handyfloss

Ya comenté en un post anterior los pros y contras que encontraba para contratar Orange o simyo como proveedor de internet móvil. Finalmente escogí simyo, con quien no tengo en principio queja, excepto que en general es más lento e irregular de lo que esperaba (pero temo que sea un problema inherente al uso de red de telefonía móvil).

Con el tiempo he ido viendo cada vez más anuncios de internet móvil, por la calle y en televisión. Obviamente los que más machacan con el tema son los ladrones de Movistar, como con todo con lo que creen que pueden sacar tajada engañando proveyendo de un servicio a la gente.

Lo que me indigna es lo absolutamente vergonzosas que son las ofertas de los principales operadores (Movistar, Vodafone y Orange), respecto a otras como la de simyo. Por ello, voy a hacer una mínima comparativa, y que el lector saque conclusiones.

Bases

Se ha comparado un producto de cada empresa, teniendo como características una tarifa plana hasta cierto volúmen de datos mensual. Tras ese gasto la velocidad ofrecida baja en todos los casos, pero no se cobra más por ese volúmen extra. Los precios son con IVA.

Datos

Notas adicionales

• El módem USB de simyo es libre. Los demás son cada uno exclusivo de su compañía.
• Vodafone excluye expresamente el tráfico [[peer-to-peer|p2p]] ([[file sharing|compartición de ficheros]]). Simyo lo permite expresamente, diciendo que pudiera ralentizarse en caso de congestión de red.

Conclusiones

¿Hace falta añadir algo?

The music loving community may rejoice, ogg2mp3 is out! OK, OK, that is too much to say, but nonetheless someone could find it useful.

Visit its site at: http://isilanes.org/soft/ogg2mp3

ogg2mp3 is a simple Python script I have made to make the task of converting OGG files to MP3 and the other way around easier. There might be other (better) tools out there for the same task, but I had some need, and this script fulfills it. ogg2mp3 can convert single files, lists of them, or even whole directory contents, and reads the [[ID3]] tags of the input OGG/MP3 files, saving them into the output MP3/OGG.

I basically convert bunches of OGG files to MP3 when I want to put them in portable players that don’t read OGG. I do the opposite when someone passes me an MP3 and I want to add it to my collection, which is in OGG format.

Enjoy!

I am a heavy user of the [[Grace (plotting tool)|Xmgrace]] plotting program, and I love it. An operation very ofter used is to scale the X and Y axes to our liking, to show different parts of our data in the resulting plot. You can do that from the command line by setting the “world” of the graph, providing four numbers as X,Y boundaries:

% xmgrace -world xmin ymin xmax ymax file.dat

Apart from setting the maximum and minimum values for X and Y, we can make use of the autoscale option to selectively show some ranges. The four options to autoscale are:

• none – show the X,Y ranges defined by the “world” variable (if not set, the default is “0 0 1 1”).
• xy – forget about “world” data, make plot range in X and Y enough to plot all data in input.
• x – autoscale X to show all data, but respect Y given by “world”. This means that if a point is not shown because it lies outside the Y range, then it doesn’t count to force X autoscale. This is a wee bit trickier than it sounds.
• y – see previous point, with X and Y swapped.

But Xmgrace is not only about [[command-line interface|command line]], or even [[Graphical user interface|GUI]]. You can write a .agr file (for example by saving a plot from the Xmgrace GUI), and manipulate it so that the following command:

% xmgrace file.agr

will bring up a plot with all the data and formatting we have put into the .agr file. It’s really handy to save a file as-is.

Now, the syntax for inputting the world in the .agr is well known:

@ world xmin, ymin, xmax, ymax

where xmin etc. are floating point numbers.

The problem is how to hardcode the autoscale feature into the .agr. I had always been forced to do:

% xmgrace -autoscale none file.agr

from the command line, because I couldn’t find out how to include it in the .agr. Finally I did find it, and that’s the main reason of this post. The syntax is explained in the manual at the Xmrace site, but I found it after googling for agr files containing “autoscale” in them. The line to include seems to be:

@ autoscale onread none

A .agr containing the above line will produce, when called as follows:

% xmgrace file.agr

the same output as a file not containing it, when called as follows:

% xmgrace -autoscale none file.agr

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        9512 (+1439)
  - Commercial     6161 (+1174)
  - Jamendo        3226 (+225)
  - Other CC       71 (+40)
  - Other          54 (+0)
Total playtime     25d (+4d)
Disk usage         45GB (+7GB)
Artist count       1270 (+236)
Album count        847 (+109)
MP3 count          0 (+0)
OGG count          9512 (+1439)

Last.fm

Playcount           41534 (+5255)

Most played artists Joaquín Sabina - 2711 (+195)
                    The Beatles - 1346 (+118)
                    David TMX - 853 (+82)
                    Silvio Rodríguez - 782 (+37)
                    Extremoduro - 694 (+251)
                    Fito & Fitipaldis - 675 (+53)
                    Siniestro Total - 650 (+39)
                    Bad Religion - 632 (+59)
                    La Polla Records - 565 (+28)
                    Ismael Serrano - 478
                    Ska-P - 440 (+20)

Most played songs   Cuando aparezca el petróleo (E. Sánchez) - 66 (+10)
                    La del pirata cojo (J. Sabina) - 55 (+3)
                    Tirado en la calle (E. Sánchez) - 53 (+7)
                    Conductores suicidas (J. Sabina) - 51 (+3)
                    Y sin embargo (J. Sabina) - 49 (+4)
                    Pacto entre caballeros (J. Sabina) - 47 (+2)

Amarok

Playcount         30392 (+4796)

Favorite artists  NanowaR - 96.16% (+2.14)
                  ABBA - 95.85%
                  Erick Sánchez - 95.19%
                  Rafael Caballero - 94.73 (+0.43)
                  Peiremans - 94.68% (+1.20)
                  Leihotikan - 94.53% (+0.14%)
                  Su ta Gar - 94.44% (+0.34)
                  Simon and Garfunkel - 94.26% (+0.42)
                  La Caja Negra - 94.22% (+0.65)
                  Antarhes - 94.18%
                  Ska-P - 94.12% (-0.96)
                  Eskorbuto - 94.06%
                  Fito & Fitipaldis - 93.87%
                  Juan Luis Guerra - 93.75% (+0.10)

Favorite songs    Salir - Extremoduro
                  You shook me all night long - AC/DC
                  Km 0 - Ismael Serrano
                  Golfa - Extremoduro
                  Todos los segundos cuentan - La Caja Negra
                  Vértigo - Ismael Serrano
                  1st movement of Winter - Antonio Vivaldi
                  Total eclipse of the heart - Bonnie Tyler
                  New America - Bad Religion
                  Caperucita - Ismael Serrano
                  Fiesta pagana (Mägo de Oz) - Mägo de Oz
                  Cuando aparezca el petróleo - Erick Sánchez
                  La extraña pareja - Ismael Serrano
                  Highway to hell - AC/DC
                  Uno - dos - tres - cuatro - Javier Álvarez
                  El roce de tu cuerpo - Platero y Tú
                  Torn - Natalie Imbruglia
                  Un muerto encierras - Ismael Serrano
                  Chop suey - System of a Down
                  Tirado en la calle - Erick Sánchez

Ups! August passed, my holidays finished, second work week… and I haven’t written much lately. I will partially fix that by updating my Linux World Domination project (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. CLP means “current Linux Percent”, as given by last logged data.

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).

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.

This is a howto provided to me really kindly by my workmate Gisela. She wanted to transform an [[Encapsulated PostScript|EPS]] file obtained with [[Grace (plotting tool)|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.

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!

I am really disappointed at the [[e-mail client|MUA]] offer I am finding for by Debian box. I have tried [[KMail]], [[Mozilla Thunderbird|Thunderbird]], [[Evolution (software)|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!