In the last couple of years I’ve been working on various projects that – unfortunately – still use Subversion as their version control system. I moved to git already a few years ago and I wanted to keep using it as much as possible. Luckily git-svn is an incredibly complete tool to interact with a Subversion repository without leaving the comfort of the git power toolset. But there are gotchas.

This post assumes you are already a little bit aquainted with git-svn and you know how to interact with a subversion repository using it. In case you are not or you want a refresher, please have a look at this post from Bart or google it.

The list below is a list of all the tips I had to research and integrate in my workflow to keep using git joyfully in conjunction with Subversion. Enjoy!

Setting up the files to ignore

You should make sure that git ignores the same files svn does. The simpler trick is to append the list of svn:ignore files to the default git exclude file:

git svn show-ignore >> .git/info/exclude

An alternative method is the magical update-index  –assume-unchanged:

git update-index --assume-unchanged files to ignore

This is quite a fine trick I’ve consistently used in the past year. If you need more information, have a look at this post on Stackoverflow.

If you use the latter method, how do you find out later that a file has been ignored in git? You can use this:

git ls-files -v | grep ^[a-z] | sed -e 's/^h\ //'

git svn clone -s -r604:HEAD http://nick@svn.xxxxxx.com/repos/ -T trunk -b branches -t tags

git st | grep .svn | awk {'print $3'} | xargs git rm --cached

I saw the trend very clearly, spanning from reddit to news.yc and let me say that the material that came up recently is very good; those neat posts prompted me to improve my vimrc dramatically and I really like what I learned.

In this installment, instead than annotating my vimrc (another one? not that interesting, I’ll refrain) , I want to compile a roundup of the best vim articles I saw recently.

I’ll also add a few classics that changed me from a hater to a vim lover and will conclude with some minor tips out of my bag.

So here we go with the roundup.

Recent Vim Articles Roundup

Jamis Buck

Vim Follow Up

Coming Home To Vim

Jamis Buck switches back to vim from a period using TextMate and talks about his experience and his configuration. Many useful tips in there.

Stephen Bach

Configuring Vim Right

Sensible defaults for your vimrc, recommended.

Learnr dev blog

Configuring Vim Some More

Some additional configuration options that totally make sense and I incorporated in my config too.

Swaroop C H

A byte of vim

A new free e-book on vim, worth reading. Covers also advanced topics like writing your own plug-ins.

Effective Vim

This ends the recent vim trend spotting. But there are some older links that are worth sharing in my opinion.

Older Vim Gems

Jonathan McPherson

Efficient Editing With Vim

This is a true gem, an intermediate level tutorial that will convert you from a beginner vim user to a way more proficient one.

Jerry Wang

vi for smarties

Very good beginners guide to vim.

David Rayner

best of vim tips

Raw tips from a very long time vi/vim user

Vim is also great for Python development, 3 ideas…

vim omnicomplete awesomeness

How to make vim a modular Python IDE

How to replicate SLIME in vim

Finally a few tips from myself

vimperator: If you’re a heavy vim user you might want to checkout the great Firefox extension vimperator. You’ll find yourself browsing mouse-less with familiar vim keystrokes in a matter of minutes. I love it.

viPlugin for Eclipse: If you’re a Java developer (been there, done that) and you’re stuck with Eclipse, you definitely want to have viPlugin. It makes the Eclipse experience something much more pleasurable for one who has vi keystrokes embedded in the fingers.

cool color scheme: If you’ve seen “some” screen-casts and you have just a subterranean TextMate envy and you can’t stop thinking at that cool color-scheme, well think no more, you can use this one or my humbly tweaked version.

For delicious users here is the page of my bookmarks that made me notice the trend.

Ending note

For full disclosure I have to say that I have been – and still am sometimes – an Emacs user. One of the rebel ones daring enough to use Viper mode. So now you know.

This time I want to talk about where to get the content for your niche web app – if you need a source of content, that is.

Leverage the Semantic Web

I apologize if you all know it and I am late to the news. But really, the semantic web is alive and here and I think one of its most promising incarnations is Freebase.

What is Freebase?

Take the whole of Wikipedia, in it’s unstructured – well I should say semi-structured – mass of data, structure it properly creating schemas on schemas of semantic relations amongst articles, and expose a clean API on top of it. Keep the openness part, allow anyone to create new domains (called bases) and to contribute structured content by hand or programmatically. That is freebase as I understand it.  Beautiful.

How did I use it

So the secret is out, that’s exactly what I used to present cool thumbnails and basic movie data for my tiny tuttivisti – now at the second week of life (check it out by the way, the new release is out).

Let me go into deeper depth here because I realize the audience requires it.

The Freebase folks have extensive documentation on how to interact with their service. In addition to that they publish two very nice Python libraries, freebase-suggest and freebase-python. The first to add a cool, jquery based autocompletion dropdown to your forms, the second to query Freebase programmatically from a Python program.

freebase-suggest example

Using the freebase-suggest library is very easy. To achieve this:

I just had to add this jquery snippet to the bottom of the page:

<script type="text/javascript">
var options = {
soft: false,
ac_param: {
type: '/film/film',
category: 'instance',
disamb: '1',
limit: '10'
}
};


$('#searchbox')
.freebaseSuggest(options)
.bind('fb-select', function(e, data) {
$('#searchbox').val(data.name);
$('#freebase_id').val(data.id);
$('#freebase_image_id').val(data.image.id);
$('#search_movie_form').submit();
return false;
});
</script>


And mark the text input of the search with id=”searchbox”.

The freebase-python library is also very easy to use and I encourage you to take a look at the documentation, here.

So in conclusion, before your app gains traction and your content is produced by your users, leverage the Semantic Web if you can, use freebase!


sending message 'Confirm email address for example.com' to email1@test1.com
sending message 'Confirm email address for example.com' to email2@test2.com
[...]
sending message 'Confirm email address for example.com' to email3@test3.com


Unix command line tools can make the job of extracting those emails and make them ready to be used in a To (or BCC) field a one liner:

cat wrong.txt | awk {'print $9'} | uniq | xargs -I{} echo -n "{},"

The result is:

email1@test1.com, email2@test2.com, [...], email3@test3.com

sudo cat /var/log/dpkg.log | grep \ installed | awk {'print $5'} | xargs

mysql-client-5.0 mysql-server-5.0 ... apache2

Then I found this very clear, step by step how to. And now everything works like a charm.

The only drawback is that I can now basically only send email from my gmail account. Well that will do it for now.

I had to change it slightly to make it work under OSX so here it is for future reference:

  find . -type f -exec sed -i -e ‘s/Old/New/g’ {} \;