lecturing and git-bisect

I was recently asked to give a lecture for the PRELUDE series at McGill. Here was my abstract:

I don’t like computers, and neither should you.

We spend too much time figuring out how to talk to them, instead of having them figure out how to understand us.

There’s a big discontinuity between what software is providing, and the killer features we want!

We’re not completely lost though. There are a lot of good tools and methodologies available!

Until the feature gap closes, let me introduce you to some of these tools, and show you how I use the computer.

I spoke about a variety of topics with the intention of filling in everyone’s knowledge about the useful tools available to users and developers. I included a section about git-bisect and have posted the script in the examples section of the bash-tutor tarball. It is now available for you to download and share.

I hope everyone enjoyed the lecture, and I always appreciate feedback!

scary cool bash scripting inside a Makefile

Makefiles are both scary and wonderful. When both these adjectives are involved, it often makes for interesting hacking. This is likely the reason I use bash.

In any case, I digress, back to real work. I use Makefiles as a general purpose tool to launch any of a number of shell scripts which I use to maintain my code, and instead of actually having external shell scripts, I just build any necessary bash right into the Makefile.

One benefit of all this is that when you type “Make <target>”, the <target> can actually autocomplete which makes your shell experience that much more friendly.

In any case, let me show you the code in question. Please note the double $$ for shell execution and for variable referencing. The calls to rsync and sort make me pleased.

rsync -avz --include=*$(EXT) --exclude='*' --delete dist/ $(WWW)
# empty the file
echo -n '' > $(METADATA)
cd $(WWW);
for i in *$(EXT); do
b=$$(basename $$i $(EXT));
V=$$(echo -n $$(basename "`echo -n "$$b" | rev`"
"`echo -n "$(NAME)-" | rev`") | rev);
echo $(NAME) $$V $$i >> $(METADATA);
done;
sort -V -k 2 -o $(METADATA) $(METADATA) # sort by version key


The full Makefile can be found inside of the bash-tutor tarball.