Improvements for the machine-readable debian/copyright emacs mode

Since the last post, I have significantly improved debian-mr-copyright-mode, that now provides an interactive function, debian-mr-copyright-scan-files that shows which files are covered by which clause of the debian/copyright file. I've also significantly improved my understanding of font lock and emacs lisp in general...

As a demonstration, the attached picture represents the results of debian-mr-copyright-scan-files on the monsterz source package (Sam's original example). The output clearly shows that some files are not covered yet...

You can get the emacs mode there. Its is starting to be good, but of course, many more improvements are still planned - in particular, quotes for files probably don't work yet. By the way, imenu now works. A debian package should probably come soon.

Emacs mode for machine-readable copyrights

I've been thinking that something that might help a wider adoption of the machine-readable copyright format is a proper emacs major mode for it. Well, at least, it does for me... So I started to write one. It is loosely based on debian-control-mode, although there is hardly any code left from it now. It only features syntax highlighting for now (including warning for licenses which were not on the wiki page at the time of the writing, or were marked as needing more discussions) but, after all, this is only my first emacs major mode...

The code can either be downloaded there, or from my bzr repository, in the debian-mr-copyright-mode directory

bzr branch http://people.debian.org/~fourmond/bzr/scripts

No debian package for that for now, as anyways it really should integrate dpkg-dev when it has matured somehow. Hope this helps !

ctioga's non-linear axes

Much as been done on ctioga since the last release, not even two weeks ago: small bug fixes, tangents improvements, the rebirth of a --subplot option, a saner framework for plot styles... But the most significant improvement in my opinion is the possibility to make non-linear axes: you just need to provide a two-ways transformation between the standard coordinates and the axis coordinates, and ctioga does the rest:

ctioga -N --xpdf --math --math-xrange 2:8 \
  'sin(x)' --xaxis bottom --new-axis biniou top \
  --axis-function biniou 1/x 1/x \
  --lines-color biniou Gray --no-title

As you can see, I did profit to add the possibility of background lines corresponding to the axes' major ticks. The only real trick that is left is to find a decent way to partition the target segment so that they ticks are "natural" (not 0.34759, for instance) and reasonably equally spaced. I thought other plotting programs had dealt with this, but in fact, that doesn't seem to be the case: I'll have to do that myself.

Uniform probability does not apply to real life !

I've always been puzzled that, quite often, a package is totally silent for a long while (say a month or two), and suddenly, you get two or three bug reports the very same day, distant from any release or transition to testing. I've seen that mostly with libqt4-ruby and pmount. This seems to be rather general: it really looks like events of our lives don't even remotely follow uniform probabilities.

I've had a recent confirmation with ctioga, a project of my own. I just need to decide to release a new version to realize just afterwards that I've got many more features to add (not less than 20 significants commits since the release a week ago !)... Life is not linear ! (and I won't complain).

Today's dirty command-line trick: progress statistics for dd

Who has already been using dd for endless data transfer without really knowing what is happening ? That is rather annoying. Sure, when the target is a normal file, you can always use

watch ls -l target

But, that won't tell you the rate of transfer, and it won't work if the target is a special file (device, pipe, ...). Fortunately, dd accepts the USR1 signal to print out some small statistics... Well, combining that with the watch tricks gives this:

watch killall -USR1 dd

And there you go, dd is now regularly printing out statistics. Pretty neat, isn't it ?

pdfnup and page size

I use a combination of pdftk and pdfnup, from the pdfjam package to arrange (PDF) graphs produced by ctioga into an array for printing. However, I find that a simple

pdfnup --nup 3x3 concatenated_graphs.pdf

does not produce an A4 output (even with --paper a4paper), but a PDF who has the same size as individual graphs. Painful. It did take me long to realize it is a feature of pdfnup, who asks pdfTeX to have the paper size adjusted to that of the input when the layout is symmetric and no orientation has been provided. To disable that, and get a real A4 paper, specify the orientation:

pdfnup --orient portrait --nup 3x3 concatenated_graphs.pdf

Virgin Megastore France doesn't like Iceweasel

I wanted to have a look at the French Virgin Megastore website, and I got the attached image. It says:

The version of your browser does not allow browsing this site under Linux. You must install Firefox.

Well, I don't want to know how they are detecting the "correctness" of the browser (after all, this is Iceweasel, so it is Firefox), or why they are so stupid as to forbid browsing if the "correct" navigator is not used, but, well, they've just lost a customer.