We're gearing up for the upcoming, very first Tulsa Ruby Workshop. Of course, all you need to know is on the website, but in short, it's a beginner's conference all about Ruby and Rails. If you're new to Ruby and/or Rails, this is for you (if you're in or near enough to Tulsa, Oklahoma that is). Tell everyone you know!

I still plan on writing the final part in the Git series on this blog, but in the meantime, on a related note, we now have a page up on the OneBody wiki about Using Git. It includes some instructions for using Git on Windows and some other commands that may be helpful to noobs.

Oooo I really like the new Firefox 3 beta. It's zippy and it looks great. My only beef was the new fancy address bar... Being an uber web geek, I tend to recognize things by their URLs instead of page titles, so this was slowing me down to much: So, to get things back all barebones FF2 style, I installed this and set browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped in about:config to true. Much better.

Just to save you a half-hour of your life, I thought I'd share that you should never create a named route called "directory" -- it will break Rails migrations and other rake tasks in mysterious and hard-to-track-down ways.

For Part 2 of our 60-second Git tutorial, we'll look at some super simple branching and merging. git branch tells you which branch you're on. git branch -a lists all branches, even remote ones. git checkout mybranch checks out the branch you want. git checkout -b newbranch creates a new branch from the one you're on, and checks it out for you. git checkout master && git merge mybranch merges changes from one branch to your master branch. If you don't want to commit the changes, you can do git merge --no-commit mybranch instead. So far, we've only talked about local git usage. Isn't it cool that you can do so much without even having a server set up with our repo? I think so. Part 3 will include pulling and pushing your changes to remote repos.

First, the mental hurdles: You don't need a server to have a git repository. All your commit history is available locally and quickly, with simple commands. Same with branches and tags. Git "checkout" and "commit" are commands you run locally. Svn "checkout" and "commit" are really more like "pull" and "push" with git. Now, the commands: rails myapp && cd myapp && git init && git add . && git commit -a creates a repo and makes the first commit (but still nothing is sent to any server; all work is done locally in your own repository) echo "my app rocks" > README && git add README && git commit -a makes another commit git rm path/to/remove && git commit -a git reset --hard HEAD returns your repo to last committed state (cancels working changes) I'm still fighting with this one. It seems the best way might be to do a git checkout -f instead. That's it for the first part. Part 2 will be next.