Here is the longhand way:

git checkout old-branch
git branch new-branch
git checkout new-branch

But there is a quicker way:

git checkout -b new-branch old-branch

… which does the same thing, albiet in one command.

For a long time, I put up with some less than optimal settings.  But over time, I learned what worked best for me.  The purpose of this post is to share that with you.

Enjoy!

Download from: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

Hint: I prefer the windows installer.  However, whatever you do, make sure you get the whole suite (unless you know you don’t need it)

Launch PuTTY and configure “Session” section

user@host is handy for auto-login.  I prefer to place my server name before my username in the saved sessions because the sort order will be maintained as the list grows.

Configure the “Terminal > Bell” section

I have found it preferable not to disable the bell if it is overused.

Configure the “Window” Settings

This is one of the most important settings.  The default of 200 lines of scrollback is just not enough.  I find 20000 to be more useful.  Also, the window size should be set according to your screen size and preferences.

Configure “Window > Appearance” settings

I find that the Luicida Console 14 point font is very easy on the eyes.  Keep in mind I’m usually using a 27″ or 30″ display at 2560 pixels wide, so I can afford the extra size of 14pt.  However, even on smaller screens, I still find it nicer to be able to read effortlessly and see less than the other way around.  Just give it a try :)

Configure the “Window > Translation” settings

As of a few years ago, Linux began to use UTF-8 character encoding by default.  This means that if your terminal is set to latin1 or similar, then each single multi-byte-character is literally interpreted as multiple latin1 characters, mostly drawn as out-of-place accented letters and various symbols.

So in my experience, it is best to use UTF-8 when connecting to Linux.

Configure “Window > Selection” settings

You need to decide here if you want an important safety precaution.  Under the “Compromise” setting above, right-click will paste whatever is on the clipboard… even if you were just blogging about sudo rm -rf /

So, think that over pretty hard.  The first option of “Windows” will bring up a right-click menu with a convenient “Paste” option.  Also, you can simply us SHIFT+INSERT to paste in PuTTY.

Configure “Window > Colours” settings

If you can read dark-blue-on-black, then your vision is in another “spectrum” than mine.  Check out the difference here:

Simply select “ANSI Blue” and change the RGB values to 112, 112, 255.

Configure “Connection” settings

It is helpful to send a null packet every once in a while to keep sessions alive.

Configure “Connection > SSH” settings (Update)

David Aldrich pointed out in a helpful comment that  ”I also think it is probably worth enabling SSH compression if working over a slow connection.”

Configure “Connection > SSH > Auth” settings

If you use SSH Agent forwarding (eg pagent) to allow you to “hop” from one server to another, then PuTTY must be told to enable Agent Forwarding.  There are some security issues with this setting when connecting to an untrusted server, so please understand them first.

Configure “Connection > SSH > Tunnels”

If you want to connect to a MySQL or PostgreSQL service running on the host you are connecting to, but have all communication encrypted and sent via SSH tunnel, here is how to set that up.

Keep in mind that your Windows OS you are on must have the source port free, so if you are ALSO running MySQL locally, then pick a different local port number like 13306.

Once your SSH session is established, then you can connect to localhost port 13306 and it will be tunneled to the remote server on 3306.  Cool!

Finally!!! Don’t forget to save your session.

(hint: press the “Save” button)

And that’s it!  The basic PuTTY settings that I use which work quite nicely.

Hope this helps.

Nearly all of the photographs we take are with the Motorola Droid X.  Provided you have sufficient light, the quality is very acceptable.

Here is one of the latest activities recorded:

This has been a great learning resource: http://www.kpsec.freeuk.com/trancirc.htm

Basically, we have 12V power going through a motor circuit (protected by a signal diode), and then to the collector of a transistor.  The emitter of the transister is connected to ground.

Lastly, the Arduino ground is joined with the emitter, and the transistor is switched by a 5V digital output pin on the Arduino board.

Now, just need to find something useful to do!

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

I recently got this starter kit from Amazon.com:

And have since been playing with making different circuits, etc… It has been a good experience in working with lower level electronics (ohm’s law, etc…)

Hope to post more soon!

For every activity, you can attach an unlimited number of images.  They are stored in the database with all of the other data, so it’s easy to backup.  Also, I am using ImageMagick to resize them into various preview sizes for quick speeds while working with them.

I used uploadify to power the image uploader and ImageMagick to resize them into preview sizes.

Here is a screen shot of the list page:

And a screen shot of the details page:

I would imagine that if I knew more about Hugin, that I could prevent some of this.

Regardless, it’s a pretty cool picture.  Zechariah is in it, if you can find him!

(make sure you click it and let your browser open it full size)

I had never stitched images together, but I must say this tool is impressive.  The images were all various shades, angles, and since taken freehand, not straight.

However, see the result below…

Quite annoying.  If on a production server, and other databases are being used, restarting postgresql is a last resort, because it generates downtime for your site (even if small).

I finally took the time to scratch around and find the answer.

As a super user, to list all of the open connections to a given database:

select * from pg_stat_activity where datname='YourDatabase';

As a superuser, to drop all of the open connections to a given database:

select pg_terminate_backend(procpid) from pg_stat_activity where datname='YourDatabase';

–

Here are some references to the functions:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/functions-admin.html#FUNCTIONS-ADMIN-SIGNAL-TABLE

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/monitoring-stats.html#MONITORING-STATS-VIEWS-TABLE

http://code.google.com/p/flot/

From their site:

Flot is a pure Javascript plotting library for jQuery. It produces graphical plots of arbitrary datasets on-the-fly client-side.

The focus is on simple usage (all settings are optional), attractive looks and interactive features like zooming and mouse tracking.

The plugin works with Internet Explorer 6/7/8, Firefox 2.x+, Safari 3.0+, Opera 9.5+ and Konqueror 4.x+ with the HTML canvas tag (the excanvasJavascript emulation helper is used for IE).

Examples

FlotUsage has plenty of examples of people and companies using Flot. Make sure you check out the examples.