handyfloss

I use Inkscape to do many of the drawings for my articles and talks, and have come across an irritating problem: I could not include LaTeX formulas on it. I have googled a bit about it, and the first match already led me to a bug report, where a comment by Kees Cook gives a fix that I quote below:

% cd /usr/share/inkscape/extensions
% curl -s 'http://launchpadlibrarian.net/12978623/eqtexsvg.py.patch' | sudo patch -p0

The bug affects (and the patch fixes) Inkscape 0.46 on Ubuntu Hardy Heron and Debian Lenny (that I know of).

No Comments yet »

After another boring month, I have little to write about, besides my LWD project data update. You can read this May 2008 post for an intro.

As usual D2D means “days to domination” (the expected time for Windows/Linux shares to cross, counting from Feb 3, 2008), and DD2D means difference (increase/decrease) in D2D, with respect to last report (around a month ago).

Except for SETI@home, all the D2Ds have gone up, showing that maybe the predictions so far were too optimistic. On the bright side (for FLOSS), SETI is, by far, the project with most users, so its results are the most reliable.

Recall that confidence percents are below 10%, except in two cases, which means logged data extent is small, compared to prediction time. This periodic report, thus, will get more and more accurate as months pass by.

No Comments yet »

This is a howto provided to me really kindly by my workmate Gisela. She wanted to transform an EPS file obtained with Xmgrace to PDF, but the landscape/portrait properties were messing around.

The setup is the following: we produce a landscape plot with Xmgrace, and save it as EPS. Then we want to convert it to PDF, but keeping its landscape nature. The problem is trickier that it sounds.

We need (all available at the repositories of most Linux distros):

• Xmgrace
• ImageMagick
• ps2pdf

Steps to Sucess(tm), assuming an A4 paper size:

1. In Xmgrace, go to Page setup, and choose A4
2. Print the plot (whithin Xmgrace) to EPS format (fileL.eps)
3. Rotate to portrait typing the following from a terminal:
   % convert fileL.eps -rotate "+90>" fileP.eps
   The greater than sign after the 90 meaning “rotate only if infile is landscape”.
4. Convert to PDF:
   % ps2pdf -sPAPERSIZE=a4 fileP.eps
   (for Letter size, omit the “sPAPERSIZE” option)
5. Rotate the PDF back to landscape:
   % convert fileP.pdf -rotate "-90<" fileL.pdf

That’s it.

No Comments yet »

This is a (in principle, monthly) update to my “Linux World Domination” project. You can read the intro in this May 2008 post.

The data presented is different from the one in the aforementioned post:

• Mac is dropped from it
• Predictor@home is also dropped
• Two projects have been added: POEM and Spinhenge
• D2D means “days to domination”. The expected time for Windows/Linux shares to cross, counting from Feb 3, 2008.
• DD2D means difference (increase/decrease) in D2D, with respect to last report (a month ago)

Except for QMC@home, all the projects have reduced the D2D. Rosetta and Einstein were expected to never lead to LWD, and now they are.

See you next month!

No Comments yet »

I am really disappointed at the MUA offer I am finding for by Debian box. I have tried KMail, Thunderbird, Evolution and Claws Mail, and all of them fail at some point. All four errors are different, and all of them almost total showstoppers.

Note: I access my e-mail through Gmail IMAP. I don’t really care if these MUAs are good at POP3 or whatever. I want good IMAP.

KMail 1.9.9

The GUI is nice, has all features I want, everything OK… It’s just that browsing the remote folders is hopelessly slow. I can brush my teeth in the time it takes to delete a message, and I don’t want to go into what I can do in the time it takes to move a message from one folder to another one.

Apparently this could be fixed in KMail2, which will come with KDE4. The problem is that I want it fixed now.

Thunderbird 2.0.0.14

This one is also very good in general. Actually, its problem is not due to itself. Its probably due to some bad interaction with X.org or something: everything works fine, but starting up and subsequent rendering/deleting of the window itself is really slow. If I minimize and maximize it back, it takes ages to reappear. I have this problem with TB and Firefox (actually Icedove and Iceweasel in Debian), and with no other program.

Evolution 2.22

Again, almost everything is fine. Almost. The single problem is that if the “To” and/or “From” fields in the message list contain non-ASCII characters, they appear garbled. Nowhere else does this happen. Even other fields, such as “Subject” can contain accents or ñ with no problem, as can the text body.

This would be a cosmetic issue I could live with, but there are two problems I can not tolerate: I do not want these errors to appear in the messages I send when replying to garbled messages, and more importantly, I have sometimes had recipient lists containing non-ASCII characters mangled. I don’t want to click “Reply all” and end up sending the message to only 3 of the 10 recipients.

This problem will supposedly be fixed in version 2.23.

Claws-mail 3.4.0

Again and again, almost everthing is right. Now messages can contain non-ASCII chars anywhere, browsing folders is fast, manipulating/drawing/erasing the program window is fast… BUT, replying to a message, regardless of the settings one chooses, does not include the original message quoted. This seems a minor error. It isn’t.

The thing that bugs me most is that I can not understand how these problems happen with free software packages. If you take KMail, Evolution and Claws, each one has a single error that the other two have already fixed… Couldn’t they just copy each other? That is precisely the whole point of free software.

Couldn’t KMail browse/scan/manipulate the IMAP folders with the efficient method Evolution and/or Claws use?

Couldn’t Evolution display the message fields with the error-free method KMail and Claws use?

Couldn’t Claws quote the original message as anyone else in the Universe does?

If only the three errors where not spread among the three MUAs, there would be one that I could use!

14 Comments »

I am facing, right now, a task that is paradigmatic of when a GUI (Graphical user interface) would be preferable over a command line interface: cropping a picture to extract a fragment (a face in a bigger picture, more precisely).

One would, of course, open GIMP, select the area to cut, then “save as”, e voilà! Sort of. First, starting GIMP is not incredibly fast. Then, you have to:

1. Select the “Selection” tool (with the mouse! That’s so slow)
2. Use the tool to select the region (with the mouse!)
3. Open the “Edit” menu (right click)
4. Choose “Copy” (with the mouse!)
5. Open the menu again, and choose “Paste selection as new” (with the… you get it)
6. Go to the newly opened picture, then “Save as”
7. Introduce name
8. Accept in the “Export” menu, when prompted about some transparency thingie
9. Choose some JPG parameters, like quality
10. Close GIMP

Of course, if you don’t like the result, you have to repeat everything. Then you will realize that the resulting file is too big, and will use ImageMagick to reduce it.

After doing the above, y resorted to convert, the tool of the ImageMagick suite that has save my *ss more times than I can count.

With convert, you write a (apparently cryptic and complex) command line once, and then you can reuse it. Cropping a region of an image blindly seems highly problematic, but it isn’t. You just choose a width, height and (x,y) position of top corner and run. If the result is too wide or whatever, you just rerun the command (hitting once the “up” arrow of the keyboard to rescue the last command, then modify at will).

The command line I am using:

convert source_image -crop WxH+x+y cropped_image && display -resize 50% cropped_image

After just a couple of runs (modifying W, H, x and y depending on the previous run), I obtained the desired result.

No Comments yet »

I decided to give a try to Ubuntu Hardy Heron, and installed the amd64 version of it in my laptop.

My gripe is caused by a really annoying issue with the installation in a multiboot system. I have a laptop with four root partitions (Windows, Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu), and obviously GRUB generates the menu that allows me to choose at boot time. The file that GRUB reads is /root/grub/menu.lst, at /dev/sda5 (the Fedora partition, which was the last one).

The annoying issue I mention is that the installation is absolutely smooth but a bootloader is not installer. What this means is that when I reboot the computer after installation, I always get the old GRUB menu, and the new OS does not appear in the list.

The only solution I found is to do the following:

1. Do a normal install of Ubuntu, but do not reboot
2. Open a console (after installation Ubuntu lauches a GNOME live session)
3. Locate the kernel and initrd images I need. They are, respectively: /target/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-16-generic and /target/boot/initrd-img-2.6.24-16-generic.bak
4. Mount /dev/sda5 into /mnt/root3
5. Edit /mnt/root3/boot/grub/menu.lst (the old GRUB menu), and add the lines:

title --------- Ubuntu 8.04 TLS Hardy Heron - sda6 ----------
root

title Ubuntu Hardy Heron - kernel 2.6.24
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-16-generic root=/dev/sda6 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-16-generic.bak
boot

6. Reboot

After that, the new Ubuntu appears in the GRUB list.

The procedure is not incredibly difficult, but for a beginner it would be a major showstopper. And, in any case, it is a really sad error.

3 Comments »

Remember Project BHS? It is an effort I am making to log the evolution of Windows/Linux/Mac/Other market share, via the respective contributions to BOINC projects.

I have taken a further (and very crude) step towards the estimation of when will the Beast from Redmond fall, by extrapolating the “Number of hosts vs. time” curves to the points of crossing. For that I have fitted the data so far to (very crude, I know) second order polynomials (with Xmgrace), and calculated the crossing points (with GNU Octave).

The results can be:

1. Windows seems to go upwards and Linux/Mac downwards (will never cross)
2. The crossing point is above 100% or below 0% market share: the extrapolation is unfit (will never cross)
3. There is a crossing point and lies within 0-100% market share: that’s the World Domintion date!!

I will be posting data for different projects, along with a “confidence” percent. This value corresponds to the fraction of the total time required for Linux/Mac to overcome Windows (according to the present tendency) that is represented in the collected data. If 10-day data suggests that Linux will overcome Windows in 1000 days, then the result is not really very trustable. OTOH, 999-day data suggesting the same is compelling.

An important notice: expected times are not measured from “now”, but from the moment I started collecting data, on Feb 3, 2008 (3 months ago).

The following table illustrates the aforementioned data for some selected projects, with time in days and confidence percent in parenthesis.

As an example, the curve fits and corresponding crossing points are given in the following figure, for the case of SETI@Home. You can infer the limited trustability of the predictions from the tiny time extent of the data points used to extrapolate the curves. As time goes by, curves will be more and more trustable, so expect updates to this “project”.

SETI@Home data (click to enlarge)

The software used to process the data is BHS, and can be found at my home page.

2 Comments »

Leo en Barrapunto (vale, la noticia tiene 2 semanas, pero es que últimamente leo poco las noticias en Internet), que tanto Eroski como el ayuntamiento de Zornotza han migrado al software libre OpenBravo para sus necesidades de ERP. La noticia tomada de empresadigitala.net.

No Comments yet »

Following the “report” series started with my first summary of info about the music collection I listen to, I will update that info in this post.

The data (in parentheses the difference with respect to last report, 5 months ago).

Files

Total files        8073 (+1037)
  - Commercial     4987 (+522)
  - Jamendo        3001 (+468)
  - Other CC       31 (+0)
  - Other          54 (+47)
Total playtime     21d (+3d)
Disk usage         38GB (+6GB)
Artist count       1034 (+217)
Album count        738 (+120)
MP3 count          0 (+0)
OGG count          8073 (+1037)

Last.fm

Playcount           36279 (+10033)

Most played artists Joaquín Sabina - 2516 (+264)
                    The Beatles - 1228 (+245)
                    David TMX - 771 (+172)
                    Silvio Rodríguez - 745 (+119)
                    Fito & Fitipaldis - 622
                    Siniestro Total - 611 (+75)
                    Bad Religion - 573
                    La Polla Records - 537
                    Extremoduro - 443
                    Ska-P - 420

Most played songs   Cuando aparezca el petróleo (E. Sánchez) - 56 (+14)
                    La del pirata cojo (J. Sabina) - 52 (+5)
                    Conductores suicidas (J. Sabina) - 48 (+2)
                    Tirado en la calle (E. Sánchez) - 46
                    Y sin embargo (J. Sabina) - 45 (+5)
                    Pacto entre caballeros (J. Sabina) - 45 (+3)

Amarok

Playcount         25596 (+7410)

Favorite artists  Ska-P - 95.08%
                  Leihotikan - 94.39%
                  Rafael Caballero - 94.30%
                  Su ta Gar - 94.10% (+2.24)
                  NanowaR - 94.02%
                  Simon and Garfunkel - 93.84%
                  Juan Luis Guerra - 93.65% (+0.8)
                  La Caja Negra - 93.57% (+1.93)
                  Peiremans - 93.48% (+1.52)

Favorite songs    You shook me all night long (AC/DC) - 99%
                  Km 0 (I. Serrano) - 98%
                  Salir (Extremoduro) - 98%
                  1st movement of Winter (A. Vivaldi) - 98%
                  Torn (N. Imbruglia) - 98%
                  Total eclipse of the heart (B. Tyler) - 98%
                  Todos los segundos cuentan (La Caja Negra) - 98%
                  Fiesta pagana (Mägo de Oz) - 98%
                  New America (Bad Religion) - 98%
                  Las cuatro y diez (L.E. Aute and S. Rodríguez) - 98%
                  Soldadito marinero (Fito & Fitipaldis) - 98%
                  Cuando aparezca el petróleo (E. Sánchez) - 98%
                  Jet pilot (System of a Down) - 98%
                  Tirado en la calle (E. Sánchez) - 98%

No Comments yet »