Month: January 2010

The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better
than a C, the idea must be feasible.

– A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith’s paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.

I had always wondered how to send HTML e-mails—you know, the ones with embedded pictures, css, and specialized formatting—from my Gmail account but could never figure it out. Perhaps Gmail prevented this to make sure people didn’t use their Gmail accounts as a source of SPAM. Who knows. I googled, too, yes I did. Still nothing.

Then it hit me. Create a Google Document and e-mail that. At first, this didn’t seem like it would work because the e-mail option under “Share” said, “Email as attachment…”. But when you click on that there is an option to simply paste document into your message.

Viola!

THIS is a great read. Best tutorial I’ve seen. Concise and right on the mark.

http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~cduan/technical/git/

After a few months, I started to understand those under-the-hood concepts. Once I did, suddenly everything made sense. I could understand the manual pages and perform all sorts of source control tasks. Everything that seemed so cryptic and obscure now was perfectly clear.

The conclusion I draw from this is that you can only really use Git if you understand how Git works. Merely memorizing which commands you should run at what times will work in the short run, but it’s only a matter of time before you get stuck or, worse, break something.

I’m still at the memorize the commands phase, but getting there.