Another Flag in the -Wall 2.0.0

September 25, 2008

We don’t need no garbage collector
We do need hardware control
No obfuscated code in the classroom

Hey, Teachers! Leave them kids alone!

All in all it’s just another flag in the -Wall

-_O

Filed under: music, programming, ~humor | Comments (0)

Goodbye Emacs. Well… not really.

September 2, 2008

Warning: useless geek-computer post

GNU Emacs: a huge bunch of features, cool cc-mode and so on. I used it for many years, I learned to code with it. I loved it.
I even bought Learning GNU Emacs, sorta kinda emacs’ holy bible (just after GNU Emacs Manual, of course).
But.. heck:
> du -h $SOME_EDITORS
4.9M /usr/bin/emacs22-nox
620K /usr/bin/vim.tiny
152K /bin/nano
116K /usr/bin/mg
40K /bin/ed
Get the picture?
(And did you notice the “nox” suffix? hehe)

Seriously, I’m tired to use *GNU* Emacs. I need a text editor, not a maya calendar[1], nor a psycologist, or a crappy newsreader… I just need a fucking TEXT EDITOR!
I know, that could sound hysterical. And that’s it.

I went to search for a replacement of the old and heavy Emacs. Man, I *am* an _emacsen_ addict (I use firemacs[2] extension on Iceweasel and emacs-style key-bindings on Xfce), so I had to find an emacs clone…

First attempt: mg[3]
Nice, light and small.
Uh, maybe _too_ small.

Okay for sysadmin work, but I’m a coder.
Well, sorta.

Then I tried JOVE, Zile and Vile. Editors called as they were Groucho Marx’s brothers. Just lame.
Nice, but… no “feeling” at all.

Then I found MicroEmacs (Jasspa incarnation), which is not really “micro”, so I fell in love with it.

PROS:

It’s what GNU “bloated” Emacs should be. I mean: lightweight _and_ customizable;

NO FUCKING LISP! (damnit, we are in 21st century!);

Amazing on-line documentation;

Pretty compatible with the GNU one;

100% compatible with win32 (actually I don’t give a shit, but it’s cute);

X11 support (see above);

CONS:

no utf8 support;

no _official_ package for Debian (not to so important though);

last stable release is dated 2006/09/09[4]

PROS | CONS: (depends on your taste)

Linus Torvalds uses a customized version of Emacs based on MicroEmacs.[5]

So, finally, GNU Emacs got replaced with MicroEmacs :)
The end (?)

ps: no damned GNU editor was used to write this post.

Notes:
[1] http://linux.about.com/od/emacs_doc/a/emacsdoc315.htm Maya calendar. Useful, isn’t it?
[2] http://www.mew.org/~kazu/proj/firemacs/ Firemacs home page
[3] http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanb/software/mg/ OpenBSD’s mg home page
[4] It’s still in developement, though: http://www.jasspa.com/development/
[5] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/linus/ (10th question)

Filed under: programming, emacs | Comments (0)

Evolution’s VCF to GMail CSV (updated)

July 4, 2008

Importing contacs from Evolution to GMail is a pain in the ass… The Novell’s Mail Client stores ‘em in a silly VCF record: such file is incomprehensible for gmail, hehe
I wrote this little-n-dirty perl script to convert the fuckin’ list.vcf to list.csv (according to gmail format).
That’s the code (you could download it from here, tho)
If you are a GNOME user you could appreciate this one, which works nicely with the Nautilus file manager. (Thanks to dave)

#!/usr/bin/env perl # # vcf2csv by gall0ws <g4ll0ws@gmail.com> # # Time-stamp: <2008-05-03 04:18:04 CEST gallows> # # Convert Evolution's vcf contact list in gmail readable csv file. # # Tested with `list.vcf' generated by Novell Evolution 2.22 (VCARD 3.0) # use strict; my @csv_fields = ('Name', 'E-mail', 'Phone', 'Notes'); my $fin = $ARGV[0]; my $fout = $ARGV[1]; sub push_field { my ($csv_ref, $vcard_ref, $re) = @_; my ($tmp) = grep(/$re/, @$vcard_ref); my ($key, $value) = split ':', $tmp, 2; chop $value; push @$csv_ref, $value; } BEGIN; if (!defined $fin || !defined $fout) { print "usage: $0 [input.vcf] [output.csv|-]\n"; exit 1; } $fout = '/dev/stdout' if $fout eq '-'; open(VCF, "< $fin") || die "$0: cannot open `$fin': $!"; open(CSV, "> $fout") || die "$0: cannot open `$fout': $!"; # print csv header on CSV handle: foreach (@csv_fields) { print CSV $_ . ','; } print CSV "\n"; do { my @vcard = (); # card in vcf format my @csv = (); # load @vcard from $fin: do { $_ = <VCF>; chomp; push @vcard, $_; } until /END:VCARD/; # put fields in @csv: push_field \@csv, \@vcard, "^FN:.*"; # name push_field \@csv, \@vcard, '\w+@\w+\.[a-zA-z]{2,4}'; # email push_field \@csv, \@vcard, "^TEL;.*"; # phone push_field \@csv, \@vcard, "^NOTE:.*"; # notes # write csv entries on CSV handle: foreach (@csv) { print CSV; print CSV ','; } print CSV "\n"; } until eof VCF; close VCF; close CSV; END;

Filed under: scripting, perl | Comments (2)

Asus Eee PC

May 30, 2008

Uh uh, finally I got it!
I installed Debian on it ’cause Xandros sucks, and (almost) everything works out of the box. Take a look here for more info.
Oh, I used ext2 (and no swap) because the SSD… Journaling, you know.
Actually there are contrasting opinions ’bout SSD lifespan.. I choose the “conservative” way. Well, at least until I get a file system corruption… Let’s hope it will be okay.

Anyway, this module allows you to “overclock” the CPU (it’s limited to 630Mhz) and control the fan too. I wrote a little program to easily manage that.
(You can download it from here)
Use it at YOUR OWN RISK. It could (indirectly) DAMAGE your Eee and/or freeze your OS.

Filed under: programming, c, eee, linux | Comments (0)

Debian’s patch against OpenSSL

May 13, 2008

A critical security advisory has been released: a Debian packager maintainer modified the source code of OpenSSL removing the seeding of the random number generator: the cryptographic keys generated on Debian (and derivate distros) from 2006 to today are guessable.
Here’s the patch:

(xkcd.com)

Filed under: debian, security | Comments (0)