/var/cache/apt/ on tmpfs //at 16:44 //by abe

My ASUS EeePC 701 (4G) “nemo” running Debian Sid has a 4 GB SSD as main disk, which is on the one hand quite full (mostly with software I use, but also local working copies of software I work on) and on the other hand an SSD, so I always try to reduce the amount of write to disk without losing convenience. Similar issues have systems which run off a CF or SD card or maybe even an USB stick.

Since I ordered a 2 GB RAM bar together with the EeePC, I not bound to the 512 MB which it had originally. But on the other hand I seldom needed more than 1 GB of RAM. Usually I needed between 400 MB and 1 GB of RAM. So it’s quite obvious to use tmpfs on as many places as possible.

Making /tmp, /var/run and /var/lock tmpfs were the most obvious directories to mount as tmpfs. Especially /var/run on tmpfs brought up a few bugs a while ago (mostly init.d scripts relying on /var/run/$PACKAGENAME/’s existence), but it’s no hassles to use nowadays. Even in Debian Stable such bugs got fixed.

Next target to explore for was /var/cache. According to the FHS, /var/cache is intended for cached data from applications. […] The application must be able to regenerate or restore the data. So it should be safe to put anything under /var/cache on tmpfs.

One directory in there which gets written quite often and with a lot of data on Debian Unstable is /var/cache/apt and its subdirectories, especially /var/cache/apt/archives. If you update your Sid installation daily, all new or updated .debs will be downloaded to /var/cache/apt first.

So I put /var/cache/apt on tmpfs by putting the following line into /etc/fstab:

tmpfs /var/cache/apt tmpfs defaults,noexec,nosuid,nodev,mode=0755 0 0

But despite FHS stating that anything under /var/cache must be reproducible by the application, apt is puking and refusing to work:

!447 Z31 ?0 L1 root@nemo:pts/0 (-zsh) 16:13:10 [~] # apt-get update
E: Archive directory /var/cache/apt/archives/partial is missing.
!448 Z32 ?100 L1 root@nemo:pts/0 (-zsh) 16:13:17 [~] # 

If you create /var/cache/apt/archives/partial, it will also argue about /var/cache/apt/partial.

Of course the workaround is simple: Just put mkdir -p /var/cache/apt/partial /var/cache/apt/archives/partial in /etc/rc.local.

But nevertheless, this is a bug in apt – which already has been reported by madduck earlier this year (#523920). Unfortunately the APT maintainers have not yet even commented on this FHS violation and therefore also a Debian Policy (Section 9.1.1) violation.

One more thought about /var/cache/apt vs only /var/cache/apt/archives: apt-file also caches its data under /var/cache/apt. So if you want to use apt-file after a reboot and have /var/cache/apt mounted as tmpfs, you have to run apt-file update first and it will download all Contents files (can be dozens of megabytes) and not only the differences to previously downloaded Contents files.

So if you use apt-file a lot, you probably go better with making only /var/cache/apt/archives tmpfs and not whole /var/cache/apt.

Screen and Emacsclient: Automatically switching to the Emacs window //at 18:41 //by abe

For a very long time, I use mutt with emacsclient as configured editor and a single GNU Emacs instance started from either .screenrc or .Xsession, depending on the system. And I’m very used to switching the virtual desktop or the screen window after starting a mail in mutt.

Since Debian 5.0 Lenny and Emacs 22, Emacs automatically grabs the focus and switches to the right virtual desktop. So after telling mutt recipient and subject of a new e-mail, it invokes emacsclient and immediately the focus has moved to the running Emacs instance. Because I was used to switch one virtual desktop to the right at that point, I often found my self two desktops to the right until I got used to it. :-)

I usually hate applications which grab the focus without being asked. But in this case I basically asked for it. And there’s no delay like with starting up an application which has to read in some database first – think of Liferea or Rhythmbox which take many seconds to minutes to start up, even on my 2.2 GHz dual core ThinkPad.

In the meanwhile I got so used to that automatic desktop switch that I forget to switch the screen window in the second scenario where I use this combination: My screen doesn’t automatically switch to the Emacs window (window 1) after I told mutt recepient and subject in window 2.

Knowing that screen is quite scriptable, I found out that only a very small change is needed to my mutt configuration to get that desktop feature to my everyday screen session. I simply replaced the editor setting in my .muttrc with the following line:

set editor="screen -X select 1;emacsclient"

Now mutt tells screen to switch to window 1 (where Emacs is running) and then tells Emacs to open the appropriate file to edit my new mail.

Update Friday, 2009-04-24, 18:22

Even though Zack surely is right with his comment about the multi-terminal feature of the upcoming GNU Emacs 23, I still have Etch (and therefore GNU Emacs 21) on the server where I have my screen session.

So the next step was to switch back to the mutt window (window 2) after I’m finished with editing the mail. Since mutt gives the the file to edit as argument to the contents of $editor, simply adding ;screen -X select 2 at the end of $editor doesn’t suffice.

So I wrote a small shell script (named ~/.mutt/editor.sh) as wrapper which calls all the commands and passes the parameters to the right command:

#!/bin/sh

screen -X select 1
emacsclient -a ~/.mutt/alteditor.sh "$@"
screen -X select 2

Of course, $editor is now set to that script:

set editor="/home/abe/.mutt/editor.sh"

Emacsclient of GNU Emacs 21 already supports the -a option to call another editor in case of not being able to connect to a running Emacs instance. Since I don’t want to switch to another screen window in that case, I wrote a second shell script (named ~/.mutt/alteditor.sh) which switches back to the mutt window and then calls GNU Zile, my preferred low-end emacs clone:

#!/bin/sh

screen -X select 2
zile "$@"
screen -X select 1

I love it!

Useless Statistics, the 2nd //at 18:05 //by abe

Myon recently posted a nice statistic about popular single letter package name prefixes. Just out of curiosity I started wondering about popular single letter package name suffixes:

On a machine with Debian oldstable, stable, testing, unstable and experimental in its sources.list, I ran the following command:

$ apt-cache search -n . | \
    awk '{print $1}' | \
    sed -e 's/.$//' | \
    sort | \
    uniq -c | \
    sort -n

And to my surprise there is a non-obvious winner:

$ apt-cache search -n '^gp.$'
gpa - GNU Privacy Assistant
gpc - The GNU Pascal compiler
gpe - The G Palmtop Environment (GPE) metapackage
gpm - General Purpose Mouse interface
gpp - a general-purpose preprocessor with customizable syntax
gpr - GUI for lpr: print files and configure printer-specific options
gps - Graphical Process Statistics using GTK+
gpt - G-Portugol is a portuguese structured programming language
gpw - Trigraph Password Generator

But since I searched through the binary packages many other hits are more obvious, like the seven packages hbf-cns40-1 to hbf-cns40-7:

      [...]
      4 ar
      4 aspell-f
      4 automake1.
      4 cpp-4.
      4 e
      4 g++-4.
      4 gappletviewer-4.
      4 gcc-4.
      4 gcj-4.
      4 gcompris-sound-e
      4 gfortran-4.
      4 gij-4.
      4 go
      4 gobjc-4.
      4 gobjc++-4.
      4 h
      4 iceweasel-l10n-e
      4 iceweasel-l10n-k
      4 kde-i18n-f
      4 kde-i18n-h
      4 kde-l10n-e
      4 kde-l10n-s
      4 kile-i18n-e
      4 koffice-i18n-e
      4 koffice-i18n-s
      4 koffice-l10n-e
      4 koffice-l10n-f
      4 libqbanking
      4 myspell-f
      4 myspell-h
      4 openoffice.org-help-e
      4 openoffice.org-l10n-b
      4 openoffice.org-l10n-h
      4 openoffice.org-l10n-k
      4 sd
      4 tcl8.
      4 tk8.
      5 aspell-e
      5 aspell-h
      5 iceweasel-l10n-s
      5 kde-i18n-b
      5 kde-i18n-e
      5 kde-i18n-t
      5 kde-l10n-k
      5 openoffice.org-l10n-e
      5 openoffice.org-l10n-t
      5 pa
      5 tc
      6 gc
      6 kde-i18n-s
      6 libdb4.
      6 m
      6 openoffice.org-l10n-n
      6 openoffice.org-l10n-s
      6 s
      7 hbf-cns40-
      9 gp

But there are also some other interesting observations to make:

• OpenOffice.org seems to have by far the biggest number of localisations, with KDE being 2nd.
• There are 6 version of the Berkeley DB in Debian: libdb4.2 to libdb4.7 (including oldstable as mentioned above)

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to find the full names of the other package names starting with s, m, gc, pa or tc and having just one additional character. ;-)

How to make identi.ca talk //at 04:50 //by abe

The listeners of yesterday’s episode of Venty’s Hackerfunk radio show on Radio LoRa already know and heard it: We made identi.ca talk. And we did it with help of other microbloggers. (The podcast version of this Hackerfunk episode will be online in a few days, too. Will link it here and either Venty or me will post it on identi.ca, too, as soon as it’s published.)

A few weeks ago we thought about how we could “show” microblogging on the radio. With identi.ca’s Jabber (XMPP) interface we have real time access, and so the idea was born to pipe all incoming ‘dents into a speech synthesis system.

Then we tried to figure out which tools would be appropriate. Quite fast, people on identi.ca as well as on the LUGS IRC (e.g. bones0) pointed us to festival and espeak. We found no support for German in festival, so we went for espeak – although festival would have had the advantage of the existence of a festival plugin for the popular multiprotocol messenger Pidgin.

Next step was more difficult than expected: How to make a “tail -f” of XMPP incoming messages? Something like rsstail, just for XMPP. Although using the IM to IRC gateway Bitlbee (as I use it myself) and using “tail -f” (or better “inotail -f”) on the IRC client’s log file (ii comes to my mind for such purposes) would have been an option, nobody had the idea at that time.

And since @deepspawn conjured xmpptail in less than two hours we happily took it. xmpptail (tar.gz) is written in Python and uses Twisted Words (Debian package python-twisted-words) as XMPP libraries.

I had to patch xmpptail slightly for unbuffered I/O, Unicode support and for removing things we don’t want to hear on the radio as follows, but it worked more or less out of the box.

--- xmmptail.py 2009-02-25 20:47:48.000000000 +0100
+++ xmpptail.py 2009-03-07 18:48:57.000000000 +0100
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-#!/usr/bin/python
+#!/usr/bin/python -u
 # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
 # author: Carlos A. Perilla 
 # This file is part of Jance bot.
@@ -65,7 +65,8 @@
          body = unicode(e.__str__())
          break
 
-    print("%s: %s" % (from_id,body))
+#    print("%s: %s" % (from_id,body))
+    print("%s" % (body.encode('utf-8')))
 
 
 def authfailedEvent(xmlstream):
@@ -80,9 +81,9 @@
   dprint('Got something: %s -> %s' % (el.name, str(el.attributes)))
 
 if __name__ == '__main__':
-    print "Starting"
+    #print "Starting"
     execfile('tailconf')
-    print USER_HANDLE
+    #print USER_HANDLE
     me = USER_HANDLE + "/xmpptail"
     myJid = jid.JID(me)
     server = USER_HANDLE[USER_HANDLE.find('@')+1:]

So after configuring xmpptail to use the hackerfunk Jabber account, we successfully ran the following script during the radio show:

./xmpptail.py | while read LINE; do
        if [ "$LINE" = "empty" ]; then
                continue;
        fi;
        echo $LINE
        echo $LINE | tee -a xmpp-espeak.log | espeak --stdin -v de;
done

At the end of the show, @rebugger found this howto which describes very detailed how to get festival working together with the non-free (“non-free” as in DFSG) MBROLA project which offers also the appropriate files for German. But because of how much work this would be to get it running, I currently prefer to stay with espeak for German speech synthesis .

Next step would be to use mnoGosearch’s mguesser to detect the language of a dent and run espeak (or whatever text-to-speech system is appropriate for the guessed language) with the appropiate options for that language, because otherwise many ‘dents sound really funny. ;-)

Update, 15:02: Venty gave the whole system the name “Identibla”.

Musikalisches-Podcast-Stöckchen //at 16:15 //by abe

Ist schon heftig, da bekommt ein Stöckchen von einem Podcast, obwohl man gar kein Podcasts hört – nur halt ab und an in einer Radiosendung auftaucht, die’s auch als Podcast gibt.

Und vorallem, wie verlinkt man solche Stöckchen? Ich klau mal die ausformulierten Regeln mal hier, das war in der Kette (Ascari → TomInMuc → Podshots → Ventys Hackerfunk → Bones0 seinem Chabis Podcast → hierher) grade greifbar.

Also hier die Regeln: “Suche das sechste Lied im sechsten Ordner heraus. Alternativ darf es auch das sechste Lied der sechsten CD im Regal oder das sechste Lied der Playlist sein.”

Da Ordner bei mir je nach Lust und Laune eine unterschiedliche Sortierung haben können, ist der sechste Ordner witzlos. Da gespielte Songs bei Rythmbox aus der Playlist rausfliegen, hat sich der sechste Song seit ich angefangen habe, diesen Text zu schreiben, mehrmals geändert. Also zum CD-Regal. Da sind grade viele CDs zweckswegen Sicherheitskopien grade nicht drin. In der ersten Spalte ist das sechste Fach leer und wenn mal die Fächer von rechts nach links und dann erst die nächste Reihe zählt, dann kommt — nee, das will man nicht, das sind Jugendsünden. ;-) Also nehmen wir in der ersten Spalte einfach die sechste CD und dort den sechsten Track:

Royal Philharmonic Orchestra London — Yesterday

Also der Beatles-Klassiker “Yesterday” als Instrumental.

Wer den Song hören will, der sollte heute um 19 Uhr auf Radio LoRa den Hackerfunk einschalten. Venty wird den Track dort spielen. Aus dem Hackerfunk-Podcast wird der Song aufgrund der Halsabschneiderei der Musikindustrie leider rausgeschnippelt werden.

Achja, in der heutigen Folge des Hackerfunks wird es um Microblogging gehen. Und ich bin, wenn auch noch durch Erkältung etwas der Stimme beraubt, ebenfalls mit von der Partie.

Und wer ist als nächstes dran? Venty meinte vorhin auf #lugs so praktisch, daß Priska ja Stöckchenspezialistin sei, also geben wir das Stöckchen mal dorthin weiter. :-)

Now playing: Herbert Grönemeyer — Bleibt alles anders

Daily Snapshot .debs of Conkeror //at 01:58 //by abe

Keeping track with packaging software which is under heavy development can be time-consuming. I noticed this while packaging Conkeror, because there was quite a demand for up-to-date packages, especially from upstream themself.

So recently on the IRC channel #conkeror the idea of automatically built Debian packages came up. After a few hours of experimenting and a few days of steadily optimizing, I can proudly present daily built snapshot packages of Conkeror for currently Lenny and Sid, ready to be included in your sources.list:

deb     http://noone.org/conkeror-nightly-debs lenny main
deb-src http://noone.org/conkeror-nightly-debs lenny main

deb     http://noone.org/conkeror-nightly-debs sid main
deb-src http://noone.org/conkeror-nightly-debs sid main

The binary package conkeror-spawn-process-helper is currently only built for the i386 architecture, but other architectures may follow.

The packages probably work also on any other Debian based distribution (e.g. Ubuntu) which includes XULRunner version 1.9.

Surely they are not of the usual Debian quality, but they should do it for staying up-to-date with the Conkeror development just by using your favourite APT frontend.

The script which generates those packages is also available in the Conkeror git repository at repo.or.cz.

The APTable archive is generated with reprepro. Packages and the repository are signed with the passphrase-less GnuPG key 373B76B4 which is used only for the Conkeror nightly builds. (If anyone knows a better solution for automatic builds than a passphrase-less key, please tell me. :-)

P.S.: I really like the new keybindings “<<”, “>>” and “G”. :-)

MBC09: The Day Before //at 08:39 //by abe

Helped my parents moving the first half of the week. Left there at Thurdays around 9am. Drove 45min to Zurich. Removed everything bicycle related from my daypack. Left the TomTom at home. (Google Maps on the E51 has to sufficed and sufficed so far.) Crammed cloths for three days in.

Was at Zurich Main Station around 11:40am. My plan was to take the direct ICE train from Zurich to Hamburg Dammtor. Bought a Rivella for the journey.

First suprise at the platform: No ICE train. Instead a Swiss InterCity. The staff told us due to a defect in the ICE train, we have to go to Basel SBB with this train, then switch trains there. No carriage numbers and reservations valid here. Hrmpf. For luck, there where not that many people in the train. No power sockets though.

Next surprise at Basel SBB: No ICE train here either. We’re advised to switch to a German InterCity and then switch again a few kilometers later at Basel Badischer Bahnhof (aka “Basel, German Station”).

There then finally waited an ICE labelled as the initially expected ICE 72 from Zurich to Hamburg Altona. Even the reservations were displayed, departure was though 20min later than the original ICE 72.

The voice from the speakers told us that this is a replacement train which came empty from Zurich. WTF? The next time the voice explained the situation, it was a replacement train coming from Interlaken… Ok, DB is not as insane as I believed for about half an hour. ;-)

Worked though the git tutorial and the git glossary on the train since in future I’ll use git in some of the OSS project I’m working together with — Conkeror beyond others. Also had a conversation with some doctor from University Hospital Zurich who has chasing as hobby. (WTF?)

The train arrived about 45 minutes late at Dammtor, so I first checked in in my hotel (“Hotel am Dammtor”, very close to the MBC09 venue) and then walked to Hamburger Botschaft where the twitter reading was already running, hoping to meet someone I know and having dinner afterwards. Guided by Google Maps on my Nokia E51 it took longer than expected to walk there. And it was windy and raining.

The twitter reading venue was quite full, but I still found a place where I saw most of the screen. At least the reminder of reading was quite funny: #famouslasttweets. They closed with a tweet similar to “And then there’s also identi.ca”. :-)

I was told it wasn’t that funny at the beginning. Didn’t find anyone I really knew, just sticked to a group talking about being hungry. When we met @igorette on our way to some restaurant and he recognised me, I found out that @muhh was also in the group I’m heading though Hamburg.

We had a nice dinner at Schmitt Foxyfood, I had GrillGold (Pommes Frites) with WuchtBrumme (Currywurst) and Fritz Cola.

After dinner, @moeffju drove me and some other guy to our hotels.

So the first evening was already very interesting despite the usual lateness of Deutsche Bahn.