señor taco’s travels

Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch, who is dying from pancreatic cancer, gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed McConomy Auditorium. In his moving talk, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals.

[via Clickable Bliss]

Well, thanks to a pointer I found out that my git-chdiff script is a bit overblown. You see, a person can just use the built in functionality of git, namely setting the GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF environment variable to point to something that can take the seven command line arguments git will pass on to whatever you’ve set as your external command. It’s beautiful in its simplicity:


#!/bin/sh
[ $# -eq 7 ] && /usr/bin/env chdiff –wait “$2″ “$5″


Just stick that in a script file, make it executable, set the GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF environment variable to point at it and away you go. I’ve also documented it in the Changes.app wiki. I feel so silly for not finding this before, but the exercise in a scripted solution was good for me.

For a long time I’ve been making southern style cooked greens. I learned how to make these when I was in school back in Nacogdoches, Texas¹ from a friend’s mom. I never wrote down a recipe and I just kind of keep making it with little changes here or there. This is the recipe as I’m currently cooking it.²

• 2-3 large bunches of chard (red or yellow chard are my favorite) or kale or any big leafy green.
• around ¹/₄ lb. of ham hock, smoked ham, or smoked pork neck pieces (optional)
• hot sauce (Frank’s Red Hot, other than Tabasco if you can)
• salt
• pepper
• cayenne powder (optional)

1. In a large pot place the pork in large chunks and about 4 cups of water. To the water add between 2-4 tbsp. of hot sauce (add more if you like, to taste, don’t go nuts at first). Add about 4 tsp. salt (maybe start with half that and bring it up to taste) and 2 tsp. of pepper. Add about ¹/₂ to 1 tsp. of cayenne powder if you like. Start to heat on medium heat while you do the rest of the work.
2. Wash and clean the greens. Cut the tips of the stems off. Take 3-5 leaves and stack them up. Start at one edge of the leaf stack and roll the leaves lengthwise into a tight bundle. Cut the leaf bundle across every half inch or so. This will form little circular bundles of leaves (when unfurled the pieces will have leaf, stem, leaf).
3. Put all the cut leaves into the pot. Add more water to fill the pot to just below the level of the leaves (make sure not to fill the pot up too far, the leaves will cook down).
4. Turn up the heat to medium-high and bring the pot to a boil, then turn it down to medium-low and keep it at a simmer for at least an hour. Let them cook for two hours if you can.
5. Strain from the pot and serve with or without the ham if you put it in.

1. Yes, it really is in the middle of nowhere.↩
2. I’ve cooked it at least three times this year, it’s popular↩

I got a MacBook recently and since I have a pretty big messenger bag so I can lug stuff when I ride my bike to and from work I figured a sleeve would be a good idea to protect it. I asked at work and got a recommendation for the WaterField SleeveCase. I am so happy with it I can’t recommend it enough.

I got the case with a flap to keep things out of the sleeve when in my bag. This case looks good, is super durable, and will be a great addition to my MacBook for the time I’m using it. If you’re in the market for a laptop sleeve I recommend you check out WaterField Designs.

Earlier this week I mentioned that Changes 1.0 shipped. I had already updated the wiki SCM integration page with instructions on how to use Perforce with the chdiff utility.

Last night I was messing around at home and trying to use the contributed script for diffing a project with Git¹ but it just wasn’t working the way I wanted. I generally like to work by being in the code tree and diffing a file against what was the last checkin (Or alternately a tagged checkin). The script that was there would do a comparison of the whole tree. I do find that valuable and I’ll keep it around for when I need that, but for my day to day work I want to just quickly view what changed from what I have on disk and what is in the repository at some point.

With that in mind I went and wrote up a quick python script that basically does what I want. I’m sure there is room for improvement and I might not have gotten everything right, but that’s why I put it up on the wiki. You can access the code directly from me if you like.

git-chdiff.py

Enjoy.

UPDATE - this only works in the root of the git project. I’ll post an update that works in subdirs when I have it.

UPDATE 2 - fixed now and uploaded.

1. I’ll have another post soon detailing why I decided to go with Git.↩

Time for a fun head game.
(from bynkii)

Today Ian Baird of Skorpiostech has released an awesome comparison tool, Changes. Besides doing text diffs you can also do directory diffs and see what files are new, removed, or changed.

It features great integration with TextMate, BBEdit and Xcode. There is also a wiki with tips for SCM integration. The addition of a great command line utility chdiff is a boon to us developers too.

I loved it so much I bought a license before the beta was over.¹ Now if only I had Leopard (required) at work to use it there. Some day.

1. I even contributed to the wiki where there was an offer of free licenses, but I turned that down, choosing instead to support an indie dev with my dollars.↩

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.” — Ernest Hemingway

As seen on Twitter 2008-02-16:

Every time you sniff and say somebody has “too much free time,” the part of you that used to love making things for pure joy dies a little. — Merlin Mann

So, I’m learning how to program on OS X. As mentioned previously mentioned I’m using Aaron Hillegass’ Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. I’m using the 2nd edition and Aaron has a 3rd edition coming out soon. I’m looking forward to it as I’ve been having to work through and figure out what changed from Tiger¹ to Leopard². It’s been good and challenging, but nothing unbearable. Today I ran across documentation on the changes to Leopard one needs to know to use the book. Sweet!

1. OS X 10.4↩
2. OS X 10.5↩