What I'm waiting for in the NEW queue

The NEW queue is where new Debian packages (packages that install packages which were not before in the Debian archive) are waiting for a short review before being let in. This review is mainly about legal problems, though you can find here a list of the reasons for which a package could be rejected.

It so happens that there are currently some packages which I'm interested in, and too lazy to fetch and build myself:

• Of course, the first one is freecol, which I packaged myself and can't wait for it to become part of the official Debian distribution. (and I guess that will please the original developers as well !).
• Still about games, I'm interested in the lordsawar package, which seems to be a rather neat strategic game as well.
• Finally, I've stumbled upon homebank, which seems to be a really neat personal accounting software. I'm currently using grisbi, which is nice, but doesn't satisfy me somehow. I'll post more about this if I ever come to switch to HomeBank

As a last note, please consider that the links in the list above will eventually (and rather soon) be broken, when the packages have gone out of the NEW queue. They are only here for me to check more easily the status of the aforementioned packages... So, don't go looking for them, and don't complain !

The aurical fonts for LaTeX

I've just been writing some cards for the birth of my daughter, and I've been looking for nice-looking fonts for LaTeX. I'm using the texlive distribution (Debian packages). So I've installed the texlive-fonts-extra package, and I had a quick look at all the pdf files therein:

for f in `dpkg -L texlive-fonts-extra | grep pdf`; do \
[ -h $f ] || xpdf $f; done

The [ -h $f ] || blurb is here to prevent reading the same file twice via a symlink. I found many interesting things, but not that many "fancy" fonts - apart from one package, aurical, that provides neat handwriting-like fonts. Attached is what I obtained with the \Fontlukas command. Hope you'll find this useful !

Blogger and file uploads

I pretty much enjoy using Blogger for this blog. I find it rather comfortable and neat. There is however one point I don't like much, the inability to share files easily. There are many (small) files I'd like to share, such as various configuration files, codes, patches, and the like. After a quick look, it seems that Mediafire is providing pretty nice free service, with a sleek interface. So watch for file downloads there !

Change of plans for SciYAG

Initially, the SciYAG program in the SciYAG project was intended as a direct competitor for the interactive part of gnuplot, while ctioga is definitely a good competitor of the "output" part (get convinced there). I had some part working, with a command-line working exactly as ctioga and some reasonable features.

However, with time, I found that what I'm really missing in my everyday scientific work is not an interactive gnuplot clone. As far as I can tell, gnuplot is jolly good itself for that, and we have a neat home-brewed program called Soas that does the job pretty well, and is tailored to our needs.

So, then, what ? What I really miss is a good program to organise my data. Here is the features I'm missing:

• First, I want to be able to attach meta-data to my datafiles, such as the buffer used for the experiment, the pH values, and so on. All these should be fully customizable on a per-experiment or per-experiment-type basis
• I want to be able to browse quickly to my experiments, sorting them according to their type, their values of their meta-data
• Of course, I'm interested to actually display the data, possibly massively, possibly as a function of some of the meta-data
• I also want to be able to associate series of fits of different kinds to each of the datafiles, and be able to quickly check them (visually, by displaying the fit and the data), and plot the parameters found there as a function of meta-data.
• And more !

This may sound ambitious, but actually, with a great programming language like Ruby, it is fun. A great deal of the architecture is already in place. What I'm currently working on is a way to store all the data. The trick is to make it so it can evolve easily, as I'll be using this program extensively for my own needs, and I don't want to reenter any meta-data already in. A good architecture should also please the lazy in me (which amounts to, say, 95%...) and have me type in only what is absolutely necessary - so most values for meta-data should be shared or guessed.

There is currently no release of SciYAG, though you can chance a look at it's SVN repository. Be sure I'll keep you posted about my progresses on the field !

PDF and included images

A little earlier in the evening, I had to send a document to my parents including pictures. Though the final version definitely should have high-quality pictures, I was forced to see that the version I sent was maybe slightly too big (5MB by email, when the receiver doesn't have a very fast connection, that is painful). After some experimentations with pdftops (from xpdf) and ps2pdf (from ghostscript) that didn't give satisfying results, I tried to use ghostscript directly:

~ gs -sOutputFile=biniou.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
  -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 FairePart.pdf  < /dev/null

What a surprise ! The output did shrink by a factor of 4:

~ ls -lh FairePart.pdf biniou.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 vincent vincent 1.1M 2007-10-10 22:56 biniou.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 vincent vincent 5.7M 2007-10-10 18:14 FairePart.pdf

A quick check with pdfimages combined with identify shows that all the images kept the same resolution. That must be a question of JPEG conversion, or something of this spirit... Then, another try is to add the -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen option to the command-line:

~ gs -sOutputFile=biniou.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
  -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 
  FairePart.pdf  < /dev/null

Then, output file is minuscule:

~ ll biniou.pdf 
-rw-r--r-- 1 vincent vincent 34K 2007-10-11 00:09 biniou.pdf

The downside is, the output is pretty much ugly (well, you wouldn't have hoped anything good with a win of a factor of 150). Images went down from 2576x1932 to 322x241 or even smaller (depends on the physical size of the image). -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook gave a slightly better output (for 70K), but still not good for my case... So I tweaked the pdfwrite parameters by hand:

 gs -sOutputFile=biniou.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
  -dColorImageDownsampleType=/Bicubic -dColorImageResolution=300 \
  -dDownsampleColorImages=true -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 \
  FairePart.pdf  < /dev/null

This gave me a pretty nice result. And this also shows that my image resolution was way too big anyway - 300 dpi is probably the best I'll get when printing... and the file produced is still ridiculously small (172K) ! I now start to realize the power of ghostscript, and I thank its authors for it !

Upload and independence !

That's it ! I've finally uploaded freecol to the Debian archives, to the contrib section (as Sun's java is not currently free and is necessary). The freecol folks have been very helpful with sorting out potential copyright and license issue, one of the authors (Stian Grenborgen) actually getting the author of a font to relicense it under the GPL !! The freecol package should be available within a week or two. In the meantime, you can have a look at the NEW queue to see in which position the package is !

In parallel, I'm happy to announce that I've won my independence ! Which also means I'll have quite a lot more free time to work on other things, such as SciYAG, my book or my various research things...

Preliminary packaging for freecol

I've just finished packaging freecol for Debian. There are still important copyright issues, but the main work has been done. It has been placed in the Debian Games SVN repository (see here). What is left now is to clear important copyright issues (essentially one font, placed in data/fonts/ShadowedBlack.ttf). Great !