Automatically Adding Remotes For GitHub Forks

I do almost all of my open source work via GitHub. And why not? It's pretty much the standard these days. I love how you can just put something up on GitHub for the whole world to see, and you can follow (and even fix!) your favorite open source projects. Sometimes, if you maintain your own fork of a project, it can lag behind the project leader's, though. Which means after your fork stagnates, you have to clone a copy, and do something like this:

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Posted on 2012-06-25

Ignoring Minified Javascript Files with Ack 2

The reason I got involved with the ack project about a year ago was because I had an itch to scratch: I wanted ack to ignore files containing minified Javascript. My need for this has since lessened, but I still contribute to the ack project, and I still encounter this from time to time. Fortunately, with the release of the ack 2.0 alpha last week, support for this has been improved.

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Posted on 2012-06-21

Lua: Why Explicit Local is a Good Thing

One complaint about Lua that I see on the #lua channel (and elsewhere) is that Lua's variables are implicitly global; if you want a local variable, you need to tell Lua. For example:

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Posted on 2012-06-04

SQLite Types: To Affinity And Beyond

If you haven't checked out SQLite, it's definitely worth taking a look at. It's perfect for a zero-configuration set up when you're doing development, and it's a great database to run a test suite against, especially since you can run a SQLite database completely out of volatile memory. It's even a great choice for small-to-medium size datasets - I have plenty of projects that store their data in SQLite to keep things simple, and even Fossil, the version control system that SQLite itself uses, stores its data in SQLite!

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Posted on 2012-04-16

Monitoring Long-Running Jobs

A while ago, I wrote a post on monitoring long-running jobs that submit multiple queries to a MySQL server. I have since written a couple of scripts that operate on more generic data, so I thought I'd apply the same principle to those scripts. So, the question is: what do you do if you've been running a script and you want to have an idea of its progress without having to restart with a verbose command line option?

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Posted on 2012-03-12