Since then, I improved the file by using less forks with type -fp, added quotes where I encountered filenames with spaces, etc. However, it is basically still the same as back then. Here, I left out the parts about the other diff functions so you get an idea how this works without requiring you to read the other blog post:

function svn() {
    local svn=$(type -fp svn)
    case "$1" in
        diff-vim)
            shift;
            $svn diff --diff-cmd $HOME/libexec/svndiff -x vimdiff "$@"
            ;;
        *)
            $svn "$@"
            ;;
    esac
}

This approach has one drawback for practical use of the svn diff-vim command: sometimes, svn does not use the original file name, but creates a temporary file first. This hinders editing of such a diff using vimdiff, as edits can not be saved easily to the actual specified file.

[Side note: this happens as soon as a file has a svn:keywords property and keywords such as $Id$ were expanded. In this case, the diff does not use the original file path but a temporary file to avoid changes introduced by keyword expansion. (details)]

This behavior became annoying for me, so I improved the original approach and present the new version below. This time, I am using svn cat to manually retrieve the older version of the file to a temporary location and then call vimdiff with the file specified and the older version. This became more complex as I also wanted to support the -r syntax to specify the revision to compare against:

function svn() {
    local svn=$(type -fp svn)
    case "$1" in
        diff-vim)
            shift;
 
            local file=""
            local rev="-rBASE"
 
            while [ $# -gt 0 ]; do
                case "$1" in
                    --)
                        break;
                        ;;
                    -r*)
                        rev="$1"
                        if [ "$1" == "-r" ]; then
                            shift
                            rev="-r$1"
                        fi
                        ;;
                    --revision)
                        shift
                        rev="-r$1"
                        ;;
                    -*)
                        echo "svn: invalid option: $1"
                        return 1
                        ;;
                    *)
                        if [ -n "$file" ]; then
                            echo "svn: diff-vim works with one single filename only" >&2
                            return 1
                        fi
                        file="$1"
                        ;;
                esac
                shift;
            done;
 
            local tmp=$(mktemp -t svn-diff-vim || return 1).${file##*.}
            $svn cat $rev "$file" > $tmp || return 1
            chmod a-w $tmp || return 1
            vimdiff "$file" $tmp || return 1
            rm -f $tmp || return 1
            ;;
        *)
            $svn "$@"
            ;;
    esac
}

A known drawback of this approach is that you can no longer use the -c option to view changes introduced in a specific revision, or specify a peg revision with the file@rev syntax. For me, these aren’t showstoppers, as the most common use case for me is to revert only some parts of a file. Using the presented function above, this is quite easy with svn diff-vim and the vim commands moving changes from one file to the other: do for diff-obtain and dp for diff-put.

You can also get the full file with all implemented diff commands as a download. This file is meant to be sourced from your .bashrc. You can share and use this script as you will, it is hereby placed into Public Domain.

As always, I am happy to hear about your experiences with this script, suggestions or better solutions in the comments below!

As older versions are still available, I noticed that the beginning of this Privacy Policy has changed over the years. There used to be a first sentence explaining the general approach Google takes towards your data. But read yourself:

August 14, 2000:

Google respects and protects the privacy of the individuals that use Google’s search engine services. _[...]

Well, that sounds fair.

July 1, 2004:

At Google, we strive to develop innovative services to better serve our users. We recognize that privacy is an important issue, so we design and operate our services with the protection of your privacy in mind. _[...]

Hey, they want to bring us innovation. Okay, at least they think about privacy—in the second sentence.

October 14, 2005,
August 7, 2008,
January 27, 2009,
March 11, 2009:

At Google we recognize that privacy is important. _[...]

Yes, they are aware that privacy is important, but they might do whatever they want with your data.

October 3, 2010,
March 1, 2012

_[...]

From here on, no such sentence exists anymore. I leave it to you what that means.

The following is a totally inaccurate benchmark, but I want to share some numbers. The MacPorts repository used here contains lots of directories with only a few files in each, often only a single file. This makes operations walking the .svn directories in the tree very expensive.

Listing status of files:

~/src/macports/trunk-svn $ time svn st

real	3m39.347s
user	0m1.450s
sys	0m5.900s

~/src/macports/trunk-svn17 $ time svn17 st

real	0m23.788s
user	0m1.914s
sys	0m2.297s

Update without changes (locking the whole working copy against concurrent access):

~/src/macports/trunk-svn $ time svn up
At revision 83750.

real	2m32.855s
user	0m1.202s
sys	0m5.060s

~/src/macports/trunk-svn17 $ time svn17 up
Updating '.':
At revision 83750.

real	0m5.362s
user	0m1.793s
sys	0m1.166s

Impressive results!

Unfortunately it grabs the global keyboard shortcuts Ctrl-1, Ctrl-2, …, Ctrl-0 and Ctrl-Option-1, Ctrl-Option-2, …, Ctrl-Option-6 to switch to the corresponding space by default. This prevents using any of these shortcuts in an application. I had defined some of those for use with my favorite editor vim, where the shortcuts ceased to work after the upgrade to Lion.

Even more unfortunate, it’s a tedious task to stop Mission Control from allocating these keyboard shortcuts. The GUI offers the configuration check boxes only for spaces which are currently enabled.

So the solution was to enable all possible spaces, which are capped at a maximum of 16, using the Mission Control interface. Then disable the check box for each of them in System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts.

As said a tedious task, but works. I was hoping to provide some defaults write command here, but I was unable to determine where these settings are stored.

But Devin Heitmueller from KernelLabs invested some time to remove the parts from tvtime that still needed the old API. The source is available from this mercurial repo.

hg clone http://www.kernellabs.com/hg/~dheitmueller/tvtime
cd tvtime
autoreconf -i -f
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --disable-nls
make
make install

There is also a report in Gentoo’s Bugzilla with a new ebuild attached, but I haven’t tried that. Installing the new patched tvtime to /usr/local works for now.

I am all ears if anyone can recommend an alternative to tvtime. I know about xawtv, but the interface is poor and offers less features than tvtime.

Fortunately, there is a patch attached to the mentioned bug report which resolves the problem:

cd /usr/src/linux
wget -O cx88-2.6.38-fix-driver-deadlocks.patch 'https://bugzilla.kernel.org/attachment.cgi?id=53722'
patch -p1 < cx88-2.6.38-fix-driver-deadlocks.patch

[Edited on 2011-04-23: replaced patch 52902 with 53722]

After applying the patch, build and install your kernel as usual. But there are still some more problems with 2.6.38 related to tvtime. See also my next post.

I do not follow kernel development close enough to know in which git tree this has to show up to confirm if it has been merged yet. Hopefully this patch will make it into the next kernel release.

Es sollte daher ja möglich sein, auch andere Verwendungsmöglichkeiten für den Oyo zu erschließen (z.B. als Organizer mit Kalenderfunktion, als Fernbedienung mit einem mpd-Client, usw.).

Nachdem nun der übliche anfängliche Respekt vor dem neuen Gerät verflogen ist, wollte ich mich auch mal ein bisschen intensiver mit dem Oyo beschäftigen. Es gibt bereits eine umfangreiche Sammlung von Informationen in Frank’s Wiki. Damit ist es mir auch schnell gelungen mittels usbserial und minicom eine Shell auf dem Gerät zu bekommen. Darüber lässt sich dann wiederum telnet aktivieren, was die ganze Sache ein bisschen angenehmer macht.

Ursprünglich läuft auf dem E-Book-Reader ein Kernel 2.6.21, der ja nun schon etwas angerostet ist. Allerdings hat Thalia immerhin ihre Pflicht gemäß GPL erfüllt und die Sourcen des Kernels und des Bootloaders U-Boot zur Verfügung gestellt. Heiko Stuebner (MMind) arbeitet derzeit daran, die Treiber und sonstige Änderungen in einen aktuellen Kernel zu portieren und berichtet regelmäßig in seinem Blog Outside the Walled Garden über die Fortschritte.

Da ich den Oyo nebenbei zu irgendwelchen Testinstallationen dennoch zum Lesen verwenden will, bietet sich der Boot von SD-Karte an. Als ersten Schritt hab ich mir auch erstmal eine 1:1 Kopie des internen Flash-Speichers gezogen. Leider kann man mit dem modifiziertem U-Boot allerdings nur in der Kombination eines zImage mit initrd/initramfs von der SD-Karte booten. Um also direkt ein rootfs von der SD-Karte nutzen zu können, werde ich wohl noch ein bisschen basteln müssen.

$ echo abc def
abc def
$ echo !$
def

A common use case would be mkdir and cd:

$ mkdir foo
$ cd !$

You can also insert the last argument of the previous command and continue typing with <ESC>.:

$ echo abc def
abc def
$ echo <ESC>. ghi
def ghi

Oh, the little things…

for i in *.txt; do
    mv $i $i.old
done

But if the glob pattern does not match anything it will be preserved unchanged in the command. This results in command execution of mv *.txt *.txt.old which fails because no file named *.txt (literally!) exists.

As this is not the desired behavior, here is a way how to do this as expected without forking using the nullglob bash shell option.

oldnullglob=$(shopt -p nullglob)
shopt -s nullglob

for i in *.txt; do
    mv $i $i.old
done

eval "$oldnullglob" 2>/dev/null
unset oldnullglob

This will silently prevent the execution of the mv command. If you use failglob instead of nullglob bash will interrupt the evaluation of any command if the glob pattern did not match anything.

Disclaimer: Be careful with this option, as this will not be the expected behavior in all cases. Most (in)famously it breaks bash-completion if you set it in your interactive bash session. I suggest to use it temporary only.

This is the script /usr/local/bin/ssl-cert-check which checks the expiry date of the certificate files passed as arguments:

#!/bin/bash
 
DAYS=30
 
for file in "$@"; do
    openssl x509 -checkend $(( 86400 * $DAYS )) -in "$file" > /dev/null
    if [ $? != 0 ]; then
        echo "==> Certificate $file is about to expire soon:"
        openssl x509 -enddate -in "$file" -noout
    fi
done

And the corresponding cronjob entry checking SSL certificates once a day:

6       6    * * *  nobody  /usr/local/bin/ssl-cert-check /etc/apache2/ssl/*.crt /etc/ssl/certs/dovecot.pem