Planet Larry

PixieLive

A friend of mine, Christian, has released PixieLive, a slax based live linux distro build with gentoo.
It’s one of the few live distributions that support Intel GMA500, popular on netbooks like some Asus EEEPC.

PixieLive

Audio transcoding in bash

A proper transcode must have a lossless audio format as a source, a good one is flac ,stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, because it does the job well and has a good licence ( BSD and GPL ).

If you have some flacs and want them in mp3 format (you need lame and flac) you can use this one liner:
for FILE in *.flac; do flac -cd "${FILE}" | lame - "${FILE/.flac/.mp3}"; done

the above line decodes every file that ends in .flac to the standard output (screen) and pipes it to lame that will encode it. “${FILE/.flac/.mp3}” will be the output file, in bash that means: take the variables “$FILE” (that is the original filename), remove “.flac” and substitute “.mp3″.

Nowadays I transcode quite often to 320 kbit/s constant bit rate (CBR)

• achieving the best quality for an mp3 and still being highly portable, some players don’t like variable bitrate of high quality ( like the V0 preset)
• doing something unefficient since mp3 is not a good codec for that quality but if your stereo reads just mp3 you don’t have any choices

I simply need to use lame with the proper switches , the above one liner becomes:
for FILE in *.flac; do flac -cd "${FILE}" | lame --cbr --preset insane - "${FILE/.flac/.mp3}"; done

To rip my compact discs and encode my music in flac I use a program for windows called Exact Audio Copy (EAC), my Wine build doesn’t like it for some reasons and Virtualbox has historical problems in handling cdroms correctly, the solution was VMWare. The native solution is RubyRipper

Added “iw” support to Linux Sea

The wireless driver developers are actively working on a new wireless toolset called “iw”, slowly deprecating the older wireless-tools toolset (which contains the “iwconfig” command). Kasumi_Ninja reported to me in the Gentoo Forums that it would be nice to add information on iw to Linux Sea, so I did. I must admit though that my systems don’t (or hardly) support iw, so I had to be lead by examples throughout the Internet.

Apart from the iw addition, I’ve reorganized the sections on Software Management as it was becoming too crowded. I’ve also started a ChangeLog for those who want to track the changes to the document.

Now if anyone can recommend me a good spell- and grammar checker…

cvechecker 0.4 released

Albeit with less updates than 0.3 had, cvechecker 0.4 brings in internal project files reorganization (more to the liking of the GNU autoconf/automake standards – I think), fixes a databaseleak (instead of memoryleak ;-) bug and introduces a teenie weenie bit more intelligent pullcves command (with multiple return code behavior to improve automation efforts) as was mentioned in the feature request list. All documentation is also updated and a pullcves manual page has been added.

the "Community Contributions" section on the Arch Linux forums is a goldmine

The Community contributions subforum of the Arch Linux forums is awesome.
It is the birthplace of many applications, most of them not Arch Linux specific.
File managers, media players, browsers, window managers, text editors, todo managers, and so on. Many shell scripts, urxvt extensions and dwm patches aswell.
Most of the apps are designed after suckless/KISS principles, but there are also some GUI programs.

If you like to discover new apps and tools, check it out.

Using PlayOnLinux to run applications already installed by vanilla WINE.

RTS is an acronym for real-time strategy. It’s a game genre. There’s a classic RTS game known as StarCraft. Although only a casual gamer (say, might I recommend Machinarium?) I have played (and somewhat enjoyed) a few more "hardcore" games – like for instance, StarCraft. Although being pretty pathetic at it, I did enjoy it and appreciated the balanced strategy between the various "races" you could control in the game. With StarCraft II already out (hell, it’s about time!) I decided to revisit the original StarCraft: Brood War game to refresh my memory.

I downloaded the game from Battle.net, installed the latest version of WINE (1.3.0), ran the Blizzard downloader flawlessly, ran the installer flawlessly – and true to its Gold ranking on the WINE AppDB, ran the game flawle- no wait. It was laggy. Not particularly laggy. But it wasn’t as fast as it should’ve been, and too many critters on the screen would make it choke. I tried all the lag-fixes suggested on the AppDB submission to no effect. It was a sort of phantom, website-loadingish lag.

However one comment on the AppDB page said that using PlayOnLinux to install WINE 0.9.14 to run StarCraft fixed all lag issues. I decided to give it a shot. Turns out any version below 1.0 is no longer supported (as any sane developer would do) and no longer available in portage. PlayOnLinux was, however – and PlayOnLinux did still allow WINE 0.9.14 to be installed. Unfortunately it wasn’t particularly intuitive to tell PlayOnLinux to run my installed .exe file with WINE 0.9.14, so perhaps this blog post might help others in my situation. Using these steps I was able to install a prehistoric version WINE via PlayOnLinux, and tell it to run the already installed version of StarCraft on my computer:

1. Install PlayOnLinux, Tools -> Manage wine versions -> install v0.9.14. Should be straightforward.
2. mkdir /home/username/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/starcraft && env WINEPREFIX=/home/username/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/starcraft wineboot
3. cp -r /home/username/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/StarCraft /home/username/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/starcraft/drive_c/Program\ Files/ (or mv it, doesn’t make a difference)
4. touch /home/username/.PlayOnLinux/configurations/installed/StarCraft
5. Place the following in the StarCraft file:

#!/bin/bash
export WINEPREFIX="/home/username/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/starcraft"
export WINEDEBUG="-all"
cd "/home/username/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/starcraft/drive_c/Program Files/StarCraft"
wine "StarCraft.exe" $@

And that’s it! Run PlayOnLinux and you’ll be able to run the program from there. This guide should be able to work for other scenarios as well so feel free to adapt it.

Oh, and as for the lag? Yep – oddly enough it did get completely fixed. Regression time.

Related posts:

1. Top 10 Windows Mobile Applications
2. A scalable and adaptable standardised user file structure?

I remain impressed by the free software community

My current personal projects, Linux Sea and cvechecker, are actively being watched by the free software community. For the Linux Sea book, I get nice feedback and ideas on the Gentoo Forums and on the cvechecker application, people such as Nigel Horne are helping out in various ways – including feature requests of all sorts.

I must admit, I remain impressed.

Small changes have already been squeezed in in the Linux Sea document. A larger change (the use of the iw tools for wireless connectivity) is being investigated (sadly, my broadcom-sta device doesn’t support the new nl80211 API so the documentation change is slower to integrate than expected). I’m also planning to make some updates on the software management chapter as it is currently becoming quite crowded.

In the cvetool, most changes are bugfixes and output enhancements as expected. I’m not going to add more functionality now – I first want to get a stable 1.0 release out there. But first continue to squash bugs and add rules to the versions.dat file so that it is usable on various systems (release 0.4 is around the corner).

Paludis 0.54.0 Released

Paludis 0.54.0 has been released:

• ‘cave resolve –remove-if-dependent’ will now cause dependent packages to be removed from world, if no versions remain.
• ‘cave resolve –make’ now defaults to ‘chroot’ when the environment’s preferred root is not ‘/’.
• ‘cave display-resolution –show-option-descriptions’ now works as documented.
• ‘cave fix-linkage’ may take multiple ‘–library’ arguments.
• New ‘cave’ subcommands: ‘report’, ‘print-id-environment-variable’.
• ‘cave print-’ commands are now consistent in handling ‘–all’ / ‘-a’ and ‘–best’ / ‘-b’.
• ‘cave show’ will now always show keys specified by ‘-k’, even if those keys are internal-only or complex.
• ‘cave search’ now takes an optional SQLite index, which can be created using ‘cave manage-search-index’.
• ‘cave search’ now has a ‘–visible’ option.
• The ‘importare’, ‘inquisitio’ and ‘reconcilio’ clients are now deprecated in favour of ‘cave import, ‘cave search’ and ‘cave fix-linkage’ respectively.
• Output managers and output.conf are now documented features, and a new ‘command’ output manager handler was added.
• Hooks are now run using an output manager, where appropriate. The API for .so hooks has been changed to allow this.
• The demo hooks have been removed, since none are particularly useful with ‘cave’.
• ‘cave’ now has a global ‘–colour’ option, and coloured output is disabled by default when outputting to a non-tty.
• The output format for certain cave commands can now be tinkered with by the user. Use ‘cave dump-cave-formats-conf’ to create ~/.cave/formats.conf and then edit as desired.
• The way sub-programs are executed has changed to be somewhat less convoluted.

The Principle of Least Surprise

Review of "Python 3 Object Oriented Programming"

Dusty Phillips, Arch Linux shwag guy, Archcon co-organizer, (python) consultant and since recently buddy of mine wrote his first book: Python 3 Object Oriented Programming.

I got the opportunity to get a free pdf copy in exchange for a review on my blog, so here we go.
Mind you, my Python knowledge is very limited. I have done some python programming, and I once read (most of) Dive into python, but over the years that experience has vanished from my memory. Dusty's book has had many proofreads/reviews by python-aficionado's, now it gets a fresh perspective from an amateur, and for me this was a good opportunity to work on my python skills.

To paraphrase the "who this book is for" paragraph, which is in the beginning of the book and in online advertisements for the book:

• people new to OO programming and people with basic python skills who want to improve their python OO.
• OO programmers experienced in other languages who want to get into python.
• python 2 programmers interested in learning python 3, although this is not the target audience.

Good, that includes me (category 2)

Pro's:

• seems very accurate
• OO focused. But not in a college/university-ish way. Real experience, nuanced, real examples and exercises. Tells you when *not* to use OO. Teaches you the difference between object orientation, OO programming and OO design, and makes you understand that in the end everything are just means to end, and thanks to the versatility of Python, teaches you various tricks to implement certain designs in less then obvious ways.
• Chapters about design patterns (there sure are many of them), testing, libraries, and some other topics not directly related to OO.

Con's:

• Not an introduction to Python. Assumes some basic knowledge about Python. (like data structures and loops). There is a chapter about (some of the) datatypes later on in the book but it focuses more on their OO nature, and to get to know the basics, you're referred to the official python tutorial.
• Does not cover *everything*.

I should clarify my last point. Here and there I found some information to be lacking. Especially static class methods (they are only mentioned very briefly in a case study somewhere) and static properties/variables.
Other then that, sometimes an example or explanation was not entirely clear to me. This didn't happen often, but there were moments where I thought 95% of what you need to know is explained, but the other 5% you have to google up yourself.
It is quite convenient however, to have the author of a book available in your jabber client.
So FWIW here are the things I asked him about and which responses I got, with some comments added by me afterwards.

<Dieterbe> hmm you mention that methods *need* a self param, but why is this?
           can't python automatically make a variable self available in the scope of the function, when calling it?
<Dusty>    no, they are always explicit
<Dieterbe> but why?
<Dusty>    it's part of the python philosophy, I guess. "explicit is better than implicit" is in the zen of python poem.
           Basically, if you are accessing a variable in any namespace, that variable has to be have been made explicitly available in that 
           namespace. The one exception is the from X import * syntax, which 98% of python programmers avoid exactly because of the namespace issues.
<Dieterbe> right
 
# good to know.  Too bad this isn't really mentioned anywhere.
 
 
<Dieterbe> i don't quite get why - in your notebook example of chap 2 - you iterate over the list to find the correct note based on its id.
           can't you just get the element based on it's index in the list? (ie keep the node id in sync with the index in the list)
<Dusty>    I don't have the code in front of me, but I suspect that it's because if a note is deleted, that id should not be recycled and applied to another note.
<Dieterbe> but still, since you keep the last used id, and keep increasing it, you won't recycle id's.
<Dusty>    yeah, but the index in the list will change
<Dusty>    when you delete #4
<Dieterbe> oh
<Dusty>    the object with ID 5 becomes the object at #4
<Dieterbe> thanks buddy
<Dusty>    no problem. :)
 
# again, makes perfect sense.  But if you don't know the ins and outs of the datatypes, you're on your own.
 
<Dieterbe> i had a question about your example for the decorator pattern.
           you use a socket and then you have 2 decorators that implement a send function which do some stuff (logging and what not)
           but also the actual sending on the socket
<Dieterbe> and you mention you can have multiple decorators on the same object.  but since each decorator also does the sending on the socket,
           doesn't that mean the sending happens multiple times?
<Dusty>    no, because the first decorator is decorating the second decorator
<Dusty>    which is decorating the socket
<Dieterbe> ah yes you're right. and although you did not specify it like this in the explanation text, it should be clear from the code.
 
# If I would have looked better at the code I would have figured it out.
# I just assumed something had to be wrong, I'm too used to the way 'behaviors' are implemented in CakePHP.
 
<Dieterbe> one last remark i have about the book: i couldn't find an explanation of static variables/properties.
           i did see a very short mention of static methods in the case study at the end of chap 3, i would have expected to have that info a bit more 
           prominent, in it's own subsection or something
<Dieterbe> especially because you use static class methods a few times throughout the book
<Dusty>    I had a long section on them and ended up removing it because the chapter was too long and one of my reviewers suggested that they aren't very good form in Python.
<Dieterbe> hmm. i see

The writing is pretty informal, and here and there you'll find a subtle reference or joke. But of course that's not what you buy this book for.

Conclusion

I would say the "who this book is for" part is a bit too optimistic. You won't learn Python (3) from scratch by only using this book. It's not a book restricted to mere OO subjects (in python), but neither does it cover all basics of the Python language.

So if you are a python newbie, I would probably recommend you 'Dive into python'. It's free, covers the basics, but doesn't contain so many real life examples.

If you want to know more about OO in python, design patterns, some real life examples and techniques, or advice from a pro, then I definitely recommend this book.

Free chapter: Chapter No. 7 – Python Object-oriented Shortcuts

Tomboy sync and Ubuntu One

I love tomboy. I drop tons of my ideas into it. And plans. Lists. Anything on my brain. The problem is as soon as I have more than one computer, like now with my netbook and laptop, all my thoughts are split in half. Ever since tomboy hit the scene years ago I've loved it but also known it needed synchronization to be the best and truly useful to me. I've only had sporadic luck with the sshfs sync. It worked last year. Now it doesn't.
Anyways, I finally couldn't stand it any longer and decided to sign up for an Ubuntu One account that goes with the Ubuntu Web Sync plugin shipped with Tomboy on Ubuntu. I'm not normally one for web services, I like to roll my own where I can (email, jabber, blog), but here since sshfs sync wasn't working and snowy (tomboy online) is pre alpha, I didn't have a choice.
(Actually, in hindsight I realize I could have tried and been using sync to local folder and placed that in my DropBox, whoops)
Anyways, it was painless and now my notes are synced to the cloud and my brain is healed. So thank you Ubuntu. I'm not a huge fan of proprietary solutions but no one else has a solution at all, so you win by virtue of just shipping. (Of course this isn't exactly a multi platform approach, I just thankfully only run Ubuntu on my laptops right now. A few years ago when I ran Gentoo on desktops/laptops this would have been a no go, and Dropbox would have probably floated to the top of my mind sooner)
Let that be a lesson to the rest of you, ideals are good, but solid options are better.

I need to get back into blogging, but like so many others, twitter has been eroding at that. We shall see.

gentoo mp3 tag editor

Fail2ban and postfix sasl

Today I found the usual chinese trying to get in my smtp to send his spam to the world and I realized that fail2ban wasn’t working because the regexp used to match the offender is wrong.

This is the log entry (/var/log/mail)
Aug 21 22:45:30 myserver postfix/smtpd[12071]: warning: unknown[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]: SASL LOGIN authentication failed: authentication failure

and this is the regex that work , just remove the part after “authentication failed” (/etc/fail2ban/filter.d/sasl.conf)

failregex = (?i): warning: [-._\w]+\[<host>\]: SASL (?:LOGIN|PLAIN|(?:CRAM|DIGEST)-MD5) authentication failed

Test it:
fail2ban-regex /var/log/mail.log /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/sasl.conf

if you are on a slow server or on a big mail server use /var/log/mail.err instead

Hacked my Drupal into acknowledging Flattr

Well, I'm not very proud of it, but I got the Flattr button working somehow. I've added the static button to the theme's template, so it shows on every node.

OK, technically it's not pretty, but to be fair, my current Drupal install isn't either (that's also the reason why Drupal's Flattr module doesn't work for me in the first place).

Can't wait for Drupal 7 to come out, get myself a PlugComputer and migrate to it.

...actually can't wait until I get that done, with the state of my DB this should be quite an ugly ordeal :\

hook out >> taking a nap to cure the headache, then working on a text to finish my application for that legal counselling job
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Emacs undo trees

I've said it before: undo in Emacs is horrible. On the other hand, undo in Vim is awesome.

But this is true no longer. Now there are undo trees for Emacs! Yes, this news is so important I had to italicize and bold it. It's like Emacs has been punching me in the face for years, and today I got it to stop. I never thought I'd see the day.

And it works great too. You can even view the tree visually and navigate it with the cursor keys, which is a step up on what Vim offers out of the box.

In other news, Vim 7.3 is out and it now has persistent undo across reloads. It's like an arms race, and gleeful hackers reap the benefits.

Non-obvious, Unannounced Gentoo Update

I’m not too happy the devicekit-power package has become unsupported but still remains in the tree as stable, with not even a word in elog or similar. This package depends on libusb:0, which has some pretty unfortunate bugs, resulting, at least for me, in power management only half working. I praise the developers of GNOME yet again for solid code writing that chugs along and still recognizes my battery and other things despite crashes like this.

It’s pretty easy to update and move on. Simply run emerge -1v upower and portage will handle the transition.

cvechecker 0.2 released

I’ve made version 0.2 available of cvechecker. It fixes some build warnings and also supports the normal “make install” step. The pullcves command now also pulls in the latest versions.dat file. Special thanks to Per Andersson for reporting that the ./configure didn’t fail if sqlite3 or libconfig wasn’t available – that should be fixed now as well.

In my Gentoo overlay, cvechecker-0.2.ebuild has been put available. Thanks there to webkiller71 for helping out with a more sane approach to cvechecker-0.1.ebuild – I hope I didn’t screw up his changes in 0.2 too much ;-)

Public Infrastructure

cc licensed flickr photo shared by Jürgen Geuter (tante)

The picture you see on the right was taken a few days ago in our “new” house. We recently moved into a new place and the house we rent now was build in 1865 so the neighbors gave the owner this picture when he bought the place (a few years ago). It shows the house how it looked around 1955 and aggregates all the different owners and how the house was build and whatnot. I am not a historian but it is kinda neat.

In Germany we’ve had some discussions about Google Street View. Many people complained how a private company could do that and how it was a huge invasion into people’s privacy, especially considering how Google makes its money selling advertising and considering how good and effective Google is with crossreferencing and linking data.

The other side of the argument supported Google, pointed at the fact that those are just pictures (and you can get your house removed). This argument focuses on the possible uses of this neat technology.

Now I don’t want to rehash the whole thing (in fact I don’t really wanna link anything because most posts and texts about the whole discussion are borderline retarded, but I want to bring us to stand back and look at what’s really happening, apart from all the recent “Google hate” we’ve been seeing here.

Step one. Let’s restate what we can consider “fact”.

1. Taking photos is somewhat of a touchy thing, people and license plates etc should be anonymized.
2. Google will use the whole thing to profile its users better, to sell more ads and make more money.
3. The service can be really useful (for navigation, to estimate an area you think about moving to etc).
4. The problem is not only Google, we wouldn’t trust the government with that kind of data either.

Step two. Let’s analyze some further thoughts.

1. Many of the direct privacy concerns can be deal with through technical means (i.e. anonymizing people’s faces and stuff). While any software will make mistakes, it still is good enough and the errors can be fixed quite simply by the community.
2. We don’t want all that data in the hands of an entity that has interests that might go against ours.

Step three. Let’s draw conclusions.

1. We have to forbid untrustworthy entities from gathering that kind of public data.
2. We need a trustworthy entity to provide that kind of data in order for the public to benefit.

All those complaints about the bad bad Google or the bad bad Government are not without merit. In fact they do have a lot of weight: Google could take that data and close it off at any given time. And just cause they publish anonymized data does not mean that they won’t use the unfiltered images for something shady in the background. But should that mean that useful services shouldn’t be implemented?

As we have also seen, many people don’t trust “the government”. I wouldn’t either. Because it’s my job to always check on my government to see that they ain’t breaking the rules for the simple reason that we are the people which makes us boss.

So with the government dropping out of the equation and profit-oriented organizations also not sounding all too pretty there can be only one conclusion: We need to find ways to have non-government, non-profit organizations handle that kind of stuff. They can provide the data in a form that we can consider “clean”. They can also provide it for free. But the crux of the matter is: Right now we lack a framework to really finance that kind of endeavor.

Money for big projects that might help the public either comes from the government or from companies. And if you start pissing those off by not giving them what they want, you will find yourself without funding quite quickly.

If there’s one thing we can learn from the whole Google shebang it’s that right now we have no way to publicly fund infrastructure in a reliable and independent way. That’s what should scare us, not that Google’s engineers decided to kinda “fix” the situation.

Think of how much historians in 20 years would thank us for a yearly updated OpenStreetView that would allow them to analyze and show how a certain area changed. We need to find way to fund those infrastructure projects and we better do it fast. Because when those things are all privatized I don’t see a big push for an independent solution pick up any steam.

People care about things working. They want to get something done and if something gets it done good enough that’s fine. The whole license and freedom angle that some people (like me) might support does not interest many people in the least. Wikipedia (or maybe better WikiLeaks) are somewhat good examples for what we want: Independend data providers that allow people to get something done. But how can we get those projects funded?

creating c++ classes using python scripts

motivation

lately i had to create 31 classes( 31x .h and 31x .cpp), that is 62 files. i thought about doing that with Qt itself but i think this can be done much more elegant with python.

what i like most about python is the string handling using “”" and “”". this is very nice as one does not have to escape much. it’s basically copy’n'pasting the code and the places the script should replace some string names are altered using a $ sign.

the script

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: iso-8859-1 -*-
import os
import string
from string import Template

modules="""
Utils NoiseMapBuilderPlane      1 0 0
Utils RendererImage             1 0 0
Utils Image                     1 0 0

Generator Perlin                0 0 1
Generator Billow                0 0 1
Generator RidgedMulti           0 0 1
Generator Checkerboard          0 0 1
Generator Const                 0 0 1
Generator Cylinders             0 0 1
Generator Spheres               0 0 1
Generator Voronoi               0 0 1

Combiner Add                    2 0 1
Combiner Max                    2 0 1
Combiner Min                    2 0 1
Combiner Multiply               2 0 1
Combiner Power                  2 0 1

Modifier Abs                    1 0 1
Modifier Clamp                  1 0 1
Modifier Curve                  1 0 1
Modifier Exponent               1 0 1
Modifier Invert                 1 0 1
Modifier ScaleBias              1 0 1
Modifier Terrace                1 0 1

Selector Blend                  2 1 1
Selector Select                 2 1 1

Transformer Displace            1 3 1
Transformer RotatePoint         1 0 1
Transformer ScalePoint          1 0 1
Transformer TranslatePoint      1 0 1
Transformer Turbulence          1 0 1

Spring Mapgenerator             1 0 0
"""

myclass_h="""
#ifndef $MYIFNDEF
#define $MYIFNDEF

#include <DataAbstractModule.h>

#define ID "$MYMODULENAME"

// http://libnoise.sourceforge.net/docs/group__modules.html

/**
   @author Joachim Schiele <js@lastlog.de>
*/
class $MYCLASS : public DataAbstractModule {
public:
    $MYCLASS();
    ~$MYCLASS();

    QString identify();
};

#endif
"""

# testing code for the .h creation
#t = Template(myclass_h)
#s = t.substitute(MYCLASS=myClassName, MYMODULENAME=myModuleName, MYIFNDEF=myIFNDEF)
#print s

myclass_cpp="""
#include "$MYMODULENAME.h"
#include "ModuleFactory.h"

#include "registermodule_macro.cpp"

M_REGISTER($MYCLASS);

$MYCLASS::$MYCLASS() : DataAbstractModule($IN,$MOD,$OUT) {
  setProperty("FIXME", 112);
}

$MYCLASS::~$MYCLASS() {
}

QString $MYCLASS::identify() {
    return ID;
}
"""
# testing code for the .cpp creation
#t = Template(myclass_cpp)
#s = t.substitute(MYCLASS=myClassName, MYMODULENAME=myClassName,IN=portIN,MOD=portMOD,OUT=portOUT)
#print s

# this code will create directories, place cpp and h files into these directories
newlines=modules.split('\n')
for i in newlines:
 mylist=i.split()
 if len(mylist) > 0:
  myClassName=mylist[1]
  myCategoryName=mylist[0]
  myModuleName=myCategoryName + "::" + myClassName
  myIFNDEF=myCategoryName.upper() + "_" + myClassName.upper() + "__HH"
  portIN=mylist[2]
  portMOD=mylist[3]
  portOUT=mylist[4]
  t = Template(myclass_h)
  s = t.substitute(MYCLASS=myClassName, MYMODULENAME=myModuleName, MYIFNDEF=myIFNDEF)
  #print s

  # creating the directory for the module, based on it's class
  if not os.path.exists(myCategoryName.lower()):
   os.mkdir(myCategoryName.lower(), 0777)
  print "modules/" + myCategoryName.lower() + "/" + myClassName + ".cpp"

  # creating the .cpp file
  f = open(myCategoryName.lower() + "/" + myClassName + ".cpp", 'w')
  t = Template(myclass_cpp)
  s = t.substitute(MYCLASS=myClassName, MYMODULENAME=myClassName,IN=portIN,MOD=portMOD,OUT=portOUT)
  f.write(s)

  # creating the .h file
  f.close()
  f = open(myCategoryName.lower() + "/" + myClassName + ".h", 'w')
  t = Template(myclass_h)
  s = t.substitute(MYCLASS=myClassName, MYMODULENAME=myModuleName, MYIFNDEF=myIFNDEF)
  f.write(s)
  f.close()

summary

FCron in practice — my fcrontabs shared

I've already stated my allegiance to FCron, but after using it for quite some while and writing an article or two about it already (see Publications subpage), I think it's time I shared my fcrontabs.

Since FCron is such a nice and vertisable command scheduler, I can depend that everything's going to get done even though my laptop is not up 24/7.

fcrontab -e systab lets me edit my system fcrontab (note: systab ≠ root's fcrontab):

# All FCron notifications are e-mailed to normal user
MAILTO=hook
 
# Updates 'slocate' in 'man' every day.
%daily,nice(7),random,mail(no) * 10-14 makewhatis -u
%daily,nice(7),random,mail(no) * 16-18 updatedb
 
# Once a month (as soon as possible) my Portage tree is updated and the results e-mailed to my normal user's account.
%monthly,nice(7)mail * 16-23  * eix-sync; emerge -DNuvp world
 
# Once a month (on a random day in the second half of it) some general cleaning of the Portage tree; again e-mail of results.
%midmonthly,nice(7),random,mail * 16-23 * eclean-dist --destructive --nocolor; eclean-pkg --destructive --nocolor; eix-test-obsolete detailed

And here's my normal user's everyday stuff, accessible by fcrontab -e:

# Twice a week the weather report gets printed automatically and an e-mail notifies me when I can take it from the printer or whether there's been a problem
%weekly,mail * 06-23 sleep 500; wget <a href="http://www.yr.no/place/Slovenia/Ljubljana/Ljubljana/varsel.pdf" title="http://www.yr.no/place/Slovenia/Ljubljana/Ljubljana/varsel.pdf">http://www.yr.no/place/Slovenia/Ljubljana/Ljubljana/varsel.pdf</a> -O /tmp/vreme.pdf && lpr /tmp/vreme.pdf && echo "Weather report printed." || echo "ERROR: Weather report *not* printed!" ; rm /tmp/vreme.pdf*
 
%midweekly,mail * 06-23 sleep 500; wget <a href="http://www.yr.no/place/Slovenia/Ljubljana/Ljubljana/varsel.pdf" title="http://www.yr.no/place/Slovenia/Ljubljana/Ljubljana/varsel.pdf">http://www.yr.no/place/Slovenia/Ljubljana/Ljubljana/varsel.pdf</a> -O /tmp/vreme.pdf && lpr /tmp/vreme.pdf && echo "Vremenska napoved je stiskana." || echo "NAPAKA: Vremenska napoved *ni* stiskana!" ; rm /tmp/vreme.pdf*
 
# Using curl magic to automatically send updates to Status.net; I don't need e-mail notification of that ;)
%nightly,mail(no) * * curl <a href="https://identi.ca/api/statuses/update.xml" title="https://identi.ca/api/statuses/update.xml">https://identi.ca/api/statuses/update.xml</a> -u johndearheart:<password> -d status='GNU John Dearheart → !discworld'
 
%daily,mail(no) * * curl <a href="https://identi.ca/api/statuses/update.xml" title="https://identi.ca/api/statuses/update.xml">https://identi.ca/api/statuses/update.xml</a> -u dwtrivia:<password> -d status="`fortune discworld pqf -n 128 -s`"' → !discworld'

Note 1: I prefer to use the %*LY commands to define cronjobs, because they fit my needs the most. FCron itself uses all sorts of ways how to define the time when a cronjob should be executed — from strict date+time (like in "normal" Crons) to intervals and even defined by uptime.
Note 2: Of course, in the last two (f)cronjobs the passwords were censured ;)

I hope this whet your appetite and you'll be anxious to try it and find your own way of how to make your life easier with FCron :]

hook out >> doing "schoolwork" for my potential new legal counselling job
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appeal.kde.org Hijacked by Debian Gaming Ninjas

Uhhh what?

Oxygen Window Dragging

Hugo Pereira Da Costa and Thomas Luebking are geniuses. If you’ve used KDE 4.5, you’ve probably noticed that you can now drag windows by selecting any blank area. You’ve also probably read that, as expected, this only works with Qt apps. How does such hackery work? What in Qt allows this kind of interaction? How can a window decoration enable such an interaction with the window manager? How do we know which events on which widgets to intercept? I suggest that if you haven’t already seen it, you give oxygenwindowmanager.cpp a close read. It’s extremely educational.

cvechecker 0.1 released

cvechecker version 0.1 is out. This is the first publicly available development release, so it’s still far from production-ready yet. However, it is usable so it can now be publicly analyzed to remove all icky bugs and such. I’m not planning (m)any new features (apart from the reporting script as mentioned on the tools’ homepage) before the first general available release, but any request will be gladly documented and taken in scope in future versions.

What is cvechecker? Well, it is a tool that strives to scan your system for installed software. For each software it detects, it attempts to discover which version you have. This information is stored in a local database. The tool then matches this information with the (publicly available) CVE data (security vulnerability information). If a CVE entry mentions the software/version you have, the tool will report this to you.

Who needs cvechecker? Noone needs it, but it can be interesting nevertheless. Users that install lots of software themselves and don’t use the Linux distribution’s package manager might benefit from this as the tool will then help them verify if a security update is needed or not. Users of LinuxFromScratch can do some security validation tests on their installations. Developers of particular packages (or even tools) can use the tool to be notified when one of their software’s has a CVE (which most likely results in a new version of the software to be made available).

Who needs cvechecker? No, this is not a duplicate paragraph – cvechecker needs input. Most of the work goes in detecting the available software and version. The method cvechecker uses is very rudimentary: run a (predefined) regular expression against the file (which is parsed with the strings command as this command understands ELF structures) and if the expression matches, it will extract the version (which is found using the expressions’ groups) and store this in the database. The rules are defined in the versions.dat file (also available from sourceforge), but this file is currently microscopicly filled – so lots and lots of additional rules need to be added. I’ll be adding more and more rules as I encounter them (or have immediate need for), but I can definitely use additional help here.

If you are interested in enhancing the versions.dat file, check out the cvechecker manual page – it describes the format and how it is used as well as some examples.

And yes, an ebuild is available in my overlay, but I’m no ebuild developer (it’s just easy to have them so Portage can track it) and the ebuild is butt-ugly (and probably also violates all QA policies).

Developing for Android on AMD64

The last couple of days I have done some coding for Android. All my resentment towards java is coming back but getting some cool mobile app requires sacrifices! But I do not want to write about java today.

The problem I encountered when installing the Android SDK is that the some of the programs won’t run on non-multilib AMD64 installations. This is really annoying since I do not want to have 32bit libraries on my system (it is matter of principals!). But linux to the rescue! A simple multilib chroot allows me to compile and deploy my android apps!

Mounting (with bind) the source directory allows me to code in my normal env while compiling in the chroot. Which is not a big thing for me since I code in VIM but for IDE users this might be an advantage!

So for all native AMD64 users there is hope! But it would be better for the Android devs to fix the binaries!

“How a programmer reads your resume”

tl;dr: Sometimes stereotypes are true.

I came across this rather excellent comic about how people see your resume depending on who they are and after glazing over it and appreciating it as one of my ~5-10 daily interweb funnies, I looked over it again and noticed that it’s eerily accurate.

Positives

1. Has written a compiler or OS for fun.
   That’d be a yes.
2. Resume compiled from latex.
   Actually, from hand made xsl to latex. There was a time when I was all excited about single source publishing, so that’s what I did here. Xml to html/pdf/txt. (Last time I checked the latex->html bridge was seriously lacking anyway.)
3. Contributes to open source software.
   Check.
4. Has written compiler or OS for class.
   Check.
5. Has blog discussing programming topics.
   You’re here.
6. President of programming/robotics/engineering club.
   Nope.
7. Participated in programming/robotics/engineering contest.
   Nope.
8. Internship at Google or Microsoft.
   They know where to find me.
9. Has written non-trivial programs in dynamic languages (perl/python/ruby).
   Mhm.
10. Knows 3 or more programming languages.
    Right.
11. Previous position demonstrates similar skills.
    Not really.
12. Has internship.
    Has.
13. Founded a company.
    Only a pretend company, and we haven’t been active for about 10 years.
14. Personal web page uses Rails, PHP or Asp.Net.
    Been meaning to switch from PHP to Python, but there’s just no pressing need for it.
15. Email address at own domain.
    Not since 2005.
16. Has modified programs in dynamic languages (perl/python/ruby).
    That’s how I started out with dynamic web stuff in 1999, found perl scripts and tried to mod them without breaking them.
17. Has personal web page.
    Welcome.
18. High grades, top of class, etc.
    Meh.

Neutrals

1. Won scholarship.
   Have never applied for one.
2. Lists job at fast food chain.
   Haven’t had the pleasure.

Negatives

1. Looks kind of drunk in facebook picture.
   One of [apparently] few specimen in the human race who don’t find unending ecstasy in alcohol.
2. Has Ph.D.
   Not so much.
3. Generic cover letter.
   Might be tempted.
4. Mentions skills in Excel/Word.
   Over my dead body etc.
5. Spelling or grammar errors on resume.
   My typing is a bit dodgy, but I tend to proofread.
6. Resume font too small.
   Let’s hope not.
7. All programming experience in class.
   Nah.
8. Knows only 1 programming language.
   Once upon a time.
9. Resume more than three pages long.
   I try to make it in two.
10. Includes irrelevant objective section.
    Never knew what the point was of that one.
11. Took certification course in a technology.
    Never occurred to me.
12. Low grades in relevant courses.
    Nah.
13. Lists visual basic experience first.
    Don’t have any.
14. Topless in facebook picture.
    Only by mistake.
15. Resume uses combination of tabs and spaces to indent sections.
    I’m clean, narc. (Actually, if you use Tab in vim with wildmenu, it’s tricky to type a tab without a space first, because it will try to auto complete the current token. Haven’t tried to fix that yet.)