Month: April 2012

A brief list of observed meanings of the word “port”

port (v):

  1. Reindent and reformat.

    empathy-time: port to TP coding style

  2. Update to compile against a backwards-incompatible version of an API.

    <ocrete> twi: I’m porting farstream to [GStreamer] 0.11 this week

  3. Rewrite to use a different widget set and network library.

    You should port Sojourner to Qt4!

  4. Reimplement in an entirely different programming language.

    Zeitgeist has been ported from Python to Vala.

  5. Translate into a different data format.

    Using Semantics3’s web crawlers, we were able to get hold of the data within a half hour, after which we spent a further half hour cleaning up the data and porting it to SQL.

Some Git aliases.

Xavier suggested I blog my Git aliases.

[alias]
	ci = commit -v
	prune-all = !git remote | xargs -n 1 git remote prune
	record = !git add -p && git ci
	amend-record = !git add -p && git ci --amend
	stoat = !toilet -f future STOATS
	update-master = !git checkout master && git pull -r
	lol = log --graph --decorate --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit
	lola = log --graph --decorate --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit --all

Mostly ((No, I don’t remember why I added git stoat either.)) self-explanatory.

git ci
Shorter than git commit, and -v shows you what you’re about to commit.
git prune-all
From the Git wiki.
git record; git amend-record
I started using these as a Darcs refugee, but they’re also a good way to avoid doing git add -p && git commit -a through overly-active muscle memory. I could probably simplify them to use git commit -p.
git lol; git lola
…come from Conrad Parker.

What’re your favourites?

Chat account group Shell extension

I have a lot of IM accounts ((32, since you ask)). I often want to turn groups of them on and off: for instance, when I’m not at work I turn off my Collabora accounts, and when testing IM-related stuff I need to turn on my test accounts. I got bored of finding the Messaging and VoIP Accounts window, searching for my work accounts, clicking on each one in turn and toggling them on and off, so I wrote a little GNOME Shell extension which gives you little switches in your panel to enable and disable (groups of) accounts.

Chat account groups menu screenshot

Out of the box it just shows you one slider per account; and it comes with a really terrible application for configuring groups. You can get it from GitHub ((“rah rah why GitHub?” Call it an experiment.)). I’m pretty sure it doesn’t conform to the approval requirements for extensions.gnome.org so it’s not available there; and the configuration application could really use some love and caring. But it does work! If you like it, hooray; if you don’t, I’d love a patch. (Pre-emptively: if it doesn’t work on 3.4, that’s probably because I’m on 3.2, and I’d love a patch.)