tiling terminals manager
August 19th, 2008 by lucas
I tried terminator (thanks go to Nicolas Valcarcel for asking me to sponsor a Debian upload, thus forcing me to try it, and Asheesh Laroia for doing a lightning talk at debconf about it), but I’m not convinced.
- More keybindings are clearly missing. You can only switch terminals using Previous/Next keybindings.
- More features would be great, like the ability to switch the position of two terminals (so you could reorganize them).
- It has some small usability problems, like the fact that the config is text-based, not using gconf, that it’s not possible to change the config without restarting it, that the title bar doesn’t display anything useful most of the time, since it prefixes the current terminal’s title with “Terminator: “, etc.
So, is there any other tiling terminals manager I should try, before filing tons of feature requests on terminator? My other requirement is that it mustn’t reinvent the wheel, but use the gnome-terminal widget.
Thank you.
Debian’s Freeze
August 12th, 2008 by lucas
Debian’s freeze sounds like a technical hack to address a social problem, and that disturbs me a bit.
The social problem is: At some point, we need everybody in Debian to make only non-disruptive changes, so everything can converge very fast into a releasable state.
The “solution” we are using is that we are blocking all packages from migrating to testing, and requiring manual review from someone on the release team. Consequences are:
- many people feel that you need to be very convincing to fix a small, not RC bug, even if fixing that bug definitely increases your package’s quality.
- the release team is completely overwhelmed by unblock requests during the freeze
- many people just stop trying to fix things during the freeze (which definitely doesn’t improve Debian’s quality), both because they think it’s hard to get a fix in, and because they don’t want to bother the release team
I wonder if we really need such a strict policy. Are there other Free Software projects that use such a technical measure to prevent software from disrupting stable releases? I am the impression that most other projects rely on social pressure instead of technical measures for that, except maybe during the last few hours before the release.
Couldn’t we act on the social level? We could default to allow everyone’s package to migrate to testing, and, when someone fucks up and uploads something that should not have been uploaded, block all his packages (switching to manual review mode) until the release. Of course, that require the release team to make decisions about _people_, which is harder than making decisions about _packages_. But if the rules are clearly stated, couldn’t this work?
Code for Debian versions comparison?
August 10th, 2008 by lucas
Do you know code that compare versions of debian packages (for example, that knows if 2:23.2.3~rc1-1 is lower than 2:23.2.3-2?), besides dpkg –compare-versions? If yes, please write a comment to this blog post, preferably with a link to the code.
Also, did someone already write a test suite for that? Who would be interested in such a test suite?
I’m considering writing a function in PL/SQL to compare debian versions (for the Ultimate Debian Database project). If someone already wrote that, I’m interested as well.
Of popular packages removed from testing, and the Ultimate Debian Database GSOC project
August 9th, 2008 by lucas
Some time ago, there was some flamewars^H^Hdebate about the Release Team’s removals of RC-buggy packages from testing. Basically, some people claimed that popular packages shouldn’t be removed, even if RC-buggy.
But, do we really miss popular packages in testing?
It’s difficult to know. You could get the popcon data, and compare it with the Packages files for testing and unstable. Or work with source packages (which removes a lot of noise), but then, you have to convert the popcon data (which uses binary packages names) to source packages. Not completely trivial.
That’s where the Ultimate Debian Database GSOC project comes to the rescue. The goal of Christian von Essen’s project is to gather data from various sources in Debian into a single SQL DB, so queries that combine all those data sources can easily be written.
For example, here is the query that lists the source packages that are in unstable, but not in testing, sorted by their popcon (using the number of insts of the most popular binary package of the source package as value for the source package):
SELECT DISTINCT unstable.package, insts FROM (SELECT DISTINCT package FROM sources WHERE distribution = 'debian' and release = 'sid') AS unstable, popcon_src WHERE unstable.package NOT IN ( SELECT package FROM sources WHERE distribution = 'debian' AND release = 'lenny') AND popcon_src.source = unstable.package ORDER BY insts DESC;
And the results are available on the web!
Top packages (> 1000 insts):
lzo 64962 gnome-cups-manager 32346 db4.6 20708 ffmpeg-debian 12908 freetype1 10569 flashplugin-nonfree 7116 perlftlib 6769 nvidia-graphics-drivers 3864 wxwindows2.4 3640 dvi2tty 2239 kdebase-runtime 1725 easytag 1717 g-wrap 1582 yaird 1507 slocate 1499 youtube-dl 1390 hugin 1275 w3c-libwww 1058
Interested in UDD? Join #debian-qa or debian-qa@lists.d.o (or talk to me @DebConf!)
Exporting logs from Suunto X6HR watches on Linux
August 7th, 2008 by lucas
I’m the happy owner of a nice geeky toy: a Suunto X6HR watch, that includes an altimeter and an heart rate monitor, which I use mainly for moutain biking and hiking.
During outings, the watch can log the altitude and heart rate every 2, 10 or 60 seconds, and the data can be transfered to a PC using a serial interface. The problem is that Suunto only provides software for Windows. I got tired of using virtualbox to connect to the watch (qemu doesn’t work, Suunto Activity Manager apparently does strange things with the serial port), so I reverse-engineered the protocol (using skimanager and Jérome Kieffer’s work as a basis) and implemented a script to fetch the logs, and export them in a format suitable for gnuplot.
Of course, Suuntux is publicly available. I’d be happy to hear from you if it works for you too. Also, if you own a Suunto X6 (similar watch, without HRM), I’d be interested in supporting it too (if it’s not supported already).
Below is a example graph, from a short mountain bike ride just before leaving for Debconf.
3G Internet access using mobile phone + laptop in France
July 11th, 2008 by lucas
In France, we only have 3 mobile network operators: Orange, SFR, and Bouygues Telecom. They usually discuss their rates together to make sure that one of them doesn’t break the market by creating too interesting rates (that’s why it would be so cool if Free.fr could get a 3G license, and why the governement can tell them “do what we want, or we will give Free a 3G license” - source).
I’ve long been interested in using my mobile phone with my laptop to access the Internet. With the 3 operators, you can get a contract for a 3G USB key, but that’s not really interesting: it’s expensive, and there’s a limit on volume of data, so you have to monitor your bandwidth. Also, I only need to use my mobile phone as modem a few times a month. So I’m not really interested in paying an expensive monthly fee for that.
What do french MNOs offer?
Most of them have rather interesting offers when you want to get unlimited internet access from your mobile, but that doesn’t cover the case of using your phone as a modem, to access the internet on another device (e.g laptop). I’m not sure how they can see the difference, but apparently they do. (It seems that there are hacks making use of those unlimited rates, using your phone as a router between the Wifi network (but your phone has to support Wifi) and the 3G network, using apps like WMWiFiRouter. Another hack is to use the same HTTP proxy on the laptop than on the phone, which seems to give unlimited HTTP access.)
But offers for using your phone as a modem are clearly less interesting (probably because they want to push their USB 3G cards offers):
Bouygues:
Apparently, you are billed only based on the volume (see page 46 of this document), with a progressive rate. 5 MB/month costs 9 EUR, 100 MB costs 20 EUR, and over 100 MB, you pay 1 EUR/MB (!).
SFR:
See page 40-41 of this document. You pay 0.50 EUR for a 30 minutes session, with 2 MB of data included. After those 2 MB of data, you pay 1 EUR/MB.
Those rates are really crazy. Using a mobile phone on an HSDPA network (called “3G+” in France), you can easily reach 1 Mbps. (and I did see this rate while fetching files using rsync, so I was not particularly aiming at performance!). 1 Mbps translates to 7.5 EUR/min using the 1 EUR/MB rate. Or 12.5 cts/sec!!!
Surprisingly, Orange (ex-France Telecom), which is usually not the most innovative MNO and ISP in France, saves us. With Orange, you pay 0.5 EUR for a 20 mins session, with unlimited volume (sessions called “session multimédia” by Orange). I was so surprised that I called the assistance to check. And after trying it yesterday, I was a bit anxious when checking my online bill this morning. But it works!
Important note before you try (from Orange website):
La session multimédia est une tarification valable pour les clients forfaits mobile Orange (hors forfaits Orange pour iPhone, Mobicarte et cartes prépayées). Pour les clients Classique, Intense, Pro, Click le forfait et Initial dont la souscription ou le réengagment est antérieur au 14 juin 2007, pour les clients forfaits bloqués dont la souscription ou le réengagement est antérieur au 16 août 2007 et pour les clients bénéficiant d’une offre blackberry, l’accord exprès de l’abonné à bénéficier de la session multimédia est nécessaire. Les autres clients bénéficient de la tarification au volume.
question to Git (power)users
June 25th, 2008 by lucas
I’m slowly switching to Git for my personal projects, and I like it more and more. And it seems that I can only find nice things to read about it.
So, I’m wondering: what are the things that you dislike with Git? That make you regret/prefer another VCS? If Git was redesigned from scratch, what should be changed?
Ubuntu divergence
June 19th, 2008 by lucas
in main:
in universe:
Those graphs (found on http://merges.ubuntu.com/) show the number of unmodified vs modified packages in Ubuntu main and universe. Interesting.
Ubuntu information on the Debian Package Tracking System and the Developer Packages Overview
June 15th, 2008 by lucas
Users of Debian derivatives sometimes report bugs that are not reported in the
Debian BTS, but that also affect Debian. It already happened a few times that
looking at the Ubuntu bugs for my packages allowed me to fix an unreported bug
in my Debian packages.
But it’s difficult to keep track of the status of our packages in Ubuntu, since
Launchpad doesn’t provide a per-Debian-maintainer summary. Since it’s always fun to abuse proprietary software, I fetched all the bug data from Launchpad and inserted it in an SQLite DB (takes about 30 mins at 1200 HTTP requests/minute — it would be so much easier if the Launchpad devs added a text export of all bugs).
The result is that there’s now an “Ubuntu” box on the Packages Tracking System, giving the current version in Ubuntu, a link to the Ubuntu patch (if any), and the number of open bugs. An Ubuntu column has also been added to the Debian Developer Packages Overview by Christoph Berg, with the current version in Ubuntu and the number of open bugs. It’s hidden by default: click on Display Configuration to enable it (then it’s stored in a cookie).
I hope that this will help Debian maintainers to track what has been reported/fixed in Ubuntu. Also, if other Debian derivatives want to export the same kind of information, don’t hesitate to contact us.
See for example:
PS: the data might be slightly outdated, as it is processed on merkel.d.o, which was offline until recently. Expect it to be up-to-date in the next 24 hours.
Text normalizer, anyone?
June 9th, 2008 by lucas
When I write text documents (using LaTeX or Docbook), I like to wrap lines, as it makes them easier to edit (less things moving on the screen), and allow to have easy-to-read diffs.
However, I always hesitate before rewrapping paragraphs (using vim’s gqap): this mean that I will add noise to my git history. So I only do that from time to time, making “rewrapping-only commits”. But that sucks, since in the meantime, I sometimes make a lot of changes, and my lines grow long again. Of course, I could rewrap my paragraphs before each commit, but if I simply add a word to a paragraph, it might cause all the lines to be rewrapped.
So I what I would need is some kind of “text normalizer” that will:
- split lines at The Right Place. After ‘.’, ‘,’, ‘:’, ‘;’, etc. So rewrapping won’t propagate changes too far away.
- understand the basics of LaTeX, so it won’t rewrap
\begin{tabular}{|l|l|}\hline x & y \\ 1 & 2 \\\hline \end{tabular}or
\begin{figure} \centerline{\includegraphics{fig}} \caption{Cool stuff} \label{coolstuff} \end{figure}(vim does rewrap those examples.)
- be editor-agnostic. So other committers could use it as well.
- support for other document formats (docbook XML) would be nice too.
I’ve looked at plasTeX: I could use it to parse a LaTeX document, and export it as LaTeX. But then it would be a LaTeX-only solution. Does anyone have a better solution?