitting. I got tired of quitting Firefox one too many times….
I wrote an add-on a while back that would catch Cmd+Q and show a screen asking for confirmation before actually quitting. I got tired of quitting Firefox one too many times.
It used to be called meta-q-override, I’ve now renamed it to warn-before-quit. As always, please file bugs for issues/feature requests.
I’ve been using `git` for quite a while now and some of it’s features continue to amaze me. Here’s a few things I learned recently.
I’ve been using git for quite a while now and some of it’s features continue to amaze me. Here’s a few things I learned recently.
When you’ve made a change against a master that’s moving often, you find that simply doing git diff master doesn’t give the right diff. It shows you the difference between your branch and current master. That’s not what you want in most cases. The master branch would have changed and now the command also shows those changes. GitHub does the right thing and the right command in this case is the following:
git diff master... Recently, our designer Sam Smith started working on making CKAN more responsive. His Branch was based off master and I wanted to make a new branch based off release-v2.2 with his changes on top of it. My instinct was to make a patch.
git diff master...responsive > ../responsive.patch Then, apply the patch onto a different branch. This would surely work, but I’m using a version control system! It should be smart about this. The good folks in #git pointed me in the right direction.
First find the last commit from the responsive branch that you don’t want to copy.
git checkout responsive git log master..responsive The last commit in that log is what you want to copy. In this case, it’s 7587c6e8fe49c809ef7357b6f88496bd06ac93b9, so now you want to do git log 7587c6e8fe49c809ef7357b6f88496bd06ac93b9^. The first commit is the one you don’t want to keep.
git checkout responsive git checkout -b reponsive-2.2 git rebase 7587c6e8fe49c809ef7357b6f88496bd06ac93b9 --onto release-2.2 Thus, responsive-2.2 is a new branch with responsive changes based on top of release-v2.2!
There already have been several excellent blog posts about the Summit. I want to talk about the biggest opportunity that the Summit provided — in-person connections…
There already have been several excellent blog posts about the Summit. I want to talk about the biggest opportunity that the Summit provided – in-person connections. I’ve been involved with Mozilla since 2011 and this is the third Mozilla event I’ve attended. Compared to the previous events, Mozilla Summit 2013 was a sensory overload, in a pleasant way of course.
On Wednesday, I met pleia2 at Union Square. We walked around and had dinner at her favorite burger place, which had a beautiful view of the Union Square. The next day, I was at the Mozilla Space in San Francisco. I spent most of the day working on HTML parsing for “Who Owns What”. It turned out that Rob was headed to Santa Clara via Caltrain and stopped by the office to say hi. I love trains, and I joined Rob. We had a great conversation going all the way until the hotel.
At the hotel, I was excited to say hi to Ben, we’ve known each other from Ubuntu and Mozilla communities. I accidentally got into the wrong elevator and I met Wes on it. That evening, a hilarious confusion happened, which is now a running joke among those who know Ashish and me. Jen and a few others walked up to Ashish and asked if he was Nigel. When I finally did meet Jen, Sole, and jbuck; sole amended my nametag to say “The real nigelb”. I believe Ashish later had “Nigel Babu*” written on one side of name tag, with the * expanded below to “*Not”. That evening, I met Jessica Ledbetter and James Tantum, who I know primarily from the Ubuntu community, for dinner at a nice Greek restaurant.
Over the course of the Summit, I met glob, bhearsum, dolske, edmorely, Dino, Gen, sid0, peterbe, Kaitlin, Kate, Hilary, Ludovic, and lots of Mozillians from the Asian and especially Indian community who were familiar from the Mozcamps. On Friday evening, after the Firefox OS dinner, I met morgamic for the first time! It was definitely an exciting moment for me. Later, philikon was talking to morgamic and he looked familiar. I asked him his IRC nick name and I had an Aha! moment. I’m grateful to have met all the folks from Mozilla Webdev who were in Santa Clara – Ben, Erik Rose, Luke, David Walsh, Jen, Sole, Owen, James, Craig, Peter, Lars, Rob, zalun, and others who I don’t even remember names to make a proper list. After the Summit, I went to the Pinterest office to meet Dave Dash. He was my mentor when I first started contributing to Mozilla and again, it was great to meet him in person. As I think back to the summit, all the people I’ve met are my most treasured memory.
Note: If I haven’t mentioned your name, it’s because I’ve forgotten it. These few weeks have been a bit stressful and it’s been more then 2 months since the Summit.
Centre for Internet and Society celebrated their 5-year anniversary with an exhibition at their Bangalore and Delhi offices and…
Centre for Internet and Society celebrated their 5-year anniversary with an exhibition at their Bangalore and Delhi offices and a series of talks in Bangalore. I was there on Tuesday and managed to spend some time at the exhibition and attend the talks.
The exhibition showed off some of the work that CIS has been doing and the work of several independent artists. The bits that are particularly in my memory is Tara Kelton’s work as well as Sharath’s work.
Later in the day, Lawrence Liang talked about the Encyclopedia of Indian cinema. It was a very interesting talk, especially for me since it encompasses open data, open source software, and copyright issues! A convergence of a lot of my interests 🙂 Lawrence talked about what they’ve built and the problems they’ve faced and how internet as a medium for a film encyclopedia is very powerful, but is limited by the legal issues surrounding copyright laws.
On that note, I’ll close with this video about copyright.
I know Disney is great, but I’m not sure I like them as much after this video.
Hello from Mozcamp Asia! I’ve just gotten back from the welcome
Hello from Mozcamp Asia! I’ve just gotten back from the welcome event at Mozcamp. It’s been great to meet friends I’ve talked to on IRC or met at last year’s Mozcamp, and make new friends who’re at this year’s Mozcamp!
I was at The Hub today morning after checking-in at the V-Hotel. Top priority today was setting up B2G on my laptop. I messed around with it for hours to finally learn, to great frustration and disappointment, that B2G on the linux desktop doesn’t work on Ubuntu 10.04. I know I can upgrade, but I really don’t want to do that in the middle of a conference. Well, looks like I’m not going to accomplish that Mozcamp Mission until I get home 🙁
Later, I was at the Scape, which is the venue for keynotes and a bunch of us had volunteered to help organize the swag bags. It was great to work with Mozillians and do small things to help with the event 🙂 I was going to head over to The Hub right afterward, but then it started raining quite heavily! Of course, it’s Singapore! We’re going to hit this problem quite a few times over the next few days, it should be absolutely fun! (Although, I hope nobody falls sick). I went right back in and had a long and interesting chat with Mike Connor and Harold about Social API.
At 7, we had the Mozcamp registration and welcome party – an absolutely fabulous time that involved meeting lots of people, eating good food, meeting my Mozcamp buddy (Amy Tsay!), and of course, the country fair. The country fair was a great way to chat with everyone and kind of get semi-familiar about names to faces. Unforgettable moment of the day: Watching Foxeh and Mozillians dance to Gangam style.
PS: I’m trying to write a blog entry for every day of Mozcamp. I may or may not be able to pull this off, but I’m definitely going to be trying!