handyfloss

Remember my previous post about a problem with Flash in Firefox/Iceweasel? Now the second part.

After following my own instructions, I ended up with a Flash instalation that could play YouTube videos correctly, but some other Flash animations would not work. By chance, my computer at work would reproduce any Flash animation just fine, so… why would that be?

To find out the reason, I have compared what Flash-related packages I have installed in Homer (my computer at work) and Heracles (the one at home). The result is quite surprising:

Homer[~]: aptitude search flash
p   flashplayer-mozilla       - Macromedia Flash Player
p   flashrom                  - Universal flash programming utility
p   flashybrid                - automates use of a flash disk as the root filesystem
p   libflash-dev              - GPL Flash (SWF) Library - development files
p   libflash-mozplugin        - GPL Flash (SWF) Library - Mozilla-compatible plugin
p   libflash-swfplayer        - GPL Flash (SWF) Library - stand-alone player
p   libflash0c2               - GPL Flash (SWF) Library - shared library
p   libroxen-flash2           - Flash2 module for the Roxen Challenger web server
p   m16c-flash                - Flash programmer for Renesas M16C and R8C microcontrollers
p   vrflash                   - tool to flash kernels and romdisks to Agenda VR
Homer[~]: aptitude search swf
p   libflash-swfplayer        - GPL Flash (SWF) Library - stand-alone player
p   libswf-perl               - Ming (SWF) module for Perl
p   libswfdec-0.5-4           - SWF (Macromedia Flash) decoder library
p   libswfdec-0.5-4-dbg       - SWF (Macromedia Flash) decoder library
p   libswfdec-0.5-dev         - SWF (Macromedia Flash) decoder library
v   libswfdec-dev             -
p   pyvnc2swf                 - screen recording tool to SWF movie
v   swf-player                -
p   swfdec-mozilla            - Mozilla plugin for SWF files (Macromedia Flash)
p   swfmill                   - xml2swf and swf2xml processor

Yes, Flash works perfectly at Homer because it has no package installed with swf or flash in their name! And I don’t have any Gnash package installed, either. I removed all swf/flash-related packages on Heracles, and now Flash works perfectly in my home computer too.

Sometimes you have files littering a svn working copy, but you don’t want to put them under version management. Often times it is impossible, or plain painful, to delete them, and having them appear in all svn status calls is uncomfortable. This can happen, for example, if you keep a repository of Python files. When a Python script is called from another script (a module, for example), a .pyc file is generated (a “compiled” version of the called .py module, that is just faster to load next time).

Clearly, you don’t want to put the .pyc files in the repository, but deleting them everytime you manage the working copy is painful. For that, you can make svn ignore some files, like e.g. .pyc files. You can do that in at least two ways: specifically for a directory, or as a general preference.

Setting ignore property on a single directory

You can set a property on any directory of a working copy, so that the chosen files in that directory will be ignored by svn. For example:

% svn propset 'svn:ignore' '*.pyc' pythonfiles/

will make svn ignore all .pyc files in the directory “pythonfiles”, but not those in other directories.

Setting ignore patterns globally

You can edit the ~/.subversion/config file, and add “*.pyc” in the line starting with "global-ignores =". For example, my such line is:

global-ignores = *.o *.lo *.la #*# .*.rej *.rej .*~ *~ .#* .DS_Store *.pyc *.swp

It works immediately, and for all the calls to svn status you do in any working copy on that machine.

[Update: read a more recent post]

I have recently come accross this problem, and I am posting the solution I just found. The problem is the following: when trying to watch any online flash animation with Iceweasel on my Debian Lenny (e.g. in YouTube), instead of the video, I got a grey window, with the following black letters on it:

This SWF file is known to trigger bugs in the swfdec decoder. Playback is cancelled.

This bug can be followed in this August 2007 thread at donarmstrong.com. I am amazed why it didn’t affect me sooner than this week, but oh well…

The steps that fixed the issue for me where to install two packages. I am not 100% sure the first one was needed, though. I first installed the package flashplayer-mozilla, which uninstalled flashplugin-nonfree as a side effect. This step alone fixed nothing.

The second step was to actually read the donarmstrong.com bug report, and see that it says that “This is fixed in swfdec-0.4.2 […]”. Great! I did a aptitude search swf, and found out that Lenny has libswfdec-0.5-4, and a swfdec-mozilla that depends on it. I installed the latter, which obviously also installed the former, plus it removed swf-player and libswfdec0.3.

After that, I opened Iceweasel again, and now flash works!

I have released (how pretentious!) rip2ogg.py, the wonderful CD ripper everyone was waiting for. You can check its “home page” at isilanes.org.

Why did I do it? Well, one of the wonderful tools GNU/Linux provides to rip CDs is KAudioCreator, which is very neat. However, it has some shortcomings I wanted to overcome (again, how pretentious!):

1. It’s slow. It rips the CD to WAV and encodes the ripped WAVs to Ogg in parallel, while rip2ogg.py does both things sequentially. Yet rip2ogg.py is 40% faster! I have ripped a whole CD in 14 minutes with KAC, and in 10 minutes with r2o.
2. You can not have arbitrary character substitution, just one, and the interface for that is horrible. For example, with KAC it’s very simple to substitute every blank in the track name with an underscore. BUT I have found no way to provide KAC with two lists, so that it substitutes every character in the first list with the corresponding character(s) in the second list.
3. You can change the track title to get a “nice” filename for the Ogg, but the change is also reflected in the “track tile” tag. You can not tell KAC to substitute a “ñ” in the title for a “n” in the filename, but to keep the “ñ” in the “tag title” tag.
4. KAC is not able to rip all CDs. It sometimes chokes on DRM‘d CDs, and copes horribly with scratched surfaces. In contrast, the programs rip2ogg.py uses to rip have never failed for me. More than once command-line was my only way of ripping some rogue CDs. KAC simply couldn’t.

In the end, it all boils down to be able to control what the ripper is doing. To do so, I decided to make this simple script.

Obviously it is FLOSS (GPLv2), so use, modify and redistribute to your heart’s content!

Simply a page with some interesting TeX tricks: volkerschatz.com.

I am a recent fan of Python, a very neat scripting language.

One thing I miss from Perl is the availability of labeled breaks. What are those? Suppose you have two nested loops. When a condition is met in the inner loop, you want to exit both loops. With Python there is not straightforward way of doing it. Imagine we are reading an array of data, line by line and column by column, and we want to exit when meeting the first zero value. With Perl:

LINELOOP: foreach my $i (0..$lines)
{
  COLLOOP: foreach my $j (0..$columns)
  {
     break LINELOOP unless $val[$i][$j];
  };
};

A simple “break” will exit the innermost loop, but we can use a label to exit a specific loop. However, in Python there is no such a thing as a labeled loop, as explained in this PEP.

My rant is with the explanations given by van Rossum himself in Python mailing list to reject the change:

1. The complexity added to the language, permanently.
2. My expectation that the feature will be abused more than it will be used right.

Wow! Incredible reasons!

The first one is silly: other languages have it, and it has worked fine. Adding complexity to a tool for the sake of it is really stupid, I agree. But the fact is labeled breaks would be tremendously useful, so the increase in complexity would be justified. Surely a language that can only print “Hello world” would be less complex, yet of little use.

The second reason is absolutely over-the-shoulder-of-the-users. So now good old Guido must guide his sheep along the “correct” path, lest we get lost! He is punishing the good programmers by not giving them a useful tool, so that bad programmers are protected from their stupidity. It’s like not selling cars at all because some people drive while drunk.

Just my 2 cents…

When I see videos like the following, I always think two things:

1. There are always freaks out there that will do anything with anything. They keep this world spinning, and I thank them for that.
2. There are sooo many things that can be done with nowadays technology and a little bit of wit. Why don’t we see all that in stores? Nintendo, or anybody else, can’t do it? Or they don’t want to do it? In both cases… why? Obviously for marketing reasons, and because they want to maximize their benefit, not users’. The reader should think twice on that before assuming it’s natural.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0awjPUkBXOU]

You can page where I found it (actually somebody who found it told me) at Johnny Chung Lee’s page.

La propaganda de MediaMarkt que hoy acompañaba al periódico me ha sorprendido bastante. Como se puede ver en la imágen (sacada de su página web), no solo ofrecen una PDA con Linux, sino que la palabra “Linux” aparece dentro de la flechita blanca que utilizan para resaltar los “puntos fuertes” del producto.

Clic para ver folleto completo

No quiere esto decir que se hayan vuelto “buenos”, pero hasta ahora (y como todos los vendedores) han estado vendidos al Enemigo Oscuro incondicionalmente. Ya sé que si venden gadgets con Linux o lo anuncian es simplemente por marketing: es una palabra de moda y vende más. Lo que me llena de alegría es precisamente que “Linux” sea una palabra que venda más y pueda ser utilizada por motivos de marketing. Eso significa que cada vez hay una base más amplia de consumidores que lo toman en cuenta, ¿no?

Siempre que he escuchado la canción Ciega, sordomuda de Shakira, me ha parecido que esta tía es una hacker y una friki.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOeaxkMbGO8]

¿Por qué digo eso? Porque la primera estrofa de la canción…

Se me acaba el argumento
y la metodología
cada vez que se aparece
frente a mí tu anatomía

… habla claramente de un programa informático, por ejemplo un script Python:

#!/usr/bin/python

import sys

class myclass:

  def __init__(self,var):
   var = self.var

  #def mymethod(self):
  #  pass

if 'frente_a_mi' == 'tu_anatomia':
  sys.argv = []
  myclass.mymethod()

This YouTube video shows Compiz Fusion running on my work computer. It has a fairly decent CPU (P4 3.00GHz), but no “useless” things like sound cards or (more relevant for this issue) graphics card. The only thing it has is an Intel 82865G graphics chip integrated in the motherboard. We are talking about an integrated chip (not dedicated graphics card) released in May 2003.

Judge the performance for yourself (take into account that the actual performance is higher, since the recording program to make the video also uses up some resources):