Free Software

Emacs is known for its multiple incarnations, I've personally used the original Emacs written in Teco, ZWEI on the Lisp Machine, the ones that came with various Lisp systems, Epsilon on early PCs, and many others I don't recall.  GNU Emacs is a tool I still can't give up!

An Emacs-like editor in Javascript, running in your browser?  Mihai Bazon's done it: http://www.ymacs.org/

Yow, will hacking fun ever end?

Sometimes you have to work on remote Linux systems from a Windows computer, and under a lot of security restrictions.  Well, as long as you can install GNU Emacs for Windows and the Putty tools, you can actually work quite comfortably.

First, Emacs has a very useful extension called tramp (transparent remote file access) that offers remote editing through combinations of scp, ssh and others.  On Windows, it can use plink.  You can work on remote files by prefixing their names using the same Putty session names you use to open terminals on remote systems.

For instance, using the setup below, if you have created a "user@host" Putty session name, use this name for your remote home directory in Emacs: "/plinkx:user@host:".

Opening a shell while you're editing remote files will get you in a remote shell session, with completion and directory tracking, which is reasonably comfortable :-)

NTEmacs is a port of GNU Emacs on Windows, currently at version 23.0.0, it comes with tramp and works fine with the following setup:

(require 'tramp)
(setq tramp-default-method "plinkx")

:;; Use ssh mode with plink
(setq ssh-program "plink")
;;; We use Putty session names of the form user@host
(setq ssh-explicit-args '("-load"))

(defun shell-host ()
  (interactive)
  (make-local-variable 'default-directory)
  (cd-absolute "/plinkx:user@host:~")
  (shell))

(setq explicit-shell-file-name "bash")

It happens... Windows XP crashed on one computer and repair didn't work. So I set out to reinstall it completely, and before that, to retrieve the "My Documents" stuff that should really always be kept from one installation to another, and never be removed. Anyway. I started the machine on a UBCD CD-ROM I had, launched FreeDOS, and after I typed in a few commands, I remembered about WinPE and asked myself "Hey, has anybody made something like a Windows Live CD?"

Googling quickly led me to Bart's Preinstalled Environment, or BartPE. It builds a bootable ISO image from a working Windows XP installation, and worked like a charm. There is an Explorer-like GUI, so it was really painless to move stuff around.

When I partitionned my 300GB disks a while back, I was liberal and allocated a bit more than 8GB for each of /tmp, /var and /usr - just in case. As was bound to happen, time went by and the 250GB /home partition filled up and eventually became uncomfortable. An easy solution to this problem is to resize partitions to have less free space where I don't need it and more where I need it. So I downloaded the GParted LiveCD 0.3.4-6, booted it and... it stopped right after a message saying:

Freeing unused kernel memory: XXXKB freed

OK... I had an old GParted LiveCD around, just to check I tried it, everything started OK but... it could resize ReiserFS partitions but not move them - and I needed that.

I had a look at the GParted news page, to find an older release that could move ReiserFS partitions and start on my old VIA Epia + 3ware card system.

Before touching anything, I mirrored the data on the spare drive, and set to move the partitions using 0.3.1. Went OK until I got a "bad signature" error at the end of GParted action, which rendered my partition table useless.

I rebuilt the Raid, until I had again a running system and a mirrored spare. And tried GParted LiveCD 0.3.2.

At last! It worked perfectly. I moved and resized a few partitions including the big one, and gained enough room to delay any disk or system upgrade when I will deem it appropriate.

UPDATE: GParted's original author now makes Parted Magic, which is the same code base as former versions of GParted - it's too late for me to use it this time, but I'll try it at the next opportunity.

Or, how Free Software saves the day - again.

These days I'm using Virtual PC virtual machines to enable remote developers to run and test software on a Linux development platform. I set the VMs up and distribute them to be run elsewhere, so the developers may work independantly without stepping on one another's toes, and still have the same environment. Very nice.

I had noticed that the VM's clock was getting late - about 4 seconds every minute - which is a lot. It turned out that this was breaking the build process: file dates were set using Subversion's commit time, which was correct, but the system's date was in the past. The make program saw that files dates were in the future and looped, because built files were never set at a later date than the source files.

I enabled the NTP service, but the clock still drifted too fast for it to compensate.

Looking around for an existing solution, I found imacat's great and to-the-point vsntp program, tried it, checked it corrected the clock drift indeed, modified it to use alarms instead of a sleep loop because it got stuck after the VM was paused/suspended, sent the patch with my thanks.

To make this work, you'll need a NTP server you can poll as frequently as every 15 seconds - so do this on your own NTP server only.

I tried a little to enable the Windows XP NTP server - could have been an elegant solution to use the host OS to sync the guest OS :-) - but I could not get it to work. Since we had an available NTP server everybody could synchronize from on the Internet, I left it at that.

Now on Radio France some broadcasts are available as MP3 podcasts... This is good, and to make it even better I wanted to make them available on the home Linux jukebox.

To do this I found Podget, which I quickly added to the set of cron jobs, wrapped up in some scripts to log the output and so on.

Et voilà! Now I automatically get the radio show "Des papous dans la tête" on the family's MP3-playing home appliance :-)

At last!  There's a Ken Burns Effect screensaver for Windows, and it works great: Eron Steger made the iSlideshow Screensaver, still in Alpha but very stable, no problem at all on the home laptop.

It delayed my urge to buy an Apple computer, for the moment :-)

Link: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~esteger/islideshow/

A friend asked my about editing digital camera Raw photo files without Photoshop CS and its plugin.  I thought "hey that's right I haven't tried that yet" and so I went out on The Gimp's plugin registry to see if I could use any on my Canon G2 files.

First I tried Matthew H. Ploughs' Windows binaries of Paweł Jochym's RawPhoto version 1.19 http://ptj.rozeta.com.pl/Soft/RawPhoto

Installation consisted of opening the downloaded zip file, displaying the readme.txt and following the instructions: copy rawphoto.exe to GIMP-2.0\lib\gimp\2.0\plug-ins directory.  As indicated, I went to http://home.arcor.de/benjamin_lebsanft/ for the binary of Dave Coffin's DCRaw, then moved to http://www.lebsanft.org/blog/?p=274, downloaded the zipped dcraw.exe and put it in GIMP-2.0\bin -- that was it.

It works well, a drawback being the command window displayed while DCRaw works.  During import you can adjust parameters, check for overexposure, saturated pixels, and quite briskly it showed my Raw file in all its Gimp glory.

Great!  But I was looking for something easier to install.

Then down the plugins page I found Udi Fuchs' Unidentified Flying Raw (UFRaw), which has a nice Windows installer and also works as a standalone program to modify image parameters and save it in the same format.  No command window on this one, it's seamlessly integrated.  And it has a very helpful User Guide.

Even better!

I'm a long time Emacs user, since the early 80's in fact, the TWENEX days. When GNU Emacs appeared on Unix, it became my main tool.

My main e-mail archive is a set of MH folders, and I've been using Kazu Yamamoto's great Mew mail reader because of its multilingualism and nice handling of MIME.

Recently, after leaving it unused for many months, I finally switched to my Gmail account. POP and SMTP interfaces worked fine with Thunderbird, my other e-mail software, but not yet with Mew.

Now it does! I found a sample configuration on Dead Poet Weblog, the only thing I could read on the page was the Lisp bit, all the rest is in Japanese.

I downloaded installed Mew's 4.2 version, installed stunnel wiith a single urpmi stroke, just had to add one line to my .emacs and it was up and running: