I found this open source recipe for Japanese curry this evening after a hard day’s work and it made me laugh (read to the end). I love seeing non-code Gists. Anyone else have a great recipe they’d like to share? Post ‘em in the comments!

What’s Emoji? According to this Ars Technica article, “Emoji icons offer a wide range of pre-built little pictures that add a little visual splash to your messaging.”

If you’re interested in Emoji support on your iPhone, the app is hosted on GitHub.

judofyr has created a simple project called Grancher which helps convert directories got git branches. It’s perfect for GitHub Pages.

Check out the repo or blog post. Thanks Magnus!

eg is a nifty piece of work. Are you meeting resistance trying to move your coworkers or friends to Git? (“SVN is good enough.”) Know someone who would love to use GitHub but can’t seem to find the time to learn Git? eg is your answer.

Start with the Easy Git for SVN Users chart.

Then move to the eg cheat sheet:

Committing works similar to SVN but tries to educate you on the idea of the staging area.

$ eg commit
Aborting: You have new unknown files present and it is not clear whether
they should be committed.  Run 'eg help commit' for details.
New unknown files:
  info.txt

Install it:

Download eg.

It’s not Subversion, but it’s a step in the Git direction.

Now a permanent fixture on my jacket.

Get yours.

The unstoppable Dr Nic has just dropped another amazing piece of software in our laps. This time it’s ChocTop, and it’s hosted right here on GitHub. From the README:

Package up your OS X/Cocoa applications into Custom DMGs, generate Sparkle XML, and upload. Instead of hours, its only 30 seconds to release each new version of an application.

Build and deploy tools for Cocoa apps using Sparkle for distributions and upgrades; it’s like Hoe but for Cocoa apps.

The main feature is a powerful rake task “rake appcast” which builds a release of your application, creates a DMG package, generates a Sparkle XML file, and posts the package and XML file to your remote host via rsync.

If you’re a Cocoa developer and this sounds like a sweet solution to a problem you have, check out Dr Nic’s detailed post and screencast about ChocTop.

From Daring Fireball:

One thing I’m noticing about GitHub is that it seems to be the first open source community through which multiple forks of the same project feed back to one another.

I just learned this morning that my favorite iPhone Twitter client, NatsuLiphone, is open source and on GitHub! If you’re into iPhone development and Twitter, find a comfortable chair, sit back, and read some code.

This morning we had some database problems. With help from Engine Yard we were able to identify the slower queries and eliminate them.

Here you can see our database exploding:

And the sweet release when we deployed the fix:

Basically, our `events` table has swelled to over 30m rows taking up 18gb of disk space. We have some solid indexes in place, but saving new events and querying are both becoming problems. As we plan to do more fancy things with the dashboard in the future this needs to be addressed.

Currently the plan is twofold:

• Split `events` table into `events` and `events_archive`. Older events will go into `events_archive`, archiving will happen nightly on a cron. This will dramatically reduce the size of the `events` table.

• Re-evaluate every query that touches `events`, make sure it’s using the best possible index.

We’ll update you as we make progress. Thanks!

I have a dream wherein future developers don’t even have to install Git for themselves in order to be able to use it. Apple has shown a very forward thinking attitude towards shipping OS X with various programming languages and version control systems. Right now is a critical time in which we can help push to have Git preinstalled on the next version of their operating system. The more people that use Git, the better the ecosystem becomes, and removing the installation barrier is a big step in that direction.

I’m told, on good authority, that the best way to make this happen is to let Apple know that it’s something we desire. So if you’d like to be able to fire up a fresh Mac and type `git` without ever installing it, open a ticket on Apple’s bug reporting site:

http://bugreporter.apple.com

Let them know that you’re using Git on your mac, and that you’d love to see it shipped with the next version of OS X so that even more developers can experience the joy of distributed version control!

Avery Pennarun is tracking Windows using Git. The post is just insane.

A taste:

I had to try it, of course. I went into ~/win, typed “git init”, and “git add .”, and “git commit”. Ta da, a working git repository with my fresh Win98 install.

Then I created separate branches, one for each version of Office, and installed them one by one. And now I can easily test new versions of my plugin: “git checkout office2000; win” or “git checkout office97sr2; win”.

JeremyBanks and davglass have been busy: they’ve rewritten my gist.rb command line tool in Python.

Check out davglass’ gist.py for the code and some enhanced functionality.

#Creates a new Gist
gist file.txt file2.js file3.html

#STDIN - Giving an extension
gist -e .js < myfile

#Debugging - This will print the Gist and not send it
gist -d -e .js < myfile

#Pull the Gist #12345
gist -r 12345

#Clone the Gist #12345
gist -r 12345 -c

Ilya Grigorik has posted an article on visualizing with code_swarm. He looks at Ruby on Rails and our own Scott Chacon.

A video of Rails’ commit history is available in HD on Vimeo.

At around the 5:05 mark, the number of contributors increases because Git (unlike Subversion) properly attributes the author of a patch. Very cool to see.

Angelo DiNardi has put the previous incarnation of CSH’s Drink machine’s touchscreen software on GitHub as csh-js-touchscreen.

The Drink machine is a soda dispenser with a touchscreen interface that can be used to purchase drinks over the Internet. PC Magazine wrote about the machine as one of their Ten Greatest Hacks of All Time (“The Internet Coke Machine (1991)”) and an FAQ from 1995 is available.

There’s also a YouTube video of a local news report about Drink. I’m pretty sure the guy with the laptop is Angelo, as you can see his GitHub username in the terminal. We have confirmation: Angelo is the guy talking at the end.

Angelo’s code ran on Opera 8 and relies on his JSCore library to power the touch interface. Cool stuff!

Update: Angelo informs us that the Drink source code is available (in Erlang) on GitHub, too: http://github.com/danw/drink

Gareth Rushgrove recently gave a presentation on Django Testing.

It goes over what testing is, when to test, how to test, and features his django-test-extensions. Thanks Gareth!

(As an aside, Gareth’s blog has tons of great Python, Jabber, Ruby, and Git content on it. Don’t miss. Localbuilder looks especially nice.)