YJL --verbose

Using Blogger builtin Google Analytics support

2012-02-25T15:48:00.000-08:00

I was wandering around the settings section and found out I can not only turn off sharing on Google+ but also have Google Analytics support from Blogger. I recall I had read it long time ago on Blogger Buzz.

I want it because the pageviews from View will be also tracked. I can not touch the code of View, so this option is very helpful if I want to have complete tracking statistics. I have put View link on top of navigation bar for really long time and I probably lost some data.

I wrote my own Layout template, so it won't work by default in my own layout. It is actually very simple to have it, add the following line before </body>, e.g.

  <b:include data='blog' name='google-analytics'/>
</body>

I also removed the tracking code from my main JavaScript script, so I wouldn't have duplicate data.

This is probably the second of third time I use View mode on Blogger, not only on my blog but entire Blogger blogs. I don't really like View, it looks good and nice, but I am just not a fan of it.

Maybe because it create unique style over different blogs. I like variety, diversity of styles or layouts or designs. Pretty or ugly, doesn't matter. The important thing is the style of the blog's owner. With View, it doesn't reveal of that much.

Since I hardly check the View of my blog. I just realize there are two ads units. One at right side, the other at bottom. I roughly check with FireBug Net tab, I think they are belong to me, my Google AdSense Publisher ID, I believe. (It's long ID, but looks like mine)

As you may know, I put two ad units in my template, so I don't object for the such convenience. Just I don't see any setting options I can adjust size or location for my View. So it probably also a unique setting all over the views, I guess.

Blogger new post preview with Google Analytics?

2012-02-25T14:35:00.000-08:00

Updated at 2012-02-25T23:08:40Z: This has nothing to do with Blogger. It seems Google Analytics' tracking script will detect if you hold the account. If you do, then it shows you the interface. Here is a screenshot when I view the homepage of my blog:

When I was writing my previous post, I saw this after I hit preview button:

We found no clickthroughs for this page. Try adjusting the date range or select another page.

You got it perfectly right, Google Analytics! Because it's totally new post, how could you find click? If you do, either your are a fortune teller or something gone haywire.

But I don't mind this show up when I edit my old posts. It would be nice to know some statistics. Only it takes a few seconds to load the Google Analytics frame every time you hit preview button.

Download GAE access log and check geographic location of IPs using MaxMind geoip-python

2012-02-25T14:24:00.000-08:00

I need to find an IP whose geographic location is already known from other source. Normally, it’s the other way around, but this situation is different. I will explain in later post.

First, downloading the access log from GAE. It is simple, this is the command I ran:

python google_appengine/appcfg.py --num_days=3 request_logs project/ access.txt

--num_days specified 3 days of logs, the default is the logs of current calendar date, according to the documentation, options of request_logs can be found below in that page.

Next is to find the geographic location by IP address. You need to install MaxMind Python binding with C core on your system. Here is the core snippet I use to generate results:

import GeoIP

#gi = GeoIP.new(GeoIP.GEOIP_MEMORY_CACHE)
gi = GeoIP.open("/usr/share/GeoIP/GeoLiteCity.dat",GeoIP.GEOIP_STANDARD)
gi6 = GeoIP.open("GeoLiteCityv6.dat",GeoIP.GEOIP_STANDARD)

with open('ips.txt') as f:
  for IP in f:
    IP = IP.rstrip('\n')
    if ':' in IP:
      gir = gi6.record_by_addr_v6(IP)
    else:
      gir = gi.record_by_addr(IP)
    print '%s: %s, %s, %s' % (IP, gir['city'], gir['region_name'], gir['country_name'])

GAE accepts both IPv4 and IPv6 connection, so you may want to also to look up for IPv6 address, or you will need to filter out IPv6 addresses and drop them. You can download free city database for IPv6. Note that Python binding version may need to be 1.2.7 for IPv6, I know 1.2.4 does not support IPv6.

Before you run this snippet, you need to process access.txt to have unique IPs:

cut -f 1 -d ' ' access.txt| sort | uniq > ips.txt

On Linux, it’s simple as that, or you can process in Python, I think it’s only need one line.

So, I ran:

script.py | grep '<CITY NAME>'

I got no results, I am sure if the requests were made, it must lies within 3 days. Something is really fishy.

Although I didn’t find that IP, but I wrote this post.

Sigh, it used to be Google Reader...

2012-02-24T18:40:00.002-08:00

This is how the future is, Google+ centralized. It used to be linked to Google Reader, if I recall correctly.

Social networking obstacle

2012-02-24T18:22:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I was watching a stream. The broadcaster received a Twitter following request via Facebook post (or something, not sure what that is called on Facebook). The screen showed the caster clicked on the link to the requester's Twitter page. The next ten or twenty seconds, the viewers watched the caster trying hard to find the "Follow" button to follow which had been under cursor for most of time.

As you could imagine, viewers were laughing so hard as I was, or ROFL or LMAO for short. Even I has stopped using Twitter almost two years ago and the layout has been changed quite a lot, I still could spot that button right away.

Recently, I found out a very interesting fact. Even someone in their sixties, they may be good at using Facebook but not be able to take care of their Windows operating system. They may be tapping like a pro on iPad, having some awesome apps installed by themselves. But never heard of or used RSS feed.

People seem to get used to be in a certain circle or website. For example, the Facebook. They are so used to it and somehow can't have a concept that they can also follow/subscribe to same group of people on other websites. Everything has to be provided or accessed via Facebook. If something is mentioned by someone, some will ask for a link.

Day after day, you will see same people ask for same thing again and again. They never learn to receive the new updates from other website which is the original source. It looks to me as if everything has to be on Facebook and only, or they would be completely unknown to those people.

Do people really have problem using other website which they are not familiar with? Certainly not, just too lazy to click.

I had used Facebook for some time and de/re/activated my account for two times at least. I just couldn't get the idea of Facebook. It's not social, in fact, not really any of social networking websites is real socializing, they are social networking, but not social.

Well, maybe they are not for general purpose, but for people to hook up someone for sexual purpose in my feeling. Nevertheless, it's still possible you can use it to find your high school classmate or long lost friends.

I also tried a few times on Google+, but never got into it, not even tried to add someone to the circles. The more I used these websites, the more I feel it's the sea of messages or posts or updates or whatever you call it.

We are buried in those messages. For me, I am afraid that I may be missing something important, something has real value. Not just that kind of chit-chat or j/k or LOL messages. It's not like I dislike those, life without those will be boring, but I don't want those to mess up with real message, either.

On Google+, you have a slider to filter the amount of messages. I know I definitely wouldn't want to try that because the chance of missing a message. I guess you can make sure someone's message will always be shown, but you never know if you remember to maintain the whitelist. In many case, it's human error of user's. They forget to set or update certain message.

You must be either having a crystal mind or giving no about what you may miss if you want to use social networking correctly, or it will just be obstacle in social life.

Email, phone, and letter are better than those.

XChat Python plugin for monitoring messages

2012-02-24T17:10:00.000-08:00

I wrote this Python snippet for XChat:

import os
import xchat


__module_name__ = "xchatmsgmon"
__module_version__ = "0.0.0.1"
__module_description__ = "Python module for monitoring messages"


def on_message(word, word_eol, userdata):

  if '@' in word[2] and \
     xchat.get_info('channel').startswith('#friends') and \
     'y' in word[1]:
    os.system('/usr/bin/mplayer /usr/share/sounds/warning.wav')


xchat.hook_print('Channel Message', on_message)
print "%s loaded." % __module_name__

To load it, run /py load /path/to/script.py or just /py load script.py if you save it at default configuration directory like ~/.xchat2. Run /py unload xchatmsgmon to unload it.

You can check sender’s username in word[0], user’s mode in word[2], and the message is word[1]. After callback function is hooked by xchat.hook_print, all channel messages will be sent to the callback function. But only the messages meet the rules below:

Sent by OP, i.e. mode with @.
Sent to channel name starts with #friends.
With letter y in the message.

If the message meet the rules above, then a command is executed. This is just snippet, so the command may not work on your system. You can use any notification system or play media file with your favorite library. Creating GTK window with red background for ultimate attention. Whatever you want as long as you can code it.

You may also want to hook up the highlight message print event as the issue mentioned here. You can read this xchat-python page, it’s a good place to get started writing about XChat Python binding.

Google Search's Blocked Sites

2012-02-24T13:10:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I was thinking to turn off Personalized Results, so I can see what non-signed in user would see. Don't want to use second browser/private session/etc to because I remember I used to see there is a link below the search result which you can temporarily turn off personalized results, but it has long gone.

I head over to the Search Settings, funny thing is I didn't see such option even a help entry, Turn off personal results, mentioning it. I don't have Web History running but I do have Google+ and I can see those additional results/annotations for social circles. I sometimes see Google Help doesn't help at all because things have changed, but help documentation doesn't get updated.

Anyway, what I saw is Blocking unwanted results, I don't long how long it have been sitting there, but I am glad I finally noticed it!

"You may block up to 500 sites." Oh yeah, that should be enough for me. I tried one and the website was removed from the results immediately.

I don't intent to block spam websites or content farms, those sites could be more the the population of cockroaches in the entire world. I want to block some archive websites as I mentioned in a post about Google Chrome Personal Blocklist Extension.

For those spams, I can only hope Google Search's algorithm will make them never see the light, rusting at the deep dungeon. Don't even think about it, they are rats, not dragon slayer. This is not video game, you nerdy dude! ;)

As for archive type websites, I don't really need to see them when there are original public source, even they are legit in my definition.

I have seen many times, they outrank original source which is never a good thing in my opinion. Besides, for one source, it could be four or more website doing the archiving. That means every five results, there is only one unique content, the only difference is the design/layout and ads.

Back to the blocking setting, you can download the list as text file, but I don't see an option for you to upload. If you really have many entries, it will be easy to maintain on your end with your favorite editor.

How so? Because I wouldn't just let it be simple text of lines of URL. It will be grouped with comments. For example, if the original archive site down, I can uncomment the archive sites group, then upload the temporarily updated list, so I can see those blocked archive sites.

Of course, I will have my custom shell script to generate uploading list text file, comments will be removed from output. Well, you only need one grep, actually.

But that's just how I would like to use it if you can upload. Who knows, we might even have API for this. I only really hope this setting will stay, Google has terminated too many good stuff.

Alright, enough talking, time to put into more action. Gotta add more blocked sites to the list, it's Friday!

The old Blogger On This Day script

2012-02-23T22:14:00.001-08:00

Four and an half years ago, I wrote a JavaScript called On This Day. It is a script which shows what posts were published on the same date (Today’s date in reader’s timezone) of previous years. I wasn’t thinking it would still work, but it does:

On this day…

I looked at the code and felt “Oh, what a noob.” I really said that to myself, it’s embarrassing. At that time, I probably didn’t know much about JSON and/or JSONP. The code went a lot of trouble to use feed. I had thought about updating the code and making this On This Day thing a gadget recently, but never got started. I guess I will never do.

Anyway, before this script, there was a WordPress plugin for this. At that time, I was a WordPress user mainly, I didn’t recall why I wrote this script for Blogger. Probably because of the WP plugin.

It’s good to see an almost five years old code still running well. The files are hosted on Google Pages, they are still accessible, I thought Google shut down Pages two years ago. Obviously not entirely, or there is a limited time for files being online for a few years?

Adobe Flash Player will be switching to PPAPI only on Linux

2012-02-22T23:38:00.000-08:00

Well, in about five years... long time.

I just saw this thread, Adobe drops Flash for Linux, except Chrome, I was like "Come on, Adobe, don't do this to Linux users!" at first. But after I read that page, I am sure that OP missed some things.

Google and Adobe partner for this PPAPI which will be used for future Flash Player version. For current NS Plugin API version of Flash, it will only have security updates for up to five years.

It does not say Adobe drop development for Linux and only make Flash work for Chrome. It's API switch, that has nothing to do with specific browser. Just, it happens Google is doing this new PPAPI.

As long as other browser starts to provide PPAPI, newer Flash will still work, or you will still have old NS Plugin API Flash for up to five years with only security updates. For other operating systems, non-PPAPI version of Flash will still be developed as before.

Of course, it may take time for other browser to provide PPAPI for plugins, but I am sure it wouldn't be long. Flash is a big demand, just think about you can't watch silly cats running, some developers soon will help to make PPAPI happened in other browser.

All of these will only start to take place after the release of 11.2, currently latest version is 11.1.102.62. According to roadmap, 11.2 is scheduled to be released in the first quarter of this year.

However, I didn't like this switch. I have same comment like the first comment of that Adobe blog post:

By Ron - 11:20 AM on February 22, 2012

Doesn’t the NS Plugin API accomplish the same purpose?

If so, wouldn’t it be better to work with Mozilla to fix the flaws in the NS Plugin API?

Or is there a non-technical rationale for creating a different API?

I don't know anything about NS Plugin API or PPAPI, but why not just fix it if there is a problem or lots of issues? Why not Google, Mozilla, Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple (sorry, Adobe, I know) work together if they really need a new API? Or is PPAPI already the case?

Anyway, I don't really care about the detail as long as I have regularly updated Flash, it doesn't matter to me. I am not one of those who requires everything is open source or open.

Proprietary software doesn't make me uncomfortable, but softwares with security holes do.

Okay, right, I forgot: Flash's performance sucks. That's the only thing I bitch about Flash.

Trying to find the traffic source via Google Plus

2012-02-22T20:35:00.002-08:00

I just spent around 30 minutes to click on profiles on Google Plus, trying to find some profiles who has Blogger blogs listed in Contributor to section. But I can't find one, even Blogger's Plus.

I have been seeing a few traffic from Google Plus (http://plus.url.google.com/...) and the URL link attached to that referral link is FeedBurner's. So, it's clear to me someone was able to click a link from my blog's feed on Google Plus.

But I have never posted my blog posts on Plus when I published a new post, so it can't be me, can it? And that might not be a link via FeedBurner but a direct link, not sure what Blogger will put in the Plus post for the blog post link.

Anyway, it's not me after 30 minutes of trying to find a profile. I was thinking to add a profile to a circle (follow?), so I can see what it is, well, actually, I have no idea anything about Plus. I just want to reproduce by finding a profile like mine.

I didn't find one, but finally I realized that I could just search for the post title, then I found the source. It was someone who shared via Google Reader. Duh, all mysteries are solved at once.

Google Reader uses my FeedBurner feed and it can post on Plus when you want to share, which I stop using because I don't want to share on Plus. I used to add my comments, but since Google started pushing and squeezing everything of Google into that 4-letter word P-L-U-S, I don't like doing so any more.

During the profile hunting, I saw a few posts are about programming. Some of them have code included. Heck! That's just like reading NASA launch procedure programming code in variable-width text. It's gonna crash, at least in my brain. And...

Wait, where was I? Oh, right, the referrer thing...

So, what does this post tell you?

Simple, only two things:

I wasted 30 minutes on clicking profiles.
You just wasted 3 minutes on reading this post.

Phil? Phil!

2012-02-22T15:25:00.000-08:00

I wasn't going to post this video after moved it to my Bin of notes. But I was cleaning up that bin and clicked on this link while wondering what this YouTube link is in my notes bin. After watched one more time, it's too hilarious not to share.

It was broadcasted during some online gaming events. You can see a lot of people asking about Phil when it's commercial time.

Make sure you watch all the way through, the last line is the most important thing in this ads. xD

reStructuredText inline markup on partial word

2012-02-22T12:45:00.000-08:00

I have been using reStructuredText for blogging for months. It’s a good tool but it also has some bizarre tiny things to deal with. For example:

foo*bar*pub
foo**bar**pub
foo``bar``pub
*foo*bar
**foo**bar
``foo``bar

None of above will work as you expect. First three will result some text with asterisks, the last three will raise errors like:

<string>:9: (WARNING/2) Inline emphasis start-string without end-string.
<string>:9: (WARNING/2) Inline strong start-string without end-string.
<string>:9: (WARNING/2) Inline literal start-string without end-string.

The workaround is to escape a space or spaces:

foo\ *bar*\ pub
*foo*\ bar

They will look like foobarpub and foobar as we expect to see.

I have a note for reminders and my-rst2html.py for conversion. I think if you are also a blogger who post about coding, you may want to check out the PyRun directive. Since I write some Python code, so a directive like that can make life easier. Also, kbd role is a simple example for role.

I am still a noob, but reStructuredText is better than Markdown because of its extensibility. Certainly, you can hack Markdown library, but it can get ugly and you have to contribute back into the library core. It’s not like you don’t want to, but the code you use may not be useful for others. With Python docutils, you can maintain you own piece of code.

Grepsort

2012-02-22T11:52:00.000-08:00

Okay, I may make up of a name.

I use VimNote for note taking task and also have F4 bound with timestamp insertion. So there are some timestamps across all over my notes. They could look like:

In Note A:
  Blah blah -- 2012-02-22T19:02:44Z

In Note B:
  ...
  * Feature Foo (2012-02-22T19:03:14Z) [blah blah]
  * Feature Bar - 2012-02-22T19:03:41Z. (Not a good idea 2012-02-22T19:03:56Z)

In Note C:
  something.... at 2012-02-22,... then blah 2012-02-22T19:04:20Z.

etc.

As you can see, they are notes, so there is no strict way to put my timestamps. They can be at anywhere in a line.

Yesterday, I wanted to know what notes I took the day before, but there was no easy way to make a list which is sorted by timestamp since you can’t not be sure where they will appear, therefore you cannot simply use sort to sort.

Suddenly, grepsort came out of nowhere in my mind. I need to grep the timestamp and then sort by the result. Here is a quick example:

REGEX='2012-02-21[^ ]*' ; sed -n "/$REGEX/ {s/.*\($REGEX\).*/\1 &/;p}" * | sort | cut -d ' ' -f 2-

# breakdown
REGEX='2012-02-21[^ ]*'
sed -n "/$REGEX/ {s/.*\($REGEX\).*/\1 &/;p}" *
| sort
| cut -d ' ' -f 2-

$REGEX is the variable with the search pattern, which is used for grepping. Although it’s called grepsort, there is actually no grep being used. Of course, you can use grep, but sed can do it at once, why bother using grep? Why I not name it as sedsort? Because the fundamental is the grepping, not line editing in sed.

We need sed, because in order to use sort, we have to provide a sorting column. But essentially, if possible, which is not in common command-line tools, we only need to sort by the grepped result.

Anyway, as you can see, we use sed to find (grep) the lines with the pattern and prefix the matched result at the first of line as sorting column, then print out the result.

Next, sort does its job. In this case, we sort by timestamp, which is basically text. You can grep any kind of information and use specific sorting option provided by sort, such as file size, human-readable numbers, or month names.

Lastly, the sorting column is cut out, but I think this can be optional.

By the way, there is a benefit for using grep, if you insisit, when does multiple. The file name will be prefixed and you can also use -n for the line number.

I also wrote a simple Python version:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# Copyright 2012 Yu-Jie Lin
# MIT License

from __future__ import print_function
import fileinput
import re
import sys

def main():

  pattern = '(%s)' % sys.argv[1]
  files = sys.argv[2:]
  RE = re.compile(pattern)
  for line in sorted(filter(RE.search, fileinput.input(files)),
                     key=lambda line: RE.search(line).group()):
    print(RE.sub('\033[1;31m\\1\033[0m', line), end='')


if __name__ == '__main__':
  main()

I would say the actual code is sorted(...). It just as simple as that, but I think some Python wizard can make it even more magical.

Often times, I found it’s very easy to work with shell commands, one-liner can easily save the day. If you are using some GUI, I doubt they will have this kind of feature for you to click.

The only thing I don’t like is both of Bash and Python codes use the regular expression twice. Well, unless you write a command or function grepsort in C, this is how it should be processing. If Python sorted can catch certain of exception from key function, so it can drop some item during the sorting, then filter would not be needed.

Using list.js and jQuery for Blogger posts querying

2012-02-21T17:06:00.000-08:00

I recently got to know about list.js, it is an awesome script. With it, you can filter in more responsive way, which is the major feature I like and you don’t need to code much for that and sorting.

The following example is only for conceptual purpose, it’s incomplete and CSS style is not so good looking.

(any Blogger blog URL)

Filter: Sorting by: Title Published date

The actual JavaScript code is only about 30 lines, please view the source of this page, note that the code is licensed under the MIT License.

The only issue I had was how to get the data when click on post title. I put the id data from Blogger API, which provides an unique way to lookup via List.get list.js API. It should be able to just use post title, but there is a chance that posts could have same title.

This is not suitable for real use because it only gets recent 50 posts. It’s simple to do a multiple requests for getting all posts. As far as I know, you can get 500 posts at once via Blogger API, if I recall correctly. But the problem is not the coding but how much data has to be returned from Blogger. With only 50 posts, the returned data is already around 27KB. This blog has more than 750 posts, it could be around 400KB and more.

For performance issue, I think it might be better to pre-process in order to reduce the data size and process time, then merge with recent posts which is retrieved directly from API. It could be last # of posts or the current month, Blogger API allows you to query by time range.

As you may know my Labels page, which use different approach. Basically, in Labels page, the query is processed on Blogger’s server, but this list.js method is processing on client browser. They have different pros and cons.

If you need any explanation of my code or have any feedback, feel free to ask in comments.

Gotta watch this cooking video!

2012-02-19T13:36:00.000-08:00

I haven't post any cooking video on this blog, but this will be first one, made by smithbitevids, called "Chocolate Soufflés with Nougat Whip" via Chef John:

Anthony Bourdain has few episodes named "Food Porn" from No Reservations, but they are totally nothing comparing to this. Just hear the luscious stirring, whipping, pouring, oh man. Even chopping chocolate sounds sexy like hell.

And the visual impact is like there is no tomorrow. Splashing, sprinkling, dipping, dripping, tipping, hooray molee smokie!

Their videos are art.

libreoffice-bin 3.4.5.2 "Illegal instruction"

2012-02-19T12:27:00.000-08:00

This is a good example why that's good idea to check bug reports or forums before emerge/upgrade big package (long build time or long list of upgrading dependencies).

I had been holding up on libreoffice since version 3.3.4, the next stable version 3.4.x which I masked because it has long dependencies list which was required by 3.3.4. But yesterday, I decided to upgrade libreoffice to 3.4.5.2 even the dependencies list is still long.

Almost 20 packages were new installs on my system and I have to have CUPS and gstreamer and all other sorts I don't use. Merging from the source is too overwhelming for me. The last version I built was openoffice-3.0.0, 3 hours, 30 minutes and 12 seconds.

After finished, I did not run it right away and I just knew it has a bug report (and a thread) which you will see this error message:

~ $ loffice 
/usr/bin/loffice: line 2: 29884 Illegal instruction     /usr/lib64/libreoffice/program/soffice "$@"

Apparently, it only affects AMD64 arch and I am using that.

For now, I am uncommenting this line in /etc/portage/packages.mask:

=app-office/libreoffice-bin-3.4.5.2

and re-emerging for downgrading. Shouldn't have commented out that line. ;)

I have too many Python slots/versions installed

2012-02-18T19:20:00.000-08:00

Python 3.2.2 just got marked as stable on Gentoo and wants to be installed, but I already have four slots!

~ $ eix ^python$
[U] dev-lang/python
     Available versions:  
        (2.5)   2.5.4-r4
        (2.6)   2.6.6-r2 ~2.6.7-r2
        (2.7)   2.7.2-r3
        (3.1)   3.1.4-r3
        (3.2)   3.2.2
        {-berkdb build doc elibc_uclibc examples gdbm ipv6 +ncurses +readline sqlite +ssl +threads tk +wide-unicode wininst +xml}
     Installed versions:  2.5.4-r4(2.5)(12:27:19 PM 10/01/2010)(berkdb gdbm ncurses readline sqlite ssl threads tk wide-unicode xml -build -doc -elibc_uclibc -examples -ipv6 -wininst) 2.6.6-r2(2.6)(09:33:45 PM 02/28/2011)(gdbm ncurses readline sqlite ssl threads tk wide-unicode xml -berkdb -build -doc -elibc_uclibc -examples -ipv6 -wininst) 2.7.2-r3(2.7)(09:28:32 PM 10/28/2011)(gdbm ncurses readline sqlite ssl threads wide-unicode xml -berkdb -build -doc -elibc_uclibc -examples -ipv6 -tk -wininst) 3.1.4-r3(3.1)(09:32:19 PM 10/28/2011)(gdbm ncurses readline sqlite ssl threads wide-unicode xml -build -doc -elibc_uclibc -examples -ipv6 -tk -wininst)
     Homepage:            http://www.python.org/
     Description:         Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language.

I feel it's too many and I need to clean up. The disk space usage is fine, I would say:

~ $ equery s dev-lang/python
 * dev-lang/python-2.5.4-r4
         Total files : 1483
         Total size  : 23.78 MiB
 * dev-lang/python-2.6.6-r2
         Total files : 1654
         Total size  : 27.71 MiB
 * dev-lang/python-2.7.2-r3
         Total files : 1782
         Total size  : 29.68 MiB
 * dev-lang/python-3.1.4-r3
         Total files : 1671
         Total size  : 27.44 MiB

Less than 30 MiB per slot, it's not much, but the amount of files is little more. I don't think I really need 2.6, 3.1. I will just keep 2.7 and 3.2, the latest versions of 2.x and 3.x. For 2.5, I have to keep it until GAE Python runtime for 2.7 out of experimental stage and I want to update my codes if needed. (I don't really use GAE anymore)

For now, I am switching to 2.7 as active interpreter after upgraded to 3.2 and removed 3.1. python-updater has a long list of package to re-emerge, after that, I will remove Python 2.6 if no packages depends on it any longer. Here is a nice explanation how to maintain Python.

(I wonder other distributions can install multiple versions of Python like ez-pz-cupcake-cheese on Gentoo?)

python-progressbar

2012-02-18T18:04:00.000-08:00

I saw this python-progressbar package when I updated my system, it's part of Gentoo Portage tree. When I saw it in the output report of eix-diff, I thought: "Really? a library for progress bar and it is included in Portage tree, really?"

I checked out its examples and ran it, then I knew why it is a library and it's in the tree. That's a lot of awesome examples and many of the progressive stylesI have never seen before. So I made a video with an additional example ^_^:

REE is something I created last September and never really made useful out of it, well, since it wasn't supposed to be. It was made only for fun. But when I saw the animated bouncing progressbar, I knew that's where REE can chime in.

I probably won't create an issue for the modification for this REE example, because REEally?

Version comparison in Bash

2012-02-18T16:32:00.000-08:00

I wrote these snippets for version comparison and they are not in good quality but enough for me.

The following code is an implementation which compare arithmetically and alphabetically:

But I later found it can’t return the correct result I expect for 1.0 and 1.0rc1. So, I decided to strip and made a simplified version, it will die hard when non-digits are supplied.

I think there is another quick way to compare, using sort -V. sort can sort version strings, too. You feed it with two lines of version strings, then see which is returned first. But, I don’t think it covers all strange versioning schemes.

glsa-check

2012-02-18T11:28:00.000-08:00

I received this GLSA about Chromium via feed. I recalled I could get notified by emerge, but I might be mistaken. Anyway, I used glsa-check to get a list of affected packages, it turned out there was one GLSA issued last year:

Gentoo has a page of documentation about glsa-check, the page is almost two years old since last updated.

It's nice to have a command for updating package because of security issues, but the commands is little complicated to remember if you compare with revdep-rebuild. I wrote this post with screenshot, so I could get the commands when next time I need them. :)

glsa-check -l
glsa-check -t all
glsa-check -p $(glsa-check -t all)
sudo glsa-check -f $(glsa-check -t all)

Upgrading to dwm 6.0

2012-02-17T12:40:00.000-08:00

I was trying to update the DWM and got this error message from emerge:

dwm.c: In function 'createmon':
dwm.c:654:15: error: 'nmaster' undeclared (first use in this function)
dwm.c:654:15: note: each undeclared identifier is reported only once for each function it appears in
dwm.c: At top level:
dwm.c:1030:1: warning: 'incnmaster' defined but not used
make: *** [dwm.o] Error 1

It seems that dwm 6.0 has included the code of nmaster patch, or a re-implementation. Anyhow, you need to update your config.h for nmaster variable, even you don't use nmaster.

/* layout(s) */
// snip
static const int nmaster      = 1;    /* number of clients in master area */
// snip

static Key keys[] = {
// snip
 { MODKEY,                       XK_i,      incnmaster,     {.i = +1 } },
 { MODKEY,                       XK_d,      incnmaster,     {.i = -1 } },
// snip

The incnmaster function is to change the amount of clients in master area. I bind them to the keys which fits into my configuration, here is the diff I updated for this upgrade.

Before 6.0, I hadn't used nmaster patch, but I did feel the need of similar feature. There were some moments, master area is, well, too big for just one client. However, I have gridmode patch, sometimes it can sort of have the layout I need.

Flexible insertion feature in jQuery plugin

2012-02-16T12:47:00.000-08:00

In jQuery, it has many of manipulation methods. If you have written an jQuery plugin, often it will require to put a generated content into a container which is specified in initialization process. For example:

$(selector).plugin_foobar({
    container: $('#container')
    });

appendTo is most likely to be used for such task. The generated content is put into #container and it’s enough for most cases.

Although I haven’t seen any flexible design on insertion, but I think the following code may come in handy for me someday:

$(selector).plugin_foobar({
    container: $('#container'),
    func: $.fn.prependTo
    });

As you can see the func is supplied with prependTo and you can expect the generated contain will be inserted before the contents in #container, not after. An implementation could look like:

// in plugin_foobar()

var container = opt.container;
var f = opt.func;

var gen_content = $('<div>foobar</div>');

f.call(gen_content, container);
// ==> gen_content.prependTo(container);

By using call, it enables the flexibility we need here. Given certain function and operating on the generated jQuery object.

Since a function is supplied, it does not have to be jQuery functions, you can even use it as a filter function. It’s very flexible of how you can use this kind of design.

Of course, you can use a string as option, values can be “before”, “after”, etc. You can use switch to manually call the corresponding function, but the code does not look clean as the design above.

Sound of files using HTML5

2012-02-14T12:27:00.000-08:00

If you are a Linux user, you probably have seen cat FILE > /dev/audio or data directory from /dev/.... And this is the HTML5 version of it, but only accept single file:

Remember to lower your sound level first, I take no responsibility of breaking anything, your ears, speakers, or whatsoever! :D

The data of file is fed into HTML5 Audio via Data URI in 8 kHz sample rate, 8 bits. The code is basically same in Single frequency wave generation using HTML5 audio. This should work with Firefox and Chrome, not tested in other browsers. I wrote this just to learn a bit of HTML5 File/FileReader stuff, not really something useful except for fun.

By the way, I think MIT License file sound okay. bzip2 sounds like a modem.

Firefox Password Reuse Visualizer

2012-02-13T17:33:00.000-08:00

Just read a post on Mozilla Lab by Paul Sawaya about this addon, here is a screenshot of my test profile in Firefox:

The graph use d3.js and it's interactive, you can draw or click, and even to check the clear text of the passwords.

Again, it's not the passwords I use daily. No way I will show you that even this is just a visualization. They are a lot can be learned from a simple graph.

I found this is helpful to help your realize how your security sense based on your passwords. A crazy nut of security should have a totally non-connecting graph.

Each green dot is a password, blue dot is the website. Square orange box connecting passwords means those passwords are similar, which by general guidelines of security that should be avoid.

Using different password for different website, but when you are testing. Well, you know abc123 comes in handy. As you can guess, those two only distinct passwords and websites are the actual passwords, and I am not going to tell you what they are. :)

PS. abc123 may just be a misleading to let you believe I use that for testing, please don't use it to hack into my account. ;)

Using PyDNS for manual domain name lookup

2012-02-13T16:59:00.000-08:00

I saw a thread about how to do DNS query via different server in PHP because OpenDNS always resolve all domains even they should result NXDOMAN. I don’t know how to do that in PHP, but I am sure there is some libraries already for such task as same in Python, such as PyDNS or dnspython.

The website of PyDNS isn’t very helpful, there is no sample code as I didn’t see any, but README is well enough to get started. I wrote a quick after I learned a bit of PyDNS, it was hard to use as you can see as the following sample code:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import DNS

print 'PyDNS %s' % DNS.__version__

DNS.DiscoverNameServers()
print 'NS: %s' % DNS.defaults['server']

DN = 'example.com'
IDN = u'παράδειγμα.δοκιμή'
NXDN = 'foobar.example.com'

def q(name, qtype):

  print '%4s Query on %s -> %s' % (qtype, name.encode('utf-8'), DNS.dnslookup(name, qtype))

q('google.com', 'A')
q('google.com', 'AAAA')
q(DN, 'A')
q(DN, 'AAAA')
q(IDN, 'A')
q(IDN, 'AAAA')

# Catching error
try:
  q(NXDN, 'A')
except DNS.ServerError as e:
  if e.rcode == 3:
    print 'Cannot resolve %s' % NXDN.encode('utf-8')
  else:
    raise e

# Again, but let it raise
q(NXDN, 'A')

PyDNS 2.3.6
NS: ['168.95.192.1', '168.95.1.1']
   A Query on google.com -> ['72.14.203.102', '72.14.203.113', '72.14.203.138', '72.14.203.139', '72.14.203.100', '72.14.203.101']
AAAA Query on google.com -> []
   A Query on example.com -> ['192.0.43.10']
AAAA Query on example.com -> [' \x01\x05\x00\x00\x88\x02\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x10']
   A Query on παράδειγμα.δοκιμή -> ['199.7.85.13']
AAAA Query on παράδειγμα.δοκιμή -> ['& \x00\x00(0\x020\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x10']
Cannot resolve foobar.example.com

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 34, in <module>
  File "<stdin>", line 15, in q
  File "/home/livibetter/lib/python2.5/DNS/lazy.py", line 37, in dnslookup
    result.header['rcode'])
DNS.Base.ServerError: ('DNS query status: NXDOMAIN', 3)

You can use DNS.DiscoverNameServers() for system’s name servers for querying.

On my system, none of any packages were built with IDN (nor IPv6) support. But since you can do a manual query, querying IDN isn’t a problem and changing the default DNS isn’t very hard:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import DNS

DNS.DiscoverNameServers()
print 'NS: %s' % DNS.defaults['server']

NXDN = 'foobar.example.com'

def q(name, qtype):

  try:
    print '%4s Query on %s -> %s' % (qtype, name.encode('utf-8'), DNS.dnslookup(name, qtype))
  except DNS.ServerError as e:
    if e.rcode == 3:
      print 'Cannot resolve %s' % name.encode('utf-8')
    else:
      raise e

q(NXDN, 'A')

DNS.defaults['server'] = ['208.67.222.222', '208.67.220.220']
print 'NS changed to OpenDNS: %s' % DNS.defaults['server']

q(NXDN, 'A')

NS: ['168.95.192.1', '168.95.1.1']
Cannot resolve foobar.example.com
NS changed to OpenDNS: ['208.67.222.222', '208.67.220.220']
   A Query on foobar.example.com -> ['67.215.65.132']

More practical method should generate a request object and query through it, check out dnslookup function in lazy.py to see how you can do it more comprehensive.