Category Archives: Dev

Ditz – the distributed issue tracker

ditz, , , ,

If you are using a distributed version control system 1 you get some really cool benefits and some really strange problems.

When I was toying around on a project with Aaron, I fell in love with ditz. We needed a quick way to keep track of bugs, without taking the time to set up a central bug repository. We wanted a bug tracker that could live in the same place as the code, where adding a friend to kick in on code didn’t require more accounts being set up and maintained.

Ditz did all of that, works straight from the command line, and even outputs some sweet html pages for display to the world.

Ditz is kind of abandonware right now as the original author has gone on to other things – but the state it is in right now is just perfect for my personal projects. If you are using it, I’ve added an RSS feed for the html output.

And the really good news? I just convinced the maintainer to make me a co-maintainer. So that means that I can integrate features! Once we get enough in for a new release, I’ll post an update right here!

  1. like git or darcs or mercurial, etc.   (back)

What to do when you get detached from your head, you git.

Dev, Hacks,

I found myself wandering about detached from my head, fully committed. You don’t want to commit when detached from head, but I had.

I didn’t know how it happened, but there I was, headless. What a silly, silly git.

I reached out to a friendly spider and the answer was there in the web.
Before you wander back to your head, it is important to mount yourself to a branch, then you can use that branch to reattach your head quite easily.
Here is how the magic incantations go:

git checkout -b the_wanderer
git rebase master
git checkout master
git merge the_wanderer
git commit

I’ve tied the branch to where I am, then grabbed where I was and attached that, then bound everything back together.
Clear as mud? Already done git checkout master? Check the spellbook that inspired me.

My Valentines / Music Hack Day NYC app!

Dev, Django, Music, NYC, Pals, Python, , , ,

-or-
Why I wasn’t around this weekend.

I was at NYC Music Hack Day!

You can try out the idea here in our valentune.es beta. We send love and music over wires and wireless to your special sweetheart.

You put in your sweetheart’s Name & cellphone, a couple of key words about your them and then ask the app to get busy.

It goes out to the MusixMatch lyrics service – finds lyrics that describe your sweetheart and then gives you a list of songs we can find streaming full mp3s online for. You choose what you don’t want in the play list and hit send.

We call your sweetheart up using the Twilio API , give them your sweet message and then play them your custom made mixtape over the phone! Yes, my lovely wife Sam was the first non-developer to get a call from the valentun.es robot.

Getting SongsPick songs on the iPhone!

Don’t have a web browser handy? Surely you jest! If you’ve got an iPhone you can use the iPhone app.

If not, the website is mobile compliant and works great on Android phones. The website uses CSS3 and WebFonts for style, but degrades well to older browsers. How old? IT WORKS ON LYNX!in case you need web 3.0 from a terminal

So all of this was accomplished by 6 talented and dedicated people over the course of 24 hours in NYC. The whole team was positive and awesome. I’m really proud of what we did so quickly. It’s got bugs 1 , but it works. I didn’t sleep the whole 24 hour hack session and I worked on a lot of the bits.

  • The Musixmatch call to find lyrics that talk about your sweetheart.
  • The Skreemr call to find playable songs with those lyrics
  • Adapting Jeff’s web mockups to Django templates
  • Calling into Alex’s Twilio wrapper
  • Pitching the idea and the vision and recruiting the group
  • Helping design the process flow and settling on using Django with Nate
  • Helping coordinate who would do what and figuring out the pitch with Jeff
  • Presenting the whole thing in 2 minutes to over 300 people with Anna and Nate

It was a busy 24 hours!

  1. the Title element has the wrong spelling of valentunes and the message doesn’t always go through and the songs sometimes take a long time to play, etc…   (back)

Tweetability and Readability

Dev, Pals, Python, , , , ,

Robin wrote a good story: Last Beautiful.  http://ur1.ca/sees
I thought Robin’s writing was “twitterish” – most of the sentences were under 140 characters. http://ur1.ca/seex
Maybe microblogging pushed him to write better, snappier sentences? http://ur1.ca/sewq
Sounds like a hypothesis – let’s make that story easy to parse: http://ur1.ca/sefl
Time to break out the python and turn this story into tweets: http://gist.github.com/348616

Continue reading Tweetability and Readability →

Android Scripting Environment is heating up

Dev, Hacks, Python, Software, , , , , , ,

The Android Scripting Environment is to the Android phone as Greasemonkey is to Firefox.   It’s a simple place to do quick hacks for your phone without having to build a full plugin or application.

Two cool scripts that just got released are Silent Night and Droid Track. Continue reading Android Scripting Environment is heating up →