Carl Mercier’s blog

Stop the press!

My pet project of long date Ajaxwhois.com was recently acquired! The deal has been in the work for quite some time and was finalized last Thursday.

I’m really excited about this since the new owner intends to make the site even better. Unfortunately, I did not have the time to maintain it as much as I wanted lately, being busy with Defensio and stuff. Selling Ajaxwhois made a lot of sense to me at this point: I really want to see the site evolve and I was no longer the guy for that.

I have a secret to share… Before saying my last goodbye to Ajaxwhois, I had to do a little something, right? Well… Before concluding the transaction, I did (yet another) a complete rewrite in Ruby. Ajaxwhois now runs on Thin and Merb! The code is much cleaner and I optimized the algorithms to make everything snappier.

Here’s what Google just showed me…

I’m sorry, but I can’t read that. Camilo could, but I couldn’t. Spammers are getting better at OCR‘ing captchas, and in return, captchas are getting harder to read. I think this one just crossed the line… now even humans can’t read them!

We’re just starting to use GIT at Defensio and although there are plenty of great resources like the Peepcode video and Jean-François Couture’s blog, the learning curve (from SVN) can be a little rough. The problem is that GIT is very powerful, and probably too powerful for a small shop like ours. This unfortunately leads to some complexity that we’d rather not have to deal with, especially since we don’t need all the fancy features.

In an effort to simplify our workflow, we started to build a few scripts that automate complex tasks. My plan is to post them on my blog for your own benefit. If they’re useful for us, they should be useful for other people too.

The first script I’m posting is git-remote-branch. It is meant to simplify the process of creating and deleting remote and local tracking branches. Instead of having to execute multiple commands, easy to remember one-liners are now enough. (hey! we’re lazy!)

Check this out:

This command creates an experimental branch on a remote server (’origin’ by default) from the one you’re currently sitting in, then a local tracking branch. When that’s done, it checks out to the newly created local branch.  You can then pull and push as you wish.

This command does the same as the previous one, but creates experimental on ‘origin2′ instead of ‘origin’.

When you’re done dealing with the remote/local branch combo you created, you can delete both in one go:

The script will delete the remote branch, then check out “master” if you’re still sitting in “experimental”. The local “experimental” branch is then deleted.

git-remote-branch can be downloaded here. Make sure to chmod +x it before executing it. For the record, it’s written in Ruby.  Let me know if it’s useful for you!