Unfortunately – Jetbrains in their wisdom did not adopt god’s designated keys for moving up and down lists j/k – instead opting to use the cursor keys – forcing users to move their hands from the home row. This has been requested and turned down by the team in JT-565 and JT-5687.

I’m a long standing user of Gmail which uses j/k for moving up and down the list of messages – and it’s difficult to have to go back to moving my hands around. After a couple of days – I decided that a greasemonkey script was called for.

No warranty is implied or given – but this works for me (at least a little bit): youtrackvi.user.js

You’ll need to update the @match with your local youtrack url.

The lovely people on the git mailing list have accepted my patch to include this speedup in the main git distribution. (It’s in git’s “next” branch and will probably be released as 1.7.2 so it’s not yet included in the latest msysgit release).

It lives here.

It didn’t take long to figure out how to package it up using git format-patch once I read SubmittingPatches.txt.

The whole thing was much less scary than I imagined. Thanks to Johannes Schindelin (of msysgit) for nursing me through the process as a complete newb!

This was my first contribution to an OSS project using git (ironically – the project itself was git) – and I’m _amazed_ how much smoother the process was than using SVN/patch files.

I’m now more optimistic that Castle Project’s move to git hub will bring some big benefits.

Somehow – twitter has clicked for me. It could be related to checking out clients and liking Twitterrific enough to keep it running. 

It’s fair to say that twitter itself it pretty unreliable – but it doesn’t seem to matter too much. I’m living proof – somewhat available is good enough for some apps. 

I’ve just upgraded from 2.2.x(?) to the latest and greatest. I think everything is back to normal – but if you notice anything unusual – please let me know.

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At the time – the best web architecture I knew of was the ArsDigita Community System (still available and maintained as OpenACS). What Oren is describing sounds similar in many ways.

The ACS architecture is based on the days when Oracle and TCL were good options for building web based systems…. but the underlying design is still very very good (e.g. it was the first place I every saw the Party pattern). They were focused on designing good data models and separating concerns.

They have the following available in their kernel:

• Parties, Users and (nestable) groups
• A permissions system which supports per “object” (think row) permissions.
• A package manager which allows you to install (and remove) modules of functionality into an existing system (including schema changes, new routes etc). e.g. adding a e-commerce, blogging or threaded discussion module is a matter of clicking in a web ui.
• Scheduled tasks

This thing was and is pretty scalable (it runs the photo.net community).

It’s over 10 years old still a source of good ideas. I recommend taking a poke around their documentation and seeing what you can learn.

(I remember reading once that Philip Greenspun – the original ACS designer was asked by Microsoft to build a new version while the .net framework 1.0 was in development as a showpiece. For some reason he didn’t but I always felt that it was a shame this never happened).