Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Cloning a git repo over ssh on Snow Leopard

I had trouble cloning a git repo between my home iMac and work MacBook Pro, both running Snow Leopard.

It should be as easy as (porkchop-sandwiches is my work machine name. That's right.):

git clone ssh://tony@porkchop-sandwiches.local/~/work/repo

But that was failing with:

bash: git-upload-pack: command not found
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

It sounded like the problem was that when logging into ssh I wasn't getting my work machine's user's path, which had all the git stuff in it. This is what I googled: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/225291/git-upload-pack-command-not-found-how-to-fix-this-correctly, and sure enough this command showed that my PATH wasn't what I expected:

ssh tony@porkchop-sandwiches.local echo \$PATH

I tried the solution at stackoverflow, by symlinking .profile to .bashrc but it didn't work even though the PATH was now correct. I don't know what was going on, but one of the other possible solutions on the stackoverflow lead me to this: http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/git/2008/6/18/2159464, which I then did, and it then did work. It basically forces SSH logins to execute that custom script as the command, which figures out whether to load .profile or not based on if there was a command passed, and then executes the original command if there was one.

I'm off to the races now!

Posted via email from Tony Hillerson's Posterous

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

The Teavana Perfect Tea Maker is Awesome.

It makes one cup of loose-leaf tea and it's so clean and easy to use. Much better than a tea ball and quicker and cleaner than a tea pot.

Here's a link: (http://bit.ly/3umdSF)

Posted via web from Tony Hillerson's Posterous

Friday, December 18, 2009

Record

This is an awesome way to spend a Friday night

Posted via web from Tony Hillerson's Posterous

Bacon and eggs.

Bacon and Eggs O's style: a slab of bacon and couscous with bacon with a 140 degree egg.

Posted via web from Tony Hillerson's Posterous

Usability is a clementine.

Usability is a nebulous word that we hear a lot about in my industry. I'm not sure what it is, but I know what it looks like - that kind of thing, you know? It's something we're supposed to make more of, though, that's for sure. In so far as we can be objective about it, it's sort of a utilitarian view (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism) of devices and software and the things that we interact with every day.

When I was at Web2.0 San Francisco last spring I heard a good definition of usability. John Maeda (http://www.maedastudio.com/index.php) said that usability is a Forever Stamp. I like that. A Forever Stamp increases usability by getting more things out of the "user's" way. When someone wants to mail something they want to mail something, not check to see if they have to attach a stamp and a half or paste a quarter on their envelope. They don't have to worry the whole time the thing is in the mail. They just put on the stamp and send it. It's goal oriented; it doesn't expose more of the inner workings of the system (e.g. stamp price changes) than it needs to.

Here's another take. Usability is a clementine. Who doesn't like oranges? Oranges taste great. At least the juicy part does. The pulpy stuff that sticks to the orange as you peel it isn't that great. Oh, and peeling is a pain. They even make special tools for it. And by the time you get done you're up to your elbows in sticky orange juice and half of the orange is crushed.

Clementines are not that way. There's nothing left behind from the skin. It's small enough that you can just zip it open and eat it. If you're really hungry, have two. Peeling is super easy too. I routinely peel one open one-handed as I drive to work.

Oranges were designed by a big corporation. They wanted to make them big, so they look like more of a deal. They wanted to seal in the good stuff so they really stuck that skin on there. They wanted to put seeds in there so there could be more oranges all over the land. Oranges are there for oranges' sake.

Not clementines. They're just for eating.

Posted via email from Tony Hillerson's Posterous

Moving, but not far

Hey, to anyone who still reads this thing, I'm moving my blog to my Posterous. I'll probably have similar things to say there, but luckly Posterous will post to blogger, so if you do end up here, all the posts at the new blog will show up here.

I'm Back!!

Wow. This is going to look weird alongside the last post, but hey - it's my own fault for not posting more often.

Anyhow - yea, I'm back at EffectiveUI. I've learned a lot and grown some (like an inch), and I'm happy to be back with my friends. It feels like coming home.

Good times.