Note to self: if you ever want to get a simple list of people who have committed to a git repository, the command you want is:

git log --format='%aN <%ae>' | sort -u | uniq

Or for just the e-mail address:

git log --format='%ae' | sort -u | uniq

Or for just the name:

git log --format='%aN' | sort -u | uniq

This is in the help manual but it’s way down the bottom so takes ages to read through to find it.

I’ve always known you could do a lot of programmatic stuff with Amazon but I’ve simultaneously been too lazy to actually look into it in detail and never really needed to. However, I’ve stumbled across instructions for auto-mounting an EBS volume which turns out to be very handy, and leads on to the particularly awesome right_aws ruby gem.

Lots of useful looking stuff for working with EC2, S3 and EBS volumes that I can see me taking a lot more advantage of in the future.

A few things I’ve discovered today that look potentially useful in the future:

• Antenna House Formatter V5 – converts HTML and CSS to PDF, including support for MathML. Heck, supporting CSS well is a plus – most HTML to PDF conversions don’t. Hat tip to one of our clients for finding that.
• jQuery Tools – there are plenty of JavaScript UI libraries around, but this one looks better componentized than most. It’s also a good, small set of components that normal web pages are likely to want, rather than being more specifically useful in web applications, though it could be used there too.
• FlowPlayer – actually I knew about this one but only just got around to looking at the details. Handy looking open source flash video player. They’ve somehow converted the GPL into a license that requires attribution which is really odd, most likely to keep their commercial licensing option open. It’s their license so they can do what they want with it but I would have thought there’d be a better fitting license.

Note to self: the nu.validator has a really handy looking SAX handler that serializes the XML.

Hat tip to Henri Sivonen for pointing this out along with a bunch of other useful XML generating tips.

When installing most if not all versions of IBM Portal on Linux, to get the installer to run you need to install a couple of extra packages:

• openmotif
• compat-libstdc++

Depending on the options you chose when first installing Linux there may be more – the easiest way to find them is to know that the graphical installer sends it’s error messages to /tmp/wpinstalllog.txt. It’s usually fairly easy to match the error messages up to the package you need to install to fix it.

Don’t be put off by the fact that it prints an error about not being able to connect to the X server to the terminal – that’s usually a red herring. Open an xterm instance to confirm the connection to the X server works and then go back to tracking down missing packages.