subversion and xxdiff

xxdiff is an X11 application for displaying differences of two files.

Installation on Debian:
$ sudo apt-get install xxdiff-scripts

Example usage with subversion (if you run the above command and are on X11 with xxdiff installed and in your $PATH, xxdiff should start, else console output should appear):

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# $Id: svndiff_gui.sh 174 2011-05-05 19:13:55Z wus $

# use xxdiff when available and on X11

if [[ -n "$DISPLAY" && -x `which xxdiff` ]]; then
 svn stat
 read -p "Graphical diff? [Y/n]: " proceed
 if [[ "$proceed" == "" || "$proceed" == "y" || "$proceed" == "Y" ]]; then
  xx-svn-diff $@
  exit $?
 fi
fi

svn diff $@

Mac OSX

I got this Mac Mini brought in today for testing a new screen capturing solution we might implement.

It turned out to be a very nice experience. I knew these macs are shiny but they seem to be pretty useful too! After some poking around I found out there is an X Server available, an ssh client was there too. So I could instantly launch some remote X apps.

It turned out, that these macs ship by default with Python (2.3.something) and there is a nice IDE called Xcode which is offered by Apple for free of charge.

Furthermore, what got me excited, was the fact that there are many command line tools and a bash (by default). It is possible to read out information about the system's hardware and configuration via «system_profiler» which seems similar to «wmic» on Win32 and «/proc» on linux.

My next laptop will be a mac book!