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30 November 2014

Enrico Zini: cxx11-talk-examples

C++11 talk examples On 2014-11-27 I gave a talk about C++ and new features introduced with C++11: these are the examples. They are all licensed under the wtfpli version 2. See cxx11-talk-notes for the talk notes. Note that the wrapper interfaces turns errors from the underlying libraries into exceptions, so the method calls just do what they should, without the need of documenting special return values for error messages, and removing the need for each library to implement yet another way of reporting errors. Also note that all wrapper objects do RAII: you create them and they clean after themselves when they go out of scope. The wrapper objects also have cast operators to make them behave as the pointer or handle that they are wrapping, so that they can be transparently passed to the underlying libraries. (note: I had to add U+2063 INVISIBLE SEPARATOR to prevent noreturn statements to be misinterpreted by the blog formatter. If you copypaste the code and encounter issues, you may want to delete the noreturn statements and retype them) A gcrypt hash class This class is a light wrapper around gcrypt's hashing functions. ezhash.h
#ifndef EZHASH_H
#define EZHASH_H
#include <string>
#include <gcrypt.h>
namespace ezhash  
class Hash
 
protected:
    // members can now be initialized just like this, without needing to repeat
    // their default assignment in every constructor
    gcry_md_hd_t handle = nullptr;
public:
    Hash(int algo, unsigned int flags=0);
    ~Hash();
    // Assign 'delete' to a method to tell the compiler not to generate it
    // automatically. In this case, we make the object non-copiable.
    Hash(const Hash&) = delete;
    Hash(const Hash&&) = delete;
    Hash& operator=(const Hash&) = delete;
    // Add a buffer to the hash
    void hash_buf(const std::string& buf);
    // Add the contents of a file to the hash
    void hash_file(int fd);
    // Get a string with the hexadecimal hash
    std::string read_hex(int algo=0);
    /// Pretend that we are a gcry_md_hd_t handle
    operator gcry_md_hd_t()   return handle;  
 ;
 
#endif
ezhash.cpp
#include "ezhash.h"
#include <unistd.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <string>
#include <cstring>
#include <sstream>
#include <iomanip>
#include <stdexcept>
using namespace std;
namespace ezhash  
namespace  
// noreturn attribute, to tell the compiler that this function never returns
[ [noreturn]] void throw_gcrypt_error(gcry_error_t err)
 
    string msg;
    msg += gcry_strsource(err);
    msg += "/";
    msg += gcry_strerror(err);
    throw runtime_error(msg);
 
string errno_str(int error)
 
    char buf[256];
#if (_POSIX_C_SOURCE >= 200112L   _XOPEN_SOURCE >= 600) && ! _GNU_SOURCE
    strerror_r(errno, buf, 256);
    string res(buf);
#else
    string res(strerror_r(errno, buf, 256));
#endif
    return res;
 
[ [noreturn]] void throw_libc_error(int error)
 
    throw runtime_error(errno_str(error));
 
 
Hash::Hash(int algo, unsigned int flags)
 
    gcry_error_t err = gcry_md_open(&handle, algo, flags);
    if (err) throw_gcrypt_error(err);
 
Hash::~Hash()
 
    gcry_md_close(handle);
 
void Hash::hash_buf(const std::string& buf)
 
    gcry_md_write(handle, buf.data(), buf.size());
 
void Hash::hash_file(int fd)
 
    char buf[4096];
    while (true)
     
        ssize_t res = ::read(fd, buf, 4096);
        if (res < 0) ezfs::throw_libc_error();
        if (res == 0) break;
        gcry_md_write(handle, buf, res);
     
 
std::string Hash::read_hex(int algo)
 
    unsigned char* res = gcry_md_read(handle, algo);
    unsigned int len = gcry_md_get_algo_dlen(
            algo == 0 ? gcry_md_get_algo(handle) : algo);
    // Format the hash into a hex digit
    stringstream hexbuf;
    hexbuf << hex << setfill('0');
    for (unsigned i = 0; i < len; ++i)
        hexbuf << setw(2) << (unsigned)res[i];
    return hexbuf.str();
 
 
Example usage
        ezhash::Hash sha256(GCRY_MD_SHA256);
        sha256.hash_buf("ciao\n");
        sha256.hash_buf("foo\n");
        cout << sha256.read_hex() << endl;
Simple sqlite bindings Remarkably simple sqlite3 bindings based on lambda callbacks. ezsqlite.h
#ifndef EZSQLITE_H
#define EZSQLITE_H
#include <sqlite3.h>
#include <string>
#include <functional>
#include <stdexcept>
namespace ezsqlite  
/// RAII wrapper around a sqlite3 database handle
class DB
 
protected:
    sqlite3* handle = nullptr;
public:
    // Open a connection to a SQLite database
    DB(const std::string& filename, int flags=SQLITE_OPEN_READWRITE   SQLITE_OPEN_CREATE);
    DB(const DB&) = delete;
    DB(const DB&&) = delete;
    DB& operator=(const DB&) = delete;
    ~DB();
    /**
     * Execute a query, optionally calling 'callback' on every result row
     *
     * The arguments to callback are:
     *  1. number of columns
     *  2. text values of the columns
     *  3. names of the columns
     */
    // std::function can be used to wrap any callable thing in C++
    // see: http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/utility/functional/function
    void exec(const std::string& query, std::function<bool(int, char**, char**)> callback=nullptr);
    /// Pretend that we are a sqlite3 pointer
    operator sqlite3*()   return handle;  
 ;
 
#endif
ezsqlite.cpp
#include "ezsqlite.h"
namespace ezsqlite  
DB::DB(const std::string& filename, int flags)
 
    int res = sqlite3_open_v2(filename.c_str(), &handle, flags, nullptr);
    if (res != SQLITE_OK)
     
        // From http://www.sqlite.org/c3ref/open.html
        // Whether or not an error occurs when it is opened, resources
        // associated with the database connection handle should be
        // released by passing it to sqlite3_close() when it is no longer
        // required.
        std::string errmsg(sqlite3_errmsg(handle));
        sqlite3_close(handle);
        throw std::runtime_error(errmsg);
     
 
DB::~DB()
 
    sqlite3_close(handle);
 
namespace  
// Adapter to have sqlite3_exec call a std::function
int exec_callback(void* data, int columns, char** values, char** names)
 
    std::function<bool(int, char**, char**)> cb = *static_cast<std::function<bool(int, char**, char**)>*>(data);
    return cb(columns, values, names);
 
 
void DB::exec(const std::string& query, std::function<bool(int, char**, char**)> callback)
 
    char* errmsg;
    void* cb = callback ? &callback : nullptr;
    int res = sqlite3_exec(handle, query.c_str(), exec_callback, cb, &errmsg);
    if (res != SQLITE_OK && errmsg)
     
        // http://www.sqlite.org/c3ref/exec.html
        //
        // If the 5th parameter to sqlite3_exec() is not NULL then any error
        // message is written into memory obtained from sqlite3_malloc() and
        // passed back through the 5th parameter. To avoid memory leaks, the
        // application should invoke sqlite3_free() on error message strings
        // returned through the 5th parameter of of sqlite3_exec() after the
        // error message string is no longer needed. 
        std::string msg(errmsg);
        sqlite3_free(errmsg);
        throw std::runtime_error(errmsg);
     
 
 
Example usage
    // Connect to the database
    ezsqlite::DB db("erlug.sqlite");
    // Make sure we have a table
    db.exec(R"(
        CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS files (
                name TEXT NOT NULL,
                sha256sum TEXT NOT NULL
        )
    )");
    // Read the list of files that we know
    map<string, string> files;
    db.exec("SELECT name, sha256sum FROM files", [&](int columns, char** vals, char** names)  
        if (columns != 2) return false;
        files.insert(make_pair(vals[0], vals[1]));
        return true;
     );
A fast Directory object This is a lightweight wrapper around O_PATH file descriptors for directories. I'd love to see a library of well-maintained and thin C++ bindings around libc, that do little more than turning errors into exceptions and making it also work with std::string buffers. ezfs.h
#ifndef EZFS_H
#define EZFS_H
#include <string>
#include <functional>
#include <memory>
#include <cerrno>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <dirent.h>
namespace ezfs  
class Directory
 
protected:
    int handle = -1;
public:
    Directory(const std::string& pathname, int flags=0);
    ~Directory();
    Directory(const Directory&) = delete;
    Directory(const Directory&&) = delete;
    Directory& operator=(const Directory&) = delete;
    /// List the directory contents
    void ls(std::function<void(const dirent&)> callback);
    int open(const std::string& relpath, int flags, mode_t mode=0777);
 ;
std::string errno_str(int error=errno);
[ [noreturn]] void throw_libc_error(int error=errno);
 
#endif
ezfs.cpp
#include "ezfs.h"
#include <stdexcept>
#include <memory>
#include <cstring>
#include <cstdlib>
#include <string>
#include <linux/limits.h>
using namespace std;
namespace ezfs  
string errno_str(int error)
 
    char buf[256];
#if (_POSIX_C_SOURCE >= 200112L   _XOPEN_SOURCE >= 600) && ! _GNU_SOURCE
    strerror_r(errno, buf, 256);
    string res(buf);
#else
    string res(strerror_r(errno, buf, 256));
#endif
    return res;
 
[ [noreturn]] void throw_libc_error(int error)
 
    throw runtime_error(errno_str(error));
 
Directory::Directory(const std::string& pathname, int flags)
 
    handle = ::open(pathname.c_str(), O_PATH   O_DIRECTORY   flags);
    if (handle < 0) throw_libc_error();
 
Directory::~Directory()
 
    ::close(handle);
 
void Directory::ls(std::function<void(const dirent&)> callback)
 
    int fd = openat(handle, ".", O_DIRECTORY);
    if (fd < 0) throw_libc_error();
    // RAII Self-cleaning DIR object
    unique_ptr<DIR, std::function<void(DIR*)>> dir(fdopendir(fd), [](DIR* dir)   if (dir) closedir(dir);  );
    if (!dir)
     
        // fdopendir(3): After a successful call to fdopendir(), fd is used
        // internally by the implementation, and should not otherwise be used
        // by the application.
        //
        // but if the fdopendir call was not successful, fd is not managed by
        // DIR, and we still need to close it, otherwise we leak a file
        // descriptor.
        //
        // However, close() may modify errno, so we take note of the errno set
        // by fdopendir and raise the exception based on that.
        int fdopendir_errno = errno;
        close(fd);
        throw_libc_error(fdopendir_errno);
     
    // Size the dirent buffer properly
    const unsigned len = offsetof(dirent, d_name) + PATH_MAX + 1;
    unique_ptr<dirent, std::function<void(void*)>> dirbuf((dirent*)malloc(len), free);
    while (true)
     
        dirent* res;
        int err = readdir_r(dir.get(), dirbuf.get(), &res);
        // End of directory contents
        if (err == 0)
         
            if (res)
                callback(*res);
            else
                break;
          else
            throw_libc_error(err);
     
 
int Directory::open(const std::string& relpath, int flags, mode_t mode)
 
    int res = openat(handle, relpath.c_str(), flags, mode);
    if (res < 0) throw_libc_error();
    return res;
 
 
Example usage
        // This is almost the equivalent of running "sha256sum ."
        ezfs::Directory dir(".");
        dir.ls([&](const dirent& d)  
            if (d.d_type != DT_REG) return;
            ezhash::Hash sha256(GCRY_MD_SHA256);
            // I have no RAII wrapper around file handles at the moment, so
            // I'll have to use a try/catch for cleaning up after errors
            int fd = dir.open(d.d_name, O_RDONLY);
            try  
                sha256.hash_file(fd);
                close(fd);
              catch (...)  
                close(fd);
                throw;
             
            cout << sha256.read_hex() << "  " << d.d_name << endl;
         );

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in November 2014

FTP assistant In contrast to the last month, this month has been rather quiet and I really liked that :-) . The stress has moved to the next team. So all in all I marked 101 packages for accept and had to reject 27 packages. As I mostly reviewed really new packages, I didn t have to file any RC bug this month. Squeeze LTS This was my fifth month that I did some work for the Squeeze LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month I got assigned a workload of 14.25h and I spent these hours to upload new versions of: I also uploaded [DLA 85-1] libxml-security-java security update, but as nobody of the LTS sponsors had any interest in this package, I did this in my spare time. A package with security in its name should not be affected by security issues. This month my failure of the month has been the binutils package. Although the security team prepared the way for finding the correct patches for all those CVEs, I somehow managed to not find them. This is embarassing I am also a bit disappointed by current LTS users. All important packages have been made available for testing before uploading them to the archive. Apart from some brave fellow DDs, no other feedback was reported on debian-lts. Complaints arrived only when the packages have been finally uploaded. Do admins have enough time nowadays and don t need to use some kind of testbed? Times are changing Other packages This month I even found some time to sponsor uploads, so please welcome a new version of fastaq in experimental and patiently wait for aegaen and kmc to pass NEW. At this point I also want to mention the Debian Med Advent Calendar, which was announced in this email and already mentioned by Andreas in his latest Debian Med bits. Everybody is invited to take care of as much as possible poor souls. Support If you would like to support my Debian work you could either be part of the Freexian initiative (see above) or consider to send some bitcoins to 1JHnNpbgzxkoNexeXsTUGS6qUp5P88vHej. Contact me at donation@alteholz.eu if you prefer another way to donate. Every kind of support is most appreciated.

Enrico Zini: cxx11-talk-notes

C++11 talk notes On 2014-11-27 I gave a talk about C++ and new features introduced with C++11: these are the talk notes. See cxx11-talk-examples for the examples. (note: I had to add U+2063 INVISIBLE SEPARATOR to prevent noreturn statements to be misinterpreted by the blog formatter. If you copypaste the code and encounter issues, you may want to delete the noreturn statements and retype them) Overview of programming languages
It has to be as fast as possible, so interpreted languages are out. You don't want to micro manage memory, so C is out. You don't want to require programmers to have a degree, so C++ is out. You want fast startup and not depend on a big runtime, so Java is out. [...] (Bram Moolenaar)
C++ secret cultist protip
Do not call up what you cannot put down.
C++ is a compiled language It is now possible to use the keyword constexpr to mark functions and objects that can be used at compile time:
/*
 * constexpr tells the compiler that a variable or function can be evaluated at
 * compile time.
 *
 * constexpr functions can also be run at run time, if they are called with
 * values not known at compile time.
 *
 * See http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/constexpr for more nice examples
 *
 * It can be used to avoid using constants in code, and using instead functions
 * for computing hardware bitfields or physical values, without losing in
 * efficiency.
 */
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
constexpr int factorial(int n)
 
    return n <= 1 ? 1 : (n * factorial(n-1));
 
int main()
 
    cout << "Compile time factorial of 6: " << factorial(6) << endl;
    cout << "Enter a number: ";
    int a;
    cin >> a;
    cout << "Run time factorial of " << a << ": " << factorial(a) << endl;
 
See also this for more nice examples. See this and this for further discussion. Multiline strings
        const char* code = R"--(
          printf("foo\tbar\n");
          return 0;
        )--";
See this. C++ memory management protip RAII: Resource Acquisition Is Instantiation This is not new in C++11, but in my experience I have rarely seen it mentioned in C++ learning material, and it does make a huge difference in my code. See this and this for details. Constructors and member initializer lists Initializers in curly braces now have their own type: std::initializer_list:
#include <string>
#include <iostream>
#include <unordered_set>
using namespace std;
// std::initializer_list< >
//   will have as its value all the elements inside the curly braces
string join(initializer_list<string> strings)
 
    string res;
    for (auto str: strings)
     
        if (!res.empty())
            res += ", ";
        res += str;
     
    return res;
 
int main()
 
    unordered_set<string> blacklist  ".", "..", ".git", ".gitignore"  ;
    cout << join(  "antani", "blinda"  ) << endl;
 
See this for details, including the new uniform initialization trick of omitting parentesis in constructors so that you can call normal constructors and initializer_list constructors with the same syntax, which looks like an interesting thing when writing generic code in templates. Type inference I can now use auto instead of a type to let the compiler automatically compute the value of something I assign to:
        auto i = 3 + 2;
        // See also https://github.com/esseks/monicelli
        vector<string> names  "antani", "blinda", "supercazzola"  ;
        for (auto i = names.cbegin(); i != names.cend(); ++i)
            cout << i;
        template<typename T>
        T frobble(const T& stuff)
         
             // This will work whatever type is returned by stuff.read()
             auto i = stuff.read();
             //  
         
See this for more details. Range-based for loop C++ now has an equivalent of the various foreach constructs found in several interpreted languages!
        for (auto i: list_of_stuff)
                cout << i << endl;
        for (auto n:  0,1,2,3,4,5 )
                cout << n << endl;
        // This construct:
        for (auto i: stuff)
        // If stuff is an array, it becomes:
        for (i = stuff, i < stuff + sizeof(stuff) / sizeof(stuff[0]); ++i)
        // If stuff has .begin() and .end() methods it becomes:
        for (i = stuff.begin(); i != stuff.end(); ++i)
        // Otherwise it becomes:
        for (i = begin(stuff); i != end(stuff); ++i)
        // And you can define begin() and end() functions for any type you
        // want, at any time
See this and this for details. Lambda functions and expressions Lambdas! Closures! Something like this:
// JavaScript
var add = function(a, b)   return a + b;  
# Python
add = lambda a, b: a + b
Becomes this:
auto add = [](int a, int b)   return a + b;  
And something like this:
// JavaScript
var a = 0;
$.each([1, 2, 3, 4], function(idx, el)   a += el  );
Becomes this:
unsigned a = 0;
std::for_each(  1, 2, 3, 4  , [&a](int el)   return a += el;  );
See this, this and this. Tuple types C++ now has a std::tuple type, that like in Python can be used to implement functions that return multiple values:
        tuple<int, string, vector<string>> parse_stuff()
         
                return make_tuple(id, name, values);
         
        string name; vector<string> values;
        // std::ignore can be used to throw away a result
        tie(ignore, name, values) = parse_stuff();
        // std::tie can also be used to do other kind of
        // multi-operations besides assignment:
        return tie(a, b, c) < tie(a1, b1, c1);
        // Is the same as:
        if (a != a1) return a < a1;
        if (b != b1) return b < b1;
        return c < c1;
See here, here and here. Regular expressions We now have regular expressions!
        std::regex re(R"((\w+)\s+(\w+))");
        string s("antani blinda");
        smatch res;
        if (regex_match(s, res, re))
            cout << "OK " << res[1] << " -- " << res[2] << endl;
The syntax is ECMAScript by default and can be optionally changed to basic, extended, awk, grep, or egrep. See here and here. General-purpose smart pointers There is std::unique_ptr to code memory ownership explicitly, and std::shared_ptr as a reference counted pointer, and smart pointers can have custom destructors:
    unique_ptr<dirent, std::function<void(void*)>> dirbuf((dirent*)malloc(len), free);
See here and here. Miscellaneous other cool things Standard attribute specifiers
string errno_str(int error)
 
    char buf[256];
#if (_POSIX_C_SOURCE >= 200112L   _XOPEN_SOURCE >= 600) && ! _GNU_SOURCE
    strerror_r(errno, buf, 256);
    string res(buf);
#else
    string res(strerror_r(errno, buf, 256));
#endif
    return res;
 
[ [noreturn]] void throw_libc_error(int error)
 
    throw runtime_error(errno_str(error));
 
See here. Hash tables See here and look at the new containers unordered_set, unordered_map, unordered_multiset, and unordered_multimap. Multithreading There is a standard threading model, with quite a bit of library support: see here, here, here, and here for atomic data structures. Variadic templates Templates can now take variable number of arguments, and that opens possibilities for interesting code generation, like implementing a generic, type-safe printf statement, or something like this:
db.query(R"(
   INSERT INTO table NAMES (id, name, description)
     VALUES (?, ?, ?)
)", 4, "genio", "fantasia, intuizione, decisione, e velocit  di esecuzione");
See here and here. Essential tools You need at least g++ 4.8 or clang 3.3 to have full C++11 support. They will be both available in jessie, and for wheezy you can use the nightly clang packages repository. I cannot think of a good excuse not to use -Wall on new code. scan-build from clang is another nice resource for catching even more potential problems at compile time. valgrind is a great tool for runtime code analysis: valgrind --tool=memcheck (the default) will check your program for wrong memory accesses and memory leaks. valgrind --tool=callgrind will trace function calls for profiling, to be analyzed with kcachegrind. valgrind --tool=helgrind can check multi-threaded programs for suspicious concurrent memory accesse patterns. And of course gdb: a nice trick with C++ is to issue catch throw to get a breakpoint at the point where an exception is being thrown. help catch provides a list of other interesting catch examples. Coredump tips: ulimit -c to enable core dumps, triggering a core dump with ^\, opening a core with gdb program core, and more details on man 5 core. An extra gdb tip, which is not related to C++ but helped me considerably recently, is that it can be attached to running python programs to get a live Python traceback.

Johannes Schauer: simple email setup

I was unable to find a good place that describes how to create a simple self-hosted email setup. The most surprising discovery was, how much already works after:
apt-get install postfix dovecot-imapd
Right after having finished the installation I was able to receive email (but only in in /var/mail in mbox format) and send email (bot not from any other host). So while I expected a pretty complex setup, it turned out to boil down to just adjusting some configuration parameters.

Postfix The two interesting files to configure postfix are /etc/postfix/main.cf and /etc/postfix/master.cf. A commented version of the former exists in /usr/share/postfix/main.cf.dist. Alternatively, there is the ~600k word strong man page postconf(5). The latter file is documented in master(5).

/etc/postfix/main.cf I changed the following in my main.cf
@@ -37,3 +37,9 @@
mailbox_size_limit = 0
recipient_delimiter = +
inet_interfaces = all
+
+home_mailbox = Mail/
+smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_mynetworks reject_unauth_destination permit_sasl_authenticated
+smtpd_sasl_type = dovecot
+smtpd_sasl_path = private/auth
+smtp_helo_name = my.reverse.dns.name.com
At this point, also make sure that the parameters smtpd_tls_cert_file and smtpd_tls_key_file point to the right certificate and private key file. So either change these values or replace the content of /etc/ssl/certs/ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem and /etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-snakeoil.key. The home_mailbox parameter sets the default path for incoming mail. Since there is no leading slash, this puts mail into $HOME/Mail for each user. The trailing slash is important as it specifies qmail-style delivery'' which means maildir. The default of the smtpd_recipient_restrictions parameter is permit_mynetworks reject_unauth_destination so this just adds the permit_sasl_authenticated option. This is necessary to allow users to send email when they successfully verified their login through dovecot. The dovecot login verification is activated through the smtpd_sasl_type and smtpd_sasl_path parameters. I found it necessary to set the smtp_helo_name parameter to the reverse DNS of my server. This was necessary because many other email servers would only accept email from a server with a valid reverse DNS entry. My hosting provider charges USD 7.50 per month to change the default reverse DNS name, so the easy solution is, to instead just adjust the name announced in the SMTP helo.

/etc/postfix/master.cf The file master.cf is used to enable the submission service. The following diff just removes the comment character from the appropriate section.
@@ -13,12 +13,12 @@
#smtpd pass - - - - - smtpd
#dnsblog unix - - - - 0 dnsblog
#tlsproxy unix - - - - 0 tlsproxy
-#submission inet n - - - - smtpd
-# -o syslog_name=postfix/submission
-# -o smtpd_tls_security_level=encrypt
-# -o smtpd_sasl_auth_enable=yes
-# -o smtpd_client_restrictions=permit_sasl_authenticated,reject
-# -o milter_macro_daemon_name=ORIGINATING
+submission inet n - - - - smtpd
+ -o syslog_name=postfix/submission
+ -o smtpd_tls_security_level=encrypt
+ -o smtpd_sasl_auth_enable=yes
+ -o smtpd_client_restrictions=permit_sasl_authenticated,reject
+ -o milter_macro_daemon_name=ORIGINATING
#smtps inet n - - - - smtpd
# -o syslog_name=postfix/smtps
# -o smtpd_tls_wrappermode=yes

Dovecot Since above configuration changes made postfix store email in a different location and format than the default, dovecot has to be informed about these changes as well. This is done in /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf. The second configuration change enables postfix to authenticate users through dovecot in /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-master.conf. For SSL one should look into /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-ssl.conf and either adapt the parameters ssl_cert and ssl_key or store the correct certificate and private key in /etc/dovecot/dovecot.pem and /etc/dovecot/private/dovecot.pem, respectively. The dovecot-core package (which dovecot-imapd depends on) ships tons of documentation. The file /usr/share/doc/dovecot-core/dovecot/documentation.txt.gz gives an overview of what resources are available. The path /usr/share/doc/dovecot-core/dovecot/wiki contains a snapshot of the dovecot wiki at http://wiki2.dovecot.org/. The example configurations seem to be the same files as in /etc/ which are already well commented.

/etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf The following diff changes the default email location in /var/mail to a maildir in ~/Mail as configured for postfix above.
@@ -27,7 +27,7 @@
#
# <doc/wiki/MailLocation.txt>
#
-mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u
+mail_location = maildir:~/Mail

# If you need to set multiple mailbox locations or want to change default
# namespace settings, you can do it by defining namespace sections.

/etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-master.conf And this enables the authentication socket for postfix:
@@ -93,9 +93,11 @@


# Postfix smtp-auth
- #unix_listener /var/spool/postfix/private/auth
- # mode = 0666
- #
+ unix_listener /var/spool/postfix/private/auth
+ mode = 0660
+ user = postfix
+ group = postfix
+

# Auth process is run as this user.
#user = $default_internal_user

Aliases Now Email will automatically put into the '~/Mail' directory of the receiver. So a user has to be created for whom one wants to receive mail...
$ adduser josch
...and any aliases for it to be configured in /etc/aliases.
@@ -1,2 +1,4 @@
-# See man 5 aliases for format
-postmaster: root
+root: josch
+postmaster: josch
+hostmaster: josch
+webmaster: josch
After editing /etc/aliases, the command
$ newaliases
has to be run. More can be read in the aliases(5) man page.

Finishing up Everything is done and now postfix and dovecot have to be informed about the changes. There are many ways to do that. Either restart the services, reboot or just do:
$ postfix reload
$ doveadm reload
Have fun!

Hideki Yamane: Kadokawa Course Internet vol.2 "Open Source - composes Internet, evolution of software"

Now it's out -you can get Kadokawa Course Internet vol.2 "Open Source - composes Internet, evolution of software" ( (2) ) at a bookstore.

Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, probably you know as programming language "Ruby" author, is supervisor for this book but more people involved in it. What I wrote is a basic overview for Open Source Software Licensing (with 32 pages in Japanese) because I've learned some about software license through my activity in Debian (thanks! :-)

It was though a bit because its deadline is really tight, so I had to write it even during DebConf14 in Portland (this is the reason why I didn't go to Pub to drink beer in the last night ;)
Hope you enjoy it (Wasshoi!!).

29 November 2014

Laura Arjona: Debian meeting in Madrid, GPG keysigning

Yesterday some Debian people in Madrid we met to have a drink together and GPG keysigning.I have received 2 signs already #oleole! :)Some minutes ago, I signed all the keys and sent the corresponding emails. Since I have to dedicate some minutes to verify fingerprints and emails, I have dedicated some time to remember each person too: his face, the topics that we talked about, etc. (we were 8 people!).
It s been nice to meet Debian people in person, in Madrid (it was the first time I attended). I like to speak Spanish in a Debian context (and different than the translators mailing list), it s kind of funny, relaxing. It has been also an opportunity to meet new people that can be very different from me, and so, open my mind to new thoughts. I hope we meet more often so we strengthen not only the web of trust but also the face-to-face social network :)
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Communities, Debian, encryption, English, gpg, social networks

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.4.550.1.0

A week ago, Conrad provided another minor release 4.550.0 of Armadillo which has since received one minor correction in 4.550.1.0. As before, I had created a GitHub-only pre-release of his pre-release which was tested against the almost one hundred CRAN dependents of our RcppArmadillo package. This passed fine as usual, and results are as always in the rcpp-logs repository. Processing and acceptance at the CRAN took a little longer as around the same time a fresh failure in unit tests had become apparent on an as-of-yet unannounced new architecture (!!) also tested at CRAN. The R-devel release has since gotten a new capabilities() test for long double, and we now only run this test (for our rmultinom()) if the test asserts that the given R build has this capability. Phew, so with all that the new version in now on CRAN; Windows binaries have been built and I also uploaded new Debian binaries. Changes are summarized below; our end also includes added support for conversion of Field types takes to short pull request by Romain.
Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.4.550.1.0 (2014-11-26)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release Version 4.550.1 ("Singapore Sling Deluxe")
    • added matrix exponential function: expmat()
    • faster .log_p() and .avg_log_p() functions in the gmm_diag class when compiling with OpenMP enabled
    • faster handling of in-place addition/subtraction of expressions with an outer product
    • applied correction to gmm_diag relative to the 4.550 release
  • The Armadillo Field type is now converted in as<> conversions
Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. As always, more detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: CRAN Task Views for Finance and HPC now (also) on GitHub

The CRAN Task View system is a fine project which Achim Zeileis initiated almost a decade ago. It is described in a short R Journal article in Volume 5, Number 1. I have been editor / maintainer of the Finance task view essentially since the very beginning of these CRAN Task Views, and added the High-Performance Computing one in the fall of 2008. Many, many people have helped by sending suggestions or even patches; email continues to be the main venue for the changes. The maintainers of the Web Technologies task view were, at least as far as I know, the first to make the jump to maintaining the task view on GitHub. Karthik and I briefly talked about this when he was in town a few weeks ago for our joint Software Carpentry workshop at Northwestern. So the topic had been on my mind, but it was only today that I realized that the near-limitless amount of awesome that is pandoc can probably help with maintenance. The task view code by Achim neatly converts the very regular, very XML, very boring original format into somewhat-CRAN-website-specific html. Pandoc, being as versatile as it is, can then make (GitHub-flavoured) markdown out of this, and with a minimal amount of sed magic, we get what we need. And hence we now have these two new repos: Contributions are now most welcome by pull request. You can run the included converter scripts, it differs between both repos only by one constant for the task view / file name. As an illustration, the one for Finance is below.
#!/usr/bin/r
## if you do not have /usr/bin/r from littler, just use Rscript
ctv <- "Finance"
ctvfile  <- paste0(ctv, ".ctv")
htmlfile <- paste0(ctv, ".html")
mdfile   <- "README.md"
## load packages
suppressMessages(library(XML))          # called by ctv
suppressMessages(library(ctv))
r <- getOption("repos")                 # set CRAN mirror
r["CRAN"] <- "http://cran.rstudio.com"
options(repos=r)
check_ctv_packages(ctvfile)             # run the check
## create html file from ctv file
ctv2html(read.ctv(ctvfile), htmlfile)
### these look atrocious, but are pretty straight forward. read them one by one
###  - start from the htmlfile
cmd <- paste0("cat ", htmlfile,
###  - in lines of the form  ^<a href="Word">Word.html</a>
###  - capture the 'Word' and insert it into a larger URL containing an absolute reference to task view 'Word'
  "   sed -e 's ^<a href=\"\\([a-zA-Z]*\\)\\.html <a href=\"http://cran.rstudio.com/web/views/\\1.html\" '   ",
###  - call pandoc, specifying html as input and github-flavoured markdown as output
              "pandoc -s -r html -w markdown_github   ",
###  - deal with the header by removing extra  , replacing  ** with ** and **  with **:              
              "sed -e's/ //g' -e's/ \\*\\*/\\*\\*/g' -e's/\\*\\* /\\*\\* /g' -e's/ $/  /g' ",
###  - make the implicit URL to packages explicit
              "-e's ../packages/ http://cran.rstudio.com/web/packages/ g' ",
###  - write out mdfile
              "> ", mdfile)
system(cmd)                             # run the conversion
unlink(htmlfile)                        # remove temporary html file
cat("Done.\n")
I am quite pleased with this setup---so a quick thanks towards the maintainers of the Web Technologies task view; of course to Achim for creating CRAN Task Views in the first place, and maintaining them all those years; as always to John MacFarlance for the magic that is pandoc; and last but not least of course to anybody who has contributed to the CRAN Task Views.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

28 November 2014

Richard Hartmann: Release Critical Bug report for Week 48

Holy bug-count-drop, Batman! Some bugs which need loving: The UDD bugs interface currently knows about the following release critical bugs: How do we compare to the Squeeze release cycle?
Week Squeeze Wheezy Jessie
43 284 (213+71) 468 (332+136) 319 (240+79)
44 261 (201+60) 408 (265+143) 274 (224+50)
45 261 (205+56) 425 (291+134) 295 (229+66)
46 271 (200+71) 401 (258+143) 427 (313+114)
47 283 (209+74) 366 (221+145) 342 (260+82)
48 256 (177+79) 378 (230+148) 274 (189+85)
49 256 (180+76) 360 (216+155)
50 204 (148+56) 339 (195+144)
51 178 (124+54) 323 (190+133)
52 115 (78+37) 289 (190+99)
1 93 (60+33) 287 (171+116)
2 82 (46+36) 271 (162+109)
3 25 (15+10) 249 (165+84)
4 14 (8+6) 244 (176+68)
5 2 (0+2) 224 (132+92)
6 release! 212 (129+83)
7 release+1 194 (128+66)
8 release+2 206 (144+62)
9 release+3 174 (105+69)
10 release+4 120 (72+48)
11 release+5 115 (74+41)
12 release+6 93 (47+46)
13 release+7 50 (24+26)
14 release+8 51 (32+19)
15 release+9 39 (32+7)
16 release+10 20 (12+8)
17 release+11 24 (19+5)
18 release+12 2 (2+0)
Graphical overview of bug stats thanks to azhag:

Daniel Pocock: XCP / XenServer and Debian Jessie

In 2013, Debian wheezy was released with a number of great virtualization options include the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP / Xen-API) toolstack packaged by Thomas Goirand to run in a native Debian host environment. Unfortunately, XCP is not available as a host (dom0) solution for the upcoming Debian 8 (jessie) release. However, it is possible to continue running a Debian wheezy system as the dom0 host and run virtualized (domU) jessie systems inside it. It may also be possible to use the packages from wheezy on a jessie system, but I haven't looked into that myself so far. Newer kernel boot failures in Xen After successfully upgrading a VM (domU in Xen terminology) from wheezy to jessie, I tried to reboot the VM and found that it wouldn't start. People have reported similar problems booting newer versions of Ubuntu and Fedora in XCP and XenServer environments. PyGrub displayed an error on the dom0 console:
# xe vm-start name-label=server05
Error code: Using  to parse /grub/grub.cfg
Error parameters: Traceback (most recent call last):,
   File "/usr/lib/xcp/lib/pygrub.xcp", line 853, in ,
     raise RuntimeError, "Unable to find partition containing kernel"
There is a quick and easy workaround. Hard-code the kernel and initrd filenames into config values that will be used to boot. A more thorough solution will probably involve using a newer version of PyGrub in wheezy. If the /boot tree is a separate filesystem inside the VM, use commands like the following (substitute the correct UUID for the VM and the exact names/versions of the vmlinuz and initrd.img files):
xe vm-param-set uuid=da654fd0-74db-11e4-82f8-0800200c9a66 \
   PV-bootloader-args="--kernel=/vmlinuz-3.16-3-amd64
   --ramdisk=/initrd.img-3.16-3-amd64"
xe vm-param-set uuid=da654fd0-74db-11e4-82f8-0800200c9a66 \
   PV-args="root=/dev/mapper/vg00-root ro quiet"
and if /boot is on the root filesystem of the VM, this will do the trick:
xe vm-param-set uuid=da654fd0-74db-11e4-82f8-0800200c9a66 \
   PV-bootloader-args="--kernel=/boot/vmlinuz-3.16-3-amd64
   --ramdisk=/boot/initrd.img-3.16-3-amd64"
xe vm-param-set uuid=da654fd0-74db-11e4-82f8-0800200c9a66 \
   PV-args="root=/dev/mapper/vg00-root ro quiet"
Future strategy Once a comprehensive XCP solution appears in Debian again, hopefully it will be possible to migrate running VMs into the new platform without any downtime and retire the wheezy dom0. Other upgrade/migration options exist and the choice will depend on various factors, such as whether or not you have built your own tools around the XCP API and whether you use a solution like OpenStack that depends on it. Debian's pkg-xen-devel mailing list may be a good place to discuss these options further.

Ian Wienand: rstdiary

I find it very useful to spend 5 minutes a day to keep a small log of what was worked on, major bugs or reviews and a general small status report. It makes rolling up into a bigger status report easier when required, or handy as a reference before you go into meetings etc. I was happily using an etherpad page until I couldn't save any more revisions and the page got too long and started giving javascript timeouts. For a replacement I wanted a single file as input with no boilerplate to aid in back-referencing and adding entries quickly. It should be formatted to be future-proof, as well as being emacs, makefile and git friendly. Output should be web-based so I can refer to it easily and point people at it when required, but it just has to be rsynced to public_html with zero setup. rstdiary will take a flat RST based input file and chunk it into some reasonable looking static-HTML that looks something like this. It's split by month with some minimal navigation. Copy the output directory somewhere and it is done. It might also serve as a small example of parsing and converting RST nodes where it does the chunking; unfortunately the official documentation on that is "to be completed" and I couldn't find anything like a canonical example, so I gathered what I could from looking at the source of the transformation stuff. As the license says, the software is provided "as is" without warranty! So if you've been thinking "I should keep a short daily journal in a flat-file and publish it to a web-server but I can't find any software to do just that" you now have one less excuse.

27 November 2014

Niels Thykier: Volume of debian-release mailing list

Page 1 of 5 To be honest, I do not know how many mails it shows per page (though I assume it is a fixed number). So for comparison, I found the month on debian-devel@l.d.o with the highest volume in the past two years: May 2013 with Page 1 of 4 . I hope you will please forgive us, if we are a bit terse in our replies or slow to reply. We simply got a lot to deal with. :)

Jonathan Dowland: PGP transition statement

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512,SHA1
I'm transitioning from my old, 1024-bit DSA PGP key, FD35 0B0A C6DD 5D91 DB7A 83D1 168B 4E71 7032 F238, to my newer, 4096-bit RSA key, E037 CB2A 1A00 61B9 4336 3C8B 0907 4096 06AA AAAA. If you have signed my old key, I'd be very grateful if you would consider signing my new key. (Thanks in advance!) This is long overdue! I've had 06AAAAAA since 2009, but it took me a while to get enough signatures on it for me to consider a transition. I still have far more signatures on my older key, owing to attending more conferences when I was using it than since I switched. This statement, available in plaintext at http://jmtd.net/log/pgp_transition/statement.txt, has been signed with both keys. I've marked my old key as expiring in around 72 days time, which coincides with my change of job, and will be just short of ten years since I generated it.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.22 (Darwin)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=JBA4
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Keith Packard: Black Friday 2014

Altus Metrum's 2014 Black Friday Event BLACK FOREST, Colorado USA Altus Metrum announces two special offers for "Black Friday" 2014. We are pleased to announce that both TeleMetrum and TeleMega will be back in stock and available for shipment before the end of November. To celebrate this, any purchase of a TeleMetrum, TeleMega, or EasyMega board will include, free of charge, one each of our 160, 400, and 850 mAh Polymer Lithium Ion batteries and a free micro USB cable! To celebrate NAR's addition of our 1.9 gram recording altimeter, MicroPeak, to the list of devices approved for use in contests and records, and help everyone get ready for NARAM 2015's altitude events, purchase 4 MicroPeak boards and we'll throw in a MicroPeak USB adapter for free! These deals will be available from 00:00 Friday, 28 November 2014 through 23:59 Monday, 1 December, 2014. Only direct sales through our web store at http://shop.gag.com are included; no other discounts apply. Find more information on all Altus Metrum products at http://altusmetrum.org. Thank you for your continued support of Altus Metrum in 2014. We continue to work on more cool new products, and look forward to meeting many of you on various flight lines in 2015!

Pau Garcia i Quiles: Reminder: Desktops DevRoom @ FOSDEM 2015

We are less than 10 days away from the deadline for the Desktops DevRoom at FOSDEM 2015, the largest Free and Open Source event in Europe. Do you think you can fill a room with 200+ people out of 6,000+ geeks? Prove it! Check the Call for Talks for details on how to submit your talk proposal about anything related to the desktop: http://www.elpauer.org/2014/10/fosdem-2015-desktops-devroom-call-for-talks/

26 November 2014

Gunnar Wolf: Guests in the classroom: @Rolman talks about persistent storage and filesystems

On November 14, as a great way to say goodbye to a semester, a good friend came to my class again to present a topic to the group; a good way to sum up the contents of this talk is "everything you ever wondered about persistent storage". As people who follow my blog know, I like inviting my friends to present selected topics in my Operating Systems class. Many subjects will stick better if presented by more than a single viewpoint, and different experiences will surely enrich the group's learning. So, here is Rolando Cedillo A full gigabyte of him, spawning two hours (including two hiccups where my camera hit a per-file limit...). Rolando is currently a RedHat Engineer, and in his long career, he has worked from so many trenches, it would be a crime not to have him! Of course, one day we should do a low-level hardware session with him, as his passion (and deep knowledge) for 8-bit arcades is beyond any other person I have met. So, here is the full video on my server. Alternatively, you can get it from The Internet Archive.

Enrico Zini: calypso-davdroid

Calypso and DAVDroid calypso and DAVdroid appeal to me. Let's try to make the whole thing work. Update: radicale seems to also support git as a backend, and I plan to give it a try, too. A self-signed SSL certificate Generating the certificate:
$ openssl req -nodes -x509 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout cal-key.pem -out cal-cert.pem -days 3650
[...]
Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]:IT
State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]:Bologna
Locality Name (eg, city) []:
Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]:enricozini.org
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:
Common Name (e.g. server FQDN or YOUR name) []:cal.enricozini.org
Email Address []:postmaster@enricozini.org
Installing it on my phone:
$ openssl x509 -in cal-cert.pem -outform DER -out cal-cert.crt
$ adb push cal-cert.crt /mnt/sdcard/
$ enrico --follow-instructions http://davdroid.bitfire.at/faq/entry/importing-a-certificate
Installing calypso in my VPS An updated calypso package:
$ git clone git://keithp.com/git/calypso
$ git checkout debian -b enrico
$ git remote add chrysn  git://prometheus.amsuess.com/calypso-patches
$ git fetch chrysn
$ git merge chrysn/chrysn/integration
$ dch -v 1.4+enrico  "Merged with chrysn integration branch"
$ debuild -us -uc -rfakeroot
Install the package:
# dpkg -i calypso_1.4+enrico_all.deb
Create a system user to run it:
# adduser --system --disabled-password calypso
# chsh calypso  # /bin/dash
Make it run at boot time (based on calypso-init from the git repo):
# cat /etc/default/calypso
CALYPSO_OPTS="-d -P $PIDFILE"
# diff -Nau calypso-init calypso-init.enrico
--- calypso-init        2014-11-26 11:50:35.301001194 +0100
+++ calypso-init.enrico 2014-11-26 12:18:16.564138554 +0100
@@ -62,8 +62,8 @@
          return 1
    mkdir -p $(dirname $PIDFILE)
-       chown calypso:calypso $(dirname $PIDFILE)
-       start-stop-daemon --start -c $NAME --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
+       chown calypso:nogroup $(dirname $PIDFILE)
+       start-stop-daemon --start -c $NAME:nogroup --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON -- \
        $CALYPSO_OPTS \
          return 2
    # Add code here, if necessary, that waits for the process to be ready
# cp calypso-init.enrico /etc/init.d/calypso
# update-rc.d calypso defaults
Setting up the database
# su - calypso
Certificates and server setup:
$ mkdir .config/calypso/certs
$ mv cal-key.pem .config/calypso/certs/cal.key
$ mv cal-cert.pem .config/calypso/certs/cal.pem
$ chmod 0600 .config/calypso/certs/*
$ cat > .config/calypso/config << EOF
[server]
certificate=/home/calypso/.config/calypso/certs/cal.pem
key=/home/calypso/.config/calypso/certs/cal.key
[acl]
type=htpasswd
encryption=sha1
filename=/home/calypso/.config/calypso/htpasswd
    EOF
User passwords:
    $ htpasswd -s .config/calypso/htpasswd enrico
Database initialization:
$ mkdir -p .config/calypso/calendars
$ cd .config/calypso/calendars
$ git init
    $ cat > .calypso-collection << EOF
[collection]
is-calendar = True
is-addressbook = False
displayname = Test
description = Test calendar
EOF
    $ git add .calypso-collection
$ git commit --allow-empty -m'initialize new calendar'
Start the server
# /etc/init.d/calypso start
DAVdroid configuration
  1. Add a new DAVdroid sync account
  2. Use server/username configuration
  3. For server, use https://:5233
  4. Add username and password
It should work. Related links

Francois Marier: Hiding network disconnections using an IRC bouncer

A bouncer can be a useful tool if you rely on IRC for team communication and instant messaging. The most common use of such a server is to be permanently connected to IRC and to buffer messages while your client is disconnected. However, that's not what got me interested in this tool. I'm not looking for another place where messages accumulate and wait to be processed later. I'm much happier if people email me when I'm not around. Instead, I wanted to do to irssi what mosh did to ssh clients: transparently handle and hide temporary disconnections. Here's how I set everything up.

Server setup The first step is to install znc:
apt-get install znc
Make sure you get the 1.0 series (in jessie or trusty, not wheezy or precise) since it has much better multi-network support. Then, as a non-root user, generate a self-signed TLS certificate for it:
openssl req -x509 -sha256 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout znc.pem -nodes -out znc.crt -days 365
and make sure you use something like irc.example.com as the subject name, that is the URL you will be connecting to from your IRC client. Then install the certificate in the right place:
mkdir ~/.znc
mv znc.pem ~/.znc/
cat znc.crt >> ~/.znc/znc.pem
Once that's done, you're ready to create a config file for znc using the znc --makeconf command, again as the same non-root user:
  • create separate znc users if you have separate nicks on different networks
  • use your nickserv password as the server password for each network
  • enable ssl
  • say no to the chansaver and nickserv plugins
Finally, open the IRC port (tcp port 6697 by default) in your firewall:
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 6697 -j ACCEPT

Client setup (irssi) On the client side, the official documentation covers a number of IRC clients, but the irssi page was quite sparse. Here's what I used for the two networks I connect to (irc.oftc.net and irc.mozilla.org):
servers = (
   
    address = "irc.example.com";
    chatnet = "OFTC";
    password = "fmarier/oftc:Passw0rd1!";
    port = "6697";
    use_ssl = "yes";
    ssl_verify = "yes";
    ssl_cafile = "~/.irssi/certs/znc.crt";
   ,
   
    address = "irc.example.com";
    chatnet = "Mozilla";
    password = "francois/mozilla:Passw0rd1!";
    port = "6697";
    use_ssl = "yes";
    ssl_verify = "yes";
    ssl_cafile = "~/.irssi/certs/znc.crt";
   
);
Of course, you'll need to copy your znc.crt file from the server into ~/.irssi/certs/znc.crt. Make sure that you're no longer authenticating with the nickserv from within irssi. That's znc's job now.

Wrapper scripts So far, this is a pretty standard znc+irssi setup. What makes it work with my workflow is the wrapper script I wrote to enable znc before starting irssi and then prompt to turn it off after exiting:
#!/bin/bash
ssh irc.example.com "pgrep znc   znc"
irssi
read -p "Terminate the bouncer? [y/N] " -n 1 -r
echo
if [[ $REPLY =~ ^[Yy]$ ]]
then
  ssh irc.example.com killall -sSIGINT znc
fi
Now, instead of typing irssi to start my IRC client, I use irc. If I'm exiting irssi before commuting or because I need to reboot for a kernel update, I keep the bouncer running. At the end of the day, I say yes to killing the bouncer. That way, I don't have a backlog to go through when I wake up the next day.

25 November 2014

Sune Vuorela: QImage and QPixmap in a Qt Quick item

For reasons I don t know, apparantly a Qt Quick Item that can show a QImage or a QPixmap is kind of missing. The current Image QML item only works with data that can be represented by a URL. So I wrote one that kind of works. Comments most welcome. It is found on git.kde.org: http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=scratch/sune/imageitem.git Oh, and the KDE End of Year fundraiser is still running. https://www.kde.org/fundraisers/yearend2014/. Go support it if you haven t already.

Enrico Zini: mock-webserver

A mock webserver to use for unit testing HTTP clients With python -m SimpleHTTPServer it's easy to bring up an HTTP server to use to test HTTP client code, however it only supports GET requests, and I needed to test an HTTP client that needs to perform a file upload. It took way more than I originally expected to put this together, so here it is, hopefully saving other people (including future me) some time:
#!/usr/bin/python3
import http.server
import cgi
import socketserver
import hashlib
import json
PORT = 8081
class Handler(http.server.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler):
    def do_POST(self):
        info =  
            "method": "POST",
            "headers":   k: v for k, v in self.headers.items()  ,
         
        # From https://snipt.net/raw/f8ef141069c3e7ac7e0134c6b58c25bf/?nice
        form = cgi.FieldStorage(
            fp=self.rfile,
            headers=self.headers,
            environ= 'REQUEST_METHOD':'POST',
                     'CONTENT_TYPE':self.headers['Content-Type'],
                      )
        postdata =  
        for k in form.keys():
            if form[k].file:
                buf = form.getvalue(k)
                postdata[k] =  
                    "type": "file",
                    "name": form[k].filename,
                    "size": len(buf),
                    # json.dumps will not serialize a byte() object, so we
                    # return the shasum instead of the file body
                    "sha256": hashlib.sha256(buf).hexdigest(),
                 
            else:
                vals = form.getlist(k)
                if len(vals) == 1:
                    postdata[k] =  
                        "type": "field",
                        "val": vals[0],
                     
                else:
                    postdata[k] =  
                        "type": "multifield",
                        "vals": vals,
                     
        info["postdata"] = postdata
        resbody = json.dumps(info, indent=1)
        print(resbody)
        resbody = resbody.encode("utf-8")
        self.send_response(200)
        self.send_header("Content-type", "application/json")
        self.send_header("Content-Length", str(len(resbody)))
        self.end_headers()
        self.wfile.write(resbody)
class TCPServer(socketserver.TCPServer):
    # Allow to restart the mock server without needing to wait for the socket
    # to end TIME_WAIT: we only listen locally, and we may restart often in
    # some workflows
    allow_reuse_address = True
httpd = TCPServer(("", PORT), Handler)
print("serving at port", PORT)
httpd.serve_forever()

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