If you’re developing with Rails you’ve probably encountered rake once or twice. This blog post aims to walk you through where rake came from and an introduction on how to use it effectively in your Rails apps.

A Little Bit of History
Rake is the project of Jim Weirich. It’s a build tool. For a good laugh and an even more in depth history check out the "rational.rdoc" from the Rake documentation. Essentially, rake started as an idea for using Ruby inside of a Makefile. Though Jim doesn’t sound convinced from the tone in that document, it is a good idea.

I’ve had various issues trying to edit the shelf in quicksilver. Some say to invoke QS, go to the shelf, then drag the item to the trash. This never seemed to work for me, so I sought out a better way. Here are two of them:

1. Invoke Quicksilver, then hit Command+Option+S. From there you can select the item you want to delete and then hit Delete or Backspace.
2. Edit the file: ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Shelves/General.qsshelf

Introduction to using vim for Rails development

Someone recently asked us to do “vim on Rails” screencasts.

So, we’re responding with this experiment. Let us know if this is valuable and we’ll try to improve things like audio quality.

More tips from thoughtbot about using vim, but this time with an emphasis on fitting it into your life.

Apple’s Cocoa text system is a complicated beast, but also extremely flexible, and with a bit of work, it can be molded to match many working styles. This how-to covers the 2 major ways of customizing the text input system: Default key bindings, and for still more control, input managers.

I’m writing this guide because nothing like it currently exists. There is incredible room for flexibility in customizing the Cocoa text environment, but most users—even power-users—have no idea of the available options. This is mostly because Apple’s documentation is 1) aimed at developers, and 2) often incomplete or ambiguous. Most users have no idea that they can look at a file which describes all of the shortcuts on the system, and that they can easily add their own shortcuts, or replace existing ones with differing functionality.

For instance, one of the most common complaints from new Windows and Linux/Unix switchers is that many of the shortcuts they are used to, such as using the Home and End keys to move to the beginning, respectively end, of a line or document, don’t work as they expect in OS X.

For new users, almost every text box you use is a Cocoa text box (or close enough to act the same as far as we’re concerned) — Safari web form boxes, the text field in iChat for sending new messages, the documents in Pages or TextEdit, the email composer in Mail, etc. Note: Some text boxes are not Cocoa however, so the tricks in this article still aren’t completely universal. Notably, Microsoft Word, Adobe applications, AppleWorks, and the text fields in Camino and Firefox won’t work with this hint.

I expect that all users of OS X can get something out of this guide. I’m starting with the basics, so that new users, unfamiliar with the terminal and the intricacies of OS X can be brought up to speed. But even the most experienced users should hopefully learn something from this article; I know I learned several new nifty things while writing it.

Disclaimer: it is possible, when mucking around with the text system, to send applications messages they aren’t expecting. This can cause them to crash. As long as you stick to standard text selectors, you should be fine, but I’m not responsible if your program crashes because of a binding you add.

Here is a collection of mailing list postings made by various people describing how they use git in their workflow.

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maintain-git by Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

Imagine that git development is racing along as usual, when our friendly neighborhood maintainer is struck down by a wayward bus. Out of the hordes of suckers (loyal developers), you have been tricked (chosen) to step up as the new maintainer. This howto will show you "how to" do it.

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rebase-from-internal-branch by Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

In this article, JC talks about how he rebases the public "pu" branch using the core GIT tools when he updates the "master" branch, and how "rebase" works. Also discussed is how this applies to individual developers who sends patches upstream.

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rebuild-from-update-hook by Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

In this how-to article, JC talks about how he uses the post-update hook to automate git documentation page shown at http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/.

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recover-corrupted-blob-object by Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

Some tricks to reconstruct blob objects in order to fix a corrupted repository.

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revert-a-faulty-merge by Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

Sometimes a branch that was already merged to the mainline is later found to be faulty. Linus and Junio give guidance on recovering from such a premature merge and continuing development after the offending branch is fixed.

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revert-branch-rebase by Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

In this article, JC gives a small real-life example of using git revert command, and using a temporary branch and tag for safety and easier sanity checking.

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separating-topic-branches by Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

In this article, JC describes how to separate topic branches.

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setup-git-server-over-http by Rutger Nijlunsing <rutger@nospam.com>
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update-hook-example by Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> and Carl Baldwin <cnb@fc.hp.com>

An example hooks/update script is presented to implement repository maintenance policies, such as who can push into which branch and who can make a tag.

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use-git-daemon
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using-merge-subtree by Sean <seanlkml@sympatico.ca>

In this article, Sean demonstrates how one can use the subtree merge strategy.

A recent post that was highly ranked on Hacker News complained about common git workflows causing him serious pain. While I won’t get into the merit of his user experience complaints, I do want to talk about his specific use-case and how I personally work with it in git.

Best I can tell, Mike Taylor (the guy in the post) either tried to figure out a standard git workflow on his own, or he followed poor instructions that tried to bootstrap someone from an svn background while intentionally leaving out important information. In any event, I’ll step through my personal workflow for his scenario, contrasting with subversion as I go.

If you operate a website that features lots of code examples, you know how important it is to spend some quality time styling the <pre> element. When left unstyled, wild <pre> tags will mangle your preformatted content and destroy your site’s layout. Different browsers treat the <pre> tag quite differently, varying greatly in their default handling of font-sizing, scrollbar-rendering, and word-wrapping. Indeed, getting your preformatted code to look consistent, usable, and stylish across browsers is no easy task, but it certainly can be done. In this article, I’ll show you everything you need to create perfect <pre> tags.

This is the basic structure of the HTML code needed for this sticky footer solution;

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