Fun facts from the UDD //at 23:20 //by abe

After spotting an upload of mira, who in turn spotted an upload of abe (the package, not an upload by me aka abe@d.o), mira (mirabilos aka tg@d.o) noticed that there are Debian packages which have same name as some Debian Developers have as login name.

Of course I noticed a long time ago that there is a Debian package with my login name “abe”. Another well-known Debian login and former package name is amaya.

But since someone else came up with that thought, too, it was time for finding the definite answer to the question which are the DD login names which also exist as Debian package names.

My first try was based on the list of trusted GnuPG keys:

$ apt-cache policy $(gpg --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg --list-keys 2>/dev/null | \
                     grep @debian.org | \
        	     awk -F'[<@]' '{print $2}' | \
                     sort -u) 2>/dev/null | \
                   egrep -o '^[^ :]*'
alex
tor
ed
bam
ng

But this was not satisfying as my own name didn’t show up and gpg also threw quite a lot of block reading errors (which is also the reason for redirecting STDERR).

mira then had the idea of using the Ultimate Debian Database to answer this question more properly:

udd=> SELECT login, name FROM carnivore_login, carnivore_names
      WHERE carnivore_login.id=carnivore_names.id AND login IN
      (SELECT package AS login FROM packages, active_dds
       WHERE packages.package=active_dds.login UNION
       SELECT source AS name FROM sources, active_dds
       WHERE sources.source=active_dds.login)
      ORDER BY login;
 login |                 name
-------+---------------------------------------
 abe   | Axel Beckert
 alex  | Alexander List
 alex  | Alexander M. List  4402020774 9332554
 and   | Andrea Veri
 ash   | Albert Huang
 bam   | Brian May
 ed    | Ed Boraas
 ed    | Ed G. Boraas [RSA Compatibility Key]
 ed    | Ed G. Boraas [RSA]
 eric  | Eric Dorland
 gq    | Alexander GQ Gerasiov
 iml   | Ian Maclaine-cross
 lunar | Jérémy Bobbio
 mako  | Benjamin Hill
 mako  | Benjamin Mako Hill
 mbr   | Markus Braun
 mlt   | Marcela Tiznado
 nas   | Neil A. Schemenauer
 nas   | Neil Schemenauer
 opal  | Ola Lundkvist
 opal  | Ola Lundqvist
 paco  | Francisco Moya
 paul  | Paul Slootman
 pino  | Pino Toscano
 pyro  | Brian Nelson
 stone | Fredrik Steen
(26 rows)

Interestingly “tor” (Tor Slettnes) is missing in this list, so it’s not complete either…

At least I’m quite sure that nobody maintains a package with his own login name as package name. :-)

We also have no packages ending in “-guest”, so there’s no chance that a package name matches an Alioth guest account either…

Emacs Macros: Repeat on Steroids //at 16:06 //by abe

vi users have their . (dot) redo command for repeating the last command. The article Repeating Commands in Emacs in Mickey Petersen’s blog Mastering Emacs explained Emacs’ equivalent for that, namely the command repeat, by default bound to C-x z.

I though seldomly use it as I mostly have to repeat a chain of commands. What I use are so called Keyboard Macros.

For example for the CVE-2011-3192 vulnerability in Apache I added a line like Include /etc/apache2/sites-common/CVE-2011-3192.conf to all VirtualHosts.

So I started Emacs with all the relevant files: grep CVE-2011-3192 -l /etc/apache2/sites-available/*[^~] | xargs emacs &

To remove those “Include” lines again M-x flush-lines is probably the easiest way in Emacs. So for every file I had to call flush-lines with always the same parameter, save the buffer and then close the file or — in Emacsish — “kill” the buffer.

So while working on the first file I recorded my doing as a keyboard macro:

C-x (

Start recording

M-x flush-lines<Enter>CVE-2011-3192<Enter>

flush all lines which contain the string “CVE-2011-3192”

C-x C-s

save the current buffer

C-x C-k<Enter>

kill the current buffer, i.e. close the file

C-x )

Stop recording

Then I just had to call the saved macro with C-x e. It flushed all lines, saved the changes and switched to the next remaining file by closing the current file with three key-strokes. And to make it even easier, from the second occasion on I only had to press e to call the macro directly again. So I just pressed e for a bunch of time and had all files edited. (In this case I used git diff afterwards to check that I didn’t wreck anything by half-automating my editing. :-)

Of course there are other ways to do this, too, e.g. use sed or so, but I still think it’s a neat example for showing the power of keyboard macros in Emacs. More things you can do with Emacs Keyboard Macros are described in the EmacsWiki entry Keyboard Macros.

And if you still miss vi’s . command in Emacs, you can use the dot-mode, an Emacs mode currently maintained by Robert Wyrick which more or less automatically defines keyboard macros and lets you call them with C-..

Creative Toilet Paper Usage in Webcomics //at 10:34 //by abe

Funnily two of my daily web comics recently featured interesting things you could do with toilet paper: Zits on 19th of September 2011 involving a fan and Calvin and Hobbes on 13th of September 2011 involving flushing the toilet.

Although both experiments are obviously resource wasting, they look like quite some fun and I’m tempted to actually try them both at least once. (I though don’t plan to try this, too. :-)

Useful but Unknown Unix Tools: How wdiff and colordiff help to choose the right Swiss Army Knife //at 12:18 //by abe

In light of the fact that it seems possible to fit the plastic caps of a Debian branded Swiss Army Knife (Last orders today!) on an existing Swiss Army Knife (German written howto as PDF), I started to think about which Victorinox Cybertool would be the best fitting for me.

And because the Victorinox comparison page doesn’t really show diffs, just columns with floating text which are not very helpful for generating diffs in your head, I used command line tools for that purpose:

wdiff

Because the floating texts are not line- but just whitespace-based, the tool of choice is not diff but wdiff, a word-based diff. It encloses additions and removals in {+…+} and [-…-] blocks. (No, those aren’t Japanese smileys although they look a lot like some. ^^).

The easiest and clearest way is to copy and paste the texts from Victorinox’ comparison page into some text files and compare them with wdiff:

$ wdiff cybertool34.txt cybertool41.txt
{+Schraubendreher 2.5mm,+} Pinzette, Nähahle mit Nadelöhr, {+Holzsäge,+} Bit-Schlüssel( 5 mm Innensechskant für die D-SUB Steckverbinder, 4 mm Innensechskant für Bits, Bit Phillips 0, Bit Phillips 1, Bit-Schlitzschrauben 4 mm, Bit Phillips 2, Bit Hex 4 mm, Bit Torx 8, Bit Torx 10, Bit Torx 15 ), Kombizange( Hülsenpresser, Drahtschneider ), Stech-Bohrahle, Kugelschreiber( auch zum DIP-Switch verstellen ), Mehrzweckhaken (Paketträger), {+Metallsäge( Metallfeile, Nagelfeile, Nagelreiniger ),+} Dosenöffner( kleiner Schraubendreher ), Kleine Klinge, Grosse Klinge, Ring, inox, Mini-Schraubendreher, Kapselheber( Schraubendreher, Drahtabisolierer ), {+Holzmeissel / Schaber,+} Bit-Halter, Stecknadel, inox, Schere, Korkenzieher, Zahnstocher

So this already extracted the information which are the seven tools which are in the Cybertool 41, but not in the Cybertool 34. Nevertheless the diff is still not easily recognizable on the first glance. There are several ways to help here.

First wdiff has an option --no-common (the according short option is -3) which just shows added and removed words:

$ wdiff -3 cybertool34.txt cybertool41.txt
======================================================================
{+Schraubendreher 2.5mm,+}
======================================================================
 {+Holzsäge,+}
======================================================================
 {+Metallsäge( Metallfeile, Nagelfeile, Nagelreiniger ),+}
======================================================================
 {+Holzmeissel / Schaber,+}
======================================================================

This is already way better to quickly recognize the actual differences.

But if you still also want to see the common tools of the two knifes you need some visual help:

One option is to use wdiff’s --terminal (or short -t) option. Added words are then displayed inverse and removed words are shown underlined (background and foreground colors hardcoded as there is no “invert colors” style in CSS or HTML):

$ wdiff -t cybertool34.txt cybertool41.txt
Schraubendreher 2.5mm, Pinzette, Nähahle mit Nadelöhr, Holzsäge, Bit-Schlüssel( 5 mm Innensechskant für die D-SUB Steckverbinder, 4 mm Innensechskant für Bits, Bit Phillips 0, Bit Phillips 1, Bit-Schlitzschrauben 4 mm, Bit Phillips 2, Bit Hex 4 mm, Bit Torx 8, Bit Torx 10, Bit Torx 15 ), Kombizange( Hülsenpresser, Drahtschneider ), Stech-Bohrahle, Kugelschreiber( auch zum DIP-Switch verstellen ), Mehrzweckhaken (Paketträger), Metallsäge( Metallfeile, Nagelfeile, Nagelreiniger ), Dosenöffner( kleiner Schraubendreher ), Kleine Klinge, Druckkugelschreiber, Grosse Klinge, Ring, inox, Mini-Schraubendreher, Kapselheber( Schraubendreher, Drahtabisolierer ), Holzmeissel / Schaber, Bit-Halter, Stecknadel, inox, Schere, Korkenzieher, Zahnstocher

But some still like to to use color instead of the contrast-rich inverse and the easily to oversee underlining. This is where colordiff comes into play:

colordiff

colordiff is like syntax highlighting for diffs on the command line. I works with classic and unified diffs as well as with wdiffs and debdiffs (the debdiff command is part of the devscripts package).

$ wdiff cybertool34.txt cybertool41.txt | colordiff
{+Schraubendreher 2.5mm,+} Pinzette, Nähahle mit Nadelöhr, {+Holzsäge,+} Bit-Schlüssel( 5 mm Innensechskant für die D-SUB Steckverbinder, 4 mm Innensechskant für Bits, Bit Phillips 0, Bit Phillips 1, Bit-Schlitzschrauben 4 mm, Bit Phillips 2, Bit Hex 4 mm, Bit Torx 8, Bit Torx 10, Bit Torx 15 ), Kombizange( Hülsenpresser, Drahtschneider ), Stech-Bohrahle, Kugelschreiber( auch zum DIP-Switch verstellen ), Mehrzweckhaken (Paketträger), {+Metallsäge( Metallfeile, Nagelfeile, Nagelreiniger ),+} Dosenöffner( kleiner Schraubendreher ), Kleine Klinge, Grosse Klinge, Ring, inox, Mini-Schraubendreher, Kapselheber( Schraubendreher, Drahtabisolierer ), {+Holzmeissel / Schaber,+} Bit-Halter, Stecknadel, inox, Schere, Korkenzieher, Zahnstocher

$ wdiff cybertool29.txt cybertool41.txt | colordiff
{+Schraubendreher 2.5mm,+} Pinzette, Nähahle mit Nadelöhr, {+Holzsäge,+} Bit-Schlüssel( 5 mm Innensechskant für die D-SUB Steckverbinder, 4 mm Innensechskant für Bits, Bit Phillips 0, Bit Phillips 1, Bit-Schlitzschrauben 4 mm, Bit Phillips 2, Bit Hex 4 mm, Bit Torx 8, Bit Torx 10, Bit Torx 15 ), {+Kombizange( Hülsenpresser, Drahtschneider ),+} Stech-Bohrahle, {+Kugelschreiber( auch zum DIP-Switch verstellen ), Mehrzweckhaken (Paketträger), Metallsäge( Metallfeile, Nagelfeile, Nagelreiniger ),+} Dosenöffner( kleiner Schraubendreher ), Kleine Klinge, [-Druckkugelschreiber,-] Grosse Klinge, Ring, inox, Mini-Schraubendreher, Kapselheber( Schraubendreher, Drahtabisolierer ), {+Holzmeissel / Schaber,+} Bit-Halter, Stecknadel, inox, {+Schere,+} Korkenzieher, Zahnstocher

(Coloured “Screenshots” done with ANSI HTML Adapter from the package aha.)

Some, especially those who are used to git, are probably confused by the default choice of diff colors. This is easily fixable by writing the following into you ~/.colordiffrc:

newtext=green
oldtext=red
diffstuff=darkblue
cvsstuff=darkyellow

(See also /etc/colordiff for the defaults and hints.)

colordiff has by the way two operating modes:

• Without parameter it reads diffs from standard input as seen above.
• With parameters it works as drop-in diff replacement including all diff options as shown below.

So now let us compare the Cybertool 29 with Cybertool 34 in a normal diff (by using the texts from above and replacing all commata with newline characters) with git-like colors:

$ colordiff cybertool29-lines.txt cybertool34-lines.txt
12a13,14
> Kombizange( Hülsenpresser
> Drahtschneider )
13a16,17
> Kugelschreiber( auch zum DIP-Switch verstellen )
> Mehrzweckhaken (Paketträger)
16d19
< Druckkugelschreiber
25a29
> Schere

Or as unifed diff with some context:

$ colordiff -u cybertool29-lines.txt cybertool34-lines.txt
--- cybertool29-lines.txt     2011-08-31 20:55:37.195546238 +0200
+++ cybertool34-lines.txt   2011-08-31 20:55:11.667710504 +0200
@@ -10,10 +10,13 @@
 Bit Torx 8
 Bit Torx 10
 Bit Torx 15 )
+Kombizange( Hülsenpresser
+Drahtschneider )
 Stech-Bohrahle
+Kugelschreiber( auch zum DIP-Switch verstellen )
+Mehrzweckhaken (Paketträger)
 Dosenöffner( kleiner Schraubendreher )
 Kleine Klinge
-Druckkugelschreiber
 Grosse Klinge
 Ring
 inox
@@ -23,5 +26,6 @@
 Bit-Halter
 Stecknadel
 inox
+Schere
 Korkenzieher
 Zahnstocher

So if you want nicely colored diffs with Subversion like you’re used to with git, you can use svn diff | colordiff.