Archives for the 'Open Source and Free Software' Category
Extol of Declarativeness
Thursday, November 6th, 2008
Far too many programmers underestimate the beauty of declarative programming. This is something which cames from the industry: functional languages are traditionally under-employed and perceived as academic choices. In fact a lot of research has been done with Lisp and Prolog (mostly in U.S.A. and Europe respectively) in AI and formal languages fields.
However, declarative languages [...]
Python considered harmful?
Friday, October 17th, 2008
Yesterday morning I started writing a simple tool which should compile all C++ files in a given directory tree. Ok, simple enough, it’s just a matter of a simple os.walk and some subprocess.call.
After that, I thought that it would be nice if the tool did something more. For example, I could write down a [...]
iPython and the less pager
Sunday, October 5th, 2008
When I develop software in Python, one of the most valuable tools is iPython. Among the first functions one learns to love, there are the ? and ?? commands.
Putting a ? after an identifier, gets help for that identifier, putting ?? shows the source. Lets use a couple of examples.
It’s easy to see how this [...]
The Year of the Kludge
Thursday, October 2nd, 2008
Some days ago, I put back on this blog. Today I dedicated about half an hour to the forum we used to run here on akropolix.
This means reading a lot of PHP. More PHP than I like to see in a whole year. I’ve yet to recover.
It’s exciting to see this big PHP applications work [...]
My Yellow Dog ate my Red Hat.
Monday, August 6th, 2007
I’ve always been one of the (not so) few geeks who run Linux on PowerPC.
Sometime ago, Linus himself was one of us, however, it appears that now
he uses a different machine.
Since Apple dropped PPC, the Linux PPC world is quite in turmoil. The architecture is perceived as almost dead. However, new interest comes from the [...]
Illuminated keyboard on PowerBook G4 and Linux.
Wednesday, April 25th, 2007
An image is worth a thousand words.
It was a matter of mod-probing i2c-dev.
It is a custom Linux 2.6.20 Kernel on Debian Unstable. Cool!
Execute saved Synaptic markings
Thursday, March 22nd, 2007
It happens quite often that I use synaptic to manage packages on my debian.
However, sometime I save the markings in order to perform the installations another time.
For example I need to apt-get something quickly without waiting for the whole thing to be
downloaded and installed.
The standard procedure would be running synaptic again and then loading the [...]
Welcome Home, Debian! (Ubuntu PPC discontinued?)
Wednesday, March 21st, 2007
Recently there are rumors that Ubuntu PPC will be discontinued.
In fact there is an IRC log about it:
Something asked a few times: Will PPC support be discontinued soon?
We will make a final decision on PPC for Feisty by the end of next week
if there is sufficient community contribution on this, then the community port can be just as good as a Canonical-supported one
we would keep the builds in place, but not block the release if things failed to build
so if people step up to unblock issues when they occur, then PPC would be on the same footing as it currently is
sabdfl, will “but ps3 is ppc” be a valid argument? (asked a few times as well)
the extra architecture costs us a lot in terms of testing bandwidth at release time, and figuring out issues like how to deal with the live CD are compicated
if SONY fund Ubuntu-on-PS3 then I guarantee it will happen
.Xmodmap hex digits
Friday, December 22nd, 2006
I’s a couple of day I’m hacking with xmodmap and keycodes to make my keyboard behave as I expect.
Recently it sprang to my mind that with SuSE 7.1 I used a utility called xkeycaps.
Unfortunately enough xkeycaps generates an .Xmodmap with keycodes expressed as hex numbers, while xev shows code as decimal numbers
This simple ruby oneliner [...]
Windowmaker
Monday, December 18th, 2006
How much I love windowmaker…
Now it is much less used than once… Most people do use KDE or GNOME (or XFCE) and the good old Window Managers are kind of forgotten (or maybe simply unknown to the masses). However, when I started KDE was slow and took every single byte of RAM from my machine. [...]