Tim Retout's www presence

Tea

I'm going insane in this country - the accents, the jaywalking, the food, the money, the poverty in the heart of Manhatten... suddenly I appreciate the UK much more.

So I have purchased an electric kettle, and set it up in the Carman basement, for the moment. I have also splashed out on a teapot, and one mug. (So far I haven't found any other mugs in the place, so bear that in mind if you wish to join me - $2.49 from the homeware store across the street.) I have brought two boxes of Twinings tea from the UK, and in the unlikely event that it runs out there are some brand names I recognise in the Westfield Market.

In the spirit of US philanthropy, I intend to donate this equipment for the betterment of Columbia University when I leave.

Posted: 31 Jul 2010 20:16 | Tags: debian, debconf, debconf10

Reverse build-depends

I've started to build up to actually doing some development-related activities. Maybe. But first, we've got QR Codes dotted around the hacklab and on our namebadges if we're taking part in the keysigning - I persuaded zbarcam (from the zbar-tools package) to reveal their mysterious secrets.

I'm looking into packaging some Java libraries that use maven. Fun. I think I'll be attending some of the talks in the Java track, although I feel like I'm three years late to the party.

While trying to find a good example, I wanted to list all packages which reverse-build-depended on maven-debian-helper. This must be a common task? With some stuff stolen from lamby, I hacked together a shell alias:

rbuilddep() {
    grep-dctrl -sPackage -i -r -F Build-Depends,Build-Depends-Indep "\b$1\b" \
            /var/lib/apt/lists/*_Sources \
        | awk '{ print $2 }' \
        | sort \
        | uniq
}

But this surely can't be the last word on this. For one thing, it might also be useful to recursively find these reverse dependencies. I hope I've missed some obvious way of doing this.

[EDIT (2012-04-13): That would be build-rdeps(1) from the devscripts package.]

I reckon my attention span has got really poor over the last couple of years. More running tomorrow morning. But first, ice cream, I think.

Posted: 29 Jul 2010 03:19 | Tags: debian, debconf, debconf10

Running around

So apparently the route I took round Central Park is 9.7km, which explains a lot. This morning I checked out Morningside Park, but it's really too small for running - there's a loop of about 400m at one end, and you can go down the long bit to 123rd St, but it gets boring very quickly. Most of the park is taken up with a big hill and stairs. I'll try Riverside Park on Thursday, or find a shorter loop at this end of Central Park.

This morning I had breakfast at Nussbaum & Wu, because it seemed like a good name. Then I went to Duane Reade down the road (a pharmacy open 24 hours a day, which is quite impressive), and picked up some hand soap for a couple of dollars - none is provided in the bathrooms (and I didn't read the checklist about what to bring). And if anyone forgets/loses their wherever-to-US power socket adaptor, the Best Buy in Union Square has four left.

So far I've missed about three sponsored meals. In related news, if you ask for all the salad at Subway in the US, you seem to end up with something much hotter than in the UK.

Posted: 27 Jul 2010 21:01 | Tags: debian, debconf, debconf10

Arriving at DebCamp

Yesterday my brother and I checked out of the youth hostel - it was a nice place, but I think it would have been better if we'd had the time to focus on the youth hostelling experience. As it was, I felt like we were just interlopers peeking into a world where we didn't belong.

We headed across Central Park and visited the Met, which is huge - and noted with some satisfaction all the things that came from England. When we left, it was raining, and we walked down Fifth Avenue in the downpour. After so much heat, it was a great relief - but it'll probably be straight sunshine for a few days now.

After a visit to a Barnes & Noble (which was a novelty, since I don't think they have a UK presence - I bought a book on JQuery), we went up the Empire State Building on a whim. Quite a view, and a cheesy but informative audio guide. Then after fetching our luggage back from the youth hostel, we went our separate ways to our respective accommodation.

For me, this meant finding Columbia University. I don't have a great track record with the whole "taking a note of where I'm meant to turn up" thing, and this time saw me wandering around the campus asking directions of people who couldn't understand me. For anyone else with the same habits: you want to find the corner of Broadway and 114th St. (you might get off the #1 subway at Broadway and 116th and walk south), and then proceed down 114th and through the first set of gates on the left. There's a green sign on the gates saying something about "Tech Campus". The Carman building is the first entrance immediately on the left after that. Alternatively you could go through the main campus entrance on Broadway opposite 115th St, and follow the path round the large building on your right until you get to just before the gates.

So then stumbling into all the DebConf people, we went for dinner at a local restaurant; and later out to a bar. Now I need to haul my ass outta bed (it's almost 12pm local time) and find the hacklab, or maybe breakfast.

Posted: 26 Jul 2010 17:06 | Tags: debian, debconf, debconf10

New York

Well, I made it to New York, along with my brother. Yesterday we walked down most of Manhatten Island - we've been staying in the youth hostel on 103rd street, and made our way on foot as far as Battery Park. Along the way, we visited McDonalds (twice) and Starbucks (was that two or three times?), both featuring free wifi and air conditioning. We went up the Rockefeller Tower as well, and got a few photos out of that.

It's really quite warm here. It's shorts and sandals weather (just like last year in Spain), and I'm tired of walking in sandals.

Interesting differences from the UK: the New York Times crossword is quite different from what we call crosswords. I think Monday's one is meant to be easiest, so perhaps starting with Saturday's was not a good plan. There are water fountains dotted around the city, which is awesome.

This morning I went running around Central Park. Except it's tougher than it looks - I'm not sure whether it was the humidity, or the inclines, or not eating anything before setting out... I ended up walking most of the second half, and it took half an hour more than I thought it would. I ran counter(anti-)clockwise - I think it would be better to go clockwise, because there's a hill in the corner with a steep side that I'd prefer to run down rather than up.

Posted: 25 Jul 2010 15:46 | Tags: debian, debconf, debconf10

Gnash and BBC glow

One thing I noticed having started to use gnash is that the BBC's iPlayer website (UK-only, I believe) gives a message like "You do not have Flash player installed" - not merely complaining about the version, but actually not recognising gnash as a Flash player at all.

Cue some digging. The BBC's pages use glow, an in-house JavaScript library (available under the Apache 2.0 License) to detect whether Flash is installed. The documentation was really easy to follow - I had a test page going quicker than you can say "Hello, World!"

The bottom line is, glow uses this regex:

var regexFLASH_VERSION = /^Shockwave Flash\s*(\d+)\.(\d+)\s*\w(\d+)$/;

and gnash uses a description like this:

Shockwave Flash 10.1 r999.
Gnash trunk, the GNU SWF Player. Copyright (C) 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009,
2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Gnash comes with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. You may
redistribute copies of Gnash under the terms of the GNU General Public
License. For more information about Gnash, see
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash.
Compatible Shockwave Flash 10.1 r999.

Note the dollar sign at the end of the regex. Indeed, rebuilding gnash without all the notices at the end of the description lets you see the iPlayer UI. (It doesn't actually play anything, don't get your hopes up.)

Interestingly, different parts of iPlayer require different minimum versions of Flash. Clips of radio programmes tend to be more liberal with what they will accept - right down to version 7. Most TV streams and clips require at least version "9.0 r115", and I've heard they use SWF verification. I'm not sure how legal it is to implement that, although apparently code exists.

Posted: 19 Jul 2010 22:34 | Tags: gnash, bbc, iplayer

Gnash

Adobe aren't supporting their flash player on amd64 right now. The cognitive dissonance gets a little draining, anyway, and I've seen the hoops I'd have to jump through to get the 32-bit version running. So I'm going to try tracking gnash trunk for a while.

First impressions: gnash seems easier to build than it used to be (or maybe I just read the instructions this time). I chose the AGG graphics backend, with gstreamer and gtk. I also chose to install the browser plugins system-wide. The bzr repository ships copies of the necessary Mozilla libraries, which I'd usually frown upon as a packager, but it did mean I didn't have to worry about them.

So the whole process looked like:

bzr branch http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/r/gnash/trunk
cd trunk
./autogen.sh
./configure --enable-renderer=agg \
            --enable-media=GST \
            --enable-gui=gtk \
            --with-plugins-install=system
make
sudo make install
sudo make install-plugins

The README file was very helpful, as was the configure script output.

So, off to youtube... "An error has occurred, please try again later." Hmpf. Off to read the mailing list... there was a problem discussed a while ago about cookies that YouTube has started sending. I checked the patch discussed at the time, and a version of it seems to be in trunk, but the symptoms are still happening for me. But... disable all cookies in the browser, and it starts working. (There's a chance that libcurl might not be configured properly.) I'll have to report the problem or track it down further, but for now, I'm sitting back and declaring success.

Co-incidentally, the video was discussing another cookie problem. ("Put pinky down. Down pinky. Good.")

Posted: 17 Jul 2010 19:39 | Tags: gnash

Starting the Emacs daemon

The daemon feature of Emacs is great. But when should the daemon be started?

At one time I used an '@reboot' line in my crontab. But when you want to use things like Tramp mode (for editing files on remote servers transparently), you very quickly wish that emacs could talk to your ssh-agent.

So if you accept that you will be running a desktop environment (not always true), you can add the daemon to your equivalent of "System >> Preferences >> Startup Programs".

But then you find that Flymake (when used with cperl-mode) is not picking up any of your uninstalled, work-in-progress Perl modules. Wouldn't it be great if you could set $PERL5LIB to fix this? And doesn't M-x copyright require you to set "$ORGANIZATION"?

Ever since Debian bug #411639 was fixed at the end of 2007, we have the option of "~/.xsessionrc" for setting environment variables that will cover everything in your desktop session, including things launched from panels and startup scripts.

So now that's what I do. But I've yet to figure out a good equivalent for console-only systems. Maybe I don't need one?

Posted: 16 Jul 2010 23:48 | Tags: emacs, daemon, debian, desktop

Toggle fullscreen in Emacs

Today I improved the function I was using to toggle full screen in GNU Emacs.

(defun toggle-fullscreen (&optional f)
  (interactive)
  (let ((current-value (frame-parameter nil 'fullscreen)))
       (set-frame-parameter nil 'fullscreen
                            (if (equal 'fullboth current-value)
                                (if (boundp 'old-fullscreen) old-fullscreen nil)
                                (progn (setq old-fullscreen current-value)
                                       'fullboth)))))

(global-set-key [f11] 'toggle-fullscreen)

The previous function would always restore the frame to "normal" state, even if Emacs was previously maximized. This one makes it behave more like, say, Epiphany or Totem.

Apparently using GNOME Keyboard Shortcuts to set this to F11 globally would override custom behaviour from some programs. I've not found any examples of this, though. This would be easily extensible to disable the Emacs toolbar when fullscreen, for instance.

Posted: 09 Jul 2010 18:45 | Tags: emacs

Play

Thank you to everyone who came to see me sing in the Southampton Philharmonic Choir this evening, and to those supporting from afar.

My favourite parts, naturally, were the phrases in Villa-Lobos's Choros 10 that include fortissimo low F notes. There's a low E at one point in Daphnis et Chloe, but it's pianissimo.

Posted: 04 Jul 2010 00:29 | Tags: music