git

As of June 2010, there's no one-click installer of Git for Windows. Following this blog entry will get you:

• msysgit, without its shell integration
• TortoiseGit shell integration instead

msysgit's shell integration is nasty to uninstall, and if you do it wrong it'll pop up a dialog every 10 seconds.

Here's how you do it...

I haven't written here often, because it's stunningly difficult to write something worth reading; only more so when your thoughts are fleeting and your Internet access is sparse. However, just to affirm that I'm still alive and kicking, I'd like to share some stuff I've been up to and thinking about.

First is my new project: Tea. Tea is a simple 2D game development library for Ruby. It's made for the sort of grass-roots development that was popular with QBASIC back in its era. Tea is designed with simplicity in mind: 0 is better than 1, and 1 is better than 2, but at the same time, it won't avoid a valuable, convenient feature just because it can be built from other features. Graphics, input, sound and text are the pillars of Tea.

Tea is making slow but steady progress. Events have been blasted right through. Sound and text are waiting on graphics, and speaking of graphics, that has been a royal pain to deal with so far. Why? In the words of Joel Spolsky:

All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.

To demonstrate, I'll describe what I'm dealing with in the graphics subsystem of Tea. Tea is built largely on Ruby/SDL, which, surprise surprise, provides a Ruby-like flavouring to SDL.

Essential reading for any Git user:

The Git Parable

If you read my article, Git for the lazy, you at know the simple commands. The Git Parable comes from the other end: what the pieces in Git are, and why they are the way they are.

EDIT: SomeScript development has halted. Heh, didn't even last the week.

SomeScript is a simple JavaScript whitelist add-on for Firefox. You can read all about it on the GitHub site, or install the very very very early version from the downloads page.

SomeScript is just YesScript backwards: instead of allowing JavaScript and blocking it on selected sites, it denies JavaScript by default and only allows it on selected sites.

The question on everyone's lips: why?

I found a pretty neat tip today, and here it is in action:

It's a custom bash prompt that shows the status of the current directory if it's a git repo. Forgive the mouse, it was an innocent bystander. Yeah, I type ls a lot.

Eric Sink recently blogged about git and how it violated "best practices" by allowing parts of a directory change-set to be committed, and history to be rewritten.

Something about the whole thing just didn't feel right. Here are the major points, as best I can summarise:

The rules and guidelines for a DVCS are different than the ones for a centralized system.

To get git st for status and git ci for commit:

git config --global alias.st status
git config --global alias.ci commit

And for colours when you're viewing diffs in a terminal:

git config --global color.diff auto
git config --global color.interactive auto