Older blog entries for connolly (starting at number 41)

CUA-mode, where have you been all my life?!?!?! Found in some comments on Gerv's search for an editor. Could it be true? No more impedence mismatches between emacs's sense of paste and the rest of the gnome/mac/windows world?

Much of my hacking life has been spent in wondering whether to mac or not to mac. I don't know how many times a day I curse emacs or firefox or gnome-terminal for screwing up copy-and-paste. I have so much angst every time I try... "if I close the window that I just copied from, will paste still work?" "oh crap! I don't want to paste what I just selected; I want to paste what I carefully spent 10 minutes copying to the clipboard!"

Speaking of to-Mac-or-not-to-Mac, and imporovisation, I wrote/discovered another little three chord ditty last night (did I mention I love having a piano in the house?). Part of me wants to try out the western music notation support in Garage Band 2, but the rest of me knows that recording my knowledge using proprietary stuff is a step backwards. I have spent many, many hours trying to get RoseGarden and the like working under debian linux... preempt kernel patch... OSS vs ALSA vs Jack vs ARTS... argh! I look forward to the day when Ubuntu can afford to make it a priority.

Back from XML 2005 in Altanta, looking into a dist-upgrade, I hesitate to make the switch to the x.org X server, since I use an nvidia chip. Does the open source nv driver support 3d acceleration?

tags: debian, dirk.dm93.org, hardware, graphics

As if the t-mobile sidekick desktop interface weren't slow and painful enough, they shortened the login session timeout. Oh for an ajax interface to my WearableGizmo calendar! Something like kiko would be really nice.

So I got to thinking about Ajax, which reminded me of my idea last May for an ajax-based quicken work-alike . I seem to be not the only one interested:

If intuit would create an AJAX version of Quicken that matched the functionality of it's windows client then you would see a better chance for homes to move to an alternate OS. posted by hawks5999 (2) at 11:07 AM 9/26/05

#swig notes

I upgraded AmdAntec over the weekend to Ubuntu breezy. Due to traffic, a straight apt-get dist-upgrade said it was going to take 14 hours, so I used bittorrent to grab the .iso, mounted it with losetup, and ran a little python BasicHttpServer.

Ho-hum. The screen was stuck at 640x480 until I did dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg a few times. And I can't get sound to work (2.6.3 seems to be the last kernel that works with my sound card, and breezy defaults to 2.6.10).

My XML 2005 late-breaking news proposal was accepted: Semantic Web Calendaring: RDF Calendar, hCalendar, and GRDDL. See the conclusions and future work section of the RDF Calendar report for some of what I'm going to talk about: getting RDF data out of hCalendar using GRDDL, and then querying it with SPARQL.

Debian Unstable Turns out I didn't need to build a new kernel to install the nvu debian package. apt allowed me to upgrade libc without removing my win4lin kernel package. After that, installing nvu worked ok.

Trying to upgrade a bunch of other stuff resulted in a conflict between some libraries used by evince. I had to endure the usual abuse before getting the clues I needed in the #debian channel: #327145: gnome-desktop-environment: unsatisfiable dependencies. So I had to remove the gnome and gnome-desktop-environment packages.

tags: rdf, semantic web, calendar, debian

So I want to post a journal/blog entry about my recent trip to Edinburgh for a TAG meeting. How and where to post it?

• advogato? It's not really about open source. Advogato doesn't support offline editing -- well, I suppose I could upload it via the XML-RPC control protocol. Advogato seems to mangle my text. I like to keep to XHTML.
• w3.org? It's got product endorsements. I don't have an RSS feed there... though... hmm... I could use my XHTML site summary hack to make one out of my homepage pretty easily. Unlike most weblog systems, posting the content would be a separate transaction from making the RSS entry, but maybe that's OK... it would let me use mailng lists posts as entries, as well as advogato posts, flickr photos, etc. It's not ImmersiveHypertextEditing, but emacs with nxml-mode combined with CVS and ssh is a pretty nice way to edit the web.

So I'm thinking about adding blog-smarts to dm93.org. As I mentioned earlier, I'm disenchanted with ZopeDB as the back end. I liked Zope's ease of access control, but the cost of being different from apache is just too high. I'd sure like to see openid support integrated with apache .htaccess stuff. Maybe a fastcgi auth hack of some sort. Anyway... back to blogging... <"> I want to use the filesystem with hg. I see there's a debian package for pyblosxom. I'm also interested in flickr's support for weblogging APIs. I see there's a bloggerapi module for pyblosxom. I would prefer the Atom protocol. I am reading An Atom-Powered Wiki by Joe Gregorio April 14, 2004. I wonder if the protocol has changed much since then.

update on testing gnome blog etc.: While waiting in the Kansas City airport recently, I had just enought time to download xjournal, recommended by Pure Mac's list of web editors. The "mood" field is kinda cool, as is the "get music button". I tried to copy and paste fromTravelCheckList in my wiki, but it came across as plain text. Bzzt.

tags: python, scm

Ugh... debian glibc transition. I tried to install nvu, and it wanted to remove my win4lin kernel in order to do so.

Tags: debian, sysadmin

One-click dialing back in action

Aha! Ted and Dom showed me how to add a tel: URI scheme handler to firefox. It turns out that firefox consults the gnome configuration database, so this works:

$ gconftool-2 -t string -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/tel/command "echo %s"

In place of echo, I use a little script that Ted wrote that uses curl to drive Vonage Third Party Call Control. This works great with the hack to build an hCard version of my sidekick contacts!

tags: UriSchemes, sysadmin, hCard.

So I'm helping my wife do some office work for a counsellor. We started with a bunch of .xls files. We exported those as text and normalized the data with a little python program and put it back into one big spreadsheet where she enters new data as it comes. We export the data as tab-separated text to run reports on it, in python again.

I think I could do the reports in excell with VBA. I have started up the learning curve, though I really don't like investing development effort in anything other than open source technology.

Meanwhile, I wrote the python code on my laptop, but the spreadsheet is on her mac mini. I though I'd use mercurial to allow me to make changes on either side and keep in sync.

But her machine doesn't have the developer tools installed, so it doesn't have gcc, so I can't install mercurial.

tags: scm, mac, VBA, python

Adventures with Mono

I just wanted some background music for reading and maybe cleaning up my office a little...

But I'm not really willing to manage my own cache of popular music; the RIAA/ASCAP rules cramp my style, which is to store stuff in the web and point to it from whichever of my N machines I happen to be using.

podcasting sure sounds cool, though I'm not sure I grok. I searched for a gnome podcast tool and found monopod. No, there's no debian package for it, but I just got a copy of Edd's Mono: A Developer's Notebook, so I thought I'd try to build monopod from source.

untar it; blow past README and INSTALL and go straight to ./configure && make and so begins the game of hunt-the-build-deps...

checking for mono >= 1.1.6... Package mono was not found

so I counter with

$ sudo apt-get install mono-devel mono-gmcs

but that turns out to be a diversion; what I really needed was...

$ sudo apt-get install libmono-dev

Next hurdle:

checking for gtk-sharp-2.0 >= 1.9.5... Package gtk-sharp-2.0 was not found ...

Easy enough:

$ sudo apt-get install gtk-sharp2

And lo! the configure script wins, but make fails thusly:

./ChannelWindow.cs(144) error CS1501: No overload for method `SetSortFunc' takes `2' arguments

Unfortunately, C# is not like python and Modula-3; it fails the unambiguitiy requirement so I can't tell just by looking at ChannelWindow.cs where SetSortFunc comes from. I can see that it comes from ListStore. Maybe an IDE will teach me the tricks for navigating C# files...

$ sudo apt-get install monodevelop

but starting monodevelop loses with

System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.
---> System.IO.FileNotFoundException:
Could not find file "/usr/lib/monodoc/monodoc.xml". : /usr/lib/monodoc/monodoc.xml

but thanks to debian package search it's easy enough to find the relevant package:

$ sudo apt-get install monodoc-manual

and now I can open ChannelWindow.cs in monodevelop, but when I hover over ListStore, I don't get any lisp-machine-like context-sensitive help.

There are only a few imports at the top:

using System;
using Gtk;
using Mono.Posix;

So I'm willing to try a brute-force search. Aha... ListStore in the Gtk# docs.

SetSortFunc takes 4 args. How did this code ever compile? I check for version skew... apt-cache policy and the README agree: Gtk# version 1.9.5. I don't get it. postscript: Edd suspects ETOONEW; he uses mono 1.1.7 and I got 1.1.8

I try filling in 0s for the arguments, but C# is too strongly typed for that. I try to figure out what the C# equivalent of None or nil is for a delegate, but it doesn't jump out at me.

Then... duh.. there's a monopod 1.4 release. I grab that, but building it fails with:

Internal() warning CS8018: Could not find the symbol writer assembly (Mono.CSharp.Debugger.dll). This is normally an installation problem. Please make sure to compile and install the mcs/class/Mono.CSharp.Debugger directory.

OK, I give.

In some ways, the mono platform is coming along more quickly than Java, but the fact remains: it takes a long time to deploy a new platform. The MonoDebianPlan shows lots of scary packaging issues.

Tags: programming, debian, media,

See also: #swig notes from tonight's journey.