handyfloss

As you might have read in this blog, I own a Neo FreeRunner since one year ago. I have used it far less than I should have, mostly because it’s a wonderful toy, but a lousy phone. The hardware is fine, although externally quite a bit less sexy than other smartphones such as the iPhone. The software, however, is not very mature. Being as open as it is, different Linux-centric distros have been developed for it, but I haven’t been able to find one that converts the Neo into an everyday use phone.

But let’s cut the rant, and stick to the issue: that the Neo is a nice playground for a computer geek. Following my desire to play, I installed Debian on it. Next, I decided to make some GUI programs for it, such a screen locker. I found Zedlock, a program written in Python, using GTK+ and Cairo. Basically, Zedlock paints a lock on the screen, and refuses to disappear until you paint a big “Z” on the screen with your finger. Well, that’s what it’s supposed to do, because the 0.1 version available at the Openmoko wiki is not functional. However, with Zedlock I found just what I wanted: a piece of software capable of doing really cool graphical things on the screen of my Neo, while being simple enough for me to understand.

Using Zedlock as a base, I am starting to have real fun programming GUIs, but a problem has quickly arisen: their response is slow. My programs, as all GUIs, draw an image on the screen, and react to tapping in certain places (that is, buttons) by doing things that require that the image on the screen be modified and repainted. This repainting, done as in Zedlock, is too slow. To speed things up, I googled the issue, and found a StackOverflow question that suggested the obvious route: to cache the images. Let’s see how I did it, and how it turned out.

Material

You can download the three Python scripts, plus two sample PNGs, from: http://isilanes.org/pub/blog/pygtk/.

Version 0

You can download this program here. Its main loop follows:

C = Canvas()

# Main window:
C.win = gtk.Window()
C.win.set_default_size(C.width, C.height)

# Drawing area:
C.canvas = gtk.DrawingArea()
C.win.add(C.canvas)
C.canvas.connect('expose_event', C.expose_win)

C.regenerate_base()

# Repeat drawing of bg:
try:
  C.times = int(sys.argv[1])
except:
  C.times = 1

gobject.idle_add(C.regenerate_base)
C.win.show_all()

# Main loop:
gtk.main()

As you can see, it generates a GTK+ window (line 04), with a DrawingArea inside (line 08), and then executes the regenerate_base() function every time the main loop is idle (line 20). Canvas() is a class whose structure is not relevant for the discussion here. It basically holds all variables and relevant functions. The regenerate_base() function follows:

def regenerate_base(self):
    
    # Base Cairo Destination surface:
    self.DestSurf = cairo.ImageSurface(cairo.FORMAT_ARGB32, self.width, self.height)
    self.target   = cairo.Context(self.DestSurf)
  
    # Background:
    if self.bg == 'bg1.png':
      self.bg = 'bg2.png'
    else:
      self.bg = 'bg1.png'

    self.i += 1

    image       = cairo.ImageSurface.create_from_png(self.bg)
    buffer_surf = cairo.ImageSurface(cairo.FORMAT_ARGB32, self.width, self.height)
    buffer      = cairo.Context(buffer_surf)
    buffer.set_source_surface(image, 0,0)
    buffer.paint()
  
    self.target.set_source_surface(buffer_surf, 0, 0)
    self.target.paint()
  
    # Redraw interface:
    self.win.queue_draw()

    if self.i > self.times:
      sys.exit()

    return True

As you can see, it paints the whole window with a PNG file (lines 15-25), choosing alternately bg1.png and bg2.png each time it is called (lines 07-11). Since the re-painting is done every time the main event loop is idle, it just means that images are painted to screen as fast as possible. After a given amount of re-paintings, the script exits.

You can run the code above by placing two suitable PNGs (480×640 pixels) in the same directory as the above code. If an integer argument is given to the script, it re-paints the window that many times, then exits (default, just once). You can time this script by executing, e.g.:

Version 1

You can download this version here.

The first difference with p1.py is that the regenerate_base() function has been separated into the first part (generate_base()), which is executed only once at program startup (see below), and all the rest, which is executed every time the background is changed.

def generate_base(self):

    # Base Cairo Destination surface:
    self.DestSurf = cairo.ImageSurface(cairo.FORMAT_ARGB32, self.width, self.height)
    self.target   = cairo.Context(self.DestSurf)

The main difference, though, is that two new functions are introduced:

  def mk_iface(self):

    if not self.bg in self.buffers:
      self.buffers[self.bg] = self.generate_buffer(self.bg)

    self.target.set_source_surface(self.buffers[self.bg], 0, 0)
    self.target.paint()

  def generate_buffer(self, fn):

    image       = cairo.ImageSurface.create_from_png(fn)
    buffer_surf = cairo.ImageSurface(cairo.FORMAT_ARGB32, self.width, self.height)
    buffer      = cairo.Context(buffer_surf)
    buffer.set_source_surface(image, 0,0)
    buffer.paint()
  
    # Return buffer surface:
    return buffer_surf

The function mk_iface() is called within regenerate_base(), and draws the background. However, the actual generation of the background image (the Cairo surface) is done in the second function, generate_buffer(), and only happens once per each background (i.e., twice in total), because mk_iface() reuses previously generated (and cached) surfaces.

Version 2

You can download this version here.

The difference with Revision 1 is that I eliminated some apparently redundant procedures for creating surfaces upon surfaces. As a result, the generate_base() function disappears again. I get rid of the DestSurf and C.target variables, so the mk_iface() and expose_win() functions end up as follows:

  def mk_iface(self):

    if not self.bg in self.buffers:
      self.buffers[self.bg] = self.generate_buffer(self.bg)

    buffer = self.canvas.window.cairo_create()
    buffer.set_source_surface(self.buffers[self.bg],0,0)
    buffer.paint()

  def expose_win(self, drawing_area, event):

    nm = 'bg1.png'

    if not nm in self.buffers:
      self.buffers[nm] = self.generate_buffer(nm)

    ctx = drawing_area.window.cairo_create()
    ctx.set_source_surface(self.buffers[nm], 0, 0)
    ctx.paint()

A side effect is that I can get also rid of the forced redraws of self.win.queue_draw().

Results

I have run the three versions above, varying the C.times variable, i.e., making a varying number of reprints. The command used (actually inside a script) would be something like the one mentioned above:

The following table sumarizes the results for Flanders and Maude (see my computers), a desktop P4 and my Neo FreeRunner, respectively. All times in seconds.

Data in the tables above has been fitted to a linear equation, of the form t = A + B n, where n is the number of repaints. In that equation, parameter A would represent a startup time, whereas B represents the time taken by each repaint. The linear fits are quite good, and the values for the parameters are given in the following tables (units are milliseconds, and milliseconds/repaint):

Darn it! I have mixed feelings for the results. In the desktop computer (Flanders), the gains are huge, but hardly noticeable. Cacheing the images (Version 1) makes for a 6x speedup, whereas Version 2 gives another twofold increase in speed (a total of 12x speedup!). However, from a user’s point of view, a 36 ms refresh is just as immediate as a 6 ms refresh.

On the other hand, on the Neo, the gains are less spectacular: the total gain in speed for Version 2 is a mere 2x. Anyway, half-a-second repaints instead of one-second ones are noticeable, so there’s that.

And at least I had fun and learned in the process! :^)

Remember plzma.py? I made a wrapper script for running [[LZMA]] in parallel. The script could be readily generalized to use any compression algorithm, following the principle of breaking the file in parts (one per CPU), compressing the parts, then [[tar (file format)|tarring]] them together. In other words, chop the file, zip the parts. Hence the name of the program that evolved from plzma.py: ChopZip.

Introduction

Currently ChopZip supports [[LZMA|lzma]], [[XZ Utils|xz]], [[gzip]] and lzip. Of them, lzip deserves a brief comment. It was brought to my attention by the a reader of this blog. It is based on the LZMA algorithm, as are lzma and xz. Apparently unlike them, multiple files compressed with lzip can be concatenated to form a single valid lzip-compressed file. Uncompressing the latter generates a concatenation of the formers.

To illustrate the point, check the following shell action:

However, I just discovered that all gzip, bzip2 and xz do that already! It seems that lzma is advertised as capable of doing it, but it doesn’t work for me. Sometimes it will uncompress the concatenated file to the original file just fine, others it will decompress it to just the first chunk of the set, yet other times it will complain that the “data is corrupt” and refuse to uncompress. For that reason, chopzip will accept two working modes: simple concatenation (gzip, lzip, xz) and tarring (lzma). The relevant mode will be used transparently for the user.

Also, if you use Ubuntu, this bug will apply to you, making it impossible to have xz-utils, lzma and lzip installed at the same time.

The really nice thing about concatenability is that it allows for trivial parallelization of the compression, while maintaining compatibility with the serial compression tool, which can still uncompress the product of a parallel compression. Unfortunatelly, for non-concatenatable compression formats, the output of chopzip will be a tar file of the compressed chunks, making it imposible to uncompress with the original compressor alone (first an untar would be needed, then uncompressing, then concatenation of chunks. Or just use chopzip to decompress).

The rationale behind plzma/chopzip is simple: multi-core computers are commonplace nowadays, but still the most common compression programs do not take advantage of this fact. At least the ones that I know and use don’t. There are at least two initiatives that tackle the issue, but I still think ChopZip has a niche to exploit. The most consolidated one is pbzip2 (which I mention in my plzma post). pbzip2 is great, if you want to use bzip2. It scales really nicely (almost linearly), and pbzipped files are valid bzip2 files. The main drawback is that it uses bzip2 as compression method. bzip2 has always been the “extreme” bother of gzip: compresses more, but it’s so slow that you would only resort to it if compression size is vital. LZMA-based programs (lzma, xz, lzip) are both faster, and even compress more, so for me bzip2 is out of the equation.

A second contender in parallel compression is pxz. As its name suggests, it compresses in using xz. Drawbacks? it’s not in the official repositories yet, and I couldn’t manage to compile it, even if it comprises a single C file, and a Makefile. It also lacks ability to use different encoders (which is not necessarily bad), and it’s a compiled program, versus chopzip, which is a much more portable script.

Scalability benchmark

Anyway, let’s get into chopzip. I have run a simple test with a moderately large file (a 374MB tar file of the whole /usr/bin dir). A table follows with the speedup results for running chopzip on that file, using various numbers of chunks (and consequently, threads). The tests were conducted in a 4GB RAM Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 computer. Speedups are calculated as how many times faster did #chunks perform with respect to just 1 chunk. It is noteworthy that in every case running chopzip with a single chunk is virtually identical in performance to running the orginal compressor directly. Also decompression times (not show) were identical, irrespective of number of chunks. ChopZip version vas r18.

Note how increasing the number of chunks beyond the amount of actual cores (4 in this case) can have a small benefit. This happens because N equal chunks of a file will not be compressed with equal speed, so the more chunks, the smaller overall effect of the slowest-compressing chunks.

Conclusion

ChopZip speeds up quite noticeably the compression of arbitrary files, and with arbitrary compressors. In the case of concatenatable compressors (see above), the resulting compressed file is an ordinary compressed file, apt to be decompressed with the regular compressor (xz, lzip, gzip), as well as with ChopZip. This makes ChopZip a valid alternative to them, with the parallelization advantage.

Update: this script has been superseded by ChopZip

Introduction

I discovered the [[Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain algorithm|LZMA]] compression algorithm some time ago, and have been thrilled by its capacity since. It has higher compression ratios than even [[bzip2]], with a faster decompression time. However, although decompressing is fast, compressing is not: LZMA is even slower than bzip2. On the other hand, [[gzip]] remains blazing fast in comparison, while providing a decent level of compression.

More recently I have discovered the interesting pbzip2, which is a parallel implementation of bzip2. With the increasing popularity of multi-core processors (I have a quad-core at home myself), parallelizing the compression tools is a very good idea. pbzip2 performs really well, producing bzip2-compatible files with near-linear scaling with the number of CPUs.

LZMA being such a high performance compressor, I wondered if its speed could be boosted by using it in parallel. Although the [[Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain algorithm|Wikipedia article]] states that the algorithm can be parallelized, I found no such implementation in Ubuntu 9.04, where the utility provided by the lzma package is exclusively serial. Not finding one, I set myself to produce it.

About plzma.py

Any compression can be parallelized as follows:

1. Split the original file into as many pieces as CPU cores available
2. Compress (simultaneously) all the pieces
3. Create a single file by joining all the compressed pieces, and call the result “the compressed file”

In a Linux environment, these three tasks can be carried out easily by split, lzma itself, and tar, respectively. I just made a [[Python (programming language)|Python]] script to automate these tasks, called it plzma.py, and put it in my web site for anyone to download (it’s GPLed). Please notice that plzma.py has been superseded by chopzip, starting with revision 12, whereas latest plzma is revision 6.

I must remark that, while pbzip2 generates bzip2-compatible compressed files, that is not the case with plzma. The products of plzma compression must be decompressed with plzma as well. The actual format of a plzma file is just a TAR file containing as many LZMA-compressed chunks as CPUs used for compression. These chunks, once decompressed individually, can be concatenated (with the cat command) to form the original file.

Benchmarks

What review of compression tools lacks benchmarks? No matter how inaccurate or silly, none of them do. And neither does mine :^)

I used three (single) files as reference:

• molekel.tar – a 108 MB tar file of the (GPL) [[Molekel]] 5.0 source code
• usr.bin.tar – 309 MB tar file of the contens of my /usr/bin/ dir
• hackable.tar – a 782 MB tar file of the hackable:1 [[Debian]]-based distro for the [[Neo FreeRunner]]

The second case is intended as an example of binary file compression, whereas the other two are more of a “real-life” example. I didn’t test text-only files… I might in the future, but don’t expect the conclusions to change much. The testbed was my Frink desktop PC (Intel Q8200 quad-core).

The options for each tool were:

• gzip/bzip/pbzip2: compression level 6
• lzma/plzma: compression level 3
• pbzip2/plzma: 4 CPUs

Compressed size

The most important feature of a compressor is the size of the resulting file. After all, we used it in first place to save space. No matter how fast an algorithm is, if the resulting file is bigger than the original file I wouldn’t use it. Would you?

The graph below shows the compressed size ratio for compression of the three test files with each of the five tools considered. The compressed size ratio is defined as the compressed size divided by the original size for each file.

This test doesn’t surprise much: gzip is the least effective and LZMA the most one. The point to make here is that the parallel implementations perform as well or badly as their serial counterparts.

If you are unimpressed by the supposedly higher performance of bzip2 and LZMA over gzip, when in the picture all final sizes do not look very different, recall that gzip compressed molekel.tar ~ 3 times (to a 0.329 ratio), whereas LZMA compressed it ~ 4.3 times (to a 0.233 ratio). You could stuff 13 LZMAed files where only 9 gzipped ones fit (and just 3 uncompressed ones).

Compression time

However important the compressed size is, compression time is also an important subject. Actually, that’s the very issue I try to address parallelizing LZMA: to make it faster while keeping its high compression ratio.

The graph below shows the normalized times for compression of the three test files with each of the five tools considered. The normalized time is taken as the total time divided by the time it took gzip to finish (an arbitrary scale with t(gzip)=1.0).

Roughly speaking, we could say that in my setting pbzip2 makes bzip2 as fast as gzip, and plzma makes LZMA as fast as serial bzip2.

The speedups for bzip2/pbzip2 and LZMA/plzma are given in the following table:

The performance of plzma is nowere near pbzip2, but I’d call it acceptable (wouldn’t I?, I’m the author!). There are two reasons I can think of to explain lower-than-linear scalability. The first one is the overhead imposed when cutting the file into pieces then assembling them back. The second one, maybe more important, is the disk performance. Maybe each core can compress each file independently, but the disk I/O for reading the chunks and writing them back compressed is done simultaneously on the same disk, which the four processes share.

Update: I think that a good deal of under-linearity comes from the fact that files of equal size will not be compressed in an equal time. Each chunk compression will take a slightly different time to complete, because some will be easier than others to compress. The program waits for the last compression to finish, so it’s as slow as the slowest one. It is also true that pieces of 1/N size might take more than 1/N time to complete, so the more chunks, the slower the compression in total (the opposite could also be true, though).

Decompression times

Usually we pay less attention to it, because it is much faster (and because we often compress things never to open them again, in which case we had better deleted them in first place… but I digress).

The following graph shows the decompression data equivalent to the compression times graph above.

The most noteworthy point is that pbzip2 decompresses pbzip2-compressed files faster than bzip2 does with bzip2-compressed files. That is, both compression and decompression benefit from the parallelization. However, for plzma that is not the case: decompression is slower than with the serial LZMA. This is due to two effects: first, the decompression part is still not parallelized in my script (it will soon be). This would lead to decompression speeds near to the serial LZMA. However, it is slower due to the second effect: the overhead caused by splitting and then joining.

Another result worth noting is that, although LZMA is much slower than even bzip2 to compress, the decompression is actually faster. This is not random. LZMA was designed with fast uncompression time in mind, so that it could be used in, e.g. software distribution, where a single person compresses the original data (however painstakingly), then the users can download the result (the smaller, the faster), and uncompress it to use it.

Conclusions

While there is room for improvement, plzma seems like a viable option to speed up general compression tasks where a high compression ratio (LZMA level) is desired.

I would like to stress the point that plzma files are not uncompressable with just LZMA. If you don’t use plzma to decompress, you can follow the these steps:

I am using the [[Glade Interface Designer]] to produce (very) small (and simple) graphical apps for my [[Neo FreeRunner]]. I produce the graphical layout in the form of an [[XML]] file (using Glade), then load this XML from a [[PyGTK]] program.

The thing is some defaults are not really usable for a device such as the NFR. For example, default fonts are in general too small for the tiny screen of the Neo, which favors apps with only a few, big and shinny buttons. In the case of Label widgets, you can use Pango markup format with the set_markup method, as follows:

mylabel  = self.glade.get_widget('label1')
txt  = '<span font_size="80000" color="red">%s</span>' % (text_string)
mylabel.set_markup(txt)

However, for other widgets it is not so evident. For example, in ComboBoxes (buttons with a drop-down list), you can’t put in the item list anything other than strings, which are displayed literally (markup is not interpreted). Moreover, CBs do not have a “set_font_style” method, or anything similar.

Searching the web did not provide immediate results, but I managed to find this FAQ item at eccentric.cx. I quote:

4.1.581 How do I change font properties on gtk.Labels and other widgets?
Easy:

 label = gtk.Label("MyLabel")
 label.modify_font(pango.FontDescription("sans 48"))

This method applies to all widgets that use text, so you can change the text of gtk.Entry and other widgets in the same manner.

Note that, some widgets are only containers for others, like gtk.Button. For those you’d have to get the child widget. For a gtk.Button do this:

  if button.get_use_stock():
     label = button.child.get_children()[1]
  elif isinstance(button.child, gtk.Label):
     label = button.child
  else:
     raise ValueError("button does not have a label")

Last changed on Thu Sep 1 14:46:30 2005 by Johan Dahlin (johan-at-gnome-org)

In the case of a CB, we have to pick its child (which is the list itself), and modify it thusly:

cbox = self.glade.get_widget("CBlist")
cblist  = cbox.child
cblist.modify_font(pango.FontDescription("sans 32"))

In my examples above, a class has been created in the script beforehand, and it binds to the Glade XML:

class whatever:

  def __init__(self):

    #Set the Glade file
    self.glade    = gtk.glade.XML(gladefile)
    self.glade.signal_autoconnect(self)

Of course, the CBlist and MyLabel mentioned in my code are the appropriate widget names defined in that XML.

I guess this post is not going to reveal anything new: testing for an item’s membership in an array is slow, and dictionaries are much more CPU-efficient for that (albeit more RAM-hungry). I’m just restating the obvious here, plus showing some benchmarks.

Intro

Let’s define our problem first. We simply want to check whether some item (a string, number or whatever) is contained within some collection of items. For that, the simplest construct in [[Python (programming language)|Python]] would be:

if item in collection:
  do something

The above construct works regardless of “collection” being an array or a dictionary. However, the search for “item” in “collection” is different internally. In the case of a list, Python checks all its elements one by one, comparing them to “item”. If a match is found, True is returned, and the search aborted. For items not in the list, or appearing very late inside it, this search will take long.

However, in the case of dictionaries, the search is almost a one-step procedure: if collection[item] returns something other than an error, then item is in collection.

The tests

I’ve run two different test scripts, one for the array case, another for the dictionary case. In both cases I’ve searched for an item that was not in the collection, to maximize the searching efforts. The array script was as follows:

#!/usr/bin/python

import sys

nitems = int(sys.argv[1])

foo = []
bar = []

for i in range(nitems):
 foo.append(1)
 bar.append(2)

for i in foo:
  if i in bar:
    pass

Similarly, for dictionaries:

#!/usr/bin/python

import sys

nitems = int(sys.argv[1])

foo = {}
bar = {}

for i in range(nitems):
  j = i + nitems
  foo[i] = True
  bar[j] = True

for i in foo:
  if i in bar:
    pass

Both scripts accept (require) an integer number as argument, then build item collections of this size (initialization), then run the check loops. The loops are designed to look for every item of collection 1 in collection 2 (and all checks will fail, because no single item belongs to both sets).

Timing

The scripts were timed simply by measuring the execution [[wall clock time|walltime]] with the GNU time command, as follows:

Bear in mind that the computer was not otherwise idle during the tests. I was surfing the web with Firefox and listening to music with Amarok. Both programs are CPU- and (specially) memory-hungry, so take my results with a grain of salt. In any case, it was not my intention to get solid numbers, but just solid trends.

Memory profiling

I must confess my lack of knowledge around memory management of software, and how to profile it. I just used the [[Valgrind]] utility, with the massif tool, as follows:

% valgrind --tool=massif script nitems

Massif creates a log file (massif.out.pid) that contains “snapshots” of the process at different moments, and gives each of them a timestamp (the default timestamp being the number of instructions executed so far). The logged info that interests us is the [[dynamic memory allocation|heap]] size of the process. As far as I know (in my limited knowledge), this value corresponds to the RAM memory allotted to the process. This value can be digested out of the log file into a format suitable for printing heap size vs. execution time (instructions, really), by a Python script:

#!/usr/bin/python

import sys

try:
  fn = sys.argv[1]
except:
  sys.exit('Insert file name')

b2m = 1024*1024
e2m = 1000000

f = open(fn,'r')

for line in f:
  if 'time=' in line:
    aline = line.split('=')
    t     = aline[1].replace('\n','')
    t     = float(t)/e2m

  elif 'mem_heap_B' in line:
    aline = line.split('=')
    m     = aline[1].replace('\n','')
    m     = float(m)/b2m

    print t,m

f.close()

The above outputs heap MB vs million executions.

A much conciser form with [[AWK|awk]]:

% awk -F= '/time=/{t=$2/1000000};/mem_heap_B/{print t, $2/1048576}' massif.out.pid

Results

The execution times were so different, and the collection size (nitems) range so wide, I have used a [[logarithmic scale]] for both axes in the time vs collection size below:

At 64k items, the dictionary search is already 3 orders of magnitude faster, and the difference grows fast as the collection size increases.

With respect to memory use, we can see that in both cases increasing nitems increases the heap size, but in the case of the arrays, the increase is not so pronounced. Looking at the X axes in both following plots, you can see that the number of instructions executed during the run grows linearly with the number of items in the collection (recall that the array plot has a logarithmic X axis).

Finally, I compare memory usage of the array and dictionary case in the same plot, as you can see below, for the case of 64k items in the collection:

It wasn’t really an easy task, because I had to combine the biggest array case I could handle with the smallest dictionary the timing of which would be meaningful (smaller dictionaries would be equally “immediate”, according to time). Also notice how the X axis has a log scale. Otherwise the number of instructions in the array case would cross the right border of your monitor.

I recently started looking for some system/format to dump personal stuff on. I checked my own comparison of wiki software, and chose [[MoinMoin]].

I have already installed some [[MediaWiki]] wikis for personal use, and I consider it a really nice wiki system. However, one of its strengths is also a drawback for me: the backend is a database. I want to be able to migrate the wiki painlessly, and with MediaWiki this is not possible. There is no end to the files and database dumps one has to move around, and then it is never clear if there is still something missing (like edit history or some setting). I want to have a single dir with all the data required to replicate the wiki, and I want to [[rsync]] just this dir to another computer to have an instant clone of the wiki elsewhere. MoinMoin provides just that (I think, I might have to change my mind when I use it more).

So here you are the steps I took to have MM up and running in my Ubuntu 8.10 PC.

Installation

Ubuntu has packages for MM, so you can just install them:

Configuration

Create a dir to put your wiki. For example, if you want to build a wiki called wikiname:

We made it a subdir of a global dir “MoinMoin”, so we can create a wiki farm in the future.

Next you have to copy some files over:

If installing a wiki farm, you could be interested in the contents of /usr/share/moin/config/wikifarm/, but this is out of the scope of this post.

The next step is to edit wikiconfig.py to our liking. The following lines could be of interest:

sitename = u’Untitled Wiki’
logo_string = u’‘
page_front_page = u”MyStartingPage”
data_dir = ‘./data/’
data_underlay_dir = ‘./underlay/’
superuser = [u”yourusername“, ]
acl_rights_before = u”iyourusername:read,write,delete,revert,admin”

Using

You just need to run wikiserver.py, there is no need to have [[Apache HTTP Server|Apache]] running or anything (like with, e.g., MediaWiki):

Then open your favourite browser and go to http://localhost:8080, and you will be greeted by the starting page.

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!

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.

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.

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.