ExpanDrive

(RT @cottonduck)

Braid, the breathtakingly beautiful indy game by Jonathan Blow has finally been released for the Mac. I have had a troubled and unhealthy relationship with video games, and so for the most part I bind myself to the mast, but I think I’m going to make an exception today. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game that looked like it had a better ratio of fun to not-fun.

You can buy it on Greenhouse for $15.

We thought we were pretty tough when we coerced FTP into working like a filesystem for ExpanDrive, but someone on GetACoder.com thinks they can get FTP to do a lot more.

Budget: $ 300-1000
Description
Hello, I need a FTP Client which can view all the directories and files on a specific server WITHOUT logging in with the FTP details. It must be able to show me the server IP and all other details given below. It must be able to get all the MySQL Databases connected to the pages. It must collect the user name, password and host name and give it to me. It must also allow me to connect with the MySQL User Name, Password and host name to any database in the world and have a SQL editor to take actions. It must be able to download the file stored on the server (not the client-side preview but the real code on the server!). Regards, Akshit Soota

This is an upside down version of a freshman year physics problem I had from K&K (problem 3.17, search for “hydrant” on Amazon ‘inside the book’). Another video on YouTube has more information on the jet pack.

“Gary” directed by Clément Soulmagnon, Yann Benedi, Sébastien Eballard, Quentin Chaillet (the French like to have a lot of directors). It’s 7 minutes long and spectacularly beautiful. You’re going to want to click on the link and watch it in HD on Vimeo, rather than in the embedded player. I don’t speak French, but it really didn’t hold me back.

Also, a testimonial of the Kiva system in action at Zappos. The pod lifting mechanism is a screw jack. When lifting or lowering a pod, the robot spins on the floor at same speed as the screw, but in the opposite direction, to keep the pod from rotating. I can’t tell for sure, but I think that the robots are guided primarily by barcode stickers on the floor, and that the lines and circles are just tire marks.

When I’m wailing on a project in bash, I frequently find myself wanting to cd back to the project root. Since we use git, this is the same as the git_root directory. So I wrote a bash function that looped through the directories in the current path and found the one that contained the .git/ directory.

Luckily, I thought to ask on #git if there was an easier way before I posted my script (because no one likes to look like a noob on their own blog). It turns out there’s a one liner. I’ve posted it here, with a little padding so that I can feel like I made a contribution.

function gr {
    ## If the current working directory is inside of 
    ## a git repository, this function will change
    ## it to the git root (ie, the directory that 
    ## contains the .git/ directory), and then print
    ## the new directory.    
    git branch > /dev/null 2>&1 || return 1
    cd "$(git rev-parse --show-cdup)".
    pwd
}

On my way home yesterday I discovered a little excitment on Memorial Drive in front of Trader Joe’s and Micro Center.