When I was a younger programmer I had the privilege of working in a few places where we had really tight development processes: Daily Builds (before CI was widely known), test suites (like perl make test type stuff - before TDD became popular) and tools to help do common things in our process.

One example of a tool like this I remember was working at a company where we were using CVS and had developed shell scripts to do the work of testing, checking in, sending a notification, and whatever else it was we did, so you could just type something like "re-up" and get all in sync and checked in.

When I started using subversion, for some reason I stopped using things like this. In subversion, I think you are encouraged to hook these things up as hooks on the server, so clients don't need to have any special scripts or know anything special to invoke the pre/post-checkin process.

This sounds like a better solution, but it's interesting that I have never once written a subversion hook script. I don't know why, but it just seems...I don't know...less visible...harder to test...harder to try out.

Since I started using git, I notice I am building little patterns I do through the day, like:

git add .; git ci; git co master; git merge NewNettingStrategy; git svn dcommit; git svn co NewNettingStrategy; git merge master

I do this whenever I want to cause a build to happen with whatever I am doing in a feature branch, then come back to the feature branch.

I usually just keep these things in my history and up-down arrow to invoke them from powershell, but more and more, I see how these could easily grow into little scripts to make it real easy to "do things my way." A script could interact with git to determine things like the current branch, where to merge into, etc. I just finished one to push my days work to a repo I can get at from home.

Git isn't really any better than subversion in this respect, except for maybe having more granular control over it, but the mindset lends itself to customization and fitting to your process, which I really enjoy.

I am sick and tired of trying to find a really good podcast client. iTunes has the best "reach" but itunes sucks in every other respect (I love it when I shift click a bunch of things while iTunes is thinking real hard about something for 30 seconds, then I release shift, and iTunes thinks I have selected just the last thing  - "he's not holding down shift now!")

I've tried maybe a dozen other podcast clients and none were worth remembering their names so I could run them again. A couple of days ago I noticed winamp had podcast client functionality. After using it for three days and having winamp crash regularly while trying to manage my podcasts, I gave up and tossed it in the pile with the others.

So, I thought, how fracking hard can this be? A podcast client: it reads rss, looks at the url of enclosures, and downloads them. What do I know that is really good at letting me work with XML and is really simple...hmmm....

So I quickly threw together this powershell script (I actually prototyped the whole thing as a single command line pipeline). Nothing special, but way better than any of the other podcast clients, and I can make it work exactly how I like:

$rootPodcastFolder = 'E:\Downloads\Podcasts'
$feeds = @(
	'http://leoville.tv/podcasts/twit.xml',
	'http://feeds.feedburner.com/rubiverse',
	'http://feeds.feedburner.com/netRocksWmadirect',
	'http://feeds.feedburner.com/altnetpodcast',
	'http://channel9.msdn.com/rss.aspx?threadID=312315&format=wma',
	'http://feeds.feedburner.com/Hanselminutes',
	'http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=13',
	'http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=5',
	'http://blog.stackoverflow.com/?feed=podcast',
	'http://feeds.thisamericanlife.org/talpodcast',
	'http://podcast.thoughtworks.com/itmatters/it_matters.xml'
)
$agent = new-object net.WebClient

foreach ($feed in $feeds) {
	$document = [xml] $agent.DownloadString($feed)
	$title = $document.rss.channel.title.Replace(':', '-')
	$feedFolder = [io.Path]::Combine($rootPodcastFolder, $title)
	if (![io.Directory]::Exists($feedFolder)) {
		[io.Directory]::CreateDirectory($feedFolder)
	}
	Write-Output "Checking $title ($feedFolder)..." 
	
	foreach ($item in $document.rss.channel.item) {
		$fileName = [io.Path]::GetFileName($item.enclosure.url)
		$fileName = [io.Path]::Combine($feedFolder, $fileName)
		if (![io.File]::Exists($fileName)) {
			"`tDownloading {0}..." -f $item.enclosure.url
			$agent.DownloadFile($item.enclosure.url, $fileName)
		}
	}
}

Now, if only powershell could help me copy these files to my windows mobile phone in less than the decade I've been waiting so far...