Upgraded to git 1.6.3 yet? You should, and Jason Rudolph says why (and if you're on a Mac, Rob Sanheim says how.)

Sadly, after you do upgrade, when you start doing "git push", your console will start to be littered with the following oddly patronizing message:

warning: You did not specify any refspecs to push, and the current remote
warning: has not configured any push refspecs. The default action in this
warning: case is to push all matching refspecs, that is, all branches
warning: that exist both locally and remotely will be updated.  This may
warning: not necessarily be what you want to happen.
warning: 
warning: You can specify what action you want to take in this case, and
warning: avoid seeing this message again, by configuring 'push.default' to:
warning:   'nothing'  : Do not push anything
warning:   'matching' : Push all matching branches (default)
warning:   'tracking' : Push the current branch to whatever it is tracking
warning:   'current'  : Push the current branch

While I'm generally in favor of verbose warnings, this one is kind of bizarre. Essentially, it's saying, "Warning! The command you just ran will continue to operate exactly as it did before!" Guys, telling us about new options is great but that's what release notes are for.

Worse, they don't provide keystroke-level instruction beyond the offhand gerund "configuring" on how to shush it. Here's the result of my 8-minute speluking inside the output of "git help config":

git config push.default matching

[Or, thanks to Alastair Brunton below

git config --global push.default matching

]

There, now, that wasn't so hard after all, was it?

First of all, fie on Apple for giving both their cloud storage service and their backup program names that are almost completely google-proof. They've recently corrected one of those by renaming "dot mac" to "MobileMe" but calling your backup program "Backup" is a great way to make it really hard to investigate. It's like, imagine how hard it would be to do a background check on someone named John Doe.

So I use the Dot Mac Backup and it works pretty smoothly, which is the second most important feature in a backup program. (The most important feature is the ability to actually restore files.) But then one day it said that to incrementally back up my "Home Minus Media" set -- the set containing my Home Folder, but excluding big-ticket items like Music, Movies, Backups, Downloads, and so on -- would require 63 DVDs. WTF?

It turned out that the problem occurred after I trashed a few old DVD rips that I had finished watching, and the culprit was the directory /Users/chaffee/.Trash. Seems like the UI was helpfully excluding it from the list of subdirectories of /Users/chaffee, it being a system file and all, so I couldn't mark it to exclude. That's OK, I think, I'm a power user, so I'll just check the box that says "Show invisible system files."

Except there's no such box. Try as I might, I can't find a way to exclude the Trash folder from the UI. I had to dig into the file system and edit Backup's own data file, as follows.

For the millionth time, cause I always forget...

Put this in ~/.bashrc:

export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home

[UPDATE: or this, which according to Mike Swingler, follows the Java version chosen in Java Preferences:

export JAVA_HOME=`/usr/libexec/java_home`

]

Also, run "sudo visudo" and add the line

Defaults        env_keep += "JAVA_HOME"

or else commands like "sudo gem install" won't be able to find Java.

Without the above, I got the following error (which seemed to have been run through a baby-talk filter) when running "sudo gem install rjb":

extconf.rb:44: JAVA_HOME is not setted. (RuntimeError)

I just had to quit Firefox for the umpteenth time because it was taking up 25% of my CPU and 1.5 GB of virtual memory. It makes my lap hot and burns down my battery and activates my fan and slows down my click response time. I have no idea if it was Gmail or Google Reader or one of the other JS-heavy apps and frankly, I'm sick of guessing.

Let's face it: the browser is an operating system. It's time it started acting like one.

Here's what I want my next browser to do:

• Put every tab's JS in its own thread or process space
• Pause that process when I switch tabs (i.e. I don't want Gmail to check for incoming mail or chats unless it's in a visible tab)
• Show me a list of the CPU and memory usage of each JS slice like "top" or the Windows process monitor and allow me to kill them without restarting my browser
• Same goes for Flash but even moreso: I want every seizure-inducing, focus-stealing, ringtone-blaring flash app to be individually killable and blockable
• Show me the content of the page now even if some stupid ad or web bug or analytics script on a different server is slow to load

And for Santa's sake when I tell you to quit don't swap in every little JS object and free it individually. Throw the whole heap away and quit, damn your eyes!

OK? OK.

IntelliJ IDEA has a great feature: if you hit control-shift-V you see a list of the ten most recent selections you cut or copied onto the clipboard. Here are two ways to get the same thing on all Mac OS X apps.

Quicksilver's "Clipboard" and "Shelf" plugins

• Video demo of the QuickSilver clipboard
• Using the Shelf module

Bottom line:

1. In QS preferences, go to (top menu) Plugins / (left menu) AllPlugins
2. Check the 'Clipboard Module' and the 'Shelf Module' so that they get installed
3. Bounce QS
4. Go back into QS preferences and go to (top menu) Preferences / (left menu) Clipboard to tweak your clipboard size and behavior
5. Now copy some text from some app
6. Now hit Command-Space, then immediately afterwards once QS comes up Command-L to see the Clipboard History window pop up for you.

I think the Shelf module lets you store clips permanently, but I haven't figured out how to use it yet.

JumpCut

• JumpCut project at SourceForge

A scissors icon will appear in your menu bar. Whenever you cut or copy a text item, it'll be added to that menu. Clippings can also be accessed by a hotkey (default is Control-Option-V.) A little window like the one you see when using the application switcher or the brightness controls will appear. While holding the modifier keys , use the arrow keys to scroll through the stack.