Yesterday I Did a Hackathon, and Here's What I Learned
Yesterday, I attended a game creation hackathon at the Dutch Game Garden in Utrecht, courtesy of HackersNL. We had eight hours to create a game based on content from "Open Culture Data sets", which is a grouping of data sets involving the Netherlands. We had at our fingertips the works of the Rijksmuseum, sounds of the Netherlands, maps from the Dutch golden age, among other things. At the start, I had no idea what I would work on. I thought I might make a Memory-style game where the cards have Dutch works of art on them. However, I eventually had a better idea: I ended up writing a game where you play a thief that sneaks around the Rijksmuseum at night, stealing works of art and hiding from the guards. But the game isn't important: what's important here is the knowledge I gained during this experience, which I would like to relate to you now. A lot of it are things I already knew, but the experience really helped to drive it home! I'm mainly writing this to gather my thoughts and serve as a reference to my future self, but hopefully you will be able to learn something too, get motivated to take part in a hackathon, or at least relate to the experience.
Read More...Posted on 2012-12-28
Quickly Change Directory to the Repo You Just Cloned
A common pattern in my shell usage is something like this:
Read More...Posted on 2012-12-18
Using Ack with MySQL DESCRIBE TABLE
When using MySQL, you can use DESCRIBE TABLE to view the columns that a table contains; this is helpful for getting to know a table you're not familiar with, or to refresh your memory on a table you haven't seen in a while. However, sometimes, you're looking for a particular column in a long list (the table I used this on has over forty columns), and you have an idea on what the name of the column is. If you run into this situation, don't fret, and definitely don't strain your eyes looking through the list yourself! Let ack do the work for you:
Posted on 2012-10-18
Building Rakudo Perl 6 For Arch Linux
One of my favorite features of my Linux distribution of choice, Arch Linux, is its package manager and the ecosystem built around it. I maintain my own repository of packages; some are custom builds of packages available in the standard repositories (like Vim), others are packages that don't exist in the standard repositories at all. One of the packages I maintain is for Rakudo Star, a Perl 6 distribution. I encountered some troubles creating a pacman package for the September release of Rakudo Star. I thought I would share my experiences so other package maintainers could learn from them.
Read More...Posted on 2012-10-12
Making SSH_AUTH_SOCK Work Between Detaches in Tmux
I make heavy use of SSH agent forwarding in my workflow. However, sometimes you'll start a tmux session, do some work, and detach it. When you come back later, whether it's an hour, a day, or a month, your SSH_AUTH_SOCK within the session will no longer be valid, and you'll need to input your password every time you want to do something involving SSH. I came up with a simple solution a while back; if you drop this in your .bashrc, it should just work:
Posted on 2012-07-27
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