Individuation Redux

Flickr favorites, March-June 2009

2009-06-14T10:55:00.000Z

My contribution to dpkg 1.15

2009-05-21T17:45:00.001Z

So, the first thing I do when I boot up my laptop is to dist-upgrade it, and I was getting a little tired of staring at the “(Reading database ...” message you get when dpkg is busy reading its file database (laptop disk + dm-crypt + cold cache = slow). To preserve my sanity, I contributed a minimal patch to add a progress report, which Guillem turned into a generic facility in libdpkg and is now in the new dpkg in unstable (1.15.1).

It doesn't make dpkg any faster, but at least now I know how slowly it's really going. :)

Nothing but the rain

2009-03-22T19:59:00.003Z

So Battlestar Galactica has come to an end and I can't believe how sad it makes me feel. My favorite character on the show has always been Kara and her scenes in the finale provide closure in a very sad and very powerful way. I had to watch the whole thing a second time just to put it into perspective, and for me the most heart-wrenching scene is when Lee asks her what she's afraid of if not dying, and she replies ”being forgotten”. Then at the end of all things, when her mission is complete, she just passes into the wind on a sunny African plain... powerful stuff.

Others have commented at length on the finale and the ending of the series and it's pretty clear that not everyone likes it (start here). For my part, I found it fitting, and mostly beautiful.

Godspeed, BSG. It was nice having you for a little while. So say we all.

GDB + Python: sign me up

2009-03-05T20:52:00.003Z

I meant to blog about this last year but never got around to it. So, better late than never: Tom Tromey has a great blog series about his (and others') ongoing work on integrating Python into GDB. It starts with how to build a Python-enabled GDB, covers defining commands and functions, pretty-printing custom types, and a lot more (or perhaps you just want to jump to the conclusion).

I hope this will reach mainline GDB in my lifetime, it's very promising. There's no timeline on the wiki but the branch is still being actively worked on, so there's hope. :)

Flickr favorites, January/February 2009

2009-02-20T21:40:00.000Z

P.S.: that russian blue cat is the gorgeous Mokona.

Notes on the ASUS Eee Box b202

2009-02-07T19:33:00.002Z

In case anyone's interested, here are some notes on the ASUS Eee Box, more specifically the b202 model, Linux edition:

I use the box as a media center, so I initially wanted to connect it to my 720p HDTV using a DVI/HDMI cable. Unfortunately it's apparently impossible to use the TV's native screen resolution (1360x768) via HDMI, the best you can get is 1280x720, which results in a somewhat blurry image. Worst yet, the HDMI input has an overscan problem, approximately 50 pixels on each side are missing... which means that your GNOME panels will be invisible. I'm not sure if this is caused by the Eee Box or by my TV set but if you absolutely want HDMI, waiting for the b204/b206 model with its built-in HDMI might be a good idea. (In the end, I used my TV's VGA input.)
It's more powerful than I thought. The Linux version ships with a 160GB SATA hard drive and 2GB of RAM (instead of 1GB for the Windows version) and the Atom N270 CPU is pretty fast. It plays 720p MPEG4 video (such as this file) with lots of CPU to spare, and the quality is really great.
The optical S/PDIF audio output doesn't work under Linux, as far as I can tell.
It's extremely silent despite the fan and hard drive.
The Gigabit Ethernet controller is a nice touch, netperf reports a speed of 611 MBits/s. In practice the drive's speed will be the bottleneck, of course.
To avoid tearing issues when playing video with Xv, use the Intel Video Overlay adaptor instead of the (default) Textured Video adaptor. (Use xvinfo to get the port number.)
OpenGL performance isn't great; Compiz with basic effects will run fine, mplayer can play most video files using the gl/gl2 output without frameloss, but games will be slow. (Not that I expected much from the Intel GMA950 anyway...)

All in all I'm pretty happy with the Eee Box. If you have any questions, feel free to email me or leave a comment below.

First Emacs 23 pretest released

2009-02-02T22:37:00.001Z

Emacs 23.0.90 was released yesterday, it's the first pretest for the upcoming 23.1 version. Debian packages for etch and lenny/sid are here; Ubuntu packages for hardy, intrepid and jaunty are here. If you find any bugs please use M-x report-emacs-bug (unless it's a packaging issue, in which case feel free to email me directly).

Some Emacs news

2009-01-25T14:14:00.000Z

This week's emacs-snapshot release (20090118-1) reached a new milestone with more than 700 downloads in just under a week. I guess this is quite an achievement considering that not everyone wants to download 25MB of Emacs packages on a weekly basis, so thanks to all my users for their continued trust and support!

Here's a quick update on the status of the Emacs 23 release: the last remaining feature on the roadmap was finally completed this week with the merge of the rmail-mbox (pmail) branch into rmail. The pretest (GNU lingo for “beta”) phase could start as early as next week, which is not to say that the release itself is right around the corner since a few major tasks need to be finished first, like updating the manuals. The release could also be delayed by the proposed (and long overdue) switch from CVS to Bazaar, pushed by newly-minted Launchpad evangelist Karl Fogel.

That being said, aiming for a release in 2009 isn't entirely unrealistic, and I really can't wait to see Emacs 23 reach a wider audience. It is the culmination of many years of work in lots of areas (Unicode support, font backend, multi-tty, Cocoa, ...) and is by far the best Emacs version to date!

Backing up tweets

2009-01-20T21:23:00.001Z

Today I decided to give Twitter a second chance and reactivated my account after almost 12 months of inactivity. Since this time I won't be protecting my updates I had to delete all my previous (possibly embarrassing) tweets before making my timeline public. But I didn't want to lose my data, so here's how I took a backup:

Install twyt (python-twyt in Debian)
Determine how many pages of tweets you want to save (let's say 10)
for i in `seq 10`; do twyt usertl -u <user> -p <password> -P $i >>twitter-backup.txt; done

You now have a text file with all your Twitter data.

Flickr favorites, November/December 2008

2008-12-21T12:08:00.001Z

Pimp your git meme

2008-12-12T17:35:00.003Z

Zack's post on git colors is a perfect opportunity to recycle this old post of mine on how to make git diff look more like quilt diff and vim.

For good mesure I'll also throw in this snippet (stolen here) which adds a git rlog alias, very handy when you just want to grab the short hash of a recent commit:

[alias]
    rlog = log --pretty=format:\"%h %Cblue%cr%Creset %cn %Cgreen%s%Creset\"

It looks like this:

Flickr favorites, September/October 2008

2008-10-11T19:41:00.002Z

The Choice (not mine)

2008-10-07T19:01:00.002Z

I know it's been all over the web and back already, but I really can't resist linking to this article in The New Yorker: The Choice.

Emacs: now with built-in daemon

2008-09-28T18:11:00.002Z

Emacs CVS has an interesting new feature: it now accepts a --daemon command line option which makes it start up as a Unix daemon; it detaches from the controlling terminal, starts up a new process session, goes to the background, starts an Emacs server and just waits for connections. The user can then use emacsclient to create new frames (console or graphical) for the background Emacs, using the new multi-tty abilities of Emacs 23. Since frame creation is virtually instantaneous, this makes the editor start up much faster than in the usual case (and a lot more so if you have an extensive configuration). Also, if your X session goes down, the editor is still running in the background with your buffers and applications, safe from harm. Very neat! (Get it from the usual place if you run Debian.)

(Note: this new --daemon mode is a cleaner replacement for the old screen-based preload-emacs script that was distributed with the multi-tty branch.)

Five and counting

2008-09-26T17:44:00.000Z

Five years ago today, I became a Debian Developer! My account was created just a few weeks after Debian's 10th birthday and we recently celebrated the 15th, so I've been around for about a third of the project's life. In that period, we released sarge and etch, had two compromises, approximately 300,000 bugs were filed in the BTS, Ubuntu was created, three DPLs came and went, dunc-tank was launched and subsequently abandoned, and the Debian Maintainer status was created (among other notable events).

For me personally there have been ups and downs, but mostly it's been fun. I'm still proud of taking part in what is perhaps the largest volunteer project to date, and one that can produce a distribution of outstanding quality and versatility. The Debian community is huge, diverse and sometimes frighteningly technical, but always focused on making Debian (both the product and the project) better for everyone; it's worth being part of it if only for the amazing melting-pot of cultures and (sometimes antagonistic) technological philosophies.

I think that after fifteen years Debian is still relevant both as a basis for derivative distributions, and as a product for end users. I like to think that I've played a part, however insignificant, in Debian's success in the past five years and I hope that I'll be given the chance to continue contributing in the future. Rock on, Debian!

Flickr favorites, August 2008

2008-08-25T15:25:00.001Z

It's not just tubes

2008-08-21T18:14:00.000Z

Is this thread the ultimate proof that the Internet is awesome?

emacs-snapshot 20080727-1

2008-07-27T18:13:00.000Z

After two weeks of well-deserved vacation and other delays, I'm back to doing regular updates of emacs-snapshot. Here's a quick summary of the notable changes in Emacs CVS since my last post:

longlines-mode was replaced by a more complete and reliable implementation of the same concept, visual-line-mode. It's based on a new low-level change to the display engine to support line wrapping at word boundaries.
Fonts can now be customized on a per-buffer basis. S-Mouse-1 shows a new menu which allows to change the font used in the buffer, increase/decrease its size, or reset it to the default font setting (Options > Set Default Font). A new minor mode variable-pitch-mode enables non-proportional fonts in the current buffer, which is useful in Gnus articles or Info buffers.
There's a new NeXTSTEP port which provides support for GNUStep (on GNU/Linux) and Cocoa (on Mac OS X).
M-s is a new global binding for all things related to search like Occur, Hi-Lock, etc.
Serial port access: Emacs can now be used as a serial terminal (like minicom), see M-x serial-term.
Project-local variables: like file variables but for directories.
New SVG splash screen images for Emacs and Gnus.
New packages: proced.el, zeroconf.el, xesam.el, linum.el, ...

❤

2008-07-24T18:42:00.000Z

I'm not making this up

2008-07-14T21:39:00.005Z

For people who like words, like me and perhaps you, the Moby Thesaurus is simply awesome:

297 Moby Thesaurus words for "god":

Aides, Aidoneus, Amen-Ra, Amor, Aphrodite, Apollo, Apollo Musagetes, Ares, Artemis, Ashtoreth, Astarte, Astraea, Athena, Atropos, Baal, Bellona, Bragi, Cailleac, Calliope, Castilian Spring, Cerberus, Ceres, Charon, Clio, Clotho, Cora, Cupid, Cynthia, Dame Fortune, Davy, Davy Jones, Decuma, Demeter, Despoina, Diana, Dike, Dionysus, Dis, Dis pater, Discordia, Donar, Dylan, Earth, Enyo, Erato, Erebus, Eris, Eros, Euterpe, Fata, Fates, Faunus, Fortuna, Frey, Freya, Frigg, Gaea, Ge, Hades, Heaven, Hecate, Hekate, Hel, Helicon, Helios, Hera, Hestia, Hippocrene, Hymen, Hyperion, Indra, Isis, Juno, Jupiter Fidius, Jupiter Fulgur, Jupiter Pluvius, Jupiter Tonans, Justice, Justitia, Kama, Kore, Lachesis, Loki, Love, Luna, Mars, Melpomene, Minerva, Minos, Moirai, Morta, Muse, Nemesis, Neptune, Nereid, Nereus, Nona, Norns, Oceanid, Oceanus, Odin, Orcus, Osiris, Pan, Parcae, Parnassus, Persephassa, Persephone, Phoebe, Phoebus, Phoebus Apollo, Pierian Spring, Pierides, Pluto, Polyhymnia, Poseidon, Priapus, Pronuba, Proserpina, Proserpine, Providence, Ra, Rhadamanthus, Satan, Savitar, Selene, Set, Shamash, Skuld, Sol, Surya, Teleia, Tellus, Terpsichore, Terra, Thalia, Themis, Thetis, Thor, Titan, Tiu, Triton, Tyche, Typhon, Tyr, Urdur, Varuna, Vayu, Venus, Verthandi, Vesta, Vidar, Vitharr, Weird Sisters, Weirds, Woden, Wotan, Zephyr, Zephyrus, Zeus, afflatus, artistic imagination, ball lightning, biosphere, blindfolded Justice, bolt, bolt of lightning, chain lightning, clash, clashing, conception, conflict, contention, corn spirit, creative imagination, creative power, creative thought, dark lightning, deep, deity, demigod, demigoddess, disaccord, disaffinity, discord, discordance, discordancy, disharmony, divinity, dread rattling thunder, enmity, esemplastic imagination, esemplastic power, faun, fertility god, field spirit, fire of genius, fireball, firebolt, flying flame, forest god, forked lightning, fresh-water nymph, friction, fulguration, fulmination, genius, geography, geosphere, globe, goddess, hero, heroine, idol, immortal, incompatibility, incompatibleness, inharmoniousness, inharmony, inspiration, jangle, jar, kelpie, lares and penates, levin bolt, lightning, limniad, man fish, mermaid, merman, mischief, mother earth, muse, mythicization, mythification, mythopoeia, naiad, nix, nixie, noncooperation, numen, oak-cleaving thunderbolts, ocean nymph, open conflict, panisc, panisca, paniscus, peal of thunder, phoenix, poesy, poetic genius, poetic imagination, power, rub, satyr, sea devil, sea god, sea nymph, sea-maid, sea-maiden, seaman, shaping imagination, sheet lightning, silenus, siren, spirit, strained relations, stroke of lightning, sylvan deity, tension, terra, terrestrial globe, the Muses, the blue planet, the goat god, this pendent world, thunder, thunderball, thunderbolt, thunderclap, thundercrack, thundering, thunderpeal, thunderstorm, thunderstroke, tutelary, undine, unharmoniousness, unpleasantness, vale, vale of tears, vegetation spirit, water god, water spirit, water sprite, whole wide world, world

The Sky Is Falling (maybe)

2008-07-13T15:31:00.002Z

Great article from The Atlantic on near-Earth objects, why the United States want a base on the moon, and keyholes (via 3qd) (see also).

Flickr favorites, July 2008

2008-07-09T11:49:00.001Z

Musings on the FriendFeed API

2008-07-02T19:40:00.001Z

I use the FriendFeed API (launched in March) to build the blog widget mentioned in my previous post, and I'm rather disappointed to see that the data it exports is not the same as the data FriendFeed shows on my profile page (which is collected from the various services linked to my account). The Flickr service data in particular has two problems:

There is no obvious way to distinguish between photos I've added to my favorites and my own photos, other than looking at the URL of the photo and extracting the username. On my profile page the photos are correctly labeled, so FriendFeed does have the information.
When I add several photos to my favorites in a row, if FriendFeed notices them in the same update batch then they're exported in the JSON feed as a single entry with multiple thumbnails. Which means that I can't add links on each image to the corresponding photo page on Flickr as per Flickr's Community Guidelines; the entry's link property points to the photo page of the first photo in the batch.

Annoying. Now, I can't think of a good technical reason that would prevent FriendFeed from exporting my data properly over their API. Are they doing this for anti-competitive purposes? It's weird. I'm a big fan of data aggregation, but not if it's lossy like that!

Meta: layout changes

2008-07-01T17:23:00.002Z

The column on the left is now slightly wider, the About section has been expanded, the search box has been moved up and the archive links are now in a drop-down list. I used the extra space to add a friendfeed javascript widget, home-made because friendfeed's default blog widget is rather bulky and difficult to style.

How to extract files from a Windows NSIS installer .exe

2008-06-26T17:30:00.005Z

It seems this is an infrequently asked question, so if you ever need to extract files from a Windows self-extracting installer executable that's been created with the Nullsoft Installer (NSIS): p7zip can do it, and it's apparently the only readily available tool for the job. The command to use is 7zr (shipped in the regular p7zip package) or 7z (shipped in p7zip-full):

$ 7zr X Firefox\ Setup\ 3.0.exe
7-Zip (A)  4.58 beta  Copyright (c) 1999-2008 Igor Pavlov  2008-05-05
p7zip Version 4.58 (locale=en_US.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,2 CPUs)

Processing archive: Firefox Setup 3.0.exe

Extracting  localized
Extracting  localized/chrome
Extracting  localized/defaults
[...]
Extracting  localized/searchplugins/google.xml
Extracting  localized/searchplugins/wikipedia.xml
Extracting  localized/searchplugins/yahoo.xml
Extracting  nonlocalized/components/browser.xpt

Everything is Ok

Folders: 26
Files: 185
Size:       24930294
Compressed: 7496920