Vinay's Tech Stuff

I've seen many people struggling with git manpages or getting confused with myriads of commands in git. If you are one of them, I would recommend you to check out stuff done by this cool guy, Scott Chacon . Specifically check out this presentation here http://gitcasts.com/posts/railsconf-git-talk The pdf of that presentation is also available there. Understanding the concepts of how git works internally is very easy and helps a lot in understanding git commands and improves your mileage with git. For users on Windows, tortoisegit is has come up quite well. It's almost feature-equivalent to tortoisesvn and has 25 more features relevant to git.

I've been a long time Vim (not vi) user and occasionally I find people around me questioning my choice and comparing it to tools like Visual Studio. I agree Visual Studio is a great IDE. But Vim is a great editor. I would love Visual Studio editor with Vim key bindings. I came across this Vi Emulator http://www.viemu.com/ that does exactly that. Personally I have not had the opportunity to use it (as I've moved to Mac and development mostly on Linux). But I found a very useful Vim cheat sheet on the author's website. Take a look. It's worth printing and hanging it near your workspace.

For quite sometime now I've been facing space crunch on my laptop and have been using various external storage devices. I'm reluctant to put any important piece of information on these devices due to security and privacy concerns. Unlike my laptop (and the disk within it), these devices will not be in my sight all the time and hence my reluctance to trust any confidential data with them. I've thought about using some software based encryption solutions. But I need them to work seamlessly on multiple operating systems as these portable storage devices will be connected to different machines running different OSs. I've been wishing for a crypto device that would sit between the computer and the portable disk and provide transparent encryption/decryption functionality. Such a device would have to be small. It can be powered from the computer over USB. It should have a biometric identification device embedded on it for authentication. One such device could be used to interf