Having reached the end of my Kickstarter funded year working on the git-annex assistant, I've decided to try one more crowdfunding campaign, to see if I can get funded to work on it a little while longer. I went back and forth on this for a while. The Kickstarter funded development was extremely successful (one of the most productive years of my life). I certianly want to work on git-annex more, and have lots more stuff to do, particularly around security and encryption. On the other hand, it's hard to frame ongoing development as a normal Kickstarter campaign to start something new.

Anyway, I've decided to go ahead and try it, and not do it through Kickstarter this time. So I have my own website set up and accepting donations, and hopefully I'll make enough to spend a few more months working on git-annex.

campaign.joeyh.name

... And if not, I'll probably spend a few months working on git-annex part time, while looking for paying work with the rest of my time.

By the way, I'm taking payments in both US Dollars (via Paypal) and Bitcoin (via Coinbase). Can't wait to see how this works out!

Last Friday, I spent and hour and a half clamping a landline phone to the side of my head, while also wearing a headset. I was recording an interview on the GitMinutes podcast about git-annex.

I've been listening to GitMinutes for a while, ever since I heard git-annex was mentioned on it. Actually, I think it's come up in 4 or 5 interviews on the podcast. Most notably with core git dev Peff King, who had some interesting things to say, for sure. I responded to that in my interview, and we covered quite a wide amount of stuff in reasonable depth in just over an hour. Thomas is quite a good host and great at drawing stuff out, and it's nice to not need to worry about going into too much technical depth. (Although I didn't get a chance to explain the automatic union merging used to maintain the git-annex branch.)

This is the first podcast I've been in, and I've always worried about audio quality if I was in one. That is, I'd want it to be really good, and probably end up annoying the host. ;) For this one, we settled on using my land line call, which went through some Skype thing to get the Europe, and mixing in a local recording I made with a not too great headset. I think the result is pretty good, considering.

You can listen to the whole thing here, if you dare! (1 hour 8 minutes) http://episodes.gitminutes.com/2013/07/gitminutes-16-joey-hess-on-git-annex.html

(Special bonus guest: The songbird that lives on my porch.)

git-annex fundraising campaign update: Initial goal reached in a mere seven hours. I will be developing git-annex fulltime for at least the next three months! Gone to stretch goal.

Also it made the top of Hacker News: thread

As a Sunday diversion, I wrote 150 lines of code and turned git-annex into a podcatcher!

I've been using hpodder, a podcatcher written in Haskell. But John Goerzen hasn't had time to maintain it, and it fell out of Debian a while ago. John suggested I maintain it, but I have not found the time, and it'd be another mass of code for me to learn and worry about.

Also, hpodder has some misfeatures common to the "podcatcher" genre:

• It has some kind of database of feeds and what files have been downloaded from them. And this requires an interface around adding feeds, removing feeds, changing urls, etc.
• Due to it using a database, there's no particularly good way to run it on the same feeds on multiple computers and sync the results in some way.
• It doesn't use git annex addurl to register the url where a file came from, so when I check files in with git-annex after the fact they're missing that useful metadata and I can't just git annex get them to re-download them from the podcast.

So, here's a rethink of the podcatcher genre:

cd annex; git annex importfeed http://url/to/podcast http://another/podcast

There is no database of feeds at all. Although of course you can check a list of them right into the same git repository, next to the files it adds. git-annex already keeps track of urls associated with content, so it reuses that to know which urls it's already downloaded. So when you're done with a podcast file and delete it, it won't download it again.

This is a podcatcher that doesn't need to actually download podcast files! With --fast, it only records the existence of files in git, so git annex get will download them from the web (or perhaps from a nearer location that git-annex knows about).

Took just 3 hours to write, and that's including full control over the filenames it uses (--template='${feedtitle)/${itemtitle}${extension}'), and automatic resuming of interrupted downloads. Most of what I needed was already available in git-annex's utility libraries or Hackage.

Technically, the only part of this that was hard at all was efficiently querying the git repository for a list of all known urls. I found a pretty fast way to do it, but might add a local cache file later on.