recent-branches – a quick git command

I’m often switching between the same few branches in git – whether I’ve been distracted by doing a quick fix in another branch, or am doing a code review on a colleague’s branch – and get frustrated with having to type out the name of said branches all the time.

With that in mind, I created a quick ruby script that will show me my most recently checked-out branches (up to a limit of my choosing) and allow me to check one out quickly by typing a number.

As mentioned, the limit can be set by the user, simply by adding the key ‘recent.limit’ to the git config (either –global or in the current project) with an appropriate number.

If this sounds useful, grab the code here: https://github.com/ascii-soup/git-recent-branches

Installing PHP 5.4.0alpha1 into Wampserver

So, around a week ago PHP 5.4.0alpha1 was released to the QA guys. What does this mean for us? It means we can get a copy of it and tinker around with some of the new features, like traits.

Static Rows widget for jQuery Tablesorter

I was using the fantastic jQuery Tablesorter plugin at work the other day and needed to keep a single “actions” row at the bottom of the table. I found the “Widget” tutorial and quickly knocked up a new widget that ensured my actions row stayed at the bottom when the columns were sorted, and then added the tidy-up job to my todo list.

So here it is. I tidied up the widget I created and allowed any rows to be marked as “static” by simply adding the “static” class to the <tr> tag.

Hopefully this will be of use to someone out there, as I found nothing while searching for something similar last week.

If you do use this widget, please let me know how you got on and if you find any bugs, please report them!

Download from GitHub

Not everything has to be a website!

Being a web developer, and working for a web development company, I often find myself coming up with ideas for new in-house tools that can improve our day-to-day lives.

Where I work, we have “creative days” once a month where us devs get to spend the whole day doodling around, playing with new technologies, building tools and generally just flexing our grey matter and keeping our skillset sharp.

Being a web developer, and working for a web development company, I often find myself building these tools as websites. It stands to reason; I use the LAMP[hp] stack all day, I live and breathe web and web technologies. Lately, however, I’ve been fiddling with C# and building *gasp* … desktop apps.