Inspirated

The standard way of including source code listings in Beamer is to use the semiverbatim environment. Needless to say, it does not provide all the syntax highlighting and line-numbering love of the listings package. Combine the two and you have something pretty as well as extremely helpful in delivering presentations which have code:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47

\documentclass{beamer}
 
\setbeamercovered{transparent}
 
\usepackage{pxfonts}
\usepackage{listings}
 
\begin{document}
 
\lstset{language=python,
        numbers=left,
        numberstyle=\tiny,
        showstringspaces=false,
        aboveskip=-40pt,
        frame=leftline
        }
 
\begin{frame}[fragile]
\frametitle{\texttt{parrot.py}}
\begin{semiverbatim}
\pause
\begin{lstlisting}
if __name__ == "__main":
 
\end{lstlisting}
 
\pause
\begin{lstlisting}[firstnumber=last]
    print "Oh yes, the, uh,
           the Norwegian Blue..."
    print "What's, uh...
           What's wrong with it? "
 
\end{lstlisting}
 
\pause
\begin{lstlisting}[firstnumber=last]
    print "I'll tell you what's wrong with it,
           my lad."
    print "'E's dead,
           that's what's wrong with it!"
 
\end{lstlisting}
\end{semiverbatim}
\end{frame}
 
\end{document}

Thanks to Christoph Korn, Ubuntu users can now install the package with a single click from the GetDeb repository. The Deb file itself is available on the release page here, along with an RPM for Fedora users.

The looks:

And the hooks:

Changelog:

• Fixed:
  • Bug #522735: Facebook: Application Request Limit Reached
  • Bug #523378: Connection reset by peer
  • Bug #522487: Facebook Friends Graph fails when friends have a dash in their name [patch by Little Jawa]

Threads are love. Threads are speed. And more often than not, threads are a consistent PITA. However, I’ve had an accidental epiphany just a few hours ago:

“When in doubt When you need to communicate among threads, use synchronized Queues.”

There. This magic mantra will solve more issues in your life than you can ever imagine, and certainly more than I expected.

Getting back to the topic at hand, adding threading support to the program has sped up the bookmark checking process by a factor of about 435895234. Coupled with fixing of some parsing bugs, Bookmark Undertaker v0.3 is finally capable of providing a quick, stable and consistent way of sanitizing your Firefox favorites:

This time, I’ve also tried to provide Deb and RPM packages on the release page for easy installation by the Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora populace.

Ushering in the era of communist applications:

“If everyone gives one thread, the poor person will have a shirt.” — Russian Proverb

I never really thought anyone other than me would be interested in seeing gargantuan graphs of their friends’ connections until I found out through this post on the OMG! Ubuntu! blog that my application was included in the GetDeb repository for Ubuntu users. I have not used Ubuntu myself since about never, but apparently you can now install the application on Karmic Koala with just a few clicks.

The application itself was in a pretty much skeletal state of being so I was a little taken aback by the exposure. Nevertheless, I was reminded of the famous aphorism apropos of open source development:

“Release early, release often.” — Linus Torvalds

And indeed, the bug reports that came from users were a valuable byproduct of the Ubuntu push as I had stopped development on the script after it started working fine for me.

“Anyone who slaps a ‘this page is best viewed with Browser X’ label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.” — Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996

People never learn. Slapping such labels is one thing, they even go as far as adopting brain-dead practices of checking user-agent strings and refusing service to any browser not originating from Redmond. For example, Opera Mobile — the sexiest mobile application on planet — works astonishingly well for Javascript websites. Nevertheless, when trying to browse my university’s academic management portal on it I am presented with a big ugly “We’re dumb, you need to open this page with Internet Explorer 6.0 or later because it uses JAVASCRIPTXX0RZ.” Even though Opera does allow spoofing of user-agent strings, the fake strings still contained “Symbian” as the operating system which still resulted in incompatibility errors.

As ever, Python came to the rescue. Firing up the Twisted framework, I created a simple HTTP proxy which modifies the user-agent string on the fly. Peaches:

The script is still very quirky and is the farthest thing from what you’d call a stable solution. You can download the inital release here. The zip file contains the tiny proxy server script as well as Twisted and Zope dependencies. Good luck with trying to counter retards who’re doing everything they can to avoid compatibility. Yes, even 14 years after Sir Tim’s veracious proclamation.

Continuing the migration to E71, here’s the new release for Inbox Stats which works on Python 2.5 releases:

inboxstats-1.1.zip

As I finally got my hands on a S60 3rd Edition device last week in form of E71, it was obviously the time to fix my PyS60 scripts for the new version. By using some workarounds to fix some brain-dead compatibility issues which I will detail in a later post, I was able to get CSV Auto-Responder running properly:

csvautoresponder-1.0.zip

GTK+ needs no introduction. LaTeX is the first thing that pops in anyone’s mind if mathematical equations’ typesetting is under consideration. Matplotlib — while not as well-known as the former two — is the super easy and elegant solution for scientific plotting on *nix platforms.

For an application demo, I required all three. Past experience has taught me that the most straightforward way of “gluing” things together is Python. GTK+ therefore = PyGTK. Next up was LaTeX, and a previous solution of mine for embedding LaTeX in PyGTK came to the rescue. The final requirement of Matplotlib was fulfilled without any hassle since the library was already written in Python.

The collective result was pretty:

radareq-0.1.tar.gz

(Click on the image for larger version.)

The linked tarball contains the Python scripts for the application. For everything to run smoothly, LaTeX and Matplotlib packages need to be installed on your system. If you encounter any issues running the code, feel free to flame your distribution for the apparent lack of sanity regarding package management.

No matter how much you try to keep the browser bookmarks clean, inevitably they jumble up and one day you realize that you have no idea which links are working and which aren’t. This is where a small utility named AM-Deadlink comes to the rescue for Windows users which checks the links for errors. Somehow, the utility lacked an alternative in the open-source world. And this is where Bookmark Undertaker comes into picture:

(Click on the image for larger version.)

For the utility, I chose PyGTK as UI backend. For parsing the bookmarks.html files exported from Firefox, I used Beautiful Soup. The latter, I must say, made my life a lot easier by cleverly sanitizing the insanity contained in Firefox’s exported favorites, staying true to the project tagline:

You didn’t write that awful page. You’re just trying to get some data out of it. Right now, you don’t really care what HTML is supposed to look like.

Neither does this parser.

And indeed it does not.

For the time being, the application imports the bookmarks properly and displays their attributes including the favorite icons. It then checks the linked URLs for errors in a separate thread and marks them as working or non-working accordingly. Exporting the bookmarks is next on the TODO-list, while it’s possible that in future I will internationalize the application as well.

Time to purge those pesky outdated 404’s.

The idea is pretty simple actually. You run the application on your cellphone and give it the path of a CSV file. The file contains some data which can be queried. For example, let’s assume that the contents are:

ID,Name,Age,Message
0,The Black Knight,43,”I move for no man”
43,Sir Galahad, 38,”Oh, let me have just a little bit of peril?”
569,John Doe,21,”Hello World”

Next, you choose a keyword; something simple like “Respond”. Then, you put the cellphone aside. It keeps checking the incoming SMS messages and as soon as it receives a message having something similar to … :

Respond 43

… it queries the CSV file and replies to the sender with results of the lookup. In our case, the reply will be:

Received query 43 from +xxxxxxxxxxxx
Found record in database:
> Name: Galahad
> Age: 38
> Message: Oh, let me have just a little bit of peril?

And that is it. The script can be downloaded from this link. Updates in future shall be linked on its specific Inspirated Code page. Here’s the whole thing in action: