March 2011 Summaries

Google’s Summer of Code (GSoC) invites students to apply for paid opportunities to contribute to open source projects over the summer, offering a chance to enhance their skills and earn money while working on real-world applications. Students enrolled in college or university are encouraged to prepare and submit their applications for various projects, including the development of functionalities for the libgit2 library and creating a minimal Git client using libgit2. Successful applicants may receive mentorship from experienced developers such as Jeff King and Vicent Marti, with the latter having transitioned to a role at GitHub following his own GSoC participation. The program highlights the potential career benefits and practical experience gained through contributing to open source initiatives.

The second edition of The GitHub Reflog is a weekly showcase of notable GitHub repositories, featuring both innovative projects and promising newcomers. Highlighted projects include koggdal/ocanvas, which simplifies Canvas region manipulation with an intuitive API and event system; evanphx/gx, a tool designed to streamline Git merge conflict resolution; BigZaphod/Chameleon, an ambitious project aiming to replicate Apple's UIKit for OSX applications; and jugyo/earthquake, a Twitter client for terminals that emerged during Japan's recent earthquakes. Other noteworthy mentions are twigkit/tempo, a JavaScript template engine for rendering JSON content, and shinh/maloader, a loader for running Xcode tools on Linux. Additionally, antimatter15/player demonstrates HTML5's potential by playing MP3 files directly from the browser. Feedback and suggestions are encouraged, with more open-source news available through The Changelog and GitHub's explore page.

Scott Chacon and PJ are in Taipei for the OSDC.TW event and are organizing a social gathering at Juliana Taipei at 8 PM on Saturday, March 26, inviting their friends and attendees for a drinkup, with the offer of a free beer for those who join them. The venue is located at No.29, Ln. 31, Sec. 1, Da’an Rd., Da’an Dist., Taipei City 106, conveniently near the MRT ZhangXiao Fuxing station exit no. 4.

GitHub has introduced a feature where users can @mention a username to notify that person and subscribe them to updates on issues or pull requests. Additionally, users now have enhanced control over their notifications, allowing them to manually subscribe or unsubscribe from specific issues without needing to comment on them. Those who prefer not to receive notifications when mentioned can disable @mention notifications through their Notification Center under Account Settings.

Blacktocat has reemerged with a fresh new look and a prominent front logo, marking its readiness for wider public attention. The introduction of Octopint Glasses offers a unique way to enjoy beverages, featuring the GitHub logo on one side and Blacktocat on the other. These glasses are available for international shipping, and interested customers can find them at the GitHub Shop. The announcement was made by Tom Preston-Werner, known by the handle @mojombo.

Rick Olson, Brian Lopez, and Kyle Neath will be present at the Ruby on Ales conference in Bend, Oregon, and they are organizing a meetup at The Bend Brewing Company on Friday, March 25th, at 7 pm, the closing day of the event. The gathering invites attendees to enjoy a drink courtesy of GitHub while engaging in discussions about Ruby, design, and their new Kegerator, along with broader ambitions.

The first edition of The GitHub Reflog, curated by Kenneth Reitz, highlights notable GitHub repositories, featuring devstructure/blueprint as the Repo of the Week for its ability to reverse engineer servers and create replicable server setups through bootstrap packages. The newsletter also showcases drbrain/meme, a Ruby gem for generating meme images from the command line, and taitems/Aristo-jQuery-UI-Theme, which offers a visually appealing theme for jQuery UI. Other noteworthy projects include brainsik/virtualenv-burrito, which simplifies Python environment setup, maccman/ichabod for running headless JavaScript tests, and twitter/commons, a collection of Twitter's internal JVM libraries. Additionally, extend/cowboy is highlighted as an evolving Erlang HTTP server project, with Kenneth inviting feedback and contributions while promoting The Changelog and GitHub Explore for further open source news.

Cameron McEfee introduces four modes for viewing image changes in commits: 2-Up, Swipe, Onion Skin, and Difference, each offering unique ways to compare image versions and identify changes. The 2-Up mode is the default, displaying both images side by side and showing dimension changes, while Swipe allows users to compare pixel shifts with a slider. Onion Skin helps detect small movements by adjusting opacity, and Difference mode highlights only the differing pixels, useful for spotting minor changes. These modes are compatible with the latest browsers, though older versions of Internet Explorer lack support for the Difference mode due to its reliance on canvas technology. The Difference mode benefits from @Phrogz's context-blender project, which simulates Photoshop blend modes, and a demo is available for users to explore these features.

A lighthearted and whimsical narrative describes a chaotic and humorous series of events at an office. The story begins with employees enjoying drinks from a new kegerator, leading to some noise that attracts police attention. In the ensuing commotion, everyone hurriedly leaves for home using various modes of transportation, while one employee takes a company plane. In their haste, they forget to lock the office door, allowing a bear to enter, attracted by the smell of fish and cake. The bear accidentally causes a power surge by stepping on a cord, leading to a fire that damages equipment. The anecdote concludes with the bear facing consequences and the team needing to handle significant paperwork and expenses to address the resulting damage, all wrapped up with a humorous and inconclusive reflection from the author, Kyle Neath.

Earlier this week, experiments began with using Amazon CloudFront as a CDN for serving static assets, alongside general asset delivery optimizations aimed at reducing page load times, especially for users outside the US. Performance is being measured globally using BrowserMob, which provides detailed insights into page load times by monitoring full page loads in real browsers. The shift to a single asset host from multiple hosts was tested, revealing that it stabilized page load times but did not drastically improve them, as multiple hosts can lead to varied response times and SSL handshake inefficiencies. CloudFront was implemented using Custom Origins, which allows for asset requests to be fetched and stored without transferring assets to an S3 bucket, despite some challenges like CloudFront ignoring query strings. Performance improvements were noted in places like Singapore, but results were mixed in the US and Europe, sparking further investigation into potential DNS resolution issues with BrowserMob. The experiment is ongoing, with plans to compare other CDNs before reaching a final decision.

Simon Rozet and Scott are organizing a drinkup event at the Delirium Cafe in Brussels on Monday, March 14, and are inviting local GitHub enthusiasts to join them for complimentary beers from the cafe's extensive menu of over 2000 options. The gathering is scheduled to start at 8:30 PM at the cafe located at Impasse de la Fidélité, 4A, in the 1000 Bruxelles area. Additionally, attendees might find interest in an impressive absinthe bar situated directly across the street, adding an extra attraction to the evening's festivities.

GitHub has updated its email notification system to allow users to reply directly to most notifications, such as issue comments, commit comments, pull requests, and direct messages, instead of using the [email protected] address. This change aims to accommodate different user preferences, such as top posting and bottom posting, without requiring Markdown. Although email comment formatting may still have some quirks, the feature allows users to conveniently respond to emails. Plain text emails are preferred as HTML content is stripped away, and email attachments are ignored since there's no option to upload assets to issues or comments. Users must ensure their email address is linked to their GitHub account to use this feature, and any issues can be reported to GitHub support with a URL or email Message-ID for assistance.

The GitHub Application for LinkedIn provides users with a platform to engage in social coding by allowing them to discover projects that their LinkedIn connections are involved in. This integration aims to enhance networking and collaboration opportunities within professional networks by connecting GitHub's coding environment with LinkedIn's professional network. For additional details, users can refer to the blog post by Chris Wanstrath, known by his username @defunkt.

Earlier today, a monitoring system alert indicated media errors on a disk in the RAID10 array of an active MySQL server, which was deemed non-critical and scheduled for replacement post-work hours. At around 7:30 PM PST, during the disk removal process, an unforeseen kernel lock coincided with a health check by the high availability (HA) system, causing it to erroneously mark the server as problematic. The HA system intervened by shutting down the affected server and activating MySQL on a standby machine, a transition that was executed smoothly. However, due to the size of certain tables, the subsequent InnoDB recovery process following the unclean MySQL shutdown extended service restoration to 7:45 PM PST. Adjustments have since been made to the procedure to prevent similar occurrences in the future, as reported by Tim Sharpe.

GitHub announced that starting June 7, 2011, it would no longer support the "dumb" HTTP transport mechanism for fetching git repositories, urging users to upgrade to at least git version 1.6.6, which includes the superior "smart" HTTP transport introduced in January 2010. Despite the initial plan, the cutoff date was extended to June 12, 2011, to allow users more time for the transition. The "dumb" HTTP transport was deemed inefficient due to its excessive data communication and the exposure of internal repository data, hindering storage capabilities. Users relying on this outdated method were encouraged to contact support if they faced upgrade difficulties, as most modern clients and Linux distributions already supported the smart transport.

Apple's release of Xcode 4 marks a significant milestone as it is the first version to natively support Git, with new projects defaulting to Git repositories, enhancing collaboration through platforms like GitHub. This integration is expected to bolster the popularity of Objective-C projects, which are already gaining traction on GitHub, potentially entering the platform's Top 10 languages. Notable Objective-C projects mentioned include JSONKit, Mogenerator, UIDickbar, MyStyledView, and JAListView, each offering unique functionalities for app development and styling. The release of Xcode 4 is anticipated to catalyze a surge in Cocoa projects, reflecting a growing trend towards leveraging Git for efficient project management and collaboration in the iOS development community.

Recent updates to service hook payloads introduce several new fields, including a flag for distinct commits, indicators for newly created or deleted branches, and a base reference name for new branches. These enhancements are utilized by the campfire service hook to refine the messages sent, ensuring only new commits are highlighted during merges and preventing unnecessary notifications from clean fast-forward merges. Additionally, when new branches are created via git push, the name of the base branch is now displayed, and branches created with commits locally will showcase new changes. While previously service hooks did not trigger on branch deletions, they now include a deleted=true payload, though CI systems and other endpoints uninterested in deletions can opt to ignore this information.

GitHub has implemented an update to its SmartHTTP protocol, making the trailing ".git" suffix optional when cloning repositories. This change, contributed by developers rodjek and technoweenie, simplifies the process of cloning GitHub repositories by allowing users to omit the suffix, as demonstrated in the command example provided by Chris Wanstrath. This update enhances the ease of use for developers utilizing GitHub for version control and collaboration.

Scott Chacon announces a last-minute gathering at Patricks Irish Pub in Paris on Friday, March 4, targeting attendees of the nearby Symfony Live Conference and local GitHub enthusiasts. The event, which starts at 8 PM, promises to be a social occasion for tech enthusiasts, as the entire bar is rented out for the night, ensuring a geek-friendly environment. Participants are invited to enjoy free beer and mingle with fellow PHP developers and GitHubbers.

GitHub has experienced significant growth in its push and commit activity over the past year, with mid-week push traffic more than doubling. A year after reporting a peak of 33,154 pushes and 109,290 commits in a single day, recent data shows that last week's activity reached as high as 83,922 pushes and 412,882 commits on certain weekdays. Weekend activity has also escalated to match the level of weekday traffic from the previous year, illustrating the platform's increasing usage and the continuous acceleration of development activity.

Git can be daunting for newcomers, particularly those unfamiliar with command prompts, but GitHub aims to simplify the learning process with new bootcamp help documents. Authored by Cameron McEfee, these tutorials focus on four crucial aspects of Git and GitHub: setting up, creating and forking repositories, and engaging socially on the platform. Designed with beginners in mind, the tutorials provide step-by-step guidance, definitions of common terms, and explanations of Bash commands, ensuring an accessible learning experience. The bootcamp section is conveniently placed on the dashboard for easy access, catering to both enthusiastic learners and those completely new to Git.