Flickr favorites, March-June 2009

My contribution to dpkg 1.15

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

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

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

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

Notes on the ASUS Eee Box b202

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

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

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

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:

1. Install twyt (python-twyt in Debian)
2. Determine how many pages of tweets you want to save (let's say 10)
3. 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