Ted Naleid

I’m pretty impressed with the community that’s forming over at StackOverflow.com (Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolksy’s new developer focused Q&A startup).

I just asked a fairly detailed question about working with mercurial. Something that wasn’t (obviously) covered on the mercurial wiki, through googling, or in the mercurial handbook, and got a quality answer back in only 8 minutes. That’s fantastic for a general purpose development website and is a great start after only being open for a couple of weeks.

They’ve started up an interesting reward/karma system over there where they award badges (similar to achievements on Xbox360) for a bunch of different positive behaviors. A nice little token system that’s paired with “power-ups” at different point levels. It’s easy to get the first few badges with just a little participation on the website, and I can see how certain personality types that are common in engineers would get big rewards out of collecting these.

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Just ran across Ubiquity over on on waxy.

It’s an alpha Firefox plugin that’s attempting to be a command line for the internet. It reminds me a little of yubnub, but quite a bit more powerful as it’s available on every page and is context sensitive.

Essentially, it has a set of built in commands (that you can add to an extend) and it’s aware of the current browser context, so if you have something highlighted, it can act on that subset of the current page.

Previously, I’ve been a heavy user of Firefox smart keywords, which allow you to assign aliases to bookmarks and type the aliases in the location bar. I’ve created smart keywords that allow me to search wikipedia, amazon, imdb and the dictionary. Ubiquity has all of these, plus a lot more built-in.

I’ve only been using it for a little bit, and there are some rough edges, but I think that there is quite a bit of promise here as well and thought that there might be a few other keyboard jockeys out there that would appreciate what Ubiquity is trying to do.

1 Comment » Posted by tednaleid / Uncategorized and command line and osx and shortcut

I ran into a couple of issues trying to clone a mercurial repository over ssh tonight. I’m documenting the solutions here in case they’re useful for anyone else (or me when I forget what I did in 6 months :).

The first issue was that I’m running ssh on a non-standard port and the repository does not reside in my home directory.
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