Rewriting Git History for Fun

For starters, if you're looking for a good JDBC connection pool, look no farther than c3p0 [github, doc].

Back a few years commons-dbcp wasn't very stable under load, so I went looking for an alternative and landed on c3p0.  Ever since then, Steve Waldman has been making it better and better.  Except for a 2-year hiatus when he wasn't working on it, he's been very responsive and willing to accept feedback and make improvements.  I'm seriously impressed by the project.

Anyway, since I've been a long-time user and fan, when I saw Steve put his software on GitHub, I went for a look.

Here is what I saw:

But what about all those prior releases in source snapshot form, that I was used to seeing from SourceForge?

I realized that perhaps I could contribute a little to the project, so I went and grabbed all the source release zips from SourceForge, created a local git repo, created a commit for each release, tagged it, and spliced Steve's recent work on the top.

Then I submitted a GitHub issue to ask Steve what he thought -- wasn't really a pull request because it was a completely disconnected history.

Here is the top of the new history:

And here is the earliest part of that history:

The tools used were:

- git config author.name - to give credit where credit was due

- git config author.email

- curl - to download all the releases

- unzip | sed - to figure out what the commit date should be

- git commit --date "[release date]" - to create the commits

- vi .git/info/grafts - to temporarily splice the new history on the old

- git filter-branch --tag-name-filter - to rewrite the new history permanently on top

- git tag -f - to replace the existing release tags to point to the new rewritten history

- git push --tags - to push it up to github

If I could consult for projects / companies to do this kind of VCS conversion work and actually get paid for it -- wouldn't that be awesome!

Modular Apps

In the last 12 months, it seems like apps are getting a lot more modular.

I discovered news.me before Christmas last year -- which felt modular at an app level -- RSS => social, and the reciprocal daily digest.  In fact, I've been reading their daily Twitter summary basically ever since, even though I am effectively a read-only non-citizen on Twitter.

It's old news to a lot of people, but when I saw IFTTT and Wappwolf, my mind was blown.  This is modularity at an app level, not just a code level.

Here is a good outline of what kind of things are possible with this new breed of app-level integrator apps:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2012/04/4-cool-things-you-can-do-with

Minus the fairly major hole of lack of HTTPS support from IFTTT, it looks awesome.  When that's fixed I'll be investing a fair amount of time/automation into it.

Backwards Names

My family likes to play a fun game called Backwards Names.  This game is played by taking each name piece of a person's name and reversing the characters and trying to pronounce it fluently.

I was just sitting on the couch tonight after a long Saturday and not thinking about backwards names at all.  I had my laptop open to get some work done, but my son sat down next to me, and I wanted to show him some programming.

I started out in irb and just did some simple string substitution with his name, but irb and ruby make it so easy to just mess around that I ended up with an implementation of Backwards Names before I knew it.

Here it is:


It was just really fun to do that with him and see lights start to turn on about what programming was like.