Git is full of nice tricks, this is a good collection. One it didn't mention that I use a lot, is manipulating history with human-readable dates:
socket = Thrift::Socket.new('localhost', 9071)
transport = Thrift::FramedTransport.new(socket) # Thrift::BufferedTransport.new(socket)
protocol = Thrift::BinaryProtocol.new(transport)
spacebase = SpaceBase::Client.new(protocol)
It seems like an awful lot to have to load, just to do some basic insertion/querying.