Peace, Love and C++

playing with non-lintian lintian checks

Thu, 24 May 2012 20:25:03 -0400

Crazy title, I know.

Over the past $WHILE, I’ve found myself checking for the same things. Some of these are fit for inclusion into lintian it’s self — others, not so much.

Here’s a rundown on what my lintian wrapper (tragically also called “lintian” and just higher up on my $PATH. I know it’s a hack.)

Since I only use lintian on .changes files - it pre-processes for some information that is stuffed in the changes.

The first step is to get all the bugs that the package closes. It then takes these bugs, and queries the BTS to see what package they’re filed against. If the bug is filed against a different bug then the package’s source, it’ll emit a warning. It has a greylist for stuff like “WNPP”. This will fail if something’s filed against it’s binary package rather then it’s source :)

Next, the wrapper will get “other” info from the changes. It checks if the suite is in the blacklist (“UNRELEASED”, and “testing”, (stable for me as well, since I don’t usually deal with SRUs often)).

It’ll also check for the changed-by and maintainer, ensuring they’re the same. This will fail for co-maint’d packages.

If you’ve not guessed by now, this system relies on false-positives :)

Nextly, if there are .debs in the Files, it’ll go through and check the control of each. It’ll print out a stanza with the short-description inside a template, to see if the description “works”.

After that, it’ll attempt to make HTTP requests to the Homepage (and eventually URLs in the description and VCS-Browse)

If the package has “python” in the source name anywhere, or in any of it’s binary packages, it’ll trigger jwilk’s lintian4python over the source as well.

After this, it passes through to regular lintian.

Oh, and it colorizes all the output :)

Here is a (mostly lint-free) package:

As you can see, it’s very (very) verbose, but i’d rather cross stuff off a checklist then worry about something being off.

Anyway, it’s a work in progress. Not even a serious one, at that. It’s a bunch of hacks put together, so I can’t really endorse anyone else using this stuff. If you feel crazy enough to do so, all the tools are found on my dot-bin repo on GitHub

gcc 4.7 patchathon

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 10:44:01 -0400

For no reason other then I had some time, I went on a patchathon against gcc-4.7 ftbfss while watching frasier

This log is really for my own use :)

Blocked 667409, 667394 and 667393 with newly filed bug 668700 in libcrypto++ (regarding providing gcc-4.7 invalid headers)
Patch sent in for 667418 (wvstreams)
Patch sent in for 667415 (wmhdplop)
Patch sent in for 667334 (pwlib)
Patch sent in for 667333 (ptlib-wolf)
Patch sent in for 667327 (populations)
Filed serious bug 668698 against cxxtools for providing a broken header
Filed serious bug 668700 against libcrypto++ for providing a broken header

Intent to become a Debian Developer

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 20:12:21 -0500

Howdy!

I’d like to officially state (for the record) that it is my intent to apply to become a Debian Developer within the next $TIMEFRAME.

Currently soliciting advice and opinions before nm.d.o comes back online :)

It’s a big step, but it’s a natural one.

Gametime?

Mapping the Ubuntu Community

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 12:04:15 -0500

In playing with some tools I’ve run into at $work, I’ve tried loading in some Ubuntu datasets in some fun and interesting ways.

Today, I’ve chosen to map all Ubuntu Members with a public lat/lon, sized by Karma.

The sizes relate to if the Karma is greater then:

1: 10

2: 50

3: 100

4: 500

5: 1000

6: 2000

7: 7000

8: 15000

9: 25000

10: 50000

So, without further adieu, here’re some maps!

python-sunlight (or: get at some awesome US Political data programmatically)

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:45:00 -0500

I’ve spent a few days during work, after work and on the weekend working on python-sunlight, a unified API implementation of a few Sunlight services.

This is very unstable, and not released yet (so please don’t rely on it yet), but it will be shortly.

Be sure to sign up for an API Key, and dump the key to ~/.sunlight.key — there’s a simple script to help with some of this in bin/, but nothing solid yet.

I do, however, encourage you to use it and play around with it, and report your bugs.

Contributions (in the form of code) are also very welcome, so please do fork the project and play around with it.

Just to give everyone a taste of how cool this is — this will pull up a list of twitter IDs of people who mention “free market” more then anyone else according to the congressional record:

from sunlight import capitolwords
from sunlight import congress

for person in capitolwords.phrases_by_entity(
    "legislator",
    phrase="free market",
    sort="count",
):
    n = congress.legislators( bioguide_id=person['legislator'],
        all_legislators="true" )
    if len(n) >= 1:
        n = n[0]
        if n['twitter_id'] != "":
            print n['twitter_id']

And the output:

RepRonPaul
stevekingia
SenSherrodBrown
JacksonLeeTX18
SenatorLeahy
ChuckGrassley
SenJohnMcCain
OrrinHatch
DanaRohrabacher
JudgeTedPoe
McConnellPress
edtowns
SenatorDurbin
SenatorSessions
SenatorHarkin
SenChrisDodd
russfeingold
RosLehtinen
sencarllevin
senjonkyl
Dennis_Kucinich
senatorsanders
SenatorReid
RepDanBurton
RepMikePence
SenSamBrownback
joebiden
FrankPallone
ToddAkin
senatorboxer
RepTrentFranks
JohnCornyn

Have fun!

Show off what’cha got, and please let me know if you do something cool!

Hey look! Openstates data!

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:25:41 -0500

npr’s site is using some OpenStates data, the project I’m currently working on at sunlight labs.

If you feel like affecting change in US politics, and know Python, we could use some help (it’s a F/OSS project!) over on github

Keep being awesome!

Dual-screen setup with aligned bottom edges

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:35:30 -0500

For the sake of anyone else who’s fighting their screens, I’ve got a script that will do this (but very very slowly)

setup script

xrandr --output VGA1  --auto
xrandr --output LVDS1 --auto
xrandr --output VGA1  --rotate left
eval "`monconf`"

monoconf script

#!/usr/bin/env python
import subprocess
output = subprocess.check_output(["/home/tag/.bin/mon.ls"])
output = [ item.split() for item in output.split("\n") ]

mons = {}

for mon in output:
    if len(mon) > 0:
        if mon[1] == "connected":
            res=mon[2]
            res=res.split("x")
            for item in res[1].split("+"):
                res.append(item)
            res.pop(1)
            mons[mon[0]] = res

BOTTOM_LEFT = "LVDS1"
TOP_RIGHT="VGA1"

LEFT_WIDTH  = mons[BOTTOM_LEFT][0]
LEFT_HEIGHT = mons[BOTTOM_LEFT][1]

RIGHT_WIDTH  = mons[TOP_RIGHT][0]
RIGHT_HEIGHT = mons[TOP_RIGHT][1]

print "xrandr --output %s --pos 0x%s" % (
    BOTTOM_LEFT,
    (int(RIGHT_HEIGHT) - int(LEFT_HEIGHT)))
print "xrandr --output %s --pos %sx0" % (
    TOP_RIGHT,
    int(LEFT_WIDTH)
)

and the mon.ls command

xrandr -q | grep "^[^\ ].*" | grep -v Screen

All of this is super hacky, but it works.

json / vim love

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:30:42 -0500

Use vim? Check out some sweet vim exrc stuff for editing one-line JSON files:

autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.json set filetype=json
command Js silent %!jp
command Jc silent %!jcompress
autocmd FileType json Js

jcompress and jp are both on my github. Have fun!

libolla (from the useless script department)

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 13:32:51 -0500

Hello, World!

Today’s hacks come remotely, on the first day of my long trek to Cleveland. As many debian readers know, debian URLs are usually transmitted over IRC or email with some snappy abbreviations. Usually, you’ll see something like:

Feel free to check out information about frob at wiki.d.o/Frob

or something like:

I have uploaded package bar onto mentors.d.n for review

What bugs me most about this is that I have to expand URLs by hand. Which is lame. Enter libolla (a fitting name as well as a graceful nod to my alma mater John Carroll University’s crest).

When LD_PRELOAD’d, it’ll intercept and expand calls to getaddrinfo transparently. It seems to work fine on SSH, and chrome (but I can’t test well, since I’m not on a real line).

This was all hacked up in a few hours I had to spare, and without any sort of internet love, so I’m willing to bet there are some bits that can be cleaned up (after all, the name of the blog is “Peace, Love and C++”, not “Peace, Love and C” - I don’t clam to be a c expert ;) )

So, feel free to fork the project on github (or as I can now do - http://g.c/paultag/libolla)

Now, I just need to find a way to globally pre-load this for apps that I start in my DE. Should be easy enough fiddling with some env-var files.

Another post from the "Useless Script" department

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 10:03:59 -0500

A while back I wrote some nodejs that mish-moshed email and web 2.0 long-poll action into a very ugly, but fairly up-to-date showing of debian changes. That is over on my server here.

The code’s fairly simple, so I also wrote a python consumer here.

Since it’s so simple, I’ve pasted it below, too.

Feel free to use (but please not abuse) my server :)

#!/usr/bin/env python

import time
import urllib
import json

service = "http://pault.ag:8080/tail"
lastts  = 0

def loop():
        global lastts
        while True:
                f = urllib.urlopen("%s?since=%s" % (service, str(lastts)))
                msgs = json.loads(f.read())
                for x in msgs['messages']:
                        print x['text']
                        if lastts < x['timestamp']:
                                lastts = x['timestamp']

loop()