The Blog that Noone Reads

I’ve been wondering if it was possible to modify a commit or merge multiple commits in a local git repository. Of course, the answer was only a google¹ away. You can’t do this once you’ve pushed your commits upstream, but that’s okay.

There are some good reasons for doing this. The most obvious is probably if you make a mistake in the comments. I like to try to make my commits completely atomic, meaning whatever change I’m making is completely implemented within a commit. This is pretty easy to accomplish if you’re willing to just not commit until you’re done. However, if you have to wait to use your version control system, you’re completely wasting the value of having a local revision control system. If you want to try something out and you’re using git, you can commit, branch, commit, merge, etc. Once you’re happy with your solution, you can package all that stuff into a single, or set of, tidy commits that each make a single, atomic, change.

¹ google is used as the noun form of the verb “to google”, not the proper noun “Google”.

If you’ve been hearing a lot about our credit crisis, and you don’t really understand what actually happened, you should watch this video. The whole thing is very complicated, and this video makes it much easier to understand.

Clever.

Bacon!

Bonus link:
Let me Google that for you

If you haven’t watched Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero presentation, you should. Stop reading this and go watch it. I’ll see you in about an hour…

All done? Great. Here’s a quick tip for getting there, and staying there, much more easily within Apple’s Mail.app. All you need to do is create a simple Smart Mailbox &emdash; you do use smart mailboxes, right? &emdash; that includes messages from your inbox(es) which are unread. Then, use this as your inbox. Once a message is read and you close the window or navigate away, the message will no longer show up in your “unread” mailbox. If you can make it a habit to use this instead, you can just ignore the garbage piling up in your inbox, or periodically archive the whole mess.

Because the messages will go away automatically, you’ll need to act on them in some way the first time. If the message requires no response, this is as simple as moving on to the next message. If the message requires a response, respond. If the message requires further action, capture the action in whatever system you use for managing tasks. If your inbox is the system you use for managing tasks, smack yourself right now.