I recently stumbled upon FeatherCast, a nice little project made by Rich Bowen and David Reid, the former, a recognized documenter within the Apache community, author of a few books on the webserver, mainly the Apache Cookbook. FeatherCast is an unofficial podcast; its primary goal is supporting the Apache Software Foundation community. I've found it to be greatly interesting, modern and up to date; more recently, bringing lights to some of the content and people, for instance, featured on ApacheCon, which took place in New Orleans, LA, late last year.

Great effort, great initiative: Subscribe and support FeatherCast!

Irb is a pain to work with… when you don't know it enough. Fortunately, it can be configured extensively enough to make your Ruby interactive sessions much smoother. Pocahontas asked me to post my Irb configuration:

# ~/.irbrc
IRB.conf[:AUTO_INDENT] = true
IRB.conf[:USE_READLINE] = true
IRB.conf[:SAVE_HISTORY] = 5000
IRB.conf[:HISTORY_FILE] = "#{ENV['HOME']}/.irb_history"
IRB.conf[:PROMPT_MODE] = :SIMPLE

require 'irb/completion'
require 'irb/ext/save-history'
require 'pp'

# load rubygems and wirble
require 'rubygems' rescue nil
require 'wirble'
require 'utility_belt'

# load wirble
Wirble.init
Wirble.colorize

Which makes Irb to look much much better:

But it is not only coloring the features you are getting, but also Readline support, command history saving, tab completion, libraries loaded by default, persistent history with Wirble, etc, etc. as you can see yourself on the very self-explanatory configuration file. Enjoy.

Update: I have to thank my co-worker Galin for pointing me most of these neat features.

Following the Git tips being thrown on Planet Debian, here's a couple:

1. Changing into a directory that contains a repo and shows you on PS1 what branch you are standing on:

On .bashrc I have:

GITPS1='$(__git_ps1 ":%s ")'
export PS1="${GREEN}\w${RS} ${YELLOW}${GITPS1}${RS}\\$ "

2. An alias I like to use on repos that are personal for quick tracking:

[alias]
  ...
  log1 = log --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit

I hope you like them.

And this is the perfect example. While I had a wonderful position, my opponent failed by trying to checkmate me too soon, and it took me some time to figure out a way to mate him myself. I consider a bit disrespectful to take the queen out too soon. See the game here. No more PGNs for you.