Steps for moving a project over from SVN to Git

Now that we are fully using Git at work one of my tasks has been to move some of our old projects over to using Git. There are some different ways you can go about doing this, you can simply do a SVN export of the project and make a new git repository from it. I don’t prefer this method because you lose the commit history. The way below is a way to maintain all the history from the SVN repository.
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MD5 hashing in Python, Ruby and Groovy

Hopping around from languages to languages, its easy to forget how to do something, nothing that a quick Google search can’t help with but I wanted to make this posting for myself to save some time. MD5 is used all over the place, its a one way hash that can be used for checking the integrity of files, storing passwords in databases and checking text being passed around. I do want to add a note here about using MD5 hashes for storing passwords in a database, I would start by looking at SHA-1 along with using salt this will help ensure if anyone gets a hold of your database they can just use rainbow table to workout the plain text of the password.
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Still Alive: Keeping your SSH alive

“This was a triumph.” If you find your SSH connections dropping or locking up after not being used for some time you may want to try to edit your ssh_config (/etc/ssh/ssh_config) file and uncomment/add in the line ServerAliveInterval 30. The number is in seconds. What this will do is send a small ‘keep-alive’ packet to the server to ensure you don’t get dropped. Why is this happening? It could be settings on the server that drop users after set time of inactive use or due to a firewall/switch rule that drop inactive connections to improve the performance of the network.
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