github – Accidents Happen

Jenkins gets out of hot water

thameera — Tue, 12 Nov 2013 15:11:17 +0000

The Jenkins guys seem to have had a rough day.

yesterday something strange has happen to many Jenkins repositories on GitHub (more then 50 Repos)…
Luca Milanesio seems have pushed to many many repositories without really changing anything – at least I have not seen anything changed.

But the folks at github have helped by restoring the state prior to the force push into a separate branch. Good old git reflog to the rescue.

Typically recovering a force push is straightforward:
1. git reflog > look at the SHA-1 before the forced push
2. git branch -f

As far as I know, bare repos don’t have reflog enabled by default. They might have turned on core.logAllRefUpdates for all the repos at github by default.

Github and Government

thameera — Wed, 16 Oct 2013 04:33:29 +0000

Git’s being used to do many more things besides version controlling code. I once wrote about tracking laws with git in Germany.

Github has introduced government.github.com. From their blog post:

Governments at all levels have been using GitHub for some time now to build better, more accessible websites, publish laws and data, and even collaborate on policies themselves.

Today we’re proud to announced the launch of government.github.com, a website dedicated to showcasing the amazing efforts of public servants and civic hackers around the globe.

Open data projects in github isn’t new. Concepts like forking your city shows the possibilities are boundless.

3D diffs in Github

thameera — Wed, 18 Sep 2013 16:18:42 +0000

STL is a standard file type used to store data about 3D objects. Like bitmaps for 2D images. Github gave the ability to visualize these files in the site some time back, now they let us view the diffs as well.

How does this work? We take both versions of the model, and using binary space partitioning, we compute the added, removed, and unchanged parts. This is done using csgtool, a C library paired with a Ruby gem via FFI. These pieces are cached and displayed by the 3D viewer we already have, though we color them differently and play with their transparency to help illustrate the changes.

How does one see diffs in 3D objects? You paint the deleted parts in red and the newly added parts in green. Ha! You didn’t see that coming. Also, the thing rotates! There’s also a slider to animate the diff.

Forking and sex

thameera — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 13:26:54 +0000

From Quora:

Am I the only one who thinks the phrase “Fork me on GitHub” sounds like it has sexual implications?

This is a genuine question. I’ve asked several people what they thought about the phrase and not many feel the same way I do. I started to wonder if I was the only one.

Did I think it had sexual implications? Not until now. -_-

New levels to githug

thameera — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 16:33:27 +0000

Githug is an interactive text-based game (or a series of challenges, if ‘game’ isn’t the word), that helps you learn git. It has a series of levels, each of which requires the knowledge of some git commands to solve. Two more levels were added today on checking out tags and solving merge conflicts. You can install the latest version with,

gem install githug

It’ll work on any operating system, given ruby gems is installed. Currently githug consists of 41 levels of increasing difficulty, and more will be added soon.

Some of the first levels in githug (click on the pic to zoom)

New ttytter extension: Add to Pocket

thameera — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 12:03:21 +0000

You can download my second ttytter extension now from the github page. This lets you add the links in tweets to your Pocket (formerly Read-It-Later) account.

To use, you first need to create a file named .pocket in the extension’s directory and add your Pocket username and password in two separate lines. In ttytter, just type /pocket and the link in the tweet will be added to Pocket. If no links were found in the tweet, the link to the tweet itself will be added.