Categories
Software development

Image diffs with git

Git is an awesome version control tool. Currently I use it exclusively for projects where I get to decide the VCS. I mostly use the command line interface and gitk and since I’m quite fluent with these the work flow is most of the time quite quick.

One of the occasions where gitk doesn’t really do well is showing differences in image files. For example, when there is a .png image checked in to the git repository and it changes gitk (nor bare git) tells nothing about what changed visually in the image.

Since git is quite configurable and extendable I wanted to search for a way to amend it somehow in order to really see how the images in my git repositories have changed – visually.

First off course I searched from the net what kind of solutions others might have for this problem. I got some ideas but not really a satisfying complete solution.

Categories
Proton

Presenting Proton SDK at Assembly Summer 2012

In the end of the next week Assembly Summer 2012 is going to take place. I’ve been to Assembly many times before but this time it’ll be a bit different. I have been booked to give a seminar session about Proton SDK.

The seminar session will take place on Thursday, the 2nd of August at 21:00 local time. Come take a look what Proton is all about. Or if there’s a web stream available you can watch that too, I guess.

Categories
Spokify

Reviving Spokify

I have been a premium subscriber of Spotify for a few years already. As a Linux user I haven’t been completely happy with the level of support Spotify shows for its paying customers.

There’s a native Linux client that Spotify offers but it has been in the “preview state” forever now. Previously there was a repository for .rpm packages (I’m using Fedora) but that was removed some months ago for some reason. The only way to get the preview client now is as a .deb package. I used to jump the hoops with the .deb package: it’s easy enough to extract it to some directory and even install system wide. I wouldn’t get any notifications about new versions this way (since I’m not connected to a package repository) but at least I could listen to music…until I went and updated the client and then it stopped working completely. All I get is a segmentation fault when starting the program. Seems that I’m not the only one. I tried the various suggested workarounds but nothing helped.

So what will a Linux nerd do in this situation? Write his own application off course!

Well, instead of starting all the way from scratch I searched for an alternative Spotify client application from the internet first. After a while I found Spokify. It seemed that Spokify had been in development some time in 2010. But then the development had stopped for a reason or another.