Search Results: "pollo"

29 May 2023

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Python 3.11, pip and (breaking) system packages

As we get closer to Debian Bookworm's release, I thought I'd share one change in Python 3.11 that will surely affect many people. Python 3.11 implements the new PEP 668, Marking Python base environments as externally managed 1. If you use pip regularly on Debian, it's likely you'll eventually hit the externally-managed-environment error:
error: externally-managed-environment
  This environment is externally managed
 > To install Python packages system-wide, try apt install
    python3-xyz, where xyz is the package you are trying to
    install.
    If you wish to install a non-Debian-packaged Python package,
    create a virtual environment using python3 -m venv path/to/venv.
    Then use path/to/venv/bin/python and path/to/venv/bin/pip. Make
    sure you have python3-full installed.
    If you wish to install a non-Debian packaged Python application,
    it may be easiest to use pipx install xyz, which will manage a
    virtual environment for you. Make sure you have pipx installed.
    See /usr/share/doc/python3.11/README.venv for more information.
note: If you believe this is a mistake, please contact your Python installation or OS distribution provider. You can override this, at the risk of breaking your Python installation or OS, by passing --break-system-packages.
hint: See PEP 668 for the detailed specification.
With this PEP, Python tools can now distinguish between packages that have been installed by the user with a tool like pip and ones installed using a distribution's package manager, like apt. This is generally great news: it was previously too easy to break a system by mixing the two types of packages. This PEP will simplify our role as a distribution, as well as improve the overall Python user experience in Debian. Sadly, it's also likely this change will break some of your scripts, especially CI that (legitimately) install packages via pip alongside system packages. For example, I use the following gitlab-ci snippet to make sure my PRs don't break my build process2:
build:flit:
  stage: build
  script:
  - apt-get update && apt-get install -y flit python3-pip
  - FLIT_ROOT_INSTALL=1 flit install
  - metalfinder --help
With Python 3.11, this snippet will error out, as pip will refuse to install packages alongside the system's. The fix is to tell pip it's OK to "break" your system packages, either using the --break-system-packages parameter, or the PIP_BREAK_SYSTEM_PACKAGES=1 environment variable3. This, of course, is not something you should be using in production to restore the old behavior! The "proper" way to fix this issue, as the externally-managed-environment error message aptly (har har) informs you, is to use virtual environments. Happy hacking!

  1. Kudos to our own Matthias Klose, Stefano Rivera and Elana Hashman, who worked on designing and implementing this PEP!
  2. Which is something that bit me before... You push some changes to your git repository, everything seems fine and all the tests pass, so you merge it and make a new git tag. When the time comes to build and upload this tag to PyPi, you find out some minor thing broke your build system (which you weren't testing) and you have to scramble to make a point-release to fix the issue. Sad!
  3. Don't go searching for this environment variable in pip's code though, as you won't find it! All of pip's command line options can be passed as env vars using the PIP_<UPPER_LONG_NAME> format. Useful for tools that use pip indirectly, like flit.

3 March 2023

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Goodbye Bullseye report from the Montreal 2023 BSP

Hello World! I haven't really had time to blog here since the start of the semester, as I've been pretty busy at work1. All this to say, this report for the Bug Squashing Party we held in Montreal last weekend is a little late, sorry :) First of all, I'm pleased to announce our local community seems to be doing great and has recovered from the pandemic-induced lull. May COVID stay away from our bodies forever. This time around, a total of 9 people made it to what has become somewhat of a biennial tradition2. We worked on a grand total of 14 bugs and even managed to close some! It looks like I was too concentrated on bugs to take a picture of the event... To redeem myself, I hereby offer you a picture of a cute-but-hairless cat I met on Sunday morning: Picture of a curious sphinx cat on a table You should try to join an upcoming BSP or to organise one if you can. It's loads of fun and you'll be helping the project make the next release happen sooner! As always, thanks to Debian for granting us a budget for the food and to rent the venue. Goodbye Bullseye!

  1. Which I guess is a good thing, since it means I actually have work this semester :O
  2. See our previous BSPs in 2017, 2019 and 2021.

26 January 2023

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Montreal Subway Foot Traffic Data, 2022 edition

For the fourth year in a row, I've asked Soci t de Transport de Montr al, Montreal's transit agency, for the foot traffic data of Montreal's subway. By clicking on a subway station, you'll be redirected to a graph of the station's foot traffic. Licences

23 December 2022

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: 2022 A Musical Retrospective

With the end of the year approaching fast, I thought putting my year in retrospective via music would be a fun thing to do. Albums In 2022, I added 51 new albums to my collection nearly one a week! I listed them below in the order in which I acquired them. I purchased most of these albums when I could and borrowed the rest at libraries. If you want to browse though, I added links to the album covers pointing either to websites where you can buy them or to Discogs when digital copies weren't available1. Browsing through the albums, I can see my tastes really shifted a lot in the last few years. I used to listen to a lot of Hip-Hop, but the recent trends in this genre2 really turn me off. In fact, it seems I didn't add a single Hip-Hop album to my collection this year... Metal also continues to dominate the list. Many thanks to Angry Metal Guy for being the best metal reviewing website out there. Concerts 2022 was also a big change for me, as I started going to much more concerts than I previously did. metalfinder has been working great and I'm really happy with it. Here are the concerts I went to in 2022: I'm looking forward continuing to go to a lot of concerts in 2023!

  1. Some of the albums especially the O ! ones are pretty underground. For most of those, I actually have physical copies I bought and ripped.
  2. Mostly mumble rap, beats than are less and less sample-based, extreme commercialisation and lyrics that are less and less political and engaged.

8 December 2022

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Debian Python Team 2022 Sprint Report

This is the report for the Debian Python Team remote sprint that took place on December 2-3-4 2022. Many thanks to those who participated, namely: Here is a list of issues we worked on: pybuild autodep8 feature About a year ago, Antonio Terceiro contributed code to pybuild to make it possible to automatically run the upstream test suite as autopkgtests. This feature has now been merged and uploaded to unstable. Although you can find out more about it in the pybuild-autopkgtest manpage, an email providing more details should be sent to the debian-python mailing list relatively soon. Fixing packages that run tests via python3 setup.py test Last August, Stefano Rivera poked the team about the deprecation of the python3 setup.py test command to run tests in pybuild. Although this feature has been deprecated upstream for 6 years now, many packages in the archive still use it to run the upstream test suite during build. Around 29 of the 67 packages that are team-maintained by the Debian Python Team were fixed during the sprint. Ideally, all of them would be before the feature is removed from pybuild. if a package you maintain still runs this command, please consider fixing it! Fixing packages that use nose nose, provided by the python3-nose package, is an obsolete testing framework for Python and has been unmaintained since 2015. During the sprint, people worked on fixing some of the many bugs filled against packages still running tests via nose, but there are still around 240 packages affected by this issue in the archive. Again, if a package you maintain still runs this command, please consider fixing it! Removal of the remaining Python2 packages With the upload of dh-python 5.20221202, Stefano Rivera officially removed support for dh_python2 and dh_pypy, thus closing the "Python2 removal in sid/bullseye" bug. It seems some work still needs to be done for complete Python2 removal from Sid, but I expect this will be done in time for the Bookworm release. Working on Lintian tags for the Team During the sprint, I managed to work on some Lintian issues that we had targeted, namely: I also worked on a few other Lintian tags, but they were unrelated to the Debian Python Team itself. I'm also happy to report many of the tags I wrote for the team in the past few months were merged by the awesome Russ Allbery and should land in unstable as soon as a new release is made. I'm particularly looking forward the new "uses-python-distutils" tag that should help us flag packages that still use the deprecated distutils library. Patching distro-tracker (tracker.debian.org) to show pending team MRs It's often hard to have a good overview of pending merge requests when working with team-maintained packages, as by default, Salsa doesn't notify anyone when a MR is opened. Although our workflow typically does not involve creating merge requests, some people still do and they end up sitting there, unnoticed. During the sprint, Kurt Kremitzki worked on solving this issue by having distro-tracker show the pending MRs on our team's tracker page. Sadly, it seems little progress was made, as the removal of python3-django-jsonfield from the archive and breaking changes in python3-selenium has broken the test suite. Migrate packages building with the flit plugin to the generic pyproject one pybuild has been supporting building with PEP-517 style pyproject.toml files via a generic plugin (pybuild-plugin-pyproject) for a while now. As this plugin supersedes the old flit plugin, we've been thinking of deprecating it in time for the Bookworm release. To make this possible, most of the packages in the archive that still used this plugin were migrated to the generic one and I opened bugs on the last handful of packages that were not team-maintained. Other work Many other things were done during the sprint, such as: Thanks Thanks again to everyone who joined the sprint, and three big cheers for all the folks who donate to Debian and made it possible for us to have a food budget for the event.

4 November 2022

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Book Review: Chokepoint Capitalism, by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow

Two weeks ago, I had the chance to go see Cory Doctorow at my local independent bookstore, in Montr al. He was there to present his latest essay, co-written with Rebecca Giblin1. Titled Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back, it focuses on the impact of monopolies and monopsonies (more on this later) on creative workers. The book is divided in two main parts: A picture of the book cover Although Doctorow is known for his strong political stances, I have to say I'm quite surprised by the quality of the research Giblin and he did for this book. They both show a pretty advanced understanding of the market dynamics they look at, and even though most of the solutions they propose aren't new or groundbreaking, they manage to be convincing and clear. That is to say, you certainly don't need to be an economist to understand or enjoy this book :) As I have mentioned before, the book heavily criticises monopolies, but also monopsonies a market structure that has only one buyer (instead of one seller). I find this quite interesting, as whereas people are often familiar with the concept of monopolies, monopsonies are frequently overlooked. The classic example of a monopsony is a labor market with a single employer: there is a multitude of workers trying to sell their labor power, but in the end, working conditions are dictated by the sole employer, who gets to decide who has a job and who hasn't. Mining towns are good real-world examples of monopsonies. In the book, the authors argue most of the contemporary work produced by creative workers (especially musicians and writers) is sold to monopsonies and oligopsonies, like Amazon2 or major music labels. This creates a situation where the consumers are less directly affected by the lack of competition in the market (they often get better prices), but where creators have an increasingly hard time making ends meet. Not only this, but natural monopsonies3 are relatively rare, making the case for breaking the existing ones even stronger. Apart from the evident need to actually start applying (the quite good) antitrust laws in the USA, some of the other solutions put forward are: Overall, I found this book quite enjoying and well written. Since I am not a creative worker myself and don't experience first-hand the hardships presented in the book, it was the occasion for me to delve more deeply in this topic. Chances are I'll reuse some of the expos s in my classes too.

  1. Professor at the Melbourne Law School and Director of the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia, amongst other things. More on her here.
  2. Amazon owns more than 50% of the US physical book retail market and has an even higher market share for ebooks and audiobooks (via Audible). Not only this, but with the decline of the physical book market, audiobooks are an increasingly important source of revenue for authors.
  3. Natural monopolies happen when it does not make economic sense for multiple enterprises to compete in a market. Critical infrastructures, like water supply or electricity, make for good examples of natural monopolies. It simply wouldn't be efficient to have 10 separate electrical cables connecting your house to 10 separate electric grids. In my opinion, such monopolies are acceptable (and even desirable), as long as they are collectively owned, either by the State or by local entities (municipalities, non-profits, etc.).

1 November 2022

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Montreal's Debian & Stuff - October 2022

Our local Debian user group gathered on Sunday October 30th to chat, work on Debian and do other, non-Debian related hacking :) This time around, we met at EfficiOS's1 offices. As you can see from the following picture, it's a great place and the view they have is pretty awesome. Many thanks for hosting us! The view from EfficiOS' offices, overlooking the Mont-Royal This was our 4th meeting this year and once again, attendance was great: 10 people showed up to work on various things. Following our bi-monthly schedule, our next meeting should be in December, but I'm not sure it'll happen. December can be a busy month here and I will have to poke our mailing list to see if people have the spoons for an event. This time around, I was able to get a rough log of the Debian work people did: pollo: mjeanson: viashimo: lavamind: anarcat: babelouest: tvaz: As always, thanks to the Debian project for granting us a budget to buy some food!

  1. Makers of the awesome LTTng project, amongst other things.

29 October 2022

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Extruded Schiit Stack

I've been a fan of the products manufactured by Schiit Audio for a while now. They are affordable (for high-end audio gear), sound great, are made in the USA1 and I think their industrial design looks great. I first started with one of their classic "Schiit Stack"2, but eventually upgraded to the Modi Multibit (I wanted the TOSLINK input), added a physical EQ (the Loki) and eventually got a Sys when I bought a Vidar speaker amp. The original Schiit Stack being 2 devices high was pretty manageable as-is. With my current 4-high stack though, things became unstable and I had to resort to finding a way to bolt them together. Mooching from a friend with a 3D printer, I printed this clever mount from Thingiverse. It worked well enough, but was somewhat imperfect for multiple reasons:
  1. The plastic tabs had a tendency of breaking in two when the screws where tight enough for the stack to feel solid.
  2. The plastic wasn't really rigid enough to support the 4 devices properly and the stack, being back-heavy from the cables, was unstable and tipped over easily.
  3. Due to the plastic tabs being fragile, it was pretty much impossible to disassemble the stack.
This last issue was what killed this solution for me. When I tried to replace my Modi 2 by the Modi Multibit, the mount pretty much crumbled away. Sadly, my friend warped a bunch of pieces on his 3D printer while trying to print ABS and I couldn't have him print me replacement parts either. After a while, I grew tired of having these four devices laying around my desk and wasting valuable space. I had tasted the 4-stack and knew how better things could be! That's when I realised the solution was to ditch 3D printing altogether, use aluminum framing extrusions and build my own stack out of metal. The 4 different Schiit devices with the hardware needed to build the extruded frame This was my first time working with aluminium frame extrusions and I had tons of fun! I specced the first version using 10mm x 10mm rails from McMaster-Carr, but discovered they do not ship to residential addresses in Canada... After looking at local options, I then decided to use 15mm x 15mm rails from Misumi. I went with this option since the rails are still small enough not to be an eyesore, but also because this system uses M3 screws, which the Schiit mini series also uses, making assembly much easier. I choose to make the assembled stack quite a bit taller than the previous one made with 3D printed plastic, as I found the headphone amp got pretty hot during the summer and I wanted to provide better airflow. If you are interested in replicating this stack, here are the parts I used, all from Misumi: I didn't order any since I had some already, but you'll also need M3 screws, namely: You can also cheap out and use only M3-10 screws (as I did), but you'll have to use the extra nuts you ordered as spacers. The assembled stack, complete with my lucky cat For the curious ones, the cabling is done this way:
                            
                                                              
          Magni (hp amp)       Vidar (sp amp)  
                                                              
                            
                                      
                            
                                             
                              Sys (switch)   
                                                      
                                     
                                                      
                                                      
                            
                                                              
                 Modi (DAC)        Loki (EQ)    
                                                              
                            
The Vidar is not part of the actual stack, as it's a 600W amp that weights 10kg :D. The last thing I think I want to change in this setup is the cables. The ones I have are too long for the stack. Shorter ones would reduce the wasted space in the back and make the whole thing more elegant.

  1. As in, designed, manufactured and assembled in the USA, from parts, transformers and boards made in the USA. I find this pretty impressive.
  2. A USB DAC and a headphone amp you can stack one of top of the other.

6 September 2022

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Montreal's Debian & Stuff - August 2022

Our local Debian user group gathered on Sunday August 28th1 at the very hackish Foulab for the August 2022 edition of our "Debian & Stuff" meetings. As always, the event was a success and we had lots of fun. Nine people showed up, including some new faces and people I hadn't seen in a while: On my side, although I was badly sleep-deprived 2, I still managed to be somewhat productive! One of the WiFi Access Points we use in our 4-apartment LAN had been boot-looping for a few weeks, after a failed sysupgrade to the latest version of OpenWRT. lavamind and I suspect the flash got corrupted in a way or another during the upgrade process... Lucky for us, this model has a serial port and runs U-Boot. After a bit of tinkering, some electrical tape and two different serial adapters3, we managed to identify the pin layout and got a shell on the machine. The device has a reset button, but since the kernel panic was happening too soon in the boot process, we weren't able to get into OpenWRT's failsafe mode this way. The WiFi AP being flashed via a serial-to-USB adapter Once we had serial access, wiping the flash and re-installing OpenWRT fixed our problem. A quick ansible-playbook run later, the device was back to being usable and configured :) I was too tired to keep track of what others did, but I took some nice pictures of the pizza we got, and of this nice blow-up Tux wearing a Foulab t-shirt. Enjoy! A blow-up Tux wearing a Foulab t-shirt One of the pizzas we ordered As always, thanks to the Debian project for granting us a budget to rent the venue and to buy some food.

  1. Please excuse the late blog post, it's Harvest Season here and I've been quite busy.
  2. A bad case of wry neck kept me from sleeping properly for a while in August.
  3. As it turns out, serial connections work better when you use the right pins for TX and RX!

21 June 2022

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Montreal's Debian & Stuff - June 2022

As planned, we held our second local Debian meeting of the year last Sunday. We met at the lovely Eastern Bloc (an artists' hacklab) to work on Debian (and other stuff!), chat and socialise. Although there were fewer people than at our last meeting1, we still did a lot of work! I worked on fixing a bunch of bugs in Clojure packages2, LeLutin worked on podman and packaged libinfluxdb-http-perl and anarcat worked on internetarchive, trocla and moneta. Olivier also came by and worked on debugging his Kali install. We are planning to have our next meeting at the end of August. If you are interested, the best way to stay in touch is either to subscribe to our mailing list or to join our IRC channel (#debian-quebec on OFTC). Events are also posted on Quebec's Agenda du libre. Many thanks to Debian for providing us a budget to rent the venue for the day and for the pizza! Here is a nice picture anarcat took of (one of) the glasses of porter we had afterwards, at the next door brewery: A glass of English Porter from Silo Brewery

  1. Summer meetings are always less populous and it also happened to be Father's Day...
  2. #1012824, #1011856, #1011837, #1011844, #1011864 and #1011967.

11 June 2022

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Updating a rooted Pixel 3a

A short while after getting a Pixel 3a, I decided to root it, mostly to have more control over the charging procedure. In order to preserve battery life, I like my phone to stop charging at around 75% of full battery capacity and to shut down automatically at around 12%. Some Android ROMs have extra settings to manage this, but LineageOS unfortunately does not. Android already comes with a fairly complex mechanism to handle the charge cycle, but it is mostly controlled by the kernel and cannot be easily configured by end-users. acc is a higher-level "systemless" interface for the Android kernel battery management, but one needs root to do anything interesting with it. Once rooted, you can use the AccA app instead of playing on the command line to fine tune your battery settings. Sadly, having a rooted phone also means I need to re-root it each time there is an OS update (typically each week). Somehow, I keep forgetting the exact procedure to do this! Hopefully, I will be able to use this post as a reference in the future :) Note that these instructions might not apply to your exact phone model, proceed with caution! Extract the boot.img file This procedure mostly comes from the LineageOS documentation on extracting proprietary blobs from the payload.
  1. Download the latest LineageOS image for your phone.
  2. unzip the image to get the payload.bin file inside it.
  3. Clone the LineageOS scripts git repository: $ git clone https://github.com/LineageOS/scripts
  4. extract the boot image (requires python3-protobuf): $ mkdir extracted-payload $ python3 scripts/update-payload-extractor/extract.py payload.bin --output_dir extracted-payload
You should now have a boot.img file. Patch the boot image file using Magisk
  1. Upload the boot.img file you previously extracted to your device.
  2. Open Magisk and patch the boot.img file.
  3. Download the patched file back on your computer.
Flash the patched boot image
  1. Enable ADB debug mode on your phone.
  2. Reboot into fastboot mode. $ adb reboot fastboot
  3. Flash the patched boot image file: $ fastboot flash boot magisk_patched-foo.img
  4. Disable ADB debug mode on your phone.
Troubleshooting In an ideal world, you would do this entire process each time you upgrade to a new LineageOS version. Sadly, this creates friction and makes updating much more troublesome. To simplify things, you can try to flash an old patched boot.img file after upgrading, instead of generating it each time. In my experience, it usually works. When it does not, the device behaves weirdly after a reboot and things that require proprietary blobs (like WiFi) will stop working. If that happens:
  1. Download the latest LineageOS version for your phone.
  2. Reboot into recovery (Power + Volume Down).
  3. Click on "Apply Updates"
  4. Sideload the ROM: $ adb sideload lineageos-foo.zip

20 May 2022

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Introducing metalfinder

After going to an incredible Arch Enemy / Behemoth / Napalm Death / Unto Others concert a few weeks ago, I decided I wanted to go to more concerts. I like music, and I really enjoy concerts. Sadly, I often miss great performances because no one told me about it, or my local newspaper didn't cover the event enough in advance for me to get tickets. Some online services lets you sync your Spotify account to notify you when a new concert is announced, but I don't use Spotify. As a music geek, I have a local music collection and if I need to stream it, I have a supysonic server. Introducing metalfinder, a cli tool to find concerts using your local music collection! At the moment, it scans your music collection, creates a list of artists and queries Bandsintown for concerts in your town. Multiple output formats are supported, but I mainly use the ATOM one, as I'm a heavy feed reader user. Screenshot of the ATOM output in my feed reader The current metalfinder version (1.1.1) is a MVP: it works well enough, but I still have a lot of work to do... If you want to give it a try, the easiest way is to download it from PyPi. metalfinder is also currently in NEW and I'm planning to have something feature complete in time for the Bookworm freeze.

18 May 2022

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Clojure Team 2022 Sprint Report

This is the report for the Debian Clojure Team remote sprint that took place on May 13-14th. Looking at my previous blog entries, this was my first Debian sprint since July 2020! Crazy how fast time flies... Many thanks to those who participated, namely: Sadly, Utkarsh Gupta although having planned on participating ended up not being able to and worked on DebConf Bursary paperwork instead. rlb Rob mostly worked on creating a dh-clojure tool to help make packaging Clojure libraries easier. At the moment, most of the packaging is done manually, by invoking build tools by hand. Having a tool to automate many of the steps required to build Clojure packages would go a long way in making them more uniform. His work (although still very much a WIP) can be found here: https://salsa.debian.org/rlb/dh-clojure/ ehashman Elana: lavamind It was J r me's first time working on Clojure packages, and things went great! During the sprint, he: allentiak Leandro joined us on Saturday, since he couldn't get off work on Friday. He mostly continued working on replacing our in-house scripts for /usr/bin/clojure by upstream's, a task he had already started during GSoC 2021. Sadly, none of us were familiar with Debian's mechanism for alternatives. If you (yes you, dear reader) are familiar with it, I'm sure he would warmly welcome feedback on his development branch. pollo As for me, I: Overall, it was quite a productive sprint! Thanks to Debian for sponsoring our food during the sprint. It was nice to be able to concentrate on fixing things instead of making food :) Here's a bonus picture of the nice sushi platter I ended up getting for dinner on Saturday night: Picture of a sushi platter

28 April 2022

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Montreal's Debian & Stuff - April 2022

After two long years of COVID hiatus, local Debian events in Montreal are back! Last Sunday, nine of us met at Koumbit to work on Debian (and other stuff!), chat and socialise. Even though these events aren't always the most productive, it was super fun and definitely helps keeping me motivated to work on Debian in my spare time. Many thanks to Debian for providing us a budget to rent the venue for the day and for the pizzas! Here are a few pictures I took during the event: Pizza boxes on a wooden bench Whiteboard listing TODO items for some of the participants A table with a bunch of laptops, and LeLutin :) If everything goes according to plan, our next meeting should be sometime in June. If you are interested, the best way to stay in touch is either to subscribe to our mailing list or to join our IRC channel (#debian-quebec on OFTC). Events are also posted on Quebec's Agenda du libre.

18 March 2022

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Debian Clojure Team Sprint --- May 13-14th 2022

I'm happy to announce the Debian Clojure Team will hold a remote sprint from May 13th to May 14th 2022. The goal of this sprint is to improve various aspects of the Clojure ecosystem in Debian. As such, everyone is welcome to participate! Here are a few items we are planning to work on, in no particular order: You can register for the sprint on the Debian Wiki. We are planning to ask the DPL for a food budget. If you plan on joining and want your food to be sponsored, please register before April 2nd.

5 February 2022

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Migrating from ledger to hledger

I first started using ledger the original plain-text accounting software in 2017. Since then, I had been pretty happy with my accounting routine, but grew a little annoyed by the repetitive manual work I had to do to assign recurring transactions to the right account. To make things easier, I had a collection of bash scripts to parse and convert the CSV files from my bank's website1 into ledger entries. They were of course ugly, unreadable piles of sed-grep-regex and did not let met achieve the automation complexity I longed for. Dissatisfied with ledger's features, I decided to migrate to hledger. Contrary to ledger, hledger comes with a CSV parser one can use to import and classify recurring transactions automagically. Having a proper DSL for this makes all the difference: I can easily add new rules and understand the old ones. In the end, I get a very consistent result, something my old bash scripts weren't great at. Here is what my debit.csv.rules file looks like. It is used to tell hledger how CSV data from my debit card should be parsed:
# skip the headings line:
skip 1
# assign fields
fields , , , date, , description, , amount2-in, amount2-out
# assign account where the money comes from
# 99 to get it at the bottom of the transaction
account99 assets:checking
include matchers.rules
As you can see, the rules matching transactions to specific accounts are imported from another file, matchers.rules. I'm doing this since I want to be able to use the same set of rules for debit and credit and use the cards interchangeably. Here's a snippet of my matchers.rules file:
# house
if Loyer/bail
  account2  expenses:rent
# leisure
if PAYPAL .*STEAM GAMES
  account2  expenses:leisure:videogame
if PAYPAL .*BANDCAMP
  account2  expenses:leisure:music
Using this ruleset, a transaction looking like this:
"SOME ACCOUNT DESC","111111","EOP","2022/01/03",00002,"Loyer/bail","",521.00,"","","","",""
Would be transformed into:
2022-01-03 Loyer/bail
    expenses:rent                               521.00
    assets:checking
Sadly, hledger's CSV rules won't let you do arithmetics. This can be useful when you know a certain transaction needs to be split between accounts. This is where auto postings come in. They are a way to specify arbitrary rules when an account is encountered. Going back to my previous rent example, I split it 50/50 with my SO using this rule:
= expenses:rent
    assets:receivable:rent    *0.5
    assets:checking
After it is applied, the final transaction looks like this:
2022-01-03 Loyer/bail  ; modified:
    expenses:rent                               521.00
    assets:receivable:rent                      260.50  ; generated-posting: = expenses:rent
    assets:checking
Neat eh? Here is the little bash script I've written to automate all these steps:
 #!/bin/bash
#
# Convert CSV to ledger using hledger
declare -a assets=("credit" "debit")
# Read the array values with space
for i in "$ assets[@] "
do
  if test -f "$i.csv"
  then
    # convert to ledger
    LEDGER=$(hledger -f "$i.csv" --rules-file rules/"$i.csv".rules print)
    # add auto_postings
    LEDGER=$(printf "include rules/auto_postings.ledger\n\n$LEDGER\n"   hledger print -f- --auto)
    # remove superfluous assets:checking lines
    LEDGER=$(printf "$LEDGER"   sed '/assets:checking \+; generated.\+/d')
    printf "$LEDGER" > "$i.ledger"
  else
    printf "File $i.csv does not exist\n"
  fi
done
Migrating to hledger, I've cut down the time I spend on accounting from 1 hour per month to about 10 minutes, all while making my workflow much cleaner. Many thanks to the kind folks on #hledger @irc.libera.chat for the help!

  1. One for my checking+savings account and another one for my credit card.

23 January 2022

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Goodbye Nexus 5

I've blogged a few times already about my Nexus 5, the Android device I have/had been using for 8 years. Sadly, it died a few weeks ago, when the WiFi chip stopped working. I could probably have attempted a mainboard swap, but at this point, getting a new device seemed like the best choice. In a world where most Android devices are EOL after less than 3 years, it is amazing I was able to keep this device for so long, always running the latest Android version with the latest security patch. The Nexus 5 originally shipped with Android 4.4 and when it broke, I was running Android 11, with the November security patch! I'm very grateful to the FOSS Android community that made this possible, especially the LineageOS community. I've replaced my Nexus 5 by a used Pixel 3a, mostly because of the similar form factor, relatively affordable price and the presence of a headphone jack. Google also makes flashing a custom ROM easy, although I had more trouble with this than I first expected. The first Pixel 3a I bought on eBay was a scam: I ordered an "Open Box" phone and it arrived all scratched1 and with a broken rear camera. The second one I got (from the Amazon Renewed program) arrived in perfect condition, but happened to be a Verizon model. As I found out, Verizon locks the bootloader on their phones, making it impossible to install LineageOS2. The vendor was kind enough to let me return it. As they say, third time's the charm. This time around, I explicitly bought a phone on eBay listed with a unlocked bootloader. I'm very satisfied with my purchase, but all in all, dealing with all the returns and the shipping was exhausting. Hopefully this phone will last as long as my Nexus 5!

  1. There was literally a whole layer missing at the back, as if someone had sanded the phone...
  2. Apparently, and "Unlocked phone" means it is "SIM unlocked", i.e. you can use it with any carrier. What I should have been looking for is a "Factory Unlocked phone", one where the bootloader isn't locked :L

22 January 2022

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Homebrewing recipes

Looking at my blog, it seems I haven't written anything about homebrewing in a while. In fact, the last time I did was when I had a carboy blow out on me in the middle of the night... Fear not, I haven't stopped brewing since then. I have in fact decided to publish my homebrew recipes. Not on this blog though, as it would get pretty repetitive. So here are my recipes. So far, I've brewed around 30 different beers! The format is pretty simple (no fancy HTML, just plain markdown) and although I'm not the most scientific brewer, you should be able to replicate some of those if that's what you want to try. Cheers!

21 January 2022

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Montreal Subway Foot Traffic Data, 2021 edition

For the third time now, I've asked Soci t de Transport de Montr al, Montreal's transit agency, for the foot traffic data of Montreal's subway. I think this has become an annual thing now :) The original blog post and the 2019-2020 edition can be read here: By clicking on a subway station, you'll be redirected to a graph of the station's foot traffic. Licences

10 January 2022

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: Grading using the Wacom Intuos S

I've been teaching economics for a few semesters already and, slowly but surely, I'm starting to get the hang of it. Having to deal with teaching remotely hasn't been easy though and I'm really hoping the winter semester will be in-person again. Although I worked way too much last semester1, I somehow managed to transition to using a graphics tablet. I bought a Wacom Intuos S tablet (model CTL-4100) in late August 2021 and overall, I have been very happy with it. Wacom Canada offers a small discount for teachers and I ended up paying 115 CAD (~90 USD) for the tablet, an overall very reasonable price. Unsurprisingly, the Wacom support on Linux is very good and my tablet worked out of the box. The only real problem I had was by default, the tablet sometimes boots up in Android mode, making it unusable. This is easily solved by pressing down on the pad's first and last buttons for a few seconds, until the LED turns white. The included stylus came with hard plastic nibs, but I find them too slippery. I eventually purchased hard felt nibs, which increase the friction and makes for a more paper-like experience. They are a little less durable, but I wrote quite a fair bit and still haven't gone through a single one yet. Learning curve Learning how to use a graphical tablet took me at least a few weeks! When writing on a sheet of paper, the eyes see what the hand writes directly. This is not the case when using a graphical tablet: you are writing on a surface and see the result on your screen, a completely different surface. This dissociation takes a bit of practise to master, but after going through more than 300 pages of notes, it now feels perfectly normal. Here is a side-by-side comparison of my very average hand-writing2:
  1. on paper
  2. using the tablet, the first week
  3. using the tablet, after a couple of months
Comparison of my writing, on paper, using the tablet and using the tablet after a few weeks I still prefer the result of writing on paper, but I think this is mostly due to me not using the pressure sensitivity feature. The support in xournal wasn't great, but now that I've tried it in xournalpp (more on this below), I think I will be enabling it in the future. The result on paper is also more consistent, but I trust my skills will improve over time. Pressure sensitivity on vs off Use case The first use case I have for the tablet is grading papers. I've been asking my students to submit their papers via Moodle for a few semesters already, but until now, I was grading them using PDF comments. The experience wasn't great3 and was rather slow compared to grading physical copies. I'm also a somewhat old-school teacher: I refuse to teach using slides. Death by PowerPoint is real. I write on the blackboard a lot4 and I find it much easier to prepare my notes by hand than by typing them, as the end result is closer to what I actually end up writing down on the board. Writing notes by hand on sheets of paper is a chore too, especially when you revisit the same materiel regularly. Being able to handwrite digital notes gives me a lot more flexibility and it's been great. So far, I have been using xournal to write notes and grade papers, and although it is OK, it has a bunch of quirks I dislike. I was waiting for xournalpp to be packaged in Debian, and it now is5! I'm looking forward to using it next semester. Towards a better computer monitor I have also been feeling the age of my current computer monitor. I am currently using an old 32" 1080p TV from LG and up until now, I had been able to deal with the drawbacks. The colors are pretty bad and 1080p for such a large display isn't great, but I got used to it. What I really noticed when I started using my graphics tablet was the input lag. It's bad enough that there's a clear jello effect when writing and it eventually gives me a headache. It's so bad I usually prefer to work on my laptop, which has a nicer but noticeably smaller panel. I'm currently looking to replace this aging TV6 by something more modern. I have been waiting out since I would like to buy something that will last me another 10 years if possible. Sadly, 32" high refresh rate 4K monitors aren't exactly there yet and I haven't found anything matching my criteria. I would probably also need a new GPU, something that is not easy to come by these days.

  1. I worked at two colleges at the same time, teaching 2 different classes (one of which I was giving for the first time...) to 6 groups in total. I averaged more than 60h per week for sure.
  2. Yes, I only write in small caps. Students love it, as it's much easier to read on the blackboard.
  3. Although most PDF readers support displaying comments, some of my more clueless students still had trouble seeing them and I had to play tech support more than I wanted.
  4. Unsurprisingly, my students also love it. One of the most common feedback I get at the end of the semester is they hate slides too and are very happy I'm one of the few teachers who writes on the board.
  5. Many thanks to Barak A. Pearlmutter for maintaining this package.
  6. It dates back from 2010, when my mom replaced our old CRT by a flat screen. FullHD TVs were getting affordable and I wasn't sad to see our tiny 20-something inches TV go. I eventually ended up with the LG flatscreen a few years later when I moved out in my first apartment and my mom got something better.

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