About StackOverflow

Published 2017-09-22, 16:35

I tried to post a few questions on StackOverflow in the last days which at times was a very negative experience: I was downvoted, got negative comments and of course got my questions closed as „offtopic“.

I am not the only one with that problem:

  1. https://hackernoon.com/the-decline-of-stack-overflow-7cb69faa575d
  2. https://movingfulcrum.com/stackoverflow-modding-itself-out-of-existence/
    • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9869886

Why do I write this down now? So I don’t start googling for exactly these posts and experiences the next time I am in this position, but can just go to this post, read some of these rants and accept it.

Then I can go back and see that maybe someone actually did provide a great comment or answer. Sometimes that still happens.

Topic(s): Kram No comments - :(

How to commit and version changes in a git fork/branch but not merge them back

Published 2017-09-21, 11:38

Recently I tried to figure out how to have both a production and staging environment of a Jekyll website hosted with Github Pages.

This turned out to be not that simple, as both repositories (Github Pages can only host one branch per repository, so you need two – one organization repository and one personal for example) need to have a CNAME and _config.yml file with different content.

So the actual question to answer was how can one commit and version changes to files in a git fork/branch but then not merge them back into the source, while still having a fully merged branch (so actual changes can be merged back via Pull Requests)?

The answer is to use the ours merging strategy when merging the changes that should be skipped:

  1. Assume we have our production repo and staging repo both checked out locally, for now being identical (and having the same CNAME and _config.yml).
  2. Check out staging, make the changes to the files and commit and push them.
  3. If we were to do a normal merge to production, this change would now get merged over.
  4. But now we run these commands:
    git checkout production
    git merge --strategy=ours staging
    (Source)
    --strategy=ours makes sure that during this merge, the production file remain unchanged. But the commit is still marked as merged.
    If we want, we can now also edit the merge commit messageto be a bit more descriptive what we just did: We merged the two branches, but made it keep „our“ (in this case: production) version of the files.
  5. Then push the changes to production:
    git push production production:master

Your next changes to staging can the be merged with production normally, without getting the CNAME and _config.yml changes.

Topic(s): Technik 1 single comment - :/

Rewriting history in Git

Published 2017-09-20, 21:00

Once again I was confused about rewriting history in Git:

As I am not a git power user – I use a GUI, SourceTree of GitKraken – for the more complicated commands and features, my mind tends to just „crash“ now and then and forget what they are and how they work.

A bit later I had it figured out again:

During these 15 minutes I googled around and found some nice explanations I now want to conserve for future reference:

And an additional nice thing to know and use when playing around with those:

Topic(s): Kram No comments - :(

Move (clone and close) Github issues to a different repository

Published 2017-08-04, 11:45

If you have any projects on Github that span multiple repositories you know the pain when someone creates a valid issue, but uses the wrong repo to do so. Of course you could tell them to „Create another issue in the correct repo and gtfo“ but that a) wouldn’t be very nice and b) is a quite a lot of work and c) probably wouldn’t have the intended effect to grow your Github community.

So you need a way to move issues betweens repos.

Github doesn’t support this out of the box, but of course some other people jumped in and created things that do. Here is an overview of my research on this:

Topic(s): Link No comments - :(

How to develop iOS 10.3.x apps in Xcode 8.2.x

Published 2017-07-10, 18:44

If you work on an older version of Mac OS, for example because Apple decided your Macbook is to old to upgrade to a recent version, you might be stuck with Xcode 8.2.x to develop and test your iOS apps. Unfortunately this can lead to this nice error message if you made the mistake to upgrade your iPhone to iOS 10.3:

Could not locate device support files
This iPhone 6s is running iOS 10.3.1 (14E304), which may not be supported by this version of Xcode.

This is because the old Xcode doesn’t get these „device support files“ via updates any more. Luckily the internet is here to rescue you.

  1. Download https://www.dropbox.com/s/i1f7q8w3vgr2ozl/10.3%20%2814E269%29.zip?dl=0 and extract it
  2. Click on „Finder“ in MAC OS
  3. Click on „Go to Folder“
  4. Paste this path:
    /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport
  5. Paste your extracted „10.3 (14E269)“ directory to that place.
  6. Quit Xcode and restart it (and maybe the whole Mac).
  7. You can now run your projects successfully on your real device again.

Adapted from source: https://gist.github.com/steipete/d9b44d8e9f341e81414e86d7ff8fb62d#gistcomment-2041802

Topic(s): Link, Notiz No comments - :(

Overview of the trakt.tv API Concepts and Endpoints

Published 2017-07-03, 17:24

trakt.tv offers a very comprehensive API with an amazing documentation. But thorough as it is – and the technical details like authentication, data formats, parameters etc. are really, really well covered – it can also feel a bit overwhelming when you jump in and want to get a first overview, or are only looking for some specific data or type of data.

As I just did exactly that, I went through the whole documentation and extracted the most relevant information. The order of this article, especially the API endpoints, follows the official API documentation. I only added some more headlines to group the endpoints in a better way:

Concepts

The API only defines some terms in „Terminology“, but there is a lot more to understand what there is and how it is all connected:

Use the checkboxes next to the terms to deactivate them in the list below. You can also set if they only should be deactivated or completely hidden.

Emojis Legend

These Emojis are used in the official documentation to indicate what functionality is offered by or needed for an endpoint.

Data Endpoints

These return the nitty-gritty of Trakt: Lots of data about shows and movies and all the things related to them:

User Endoints

If it matters which user is logged in via OAuth, these endpoints are collected here:

Master Data Endpoints

These endpoints offer mostly static data that should be retrieved once and then be cached for further use:

And that’s it! All essential API endpoints of the trakt.tv API, groupd by type and explained a bit more.

Topic(s): Kram, Link, Research No comments - :(

Google Spreadsheet: Output current date (statically)

Published 2017-06-30, 13:03

Imagine you have a Google Spreadsheet with a „last active“ column where you e.g. log the date when you last worked on the line item. You don’t want to have to type the date every time you change something as a) typing is cumbersome and b) you don’t even know the current date anyway.

Normally there is a default keyboard shortcut for that in Google Spreadsheets:

Insert time: Ctrl + Shift + ;

Unfortunately this doesn’t really work with a German keyboard (in Windows 10 with English OS language). In Chrome you can replace the Semicolon with Ü, but in Firefox this doesn’t work and I found no way to trigger this shortcut 🙁

Two solutions:

  1. Create a field with formula `=TODAY()`, maybe in the second row of the headline of the table. (Unfortunately this value will be recalculated on every change – so you can’t just use THAT everywhere to get the date – this value will change.) Now you can just Ctrl + C to copy that value and then Ctrl + Shift + V to output its value (and not copy the formula) to the target cell.
  2. Add a „Date“ validation to your column. Now you can double click the cell to get a nice calendar tooltip thingie where you can just click on the date you want.

To be honest 1) doesn’t really solve b), but you can leave the formula from 1) in the subheader for that anyway and just use 2) use this instead of the value pasting from 1).

Topic(s): Kram No comments - :(

(Visual) CMS for Jekyll

Published 2017-06-22, 12:20

Jekyll is „a blog-aware, static site generator in Ruby“. It also is used by Github Pages, which means you can host simple static sites, managed via Git, for free with it. That’s great.

Not that great (for me) is that you have to manage the content in the file system and manually handle Markdown files. That’s why there are multiple visual, hosted CMS for Jekyll.

I looked at some of them:

(A more complete list is at headlessCMS.org.)

So because of the shortcomings of Siteleaf (unusable because of messing with my data), Forestry (buggy editors) and Cloudcanon (doesn’t support advanced stuff) I am actually using Prose right now.

(Of course there also several options you can self host, but as that kind of defeats the purpose to go to a Github Pages hosted static site – now I have o host the CMS myself – I skipped those. Still, some links: MeetHyde, jekyll-admin)

Topic(s): Kram, Link No comments - :(

YouTube RSS Feeds

Published 2017-04-23, 22:47

  • https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNELID
  • https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=USERNAME
  • https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=YOUR_YOUTUBE_PLAYLIST_NUMBER

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/a/31535120

Topic(s): Link No comments - :(

Mac OS X: Unabhängige Scroll-Richtung für Maus und Touchpad

Published 2017-04-04, 12:28

Natural Scrolling ist toll auf Mac OS X. Allerdings nur mit dem Touchpad, nicht mit der angeschlossenen USB-Maus. Dummerweise sind die „Scroll Direction“-Einstellungen von Maus und Touchpad aneinander gekoppelt, so dass wenn die eine (de)aktiviert wird, die andere dies auch tut.

Heute aber eine Lösung gefunden: https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/
Installiert, konfiguriert, Problem behoben.

Topic(s): Link No comments - :(

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