According to the
man page, there are three ways to exclude files from being tracked by
git.
Shared list of files to ignore The most well-known way of preventing files from being part of a git branch is to add such files in
.gitignore. (This is analogous to CVS'
.cvsignore files.)
Here's an example:
*.generated.html
/config.php
The above ignore list will prevent automatically generated HTML files from being committed by mistake to the repository. Because this is useful to all developers on the project,
.gitignore is a good place for this.
The next line prevents the local configuration file from being tracked by git, something else that all developers will want to have.
One thing to note here is the use of a leading slash character with
config.php. This is to specifically match the config file in the same directory as the
.gitignore file (in this case, the root directory of the repository) but no other. Without this slash, the following files would also be ignored by git:
/app/config.php
/plugins/address/config.php
/module/config.php
Local list (specific to one project)For those custom files that you don't want version controlled but that others probably don't have or don't want to automatically ignore, git provides a second facility:
.git/info/excludeIt works the same way as
.gitignore but be aware that this list is only stored locally and only applies to the repository in which it lives.
(I can't think of a good example for when you'd want to use this one because I don't really use it. Feel free to leave a comment if you do use it though, I'm curious to know what others do with it.)
Local list (common to all projects)Should you wish to automatically ignore file patterns in all of your projects, you will need to use the third gitignore method: core.excludesfile
Put this line in your
~/.gitconfig:
[core]
excludesfile = /home/username/.gitexcludes
(you need to put the absolute path to your home directory,
~/ will not work here unless you use git 1.6.6 or later)
and then put the patterns to ignore in
~/.gitexcludes. For example, this will ignore the automatic
backups made by emacs when you save a file:
*~
This is the ideal place to put anything that is generated by your development tools and that doesn't need to appear in your project repositories.
Sarah hit the 20 week mark on Monday, and so we had the big anatomical
ultrasound. We also found out that it looks like we're having a girl. We're
now trying to come up with a name.
There was also a worrying piece of news: they couldn't see the cavum septum
pellucidum, while they were checking out her brain.
Apparently the cavum septum pellucidum is a particular marker they look for
when they're checking everything out.
Now what the absence of the cavum septum pellucidum actually means isn't
terribly clear. Apparently normally this is found along with other
abnormalities, but the rest of her brain structures look fine. The nuchal
translucency we had earlier in the pregnancy came back fine also.
So we got bustled off to have a chat with the genetic counsellor (during
which the 4.1 earthquake happened). We got booked in for an amniocentesis
for later that afternoon, as well as a fetal MRI at 22 weeks, and trundled
off home.
To cap things off, when we were trying to park back at the hospital for the
2pm appointment, I managed to scrape the car up against one of the poles in
the car park. (The lower level parking is notoriously tight). Note to self:
always use the free valet parking service from now on.
Sarah had some second thoughts about the amniocentesis, as it does carry
with it some risk of miscarriage, and after chatting with with a couple of
the obstetricians, we elected not to do it. The fetal MRI should
definitively determine if the cavum septum pellucidum is absent, and then we
can talk to a paediatric neurologist about what the ramifications of that
might be.
One of the reasons they wanted to do an amniocentesis now, rather than after
the fetal MRI, is the amniocentesis itself takes a couple of weeks for the
results to come back, and that would bring us up to the 24 week mark.
Apparently if we wanted to terminate the pregnancy, once it was at 24 weeks,
we'd have to go to LA to do it.
Whilst I consider myself an atheist these days, I was raised a Catholic, and
although I like to think of myself as pro-choice, I still have a lot of
problems with abortion, so I don't think I'd be comfortable terminating
unless it could be shown with reasonable certainty that our baby was going
to be in a really bad way. Based on how the rest of the brain looked, and
the nuchal translucency results, and the fact that the amniocentesis would
only identify chromosomal and not genetic neurological disorders, I don't
think we'll be aborting.
From my limited research, it sounds like the cavum septum pellucidum
disappears at about 3 months after birth anyway, so looking at it one way,
you could say our baby's brain is developing faster. Other research has
indicated a correlation with optic nerve development issues, so I don't know
if that means she might be blind. We really need to chat with a paediatric
neurologist. But hopefully the fetal MRI will find it, and this will turn
out to be nothing.
An anxious two weeks will now follow.
Over the holidays I investigated how to cross-compile GTK applications for Windows, and managed to port screen-message. I also created an Inno Setup based installer for it that includes the necessary GTK DLLs. You can grab it from the 
Debian's package manager dpkg has the perhaps unique feature that it distinguishes between removing and purging a package. Removing it removes the program files but keeps the configuration files (and sometimes the logs) around, purging it really removes everything. While this distinction undoubtedly has some uses, I have found that I almost never make use of it. I think in about six years of using Debian I have actually needed a remove-but-not-purge functionality about five times, during some really tricky upgrades (and using Aptitude instead of APT might have helped, not sure) and once when I wanted to build a package that had a build dependency that conflicted with a package I had installed (cowbuilder came later).
Is it just me, or did Jeff Addiss just say, Fuck you dolphin,
fuck you, whale. ?
Two weeks after the 
I run a
Since about a week, I have a Nokia N900. They're not actually on sale
in Belgium yet, but I managed to get hold of one through a 
As a standalone browser, it may look quite similar to 
The following snippet allows