I knew walking all over the Pyrenees during a whole month would come with some side effects. I could imagine having a few muscular issues in my legs and some back pain for a while after getting back; after all we did over 7 hours of exercise every single day during a month. What I got after our hike was totally unexpected... I should have run a half marathon in Gandia on the 21st, and instead I stayed at home doing some assignments. When we came back, I was in a really good condition, and wanted to keep the good shape we had built the month before. Given I haven't been able to swim for nearly a year now, due to the Misterious Shoulder Injury and I don't have enough time to go out cycling regularly, I centered my efforts in running, with the idea of starting to get prepared for cross/mountain races this season. Training had to wait a little because some days after getting back, I got a sudden pain on both knees, which even made climbing stairs difficult. It stuck for a while, and when it finally went away, more or less, I went ahead and tried going out for a run. I haven't been training for over two years, so I indended to increase the distances proggressively. The first day I went out, I ran really nicely for the first 25 minutes, and suddenly I started getting an intense pain in the outer side of my right knee, to the point I could barely walk back home. I've tried letting them rest for weeks, and every time I try them, the pain comes back. My physiotherapist says my body has developed quite a few asymmetries, probably caused by the many days I had to walk crippled by a big blister in my right foot. As time passes, I feel I'm losing all the physical improvements I had developed during the summer, and I can't do anything about it. The new approach to tackle this is yoga. I know my body isn't too elastic, and the lack of stretching during the walk made it even worse, so I'll try to forget about real traning during some time and focus on healing my muscles. Hopefully, this will help me resolve the nastiest physical problem I've ever come across.

DebConf 11 will take place from July 24 to 30, 2011, in the city of Banja Luka, Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The final calendar of the event is:

• July 17, 2011: Setup day (only for people doing initial setup)
• July 18-23, 2011: DebCamp, the yearly developer work sessions.
• July 23, 2011: Arrival Day for DebConf11
• July 24-30, 2011: DebConf11
• July 31, 2011: Departure/cleanup day

The call for papers and registration dates are still to be decided.

More information at the DebConf 11 website.

As part of the Training Sessions initiative organized by the Debian Women project, this week a lesson about Python packaging will be held. The lesson, which is aimed at an intermediate audience, will focus specifically modules and applications packaging and will be held by Piotr O arowski who is member of Python Applications Packaging Team and Debian Python Modules Team.

The session will take place, as usual, on #debian-women channel on irc.debian.org on Thursday, 2nd December at 20:00 UTC.

Cause of the advanced topic is madatory to have some knowledge about Debian packaging (see, for example Lars Wirzenius tutorial) and about general Python development.

The lesson will consists of a first, theoretical, part in wich Piotr will explain us some basics; and of a Q&A part, entirely dedicated to more advanced problems.

See you on Thursday!

Contributed by: Francesca Ciceri

Debian-NYC is having it's first Novice Night this Wednesday, December 1st, hosted at Eyebeam. It will run from about 18:30 until 22:00, but people can come and go.What are Novice Nights? They are a time for people to come and informally get help with Debian and derivatives. It's like an "installfest", but not just about installing. It's about getting help with what you already have installed. It's about helping to solve little problems. It's about meeting the community, and learning what resources are available, so that you can help yourself in the future.We'll see how the first one goes, and improve from there. I'm looking forward to it, and seeing how this series evolves.If you know anyone in the NYC area, point them to the Novice Night announcement and planning page and encourage them to come. Groups are welcome. There is also lots of other Debian-NYC events that happen, too.Tags: debian-nyc

Tesetrepository has a really nice workflow for fixing a set of failing tests:

1. Tell it about the failing tests (e.g. by doing a full test run, or running a single known failing test)
2. Run just the known failing tests (testr run failing)
3. Make a change
4. Goto step 2

As you fix up the tests testr will just give your test runner a smaller and smaller list of tests to run. However I haven t been able to use that feature when developing (most) Python programs. Today though, I added the necessary support to testtools, and as a result subunit (which inherits its thin test runner shim from testtools) now supports load-list. With this a simple .testr.conf can support this lovely workflow. This is the one used in testrepository itself: it runs the testrepository tests, which are regular unittest tests, using subunit.run this gives it subunit output, and tells testrepository how to run a subset of tests.

[DEFAULT]
test_command=python -m subunit.run $IDOPTION testrepository.tests.test_suite
test_id_option=--load-list $IDFILE


While I share Alex s law [is] boring view, this also attracted my attention because it s (slightly) about statistics software. I feel the SAS v WPL case mentioned on his blog deserves a wider airing:

The basic story is that the Judge in this case is deeply unsure of the boundary of copyright. [...] has sent a number of questions to the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The questions are hypothetical, but clearly designed to test the waters and figure out where this line falls.

Now will this re-affirm what I ve always been told, that copyright s border is between ideas and expressions, and copyright only covers expressions? Or will it draw a different boundary? It seems that those most likely to be affected are those who are at the edges of acceptability of licences like LGPL, or trying to provide workalikes of hostile proprietary companies, but please, read it for yourself.

At the end of September, things were quite exciting as we had our first project meeting. At that meeting those in the room saw a demonstration of the Moonshot GSS EAP mechanism and we discussed a number of open issues and began to plan for our test infrastructure. We ve made significant progress on the specification front and on explaining Moonshot to important communities since then. However there has been little public progress on the implementation front. Unfortunately, getting the necessary legal clearance and agreements to release code often takes longer than anyone would like; that is what is happening here. We re all eagerly awaiting final approval from the lawyers and JANET(UK) management. However, things have been moving behind the scenes. Throughout much of October, Luke Howard and Linus Nordberg were working on their respective parts of the code. I ve also been working on putting together the test and build infrastructure. As we discussed at the meeting, we re going to use Debian and Ubuntu as the basis for our testing. For example, we hope to release virtual machine images for these platforms for the major Moonshot components. Thus the primary build environment for our testing and virtualization will be for Debian. I ve been putting together that here. Right now, that branch will pull together packages of the SAML infrastructure that we need. I ve also been looking into virtualized test frameworks and believe I ve found one that meets our needs. I ve also put together some primitive build infrastructure that is independent of packaging available here. I ve set up a buildbot that builds both environments. So, as the code becomes available we ll be in a good position to start making it available.

The ABFAB working group, which will be standardizing technologies that Moonshot depends on, had its first meeting at IETF 79 in Beijing, China. The meeting was quite productive. Because the meeting was the first of the working group, there were some introductory presentations. A group of authors are putting together a proposed architecture document; we presented the current state of our work. However things have evolved significantly since the working group meeting and I think it will make more sense to wait a couple of weeks to discuss the architecture document. Most of the time was spent on two presentations. The first was the status of the GSS mechanism. We discussed issues that were discovered while implementing the EAP GSS-API mechanism. Discussion in the room tended to support the proposals made in the slides. A few issues will need to come to the list. We had the most interesting discussion of SAML AAA integration. Minutes are available.

Another thing I regard as useful on the commandline are colors. (Others commonly refer to my color preferences as eye cancer, but that s not relevant here. ;-) Colors help to easily distinguish between relevant and non-relevant things or to separate different things. One colored command line program I use nearly everyday is the colored fork of bsdmainutils s well know (or at least better known) cal program whose output looks like this:

$ cal
    November 2010    
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
    1  2  3  4  5  6
 7  8  9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30
$ 

Since the colored fork calls itself still cal (as the Debian source package is called), to avoid conflicts with bsdmainutils s cal, the binary package and the binary itself are called ccal (short for colored cal) and its output looks like this:

$ ccal
    November 2010     
 Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su 
  1  2  3  4  5  6  7 
  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 
 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 
 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 
 29<30>               
                      
$ 

ccal also use the locale definitions (LC_TIME), if available, that s why the one screenshot is Sun-Sat and the other one is Mon-Sun. According to the man page, ccal has some more improvements over the classic cal: If displaying the single-month format, ccal will look for a date file (the default file or whatever you specify with the -d option). If found, ccal will read the file, looking for special date descriptions for that month which will be displayed to the right of the calendar. By default, up to 24 appointments (number may be changed with -m) may be displayed per month. If the current date happens to fall on one of these special dates, it will be flagged by an asterisk. If there is room, appointments for the next month may also be displayed (next month s dates having definitions like 2nd Thursday will be skipped). But I must admit, I don t use that feature. I just use it as on-demand calendar sheet. The colored screenshot above is btw. generated with Adam Borowski s ansi2html which popped up after I published my Intent to package aha (for Ansi HTML Adapter), the first ANSI colors to HTML converter I found on the net. (And yes I searched for it because of this and some yet to come blog postings. No spoilers here though. ;-) While capturing colored output of ls and some other tools was easy, it needed a little hack to capture ccal s output, because if you pipe ccal output to anything, it drops its colors. Always. The solution was to run it in GNU Screen, log the output and then pipe the log file through aha or ansi2html :

$ screen -c /dev/null -L ccal; cat screenlog.0   ansi2html > ccal.html

Probably the output of every program which drops colors when writing to a pipe instead of a terminal can be fetched that way. Update, 2:04 CET: As Adam Borowski points out in message 62 of #605380, script is the better tool for making tools believe they talk to a terminal:

$ script -q /dev/null -c "ccal"   ansi2html

Catching the output of a whole year s calender ( ccal 2011 ) failed with GNU screen though, as it was truncated on the 24th of September by GNU screen (as it was already truncated in the screenlog.0), so no screenshot of that for the moment. And with script, I d get the whole output, but would have to manually fix the styles so they don t get posted literally to Planet Debian. So look for yourself how the output of ccal 2011 looks like by installing ccal. ;-)

On the 25th of November I held a training session for the Debian Women project, about Using Git. A transcript of the session is available. The session took 2,5 hours, more than I really expected (one hour less), but I had many questions asked. There were ~160 attendants, but many of those asking questions seem to have missed that this was a "basic" session, for people who never used it. All in all, it was a great experience. While preparing the talk, I had the chance to re-read some forgotten manpages, which clarified some points, so it was really useful for me as well Given the kind of questions I had, it would be nice to have an "Advanced Git" session, maybe in January-February. Any volunteers? I'll sure be attending it FYI, the next session will be held by POX (Piotr O arowski) next Thursday (Dec, 2). It will be about Python libraries/application packaging, you'll have to read the introductory session as a pre-requisite.

Once again, there s been another story about how Google is having trouble retaining talent. Despite all Eric Schmidt s attempts to tell folks that Google s regretted attrition rate has not changed in seven years, this story just doesn t want to seem to die. (And those stories about Google paying $3.5 million and $7 million to keep an engineer from defecting to Facebook? As far as I know, total bull. I bet it s something made up by some Facebook recruiter who needed to explain how she let a live prospect get away. :-) At least for me, the complete opposite is true. There are very few companies where I can do the work that I want to do, and Google is one of them. A startup is totally the wrong place for me. Why? Because if you talk to any venture capitalist, a startup has one and only one reason to exist: to prove that it has a scalable, viable business model. Take diapers.com for example. As Business Week described, while they were proving that they had a business model that worked, they purchased their diapers at the local BJ s and shipped them via Fedex. Another startup, Chegg, proved its business model by using Amazon.com to drop ship text books to their first customers. (The venture capitalist Mark Maples talked about this in a brilliant talk at the Founders Showcase; the Chegg example starts around 20:50 minutes in, but I d recommend listening to the whole thing, since it s such a great talk.) You don t negotiate volume discounts with textbook publishers, or build huge warehouses to hold all of the diapers that you re going to buy until you prove that you have a business model that works. Similarly, you don t work on great technology at a startup. Startups, by and large, aren t about technology at least, not the Web 2.0 startups like Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, Groupon, etc. They are about business model discovery. So if you are fundamentally a technologist at heart, whose heart sings when you re making a better file system, or fixing a kernel bug, you re not going to be happy at a startup. At least, not if the startup is run competently. If you have the heart of an entrepreneur, and you are willing to roll the dice (since 9 out of 10 startups go belly up; those are the ones that failed to find a viable business model), then sure, go for a startup. And understand that your job will be to make something that works well at a small scale, quick, dirty, and cheap. If that means using some proprietary software, then that s what you should do. Hopefully you ll get lucky and win the IPO lottery. But if your primary interest is to doing great engineering work, then you want go to company that has a proven business model. Google has enough scale that I can sleep well knowing that improvements I am making to Linux and the ext4 file system are saving enough money for the company that Google is making a profit on me. That is, the value Google is getting out of my work is worth many multiples of my total compensation. And that s a position that every engineer should strive for, since that s how you can be confident that you will remain gainfully employed. The fact that I can do what I love, and go to conferences, and all of my work is open source that s just total icing on the cake. :-) No related posts.

On friday, the first Debian Edu / Skolelinux development gathering in a long time take place here in Oslo, Norway. I really look forward to seeing all the good people working on the Squeeze release. The gathering is open for everyone interested in learning more about Debian Edu / Skolelinux. On Saturday, the Norwegian member organization taking care of organizing these development gatherings, Fri Programvare i Skolen, will hold its General Assembly for 2010. Membership is open for all, and currently there are 388 people registered as members. Last year 32 members cast their vote in the memberdb based election system. I hope more people find time to vote this year.

Paul Wayper has written a blog post criticising the main chains of grocery stores in Australia [1]. That is the cartel of Coles and Woolworths (which was formerly known as Safeway in some parts of Australia), and the German newcomer Aldi.While he does make some good points I think he was a little harsh on Aldi. As a portion of the stock on shelves (by quantity stocked, shelf space, number of products, or almost any other metric) it seems that Aldi easily beats every other decent sized grocery chain for the portion of the stock being organic food. Aldi also has a very high portion of their stock being fair-trade also probably beating the other chains handily. Having organic fair-trade food sold in bulk at low prices is a really good thing!Paul criticises the lack of range on offer in the major chains. Aldi has the smallest range as their entire business model is based around offering a small range of products in a relatively small store at very low prices. That dramatically decreases the amount of stock that they have and therefore decreases the amount that is spoiled and the expense of storing and tracking it all. I wonder if the success of Aldi can drive other stores to getting a better range of products. Why buy a small range of products from Coles or Woolworths when you can get a similar small range from Aldi at low prices that the business models of Coles and Woolworths can t match? This may even drive consumers to buying core products (bread, milk, pasta, etc) and some basic luxury products (cooking wine, basic chocolate, cheap soda, etc) from Aldi and then buying other products from specialist stores. This might result in more delicatessens!Aldi also has a weekly selection of special items. For example selling snow boots etc just before winter starts. In most parts of Australia we don t see snow much and a cheap pair of snow boots is a good investment for the one day a year that most people spend at the snow. These specials provide real benefits to consumers although not to the Australian economy.Paul complains about own brand products. But for some products such as sugar you will get the same product from home brand as from other brands (there aren t really many options for sugar) and it ll probably end up being Australian just due to economics.When you buy big-name products you are mostly paying for marketing. For some things there are real taste differences (such as Coke for me), but for lots of things there are no difference, so I m happy to buy own brand . Generally not paying for marketing is a good thing.I totally agree with Paul s point about buying Australian to help the local economy and also to avoid the transmission of diseases. Any treaty which forces us to accept the import of products from countries that have diseases that can be transmitted to Australian crops should be voided. It seems that the WTO is specifically designed to benefit corporations at the expense of member countries and their citizens.Paul gave a positive review to IGA, I wasn t impressed with my local IGA the last time I visited it. But I ll give it another go.

• [1] http://www.mabula.net/tbfw/blosxom.cgi/2010/11/29#2010-11-29-scarcity-in-abundance

The Debian archive is known to be one of the largest software collections available in the free software world. With more than 16,000 source packages and 30,000 binary packages, users sometimes have trouble finding packages that are relevant to them. Debian developer Enrico Zini has been working on infrastructure to solve this problem. During the recent mini-debconf Paris, Enrico gave a talk presenting what he has been working on in the last few years, which hasn t gotten yet the attention it deserves . Enrico is known in the Debian community for the introduction of debtags, a system used to classify all packages using facets. Each facet describes a specific kind of property: type of user-interface, programming language it s written in, type of document manipulated, purpose of the software, etc. His most recent work builds on that. It is available in Debian and Ubuntu in the apt-xapian-index package. Its purpose is to allow advanced queries over the database of available packages. Users of apt-xapian-index He started by presenting some early users of the infrastructure. The most widely know is Ubuntu s software center. Its search feature provides results almost instantly thanks to apt-xapian-index. But it is a very simple interface that doesn t exploit many of the advanced features provided by the apt-xapian-index. Another early adopter, making use of some more advanced features, is GoPlay!. It s a graphical user interface to find games. It makes use of debtags to classify games so that you can browse, for example, all 3D action/arcade games related to cars. GoPlay has even been extended to be a more generic debtags based package browser and the package now also provides GoLearn!, GoAdmin!, GoNet!, GoOffice!, GoSafe!, and GoWeb!. Fuss-launcher is an application launcher and not a package browser, but by using apt-xapian-index, it s able to reuse information provided at the package level to make it easier to find installed applications. Package descriptions tend to be more verbose than those embedded in .desktop files. Enrico also showed another nice feature to the audience: if you drag a document onto its window, it will show you a list of applications that can open it. Last but not least, apt-xapian-index provides a command line search tool that is vastly superior to the traditional apt-cache search: it s axi-cache search (axi stands for apt-xapian-index). Enrico compared the output of a search on the letter r . While apt-cache spits out an infinite list of packages containing this letter somewhere in the description, axi-cache only listed packages related to GNU R. He also demonstrated the contextual tab completion. It makes it easy to use debtags and to refine your search. Once you have typed a first keyword, the tab-completion for the second one only contains keywords or debtags that are actually able to provide more restrictive results. Advanced queries with logical operations (AND, OR, NOT, XOR) are also supported. Features of the backend Enrico then dived into the internals. Xapian s search engine is at the root of this infrastructure. He likes it because it s a simple library (i.e. no daemon) and it has nice Python bindings. While apt-xapian-index s core work is to index the descriptions of all the packages, it actually stores much more and can be easily extended with plugins (written in Python). For instance, the information stored encompasses:

• words appearing in the description of the packages (including the translated descriptions if the user uses a non-English locale);
• their origin;
• their section;
• their size and installed size;
• the time they have been first seen;
• icons, categories, descriptions from the .desktop files they contain (through app-install-data);
• aliases for names of some popular applications that are not available on Linux (for instance excel maps to the debtag office::spreadsheet).

He already has plans to store more: adding popularity contest data (see wishlist bugs #602180 and #602182) will make it possible to sort query results in a useful way. The most widely used applications are good choices when it comes to community support, and they are likely of better quality due to the larger user base. Adding timestamps of the last installation/upgrade/removal, will make it easier to pin-point a regression to a specific package update. The generated index is world-readable and can be used from any application provided it can use the Xapian library which is written in C++ but has bindings for Perl, Python, PHP, Java, Tcl, C#, and Ruby. Call for experimentation Enrico believes that many useful applications have yet to be invented on top of apt-xapian-index s features. He s calling for experimentation and asking for new ideas. The only practical limit that he has encountered is the size of the index: currently it varies between 50 Mb (Debian unstable without translation) and 70 Mb (Debian stable/testing/unstable with one translation). He would like it to not grow over 100 Mb since it s installed by default (due to aptitude recommending it) and he s not comfortable with the idea of using more than 20% of the disk footprint of a basic install just for this service. That s why the index was configured to not store the position of the terms: it s thus not possible to find out packages whose description contains the word statistical immediately followed by the word computing . You can however find those which have both terms somewhere in their description. Enrico wondered if apt-xapian-index offers too much freedom. That could explain why few people experimented with it despite his numerous blog posts with code samples and information on how to get started using it. But it s not difficult to imagine use cases for this data. It could be used to extend tools like rc-alert or wnpp-alert, for example. They provide a long list of Debian packages that are looking for some help and are installed on the machine. With apt-xapian-index, it would be possible to restrict the results to the set of packages written in a specific programming language or for a particular desktop environment. The more likely explanation is that too few people know about the tool. There are many more itches to scratch where apt-xapian-index s features could be very useful, and my guess is that Enrico s wishes will eventually come true.

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AltOS 0.8 New Software and Firmware for Altus Metrum Devices Bdale and I are pleased to announce the release of AltOS version 0.8. AltOS is the core of the software for all of the Altus Metrum products. It consists of cc1111-based microcontroller firmware and Java-based ground station software. AltosUI New Features in the AltusMetrum Ground Station AltOS version 0.8 contains significant upgrades to the ground station software, AltosUI:

• Post-flight graphing tool. This lets you explore the behaviour of your rocket after flight with a scroll-able and zoom-able chart showing the altitude, speed and acceleration of the airframe along with events recorded by the flight computer. You can export graphs to PNG files, or print them directly.

• Real-time moving map which overlays the in-progress flight on satellite imagery fetched from Google Maps. This lets you see in pictures where your rocket has landed, allowing you to plan recovery activities more accurately.

• Wireless recovery system testing. Prep your rocket for flight and test fire the deployment charges to make sure things work as expected. All without threading wires through holes in your airframe.
• Optimized flight status displays. Each flight state now has it s own custom tab in the flight monitoring window so you can focus on the most important details. Pre-flight, the system shows a set of red/green status indicators for battery voltage, apogee/main igniter continutity and GPS reception. Wait until they re all green and your rocket is ready for flight. There are also tabs for ascent, descent and landing along with the original tabular view of the data.
• Monitor multiple flights simultaneously. If you have more than one TeleDongle, you can monitor a flight with each one on the same computer.
• Automatic flight monitoring at startup. Plug TeleDongle into the machine before starting AltosUI and it will automatically connect to it and prepare to monitor a flight.
• Exports Google Earth flight tracks. Using the Keyhole Markup Language (.kml) file format, this provides a 3D view of your rocket flight through the Google Earth program.

Continuing Features AltOS version 0.8 continues to provide the following features:

• Receive and log telemetry from a connected TeleDongle device. All data received is saved to log files named with the current date and the connected rocket serial and flight numbers. There is no mode in which telemetry data will not be saved.
• Download logged data from TeleMetrum devices, either through a direct USB connection or over the air through a TeleDongle device.
• Configure a TeleMetrum device, setting the radio channel, callsign, apogee delay and main deploy height. This can be done through either a USB connection or over a radio link via a TeleDongle device.
• Replay a flight in real-time. This takes a saved telemetry log or eeprom download and replays it through the user interface so you can relive your favorite rocket flights.
• Reprogram Altus Metrum devices. Using an Altus Metrum device connected via USB, another Altus Metrum device can be reprogrammed using the supplied programming cable between the two devices.
• Export Flight data to a comma-separated-values file. This takes either telemetry or on-board flight data and generates data suitable for use in external applications. All data is exported using standard units so that no device-specific knowledge is needed to handle the data.
• Speak to you during the flight. Instead of spending the flight hunched over your laptop looking at the screen, enjoy the view while the computer tells you what s going on up there. During ascent, you hear the current flight state and altitude information. During descent, you get azimuth, elevation and range information to try and help you find your rocket in the air. Once on the ground, the direction and distance are reported.

AltOS Firmware Update AltOS version 0.8 contains a minor firmware update for TeleMetrum to resolve an issue with main deployment. A mis-feature in the igniter firing code would delay main deployment by 2 seconds in some cases. Thanks to our contributors! We had a lot of help with this release:

• Anthony Towns wrote both the new data graphing interface and the moving map display.
• Bob Finch helped clean up our documentation, and provided flight testing for the firmware updates.

Future Plans A number of features are implemented or in process in the sources available in our publicly visible repository that are not part of the current stable release.

• A Kalman-filter based approach to apogee detection using more than just the baro sensor, so that we can safely control apogee ejection on flights to altitudes beyond the range of our baro sensor alone. Unlike the other items on the list, this will be a significant change to the in-rocket TeleMetrum firmware. It may therefore be a while before this becomes part of a stable firmware release.
• Motor characterization. Because TeleMetrum contains a high-resolution, high-frequency accelerometer, it is possible to take the data from that and compute an accurate thrust curve for the motor.
• Comprehensive PDF and/or HTML -based flight report. Construct a complete report of the flight suitable for publication on the web that includes graphs of the flight and details about motor performance etc.
• Publish flight data to the Altus Metrum web site. This will allow you to share your flight data with others, and let you download flights published by others.

There are any number of additions that could be made to this list; feel free to send along ideas that you ve got. Of course, all of this software is licensed under the GNU General Public License, so you can get the source and hack on it in the comfort of your own home.

Yesterday in Harald K nig s commandline talk at LinuxDay.at, I first heard of cat s -e option, and noticed that cat has quite some interesting options. From the man page of cat:

-A, --show-all

equivalent to -vET

-b, --number-nonblank

number nonempty output lines

-e

equivalent to -vE

-E, --show-ends

display $ at end of each line

-n, --number

number all output lines

-s, --squeeze-blank

suppress repeated empty output lines

-t

equivalent to -vT

-T, --show-tabs

display TAB characters as ^I

-v, --show-nonprinting

use ^ and M- notation, except for LFD and TAB

Some examples made on an UTF-8 terminal:

user@host:demo $ cat bla
            
abc
user@host:demo $ cat -Ab bla
     1  M-CM-$  M-CM-6  M-CM-<^IM-CM-^_   $
$
$
     2  abc$
user@host:demo $ cat -Ens bla
     1              $
     2	$
     3  abc$
user@host:demo $ 

I hope this blog posting will reduce the percentage of useless uses of cat by raising the amount of useful uses of cat . :-)

Yesterday night, we were at Stade de France to witness the debacle of the French national rugby team against Australia (16-59). 7 tries to 1. For someone who loves rugby and knows the high level of players we have in France (Top 14 is a collection of great games every week), it hurts. Maybe, next time, there will be a little more Toulouse players on the field and a little less people who have nothing to do there (should I name a few? Andreu, Huget, Porical...). The only good point of that game was (as usual) the scrum first row (at least during one hour...then even there we got crushed by the Australians). French winter was even here to help, but apparently the yellow/green folks didn't really care. Australia has a really impressive team, particularly their back line. We'll be having hard times in RWC in New Zealand next year. Big round of aplause at the end of the game for that team. For our team: a pique.....fort!

Sometimes it s nice being wrong. Contrary to what I predicted, ZFS will be supported in Debian Squeeze using the official installer. This means that Debian Squeeze will be one of the first GNU distributions to support ZFS. In fact, even though ZFS support didn t make it to Debian-Installer beta1 by the time it was released, it is now available in the netboot images (this happens because netboot images fetch newer installer components from the internet). As a consequence of this my unofficial installer can now be considered obsolete. So why did I say something that turned out to be grossly inaccurate? It s not due to anyone s fault really. At that time, the version of Parted that included ZFS detection hadn t migrated to Squeeze. The unblock policy didn t appear to allow this migration. However, the Release Team kindly decided to make an exception that allowed this, and after Parted had migrated the changes in Debian-Installer itself went in quite smoothly.