When the Linux kernel developers no longer had free access to BitKeeper, a proprietary version control system, Linus Torvalds couldn’t find a free replacement that met his needs. So he created his own: Git.

Slowly but surely, Git is conquering the world.

Today, a “social network for developers” based on the coolness of Git launched: GitHub.

One of the most impressing features of GitHub is their network visualiser. The visualiser shows open source software development in a whole new light. Very nice.

Once the book on Pragmatic Version Control With Git is out, I’ll have no excuse left not to convert to Git. All the cool kids seem to be using it. Git is in. Git is the new black.

Last week I attended “The Online Opportunity” at Microsoft’s headquarters here in London. The main attraction was that Steve Ballmer, CEO, was giving a talk about his company’s take on the brave new world of Software as a Service and doing business online in general. Microsoft Startup Zone has a video recording of Ballmer’s and all the other talks.

Ballmer reiterated MS’s “use Suse or be afraid” position on Linux, i.e. that companies should use Novell’s Linux distribution to avoid being sued by Microsoft for patent infringement (Novell is a Microsoft partner).

He also discussed the drawbacks of the “free with ads” business model and noted that Microsoft had never had much luck in monetising Hotmail. He stated that Google was having the same problems even though “they read your mail and we don’t” (a comment that surfaced on Slashdot today).

Although his performance wasn’t as energetic as on some previous occasions, Microsoft’s man in the bridge came across as sensible, pragmatic and knowledgeable.

For more comments on the event, check out the coverage by Simon Willison and Jeremy Keith.

In my last post I mentioned a hack that was featured in a presentation made by Matthew Ogle and Anil Bawa-Cavia of Last.fm at The Future of Web Apps conference last week. Anil has blogged about the presentation and the hack which has just been open sourced by their CTO, Richard Jones.

The hack is basically an IRC bot, called IRCCat (as in cat to IRC), that listens to messages on some port and sends them to an IRC channel the developers are logged onto. This can be used to make commits to Subversion, ticket changes on Trac or any other event in a development environment become part of a chat conversation.

Now that IRCcat has been open sourced, implementing this for Capistrano deploys will be very straight forward.

The European edition of Time magazine has a feature on 60 years of “heroes”. Along with Margaret Thatcher, Coco Chanel and Nelson Mandela they list Linus Torvalds in the category “Rebels and Leaders”. The list also includes The Beatles under the category “Culture and Business”.

I would have liked to sit in on the meeting when they compiled that list.

Business Week has some of the most interesting podcasts around. Their cover story podcast is often quite entertaining especially since the host, Business Week’s executive editor John Byrne, has a sceptical and humorous interviewing technique.

Another BW offering is the CEO’s guide to technology which featured a Tim O’Reilly interview earlier this summer. Tim is quite candid regarding the “web 2.0″ buzzword and he makes some interesting points regarding the tech industry.

Moving from business to technology, another podcast I recently discovered is The Linux Action Show. These guys are of the pragmatic school of Linux (as opposed to the more ideological one) and are defectors from OS X.

Other interesting podcasts include the various BBC offerings (most notably Digital Planet, In Business and Melvin Bragg’s In Our Time) and finally IT Conversations.

I recently came across a killer ruby application called autotest, which is part of a package called Zentest.

Geoffrey Grosenbach’s Nuby on Rails blog explains how to use autotest with Rails. It’s pretty simple, install Zentest:

gem install ZenTest

and from the Rails project’s root, type:

autotest -rails

Monitoring a console for failed tests is annoying and keeping an open console on-screen is too screen real-estate expensive on a 14 inch laptop. Enter KNotify and DCOP.

Create a file called .autotest in your home directory and paste the following code into it:

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#!/usr/bin/ruby
module KDENotify
  def self.knotify title, msg
    system "dcop knotify default notify " +
           "eventname \'#{title}\' \'#{msg}\' '' '' 16 2"
  end
  Autotest.add_hook :red do |at|
    knotify "Tests failed", "#{at.files_to_test.size} tests failed"
  end
end

Once autotest is started and coding has commenced, a passive pop-up window will appear as soon as a saved file has caused a test to fail.

This is all made possible by autotest’s excellent design along with the genius that is KDE.