Railsconf was a blast. Here are just a few links I gathered during the various talks: https://gist.github.com/2495211

Beyond excited to be attending Railsconf in Austin, TX this year! Can’t wait to finally meet the rest of Site5 Engineering team in person. If you’re at any of the bars afterward, make sure to flag down Site5 for a drink!

Incidentally, I wonder why the TSA recommends you arrive two hours early for a flight when it took me all of 5 minutes to clear security.

This was a pretty cool story about how the developer of the original Prince of Persia game was able to recover it’s source code after 20 years. It almost makes me wish I had kept my pile of floppy disks!

This is a pretty comprehensive article that discusses the overall shittiness of PHP. Many of the points listed here are reasons I love Ruby over PHP.

Today I learned that gifs can have more than 256 colors. Using more seems unpractical, but it’s still a cool trick.

This was an interesting article about resizing vector icons — in short, the details count, and SVG is no replacement for a designer’s keen eye.

This is just a test post from Heroku :)

Blargging this so I remember to read it later :)

This made me laugh, Gradients, motherfucker.

While working on a project managed with Git, I needed to split some files into a new repository. In order to maintain the git history on these files, I used git filter-branch. Here are two methods I used.

First, create a copy of the original repo. git filter-branch is destructive and will rewrite your repos history!

git clone original-project/.git new-project
cd new-project

In one case, the files I wanted to keep were all isolated to a subdirectory in the original repo (eg: lib/keep_us). In this case, one can use the —subdirectory-filter option of git filter-branch:

git filter-branch —subdirectory-filter lib/keep_us

Once this command is complete, new-project will contain only the files from lib/keep_us (git history only includes these files as well) in the project root. That is, any files previously in lib/keep_us would be in the git root.

For another repo, I needed to split files across different directories. This is a bit more complicated. In order to do this, you need to get a list of all files you want to keep. Then, you must traverse each commit and remove any files that are not in this list.

I used the following ruby script to do this:

Dir.chdir “new-project”

all_files_ever = git log —pretty=format: —name-only —diff-filter=A | sort –.
                 chomp.split(“\n”).reject {|line| line.chomp == “”}
keepers = %W(
  app/models/foo.rb
  spec/models/foo_spec.rb
  lib/tasks/foo.rake
)

delete_us = all_files_ever – keepers

git filter-branch —prune-empty —index-filter “git rm -f —cached —ignore-unmatch #{delete_us.join(' ')}” HEAD

After running this script, you’ll be left with only the files specified as “keepers”. Unlike the —subdirectory-filter option, these files are left in their original location. That is, app/models/foo.rb is still app/models/foo.rb after the rewrite.

Hope it helps someone else!