JarrodSpillers.com

you bastard!

Thanks to my good friend and mentor Jerry Jackson forcing me to practice every day until I grew to like it, I am a die hard VIM user. To me it is just a much faster way to write code and edit text in general.

Once upon a time I was suffering from repetitive stress injuries to my mouse hand from long hours of 3D modeling and graphic design. Once I started to move away from the creative side of things and more to development (and thus using VIM regularly) that all went away.

Several weeks ago I began a new project here at my day job. For reasons of practicality I have been forced to deal with the evils of a more traditional IDE. The IDE in question is Visual Studio .NET (don’t get me started on how much I hate .NET – I will save that for a much longer and more thorough article).

Earlier today I noticed the all too familiar discomfort and tightness in the connective tissues of my wrist. The constant in all of this is the percentage of time I am using my mouse. The mouse is just VERY bad for your hands and wrist. With VIM you rarely leave the home row… the mouse becomes “that weird thing on your desk that you don’t use anymore”.

Hopefully I will be done with this project soon and be able to move back to some Rails projects where I can be back at home with a text editor that doesn’t hurt to use. Yet another compelling reason to stick with that archaic, esoteric old thing known as VI improved!

• Requirements and Dependencies

  1. svnmerge.py - a python script that helps you keep your branches in synch with the trunk. The script and full documentation are available at http://www.orcaware.com/svn/wiki/Svnmerge.py
  2. define a bash variable of the svn path ($TIS_SVN_URL in this case)

• Creating the branch

  1. stop your development server
  2. commit any outstanding changes to the trunk
  3. copy the trunk to a branch

     svn copy $TIS_SVN_URL/trunk $TIS_SVN_URL/branches/branch-name

  4. switch over to that branch

     svn switch $TIS_SVN_URL/branches/branch-name

  5. initialize the branch

     svnmerge.py init

  6. commit:

     svn commit -F svnmerge-commit-message.txt

• Working with the branch

  1. stop your development server
  2. occasionally perform svnmerge.py merge to keep in sync with the trunk

• Merging branch back into the trunk

  1. stop your development server
  2. with a clean branch switch over to the trunk:

     svn switch $TIS_SVN_URL/trunk

  3. check properties on trunk for any merge stuff:

     svn proplist -v .

  4. Initialize the merge tracking support on the trunk, related to the given branch, using:

     svnmerge.py init $TIS_SVN_URL/branches/alpha02-dashboard

  5. commit:

     svn commit -F svnmerge-commit-message.txt

  6. update
  7. merge:

     svnmerge.py merge --bidirectional -S $TIS_SVN_URL/branches/alpha02-dashboard > merge_log.txt

  8. check merge log for any conflicts
  9. resolve any conflicts
  10. rake test
  11. commit:

      svn commit -F svnmerge-commit-message.txt

  12. svnmerge.py uninit -S $TIS_SVN_URL/branches/alpha02-dashboard
  13. commit:

      svn commit -F svnmerge-commit-message.txt

  14. svn rm -m ‘removing branch’ $TIS_SVN_URL/branches/alpha02-dashboard

On my home workstation I dual boot fedora 6 and windows xp (only for games really). I wanted to be able to easily share a storage drive between the two OSes so I decided to format one of my secondary drives FAT32. Here are the steps I took to complete the task. I am posting them on here mostly for my own reference, if you have any questions leave a comment and I will do my best to help you out!

From a command line as root:

# “fdisk hda” (or sda for serial ata drives) to enter the menu drive fdisk utility
# “p” to list current partitions
# “n” create a new partition
# “p” for primary
# Give the volume a label (1 for hda1 or sda1)
# Set the first and last sector
# “t” to change the filesystem type
# “c” for vfat
# “w” to write the partition table and exit the fdisk utility
# “mkfs -t vfat /dev/{your_vfat_drive}
# “vi /etc/fstab”
# /dev/{your_vfat_drive} /mnt/{mount_point} defaults,umask=000 0 0
# “mount -a or mount /dev/{your_vfat_drive}”