pterjan's diary

  End of vacation

I spent 5 great days in Saint Petersburg this week!

This was my first visa and I was worried about the needed paperwork (insurance, hosting certificate, ...), and then the registration after arriving. Getting the visa was not easy as you need to go to the embassy on Monday, Tuesday or Thursday between 9:00 and 12:00 and spend some time there (queuing 3 times...). Then you can chose to get the visa as soon as it is ready (the same day) for 70 euros, or wait 7 days before picking it up and only pay 35 euros...

At the airport I was welcomed with huge queues for passport checks (I think I spent about 30 minutes there) and then by Ирнина which was better :)

Apart from usual buildings and museums (I admit I haven't visited some major ones), I visited a great bar/club on the first evening, which I enjoyed even if I had not slept the night before (We went there again the next day and it was much better :) ).

I can now pronounce most letters (not all) and often understand the word when it sounds like French or English (or other, like CYШИ for sushi) but reading letter by letter is so slow... And I can't manage to read anything hand written :(

I hope I'll have the opportunity to go there again!

Photos are already online!

  Bash and horizontal-scroll-mode

On my machines (Mandriva cooker, bash 3.2+upstream patches, readline 5.2+upstream patches) bash now displays the long command lines on a single line and handles scrolling.

This means I can't read all the command line without scrolling, and I can't copy it...

After some search on this topic I found a readline option called horizontal-scroll-mode which exactly does this, but is off by default (at least according to the doc).

Our packages changelog does not say anything about it and grep "horiz" in the patches or the config files does not return anything related. The upstream changelog of readline and bash also does not say anything about it...

Worse, I tried "set horizontal-scroll-mode off" in .inputrc and then in /etc/inputrc, without any effect...

Any idea on how to fix this ?

  Tip of the day: tar is now smart

As toady pointed out on IRC, you no longer need to tell tar that it needs to uncompress an archive with gzip or bzip2. So, instead of calling tar xzf on tar.gz archives and tar xjf on tar.bz2 ones, you can now call tar xf on both.

Update: To answer Beranger, this was introduced by tar 1.15 on 2004-12-29, and should be available in all recent distributions (According to Distrowatch: Mandriva since 10.2, Debian since Etch, Ubuntu since 5.10, Fedora since FC4).

  Taiwan photos uploaded

At last, I finished uploading the photos of the 3 weeks I spent in Taiwan in February! I had taken more than 1000 photos (Meaning I had more than 1024 files in a directory and libgphoto2 did not want to import them), so after a difficult triaging I uploaded a set of 512 photos, and then for people in a hurry, a subset of 100 photos.

  Funny download stats on ftp.free.fr

Here is the download count for Mandriva iso images on ftp.free.fr yesterday:

$ GET ftp://ftp.free.fr/stats/mandriva.daily.20080409.txt | grep iso/
/official/iso/2008.1                    6741   2656708887348     2.42      83.92
/official/iso/2008.0                     753    205020960820     0.27       6.48
/devel/iso/2008.1                         35     18410545367     0.01       0.58
/official/iso/2007.1                      22      3233336546     0.01       0.10
/official/iso/2007.0                      26      1270717545     0.01       0.04
/official/iso/move                         6       795533110     0.00       0.03
/devel/iso/contrib                         3          492062     0.00       0.00
/official/iso/2006.0                       4           36204     0.00       0.00

Can someone explain me why some people are still downloading iso from 2006.0, 2007.0, 2007.1, or move ?

  PLF stats

It looks like 2008.0 was much more successful than previous distros. Previously we had a lot of downloads when a new release was out, but on 2008.0 it increased during the life of this distro !

  Photos

Now that I have fixed a very annoying but simple to fix bug in Flickr::Upload, my other Taiwan photos are arriving much faster :)

  Back

I came back from Taiwan 10 days ago, and have only uploaded the photos of the first four days yet (out of three weeks), so don't except do watch them all soon :)

It was great, people there are really nice and helpful (sometimes too much, you can't watch a map more than 30s before someone offer you some help). I need to go back there, for several reasons including that I did not visit the beautiful eastern part of the island !

Since I'm back, except fixing bugs, I added support for sound keys in the EeePc (generating input events for mute and volume keys in asus_acpi), I think this solution is more clean that having a shell script launching amixer. I also binded fn+f6 to webcam toggling as I could not find what this key is intended to do. I then discovered the asus-laptop module, so I will have to port all of this to it before discussing it upstream...

  New Year

As you may have noticed, 2007 is over and this is my first post for 2008. I wish you all a happy new year :)

2007 was a very good year for me on both personal and professional sides and I hope 2008 will be more quiet. I bought a new apartment in December and moved there just before Christmas, so I only got Internet access yesterday, and I'm now back !

New years' eve was nice, with too much good food as usual.

  Idiocracy

In the morning of new year's day, we found Idiocracy in the "personal videos" section of 's "TV perso" service.

It is a good movie about stupid people taking over the world as intelligent ones tend to have less children. Joe get 500 years in the future and sees the world as it may become. Everyone is stupid, the best TV show is "Ow, my balls!", the best movie of the year just shows an ass, guilty people have to fight giant trucks in an arena in a so called "Rehabilation session".

As some people slept and got up at various times, we had to watch it 3 times so that everyone get it full! We know it very well, but still ordered 3 DVD :)

  EeePc

I had the opportunity to play with the Asus EeePC. This is a very nice machine despite the small screen, and I plan to buy one when I will have enough money:) It will be available in France on the 23, but I expect it to be quickly sold out...

  Vacation

I will have 3 weeks off in February, this is the longest vacation I ever had since I started working 5 years ago. More important, it will be my first time out of Europe as I will go to Taïwan!

  Letter sequence in bash

Someone asked on IRC how to generate a sequence of letters in bash, like seq does for numbers.

An answer was to use jot -w %c 26 a on FreeBSD, but he was on Linux.

I gave an other answer for use with bash 3, and I post it here as it looks like not much people know it :

[pterjan@plop ~]$ echo {a..e}
a b c d e
[pterjan@plop ~]$ echo {a..b}{a..b}
aa ab ba bb

  Ruby binding for libcaca, again

I have now an almost complete version, with a little documentation and some tests !

The code is in libcaca's subversion repository, and the doc is there.

Have fun and please tell me if you find some use for it or have ideas to improve the API.

  Ruby bindings for libcaca

Few days ago I came across the following in man todo:

Language bindings
   Not that important
       · Ruby

So I decided to start writing some Ruby bindings for libcaca :) I started with the Canvas part of libcucul tonight:

$ irb -rcucul
irb(main):001:0> Cucul.constants
=> ["BROWN", "BOLD", "GREEN", "LIGHTMAGENTA", "LIGHTBLUE", "BLINK", "MAGENTA", "DEFAULT", "TRANSPARENT", "BLUE", "LIGHTRED", "DARKGRAY", "UNDERLINE", "RED", "WHITE", "BLACK", "LIGHTCYAN", "LIGHTGRAY", "ITALICS", "CYAN", "YELLOW", "LIGHTGREEN", "Canvas"]

irb(main):002:0> Cucul::Canvas.methods.sort - Cucul::Canvas.ancestors[1].methods
=> ["export_list", "import_list"]

irb(main):003:0> Cucul::Canvas.instance_methods.sort - Cucul::Canvas.ancestors[1].instance_methods
=> ["clear", "cursor_x", "cursor_y", "export_memory", "flip", "flop", "handle_x", "handle_y", "height", "height=", "import_file", "import_memory", "invert", "rotate_180", "rotate_left", "rotate_right", "set_size", "stretch_left", "stretch_right", "width", "width="]

irb(main):004:0> Cucul::Canvas.new(0, 0).import_memory("plop", "").flip.export_memory("irc")
=> "qolq\r\n"

irb(main):005:0> Cucul::Canvas.export_list
=> [["caca", "native libcaca format"], ["ansi", "ANSI"], ["utf8", "UTF-8 with ANSI escape codes"], ["utf8cr", "UTF-8 with ANSI escape codes and MS-DOS \\r"], ["html", "HTML"], ["html3", "backwards-compatible HTML"], ["irc", "IRC with mIRC colours"], ["ps", "PostScript document"], ["svg", "SVG vector image"], ["tga", "TGA image"]]