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.

I recently blogged about a nice hack presented by the Last.fm guys on the Future of Web Applications conference here in London.

The hack consists of having an IRC bot tell everyone on a certain channel that something in the development process has happened, i.e. ticket changes in Trac or commits to Subversion.

Richard Jones open sourced the hack and I’ve managed to get it to work on a project we’re working on. The trickiest part was to get Richard’s code for the Trac plugin to work.

I’ve created a Google project for the packaging of Richard’s Trac code: irccat-listener-trac-plugin

As for the title of this post: The bot in our development channel is called overlord (with a lowercase ‘o’).

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.

Flock, “the social web browser”, got a lot of attention (or hype) when the web 2.0 term was starting to get traction. The most recent release is 0.7.8 so it is still in beta.

I haven’t had a look at Flock until now and my first reaction is very positive. It somehow feels like so much more than a browser. Apart from its super slick branding on every front (although even the Flock team can’t make a myspace page look good) the browser seems to bring “the web as a platform” one step closer.

When a MySql developer was once asked about innovation he answered that it was easy, Oracle’s feature list was MySql’s to-do list. It’s easy to innovate when your catching up.

Opera is no longer the only Oracle of the web experience. Now, Flock and Opera will give the preview of what will be included next in Mozilla’s Firefox and Microsoft’s Explorer.

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.

Developing Rails applications with Eclipse running on a laptop with 512 Mb RAM means that being economical with processing power and memory is crucial.

Just over two decades ago John Gage coined Sun Microsystem’s slogan “The network is the computer”. Only recently has this become a reality to some extent on a consumer level and thanks to various web services, saving RAM and CPU cycles by outsourcing them to the network has become possible.

The above screenshot shows four programs running in KDE’s system tray. Starting from the left they are: a calendar program (KOrganizer), an instant messaging client (Kopete), an RSS feed monitor (Akregator) and a gmail inbox monitor (KCheckGmail).

Until recently, I was running Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client instead of the GMail notifier. Thanks to Google and the authors of KCheckGmail, I can halve the memory allocated to email by shutting Thunderbird down and turning to KCheckGmail, which does nothing but check my email and send me to GMail.com when I want to read or reply.

The other applications mentioned are still running locally, not on the network.

Google is a pioneering force in providing open and reliable APIs for programmers to access their databases. An obvious motive for this is to have people stop using whatever office tools they currently use and outsource more to the network, i.e. Google.

A KCheckGmail equivalent for Google’s blogreader and calendar would provide the means to outsource even more of our office tools and it is only a matter of time until someone writes them.