pages tagged SOFTWARE

The UCLA Thesis Style for LaTeX

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 14:05:44 -0800

The UCLA Thesis Style for LaTeX LaTeX is my text formatting program of choice. Since I wanted to graduate (or maybe to avoid doing so), I took over maintenance of the UCLA Thesis document style. This document style is based on work from Leslie Lamport, Dorab Patel, Eduardo Krell, Richard B. Wales, and John Heidemann. Since I've now graduated and left UCLA I am no longer able to maintain this document style. I put together a post-final release (1.2) in June 1996. Fortunately, in 15 years, the World Has Marched Forward. UCLA changed their required styles in 2012, and John Colby helped move uclathes to github. Please see the version at github for a current version. I used to provide two versions are available: The older version (104KB, tar.gz, no longer actively maintained) for LaTeX 2.09, and a new version (180KB, tar.gz) for LaTeX2e. Both versions include an user's guide written by Rich Wales. But now, please use the version at github. Many people have gotten degrees with versions of this package, including (according to their self-reports; I cannot verify accuracy other than the first individual): John Heidemann (MS and PhD, CS, 1991 and 1995), Ashvin Goel (MS, CS, 1996), Geoff Kuenning (PhD, CS, 1997), David Ratner (MS and PhD, CS, 1995 and 1998), Bill Faust (PhD, EE), Ted Kim (MS and PhD, CS, 1995 and 1998?), Patrick Madden (PhD, CS), Marcio G. Siqueira (PhD, EE), Steve Vincena (PhD, physics), Joseph N.Q. Pham (PhD, EE), David Kan (PhD, math, 1999), Sylvia Lin (MS, EE, 1999), Kirill Shtengel (PhD, physics, 1999), Yoichiro Miyamoto (MS?, EE, 1999?), Jonathan Fredrick (MS, EE, 2000), Andrew Knightly (Math, 2000), S.J. Lee (PhD, CS, 2000), Doreen DeLeon (PhD, Math, 2000), Chris Mitchell (PhD, physics, 2001), David Sherman (PhD, math, 2001), Verner Thorsmølle (PhD, physics, 2001), Scott Desposato (PhD, political science, 2001), Lance Menthe (PhD, physics, 2001), Tara Drozdenko (PhD, physics, 2000), Roya Zandi (PhD, physics, 2001), Albert Cortez (PhD, math, 2001), Matt Griskey (PhD, physics and astronomy, 2002), Matthew Fong (MS, EE, 2002), Scott Seongwook Lee (PhD, CS, 2002), David Gabriel, Nirupama Bulusu (PhD, CS, 2002), Jonathan Fredrick (MS, EE; and PhD, EE, 2002), Vijay Raghunathan (MS, EE, 2002), Gregory Johnson (PhD, Nuclear Engineering, 2002), Robert Bell (PhD, Geography, 2003), Jeremy Elson (PhD, CS, 2003), Michael J. Pan (MA, Architecture, 2003), Beichuan Zhang (PhD, CS, 2003), Greg Prier (MS, CS, 2003), Vladimir Bychkovsky (MS, CS, 2003), Ignacio Thayer (MS, CS, 2003), Lukas Mandrake (PhD, physics, 2002), Dongwon Lee (PhD, CS, 2002), Fan Ye (PhD, CS, 2004), Chris Staecker (PhD, Math, 2005), Tohru Ohnuki (PhD, physics, 2005), David Gabriel (PhD, comparative literature, 2005), John Hernlund (PhD, geophysics and space sciences, 2005), Ling-Jyh Chen (PhD, CS, 2005), Elizabeth Bruch (PhD, sociology, 2006), Arun Agrahara Somasundara (PhD, EE, 2005), Chikako Yamauchi (PhD, Economics, 2005), Richard Wang (PhD?, Math, 2005), N. V. Krishna (PhD, CS, 2005), William Elmer (MS, Civil Eng., 2006), Juhani Linnainmaa (PhD, finance, 2006), Doug McKee (PhD, economics, 2006), Athanasios Stathopoulos (PhD, CS, 2006), Vijay Raghunathan (PhD, EE, 2006), Heemin Park (PhD, EE, 2006), Carin Siegerman (PhD, biomedical engineering, 2007), Seth Bouvier (PhD, Neuroscience, 2007), Morgan Beeby (PhD, biochemestry and molecular biology, 2007), Matthew Barczys (PhD, astronomy, 2007), Nikitas Liogkas (PhD, CS, 2008), S. Alex Smith (PhD?, math, 2008), Ahmad Fattahi (PhD, EE, 2008), Ali Parsa (PhD, EE, 2008), Rolf Campos (PhD, economics, 2008), Rodney Chandler (MS, EE, 2008), Alessandro Warth (PhD, CS, 2009), Thomas Schmid (PhD, EE, 2009), Eren Eraslan (MS, EE, 2010), Roy Shea (PhD, CS, 2010), Ian Craig (PhD, Chemistry, 2010), Elaine Wah (MS, CS, 2010), Andrew Parker (PhD, CS, 2011), Michael Nowotny (PhD, Finance, 2011), Jordan Tucker (PhD, Physics, 2011), and John Colby (MD/PhD, Neuro and Biomedical Eng, 2012). Also, some non-UCLA folks: Laurentiu B. Cristofor (PhD CS, 2002, UMass-Boston) made some mods for his school; Marcelo H. T. Martins (MS, Communications Eng., U. Tokyo, 2009). A couple people have contacted me when starting their degrees, but I never heard if they finished: Andy Schwartz (Physics), Alon Barlevy (EE). Remember to let me know if you format your thesis with this style. Comments From Users From Lance Menthe: It was accepted easily with no issues whatsoever. I am told I had one of the easiest times with the thesis advisor. Thank you SO MUCH for maintaining this file. I think you saved me months of work (I did not know TeX at all before I began writing my dissertation.) From Jordan Tucker (2011-11-29): I made a couple of tweaks, but it was before the thesis lady ever saw it so I dunno if they were truly necessary. I ended up changing the defs of \@doublespacing in uclathes.cls and uclathti.clo from 1.544 to 1.65 to get back under the 3 lines/inch max. This might have only been necessary due to my particular pdflatex+acrobat setup, but you might consider putting a warning on the uclathes webpage. I used oldlfont (too lazy to convert a lot of \bf and \rm to the new style in existing text), so to get small caps to work for some of the prelim pages, I just stuck in extra \scshape commands in uclathti.clo (diff below). It was already there for the "Publications" header. (Added \scshape after \large on the lines "University of California", "Acknowledgments", "Vita", and "Abstract of the \@Thesisname".) Bugs, desired features, and changes Unfortunately uclathes does not have a maintainer right now, but I will collect bugs and desired features here. From David Sherman (2001): To avoid printing vacuous lists of tables and figures [i.e., if you don't have any in your thesis], I placed % just before \@figurestrue and \@tablestrue According to Michael Pan (2003), ``I met with the thesis advisor today, and she noted one thing that needed to be changed about the template-while footnotes can be single spaced, the spacing between footnote entries need to be double spaced.'' He recommends applying this patch (uclathes-1.2-footnote.patch) to change that. Also I think from Michael Pan (2003): The thesis/dissertaion advisor told me that figure captions no longer need to be double spaced. In fact, she recommended I make them single spaced. By setting baselinestretch to one before the figure caption (and back to the original value after). [Another approach: use the doublespace package in LaTeX2e. -johnh] This works fine for the figures that appear in the text, but the captions in the "list of figures" in the intro pages are still double spaced. Tohru Ohnuki (2005) added a file to report the margins; see the comments at the head for a description about how to use it. Chris Staecker (2005) told me that the margin lady doesn't like lists of tables or lists of figures that are empty (if you have no tables or figures). Fix: find in the style file where to comment out the code that generates these lists (see the comment from David Sherman above for what to look for). Alternative fix: didn't you really want to add that figure or table? :-) Elizabeth Bruch (2006), reports getting the error message: \newblock undefined when using the natbib package. (This error didn't happen for me.) Her work-around: add \def\newblock{\hskip .11em plus .33em minus .07em}. Doug McKee (2006) warns: "Most installations of pdflatex default to A4 paper and most pdf readers will automatically scale the document to fit 8.5x11 making the margins rather larger than the margin lady would like. Printing the A4 document without scaling results in a bottom margin that is way too small. She said she gets lots of people coming in that don't realize this and don't know what to do about it when she points it out. " His suggested fix: Just adding "\setlength{\pdfpagewidth}{8.5in}" and "\setlength {\pdfpageheight}{11in}" to the beginning of my document solved this problem. Roy Shea (2010) provides this change as a patch to the class file. My suggested fix: Fix your TeX configuration (as descrbibed on my web page). Ian Craig (2010) had a similar comment: "I was using the editor TeXnicCenter and for some reason it overrode the 'letter' setting under MikTeX and rendered the document as A4...[so I ended up with] 450 pages of archival quality scratch paper". Please note this is a problem with his TeX environment, not the class file. But I would take the moral as always check paper size. Tom Kemeny reports (Nov. 2008) that: `One thing I'm curious about is the use of the \appendix command. I have been using it in my standalone chapters done in LaTeX, but when I try to use it in the UCLA thesis document style, it for some reason numbers the appendix ".1." Fix from Rodney Chandler (May 2009): Use the \appendix macro, then start a new chapter, i.e.: \appendix \chapter{My Appendix} Roy Shea (2010) reports: I used the listings package to include code within my dissertation as actual listings, rather than embedding code in a figure or table. A naming conflict between variables used to set up the table of contents in the UCLA thesis style and the listings package causes problems when setting a title for a list of listings within the table of contents. Attached is a patch (an ugly hack) for listings.sty 1.4 that prevents this naming conflict. His patch to fix this conflict. John Colby (2012) reports: Starting Spring 2012, the graduate division is introducing a newly-modified set of formatting rules. In general, they are actually simpler. Also, there are some mods to the preliminary content, and the submission process is now fully digital. He changed the format to match these requirements. Please see the version at github for a current version. The above image was re-drawn from page 11 of Queueing Systems, Volume 1, Copyright 1975 by Leonard Kleinrock, with the author's permission.

Ikiwiki Extensions

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 22:21:56 -0700

Ikiwiki Extensions

This page documents some of my ikiwiki hacks and extensions.

The Mediawiki Plugin

Three patches to the mediawiki markup plugin for ikiwiki.

pass raw img tags through (patch)
support mediawiki File:foo.png-style in-line images (patch)
fix a bug that was preventing mediawiki use in ikiwiki blogging (patch)
an additional cleanup (patch)

Or just get my current version.

usedirs_redir

I wrote a new ikiwiki plugin (download source) to generate redirection files so that the URL http://example.com/wiki/foo.html turns into http://example.com/wiki/foo/.

This plugin is particularly useful when converting old sites built with static wiki pages into shiny new ikiwiki ones, while preserving external links.

Software Written by John Heidemann

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 22:04:33 -0700

Software Written by John Heidemann

Writing software is both my job and one of my hobbies. Over the years I've written and released a variety of software. The following packages listed below are currently available and maintained. Also, at the bottom I list and point to packages I wrote but no longer maintain.

Utilities

Fsdb: an ASCII database (previously called JDB): Fsdb is package of commands for manipulating flat-ASCII databases from shell scripts. Fsdb is useful to process medium amounts of data. Fsdb can be thought of as an incompatible reimplementation of /rdb, if you're familiar with that.

dns browse: Dns browse is a simple DNS browser in Perl and Tcl/Tk, modeled after Windows-style hierarchical lists.

dmalloc_summarize: Dmalloc_summarize is a small Perl-program that converts the log output by Gray Watson's dmalloc (a source-available malloc debugger) into a form that makes it easy to answer questions like ``where is my memory being used?''. Download (5KB) (updated 18-May-98 to fix a serious off-by-one error).

LavaPS: LavaPS is a lava-lamp simulator where each blob corresponds to a currently running process.

Mediawiki hacks: Minor wiki hacks: wiki upload, a perl program that allows command-line uploading of files to Mediawiki.

Ikiwiki hacks: My extensions to Ikiwiki.

TeX Tools and Macros

lookbibtex: Lookbibtex is a grep-like program which understands the format of BibTeX files. Download version 1.44 released 19-Mar-98).

ACM paper formats: There are a number of templates for ACM paper formats around. These are mine, unique for including 10-point fonts as an option.

UCLA Thesis document style: I used to maintain the UCLA Thesis document style for LaTeX, and I still make the most recent release available (Version 1.2 was released June, 1996.)

Emacs Macro Packages

Notes-mode: Notes-mode is a package for organizing on-line note-taking. Notes-mode automates index generation and allows URLs to point to subjects.

Other Programs

Graphing programs: Gnuplot is a pretty good graphing program, but its user interface is non-shell-script friendly. Gnuplotfront is a front-end to gnuplot to solve part of this problem.

digital camera info: I'm trying to go digital for my photo needs. This page has pointers to useful software.

music stuff: Some small hacks for MP3s and FreeDB.

miscellaneous GNOME environment changes: Small hacks to GNOME tools.

FBReaderJ: A patch adding widow/orphan elimination to the Android e-book reader FBReaderJ.

Unmaintained

In addition, the following software packages have all been put out to pasture on my "retired" software web page: stackable filing software, kernel debuggers, Apache performance enhancements, WWW::Search, WebStone-1.1 patches, paper_carrier, monitor, jogutils with jogscroll, some emacs macro packages, some games such as klondike, dontspace, xbomb. Xcron and lcron, a cron extension with location-triggered events. Ical patches to keep it building in 2009. In general, these programs have been transfered to others, superceded by other work, or no longer useful.

Fsdb

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 13:34:38 -0700

Fsdb Fsdb, the flatfile streaming database is package of commands for manipulating flat-ASCII databases from shell scripts. Fsdb is useful to process medium amounts of data (with very little data you'd do it by hand, with megabytes you might want a real database). Fsdb was known as as Jdb from 1991 to Oct. 2008. Fsdb is very good at doing things like: extracting measurements from experimental output re-examining data to address different hypotheses joining data from different experiments eliminating/detecting outliers computing statistics on data (mean, confidence intervals, histograms, correlations) reformatting data for graphing programs Rather than hand-code scripts to do each special case, Fsdb provides higher-level functions. Fsdb is built on flat-ASCII databases. By storing data in simple text files and processing it with pipelines it is easy to experiment (in the shell) and look at the output. The original implementation of this idea was /rdb, a commercial product described in the book ``UNIX relational database management: application development in the UNIX environment'' by Rod Manis, Evan Schaffer, and Robert Jorgensen (and also at their web page). FSDB is an incompatible re-implementation of their idea without any accelerated indexing or forms support. (But it's free!). For more information, see the README file or download Fsdb 2.38 (released 2013-02-26): Fsdb-2.38.tar.gz, and in RPM format perl-Fsdb-2.38-1.noarch.rpm, perl-Fsdb-2.38-1.src.rpm (built against Fedora 18). Alternatively: download Fsdb-current.tar.gz, perl-Fsdb-current.noarch.rpm, perl-Fsdb-current.src.rpm to get the same thing with an unchanging link. Warning: the 2.0 series is an incompatible change from 1.x, and I still expect some format and API changes. The 2.7 release is feature-complete except for a global header change. I expect a non-beta 2.x release in August, 2008. However, I now recommend 2.7 over 1.15. For announcements and discussion about Fsdb, please subscribe to the mailing lists: http://www.heidemann.la.ca.us/mailman/listinfo/fsdb-talk fsdb-announce fsdb-talk. (Download older releases in tar.gz format: 2.38 (2013-04-29), 2.37 (2013-02-26), 2.36 (2013-02-25), 2.35 (2013-02-23), 2.34 (2013-02-10), 2.33 (2012-12-23), 2.32 (2012-12-21), 2.31 (2012-11-28), 2.30 (2012-11-25), 2.29 (2012-11-20), 2.28 (2012-11-15), 2.27 (2012-11-15), 2.26 (2011-12-12), 2.25 (2011-08-07), 2.24 (2011-04-15), 2.23 (2011-03-10), 2.22 (31-Oct-10), 2.21 (16-Apr-10), 2.20 (30-Nov-09), 2.19 (10-Jul-09), 2.18 (1-Jul-09), 2.17 (25-Jun-09), 2.16 (14-Apr-09), 2.15 (13-Apr-09), 2.14 (26-Nov-08), 2.13 (30-Oct-08), 2.12 (16-Oct-08). Releases before 2.12 were called Jdb: 2.11 (14-Oct-08), 2.10 (23-Sep-08), 2.9 (6-Aug-08), 2.8 (5-Aug-08), 2.7 (30-Jul-08), 2.6 (11-Jul-08), 2.5 (24-Jun-08), 2.4 (18-Jun-08), 2.3 (27-May-08), 2.2 (23-May-08), 2.1 (6-Apr-08), 2.0 (25-Jan-08), 1.15 (12-Nov-07), 1.14 (24-Aug-06), 1.13 (4-Feb-04), 1.12 (30-Oct-02), 1.11 (2-Nov-01), 1.10 (10-Apr-01), 1.9 (6-Nov-00), 1.8 (28-Jun-00), 1.7 (5-Jan-00), 1.6 (24-May-99), 1.5 (25-Jun-98), 1.4 (27-Mar-98), 1.3 (17-Mar-98), 1.2 (11-Feb-98), 1.1 (20-UJan-98), 1.0 (22-Jul-97), 0.2 (15-Mar-95), 0.1 (26-May-94), 0.0 (1991).

Notes-mode

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 13:34:38 -0700

Notes-mode Notes-mode is an indexing system for on-line note-taking. Notes-mode is composed of two parts, the visible part, a major-mode for emacs to aid note-taking; and the invisible part, scripts which periodically index your notes for you. For more information about notes-mode, you can consult the manual in HTML format, single-page HTML, or gzip'ed PostScript. Notes mode was also reviewed in the Linux Gazette by Larry Ayers (with a later follow-up). Download notes-mode-1.29.tar.gz. (released 2012-04-04) Notes-mode FAQs (See also ``late breaking news'' below.) Q: I've installed notes-mode, but when I run it I have problems because the internal paths are all wrong (they have johnh's in them). What's wrong? A: You're running the distributed code, not the installed code. Please read the installation instructions carefully! You may find this annotated installation script helpful (thanks to Adrian Burd for contributing it). Late Breaking News 1.29 released 2012-04-04 to fix some encryption bugs 1.28 released 2010-06-20 Bugs in 1.26 1.26 has problems if you use non-ASCII characters and use something other than utf-8. Really you should change to utf-8, but if you insist in using some other locale, upgrade to 1.27. Bugs in 1.22 The mailing list location has changed. You may use the web to sign up at notes-mode-announce or notes-mode-talk. Bugs in 1.21 1.21 has several notesinit problems fixed in 1.22 Bugs in 1.20 Running "mkall" for the first time will fail with an error about renaming. Work-around: create a dummy "rawindex" file (typically in ~/NOTES), perhaps with touch ~/NOTES/rawindex. Bugs in 1.19 Missing notes-first.el (fixed in 1.20). Bugs in 1.18 GPG encryption support doesn't work in 1.18 release; apply this patch from Bill Perkins to fix it (thanks also to Knut Anders Hatlen for sending in a similar patch). Bugs in 1.17 None found (yet). Bugs in 1.16 1.16 has a y2k bug in mkindex (fixed in 1.17, or get the critical patch if you can't upgrade.) Two bugs reporeted by Thierry Bezecourt: the 'configure' script calls xemacs with options '-q -batch' . It doesn't work, because Xemacs tries to open a file named "-batch" . It works if you permute the options ('-batch -q'), as indicated in the Xemacs man page. I don't know how it works for other emacsen. the notesinit program asks for the location of the NOTES directory. However, it converts to lower case the path entered by the user. Is it really what you want to do ? Apply this patch (notes-mode-1.16-two.patch) against 1.16 to fixes these problems. Bugs in 1.15 6-Jan-98: If you're running emacs-19, or if you get a message that ``paragraph-indent-text-mode is undefined'' you'll probably need to apply this patch. 4-May-98: Subjects with #'s in them break indexing with the message ``Index is not in sorted order''. Apply this patch to fix the problem. Bugs in 1.14 5-Jan-98: If you're using mailcrypt encryption, you should apply this patch. Please note that notes-mode supports both Rick Campbell's emacs interface, PAM (PGP Augmented Messaging) (note that as of January 1997, PAM is no longer at this ftp site and appears to not be publically available) and LoPresti and Choi's mailcrypt for encryption. (The manual distributed with 1.14 lists only PAM, although the release notes list both.) Older versions in case you need to track down a bug: notes-mode-1.13.tar.gz released 24-Aug-96, notes-mode-1.14.tar.gz released 1-Jan-98, notes-mode-1.15.tar.gz released 5-Jan-98. notes-mode-1.23.tar.gz (released 20-Feb-05)

LavaPS

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 13:34:38 -0700

LavaPS LavaPS is an interactive process-tracking program like ``top'', but with a much different attitude. Rather than presenting lots of specific info in digital form, it tries to present certain important information in a graphical analog form. The idea is that you can run it in the background and get a rough idea of what's happening to your system without devoting much concentration to the task. Each blob represents a process. Blob size is porportional to memory usage. Movement is porportional to CPU usage. Color is a combination of program name (which decided the hue) and time since the program last ran (which decides saturation). Basically, things that haven't run in a while are stationary and dark, while things that run a lot are bright and moving. A popup box (shown to the right) can give more information about a process. Clicking the left button brings up the popup, the right button brings up a control menu. LavaPS was inspired by Mark Weiser's idea of calm computing. For details, see: Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown. The Coming Age of Calm Technology, Revised version of Weiser & Brown. ``Designing Calm Technology'', PowerGrid Journal, v 1.01, http://powergrid.electriciti.com/1.01 (July 1996). October, 1996. < http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/acmfuture2endnote.htm>. (This program dedicated to the memory of M.W.--I hope you would have thought it a good hack.) Building LavaPS requires C++, STL, and either Tcl/Tk (8.x) or Gnome/Gtk (2.2 or later). LavaPS is necessarily system-specific. It currently runs under Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Irix, AIX, NetBSD, and MacOS X. Ports to other systems are encouraged. For more details, see the man page or look in the code. LavaPS was also reviewed as app-of-the-week by Brett Neely of Linuxcare, featured at NooFace, and at sweetcode. I'm also told it was reviewed in the August 2001 issue of LinuxFormat (a UK magazine), but I haven't seen the review (and don't have a URL to it). Download lavaps-2.7: source code (tar.gz), RedHat i386 package (i386.rpm), RedHat source package (src.rpm). Other folks maintain other versions (now very, very old): a lavaps-1.15 PPC RPM for Linux. Lavaps is in the Debian package system, with different versions in stable, testing, and unstable. Install it using apt-get install lavaps Lavaps is also a package in AltLinux. (Download older releases: 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, 1.9, 1.10, 1.11, 1.12, 1.13, 1.14, 1.15, 1.16, 1.17, 1.18, 1.19, 1.20, 1.21, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, 2.7) As of 11-Jan-05, all RPMs are signed with my GPG key. Known Bugs Lavaps-2.6 has problems building in Tcl/Tk mode and with gcc-3.4. Problems fixed in lavaps-2.7. Lavaps-2.5 and 2.4 (fixed in 2.6) give this warning on startup: (lavaps:31794): GConf-CRITICAL **: file gconf-value.c: line 1592 (gconf_entry_get_value): assertion `entry != NULL' failed This bug is just cosmetic. Work-around: ignore the warning. Fix: apply this patch: --- gtk_blob_conf.cc 2003/12/01 01:06:10 1.14 +++ gtk_blob_conf.cc 2004/06/07 23:40:56 1.15 @@ -105,7 +105,7 @@ gtk_blob_conf::from_entry_validated(GConfEntry *entry) { // typechecking - if (gconf_entry_get_value(entry) == NULL) { + if (entry == NULL || gconf_entry_get_value(entry) == NULL) { set_default_value(); // suppress lack of default silently return; Lavaps-2.3 doesn't build on gcc-3.3 (such as in SuSE Linux 8.2). Problem fixed in lavaps-2.4. Lavaps-2.2 has an important installation bug--get lavaps-2.3. Lavaps-1.20 doesn't build cleanly under gcc-3.2. Fixed in 1.21. Lavaps-1.17 doesn't build under gcc-3.0. Fixed in 1.18. Lavaps-1.15 doewsn't build on RedHat 7.0. Fixed in 1.16. I'm told that lavaps-1.15-1.1386.rpm has an error when trying to run in Linux-Mandrake 7.1 with Helixcode Gnome updates: lavaps: error in loading shared libraries: lavaps: undefined symbol: _t24__default_alloc_template2b1i0.free_list Work-around: recompile for that platform. (The RPM works fine under RedHat 6.2.) Lavaps-1.14 has a serious bug: if no geometry is specified the window grows infinitely on startup. This bug is fixed in 1.15. Two people reported that lavaps-1.13 needs this patch to compile on some system: --- tcl_blob.cc 2000/06/27 04:25:47 1.43 +++ tcl_blob.cc 2000/07/18 04:30:44 @@ -258,7 +258,9 @@ } else if (strcmp(key, "shaped_window_ok") == 0) { if (argc != 2) goto wrong_number_args; - Tcl_SetResult(interp, shaped_window_ok() ? "1" : "0", NULL); + // The cast on this next line is to work around a + // compiler problem on an unknown platform. + Tcl_SetResult(interp, (char*)(shaped_window_ok() ? "1" : "0"), NULL); } else if (strcmp(key, "shape") == 0) { if (argc != 3) goto wrong_number_args; to avoid this compile error: tcl_blob.cc: In function `static int tcl_blob::lava_menu_proc(void *, Tcl_Interp *, int, char **)': tcl_blob.cc:260: passing `const char *' as argument 2 of `Tcl_SetResult(Tcl_Interp *, char *, void (*)(char *))' discards qualifiers Lavaps-1.10 produces a compiler warning on snprintf. This will be fixed in the next release; for now just ignore it. Lavaps-1.8 and 1.9 leaks memory on Debian Linux (but not on RedHat or FreeBSD, see Debian bug #49828 for details). The problem appears to be in a library (see Debian bug #53343), not in lavaps, so I cannot fix it. The good news is that the Tcl/Tk debian port maintiner has found the problem and it should be fixed in the next Debian release (thanks Kirk!). Lavaps requires at least gcc 2.8. FreeBSD users will need to upgrade gcc before building lavaps.

Mailman Hacks

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 13:13:58 -0700

Mailman Hacks Mailman is a widely used mailing list manager. This page captures some hacks I've done for mailman. unspamify_mailman Because mailing lists accumulate spam (in this day and age :-), one needs to deal with that. With closed lists, one accumulates a lot of spam. To quickly dispose of it (without multiple clicks), I wrote this script. WARNING: If run with just a URL, this program blindly discards all messages queued for the mailing list. Instead, it is recommended you run it with the -m option, in which case it will cancel mail for ONLY those senders listed in the mail. Download the Perl source code (release 040214). To install, save it in a file, chmod +x it, make sure the #! at the top is correctly pointed at Perl, and make sure you have WWW::Mechanize installed (to install that, do "perl -MCPAN -e 'install WWW::Mechanize'"). (Old versions: 040130, 040214.)

LSAM Apache Patches

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 13:13:58 -0700

LSAM Apache Patches As part of my work with ISI's LSAM project we have found some optimizations in http-server performance. We describe these problems in a web page which has been published in ACM Computer Communications Review. We have made patches to Apache, a popular HTTP server to resolve these problems. Regrettably, they are made relative to several different versions of Apache. They should apply to the current version fairly easily. The ISI_MMAP patch. Use memory mapping for IO of large files. Note: a bug in the old version of this patch was found by Klaus Weide. Get the updated patch against Apache-1.0.5. A version of this patch appears in Apache-1.3b1. A patch for the Short-Initial-Segment Problem. Patch against Apache-1.1b4. This problem has been independently fixed by Apache-1.2b7 according to Dean Gaudet. A patch for the Odd/Short-Final-Segments Problem. Patch against Apache-1.1b4. A version of this patch appears in Apache-1.2. A patch for the Small Send Buffer Problem. Patch against Apache-1.1.1 with the above patches already applied (should apply to vanilla Apache-1.1.1 with line number differences). A version of this patch appears in Apache-1.2. We welcome comments about this work and these patches.

Kgdb-Sparc

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 13:13:58 -0700

Kgdb-Sparc Kgdb/sparc is a source-level kernel debugger for SunOS 4.1 based on GNU gdb (versions 4.7 through 4.11, not 4.13 or later) and Sun's kadb. It requires Sun kernel source code to build and two machines to operate. The current release of kgdb is 1.8 (released 12-Sep-94). Version 1.9 is in preparation (as of 11-Jul-96) For more details: see the kgdb-1.8 README download kgdb-1.8.tar.gz download patched-gdb-4.11.tar.gz

ical2ics_la.pl - convert Sanjay Ghemawat's ical calendar files to IETF .ics

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 13:13:58 -0700

NAME SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION OPTIONS INSTALLATION AND RELEASE COPYRIGHT AND AUTHOR NAME ical2ics_la.pl - convert Sanjay Ghemawat's ical calendar files to IETF .ics (iCAL) SYNOPSIS ical2ics_la.pl [-d STRING] [-m mergefile] [infile] [outfile] DESCRIPTION This little script tries to convert ical calender files produced by Sanjay Ghemawat's ical to the iCAL (aka .ics aka iCalendar as defined by RFC-2445) format which can be read by GNOME Evolution or other compatible programs. By default the program reads standard input and writes to standard output. This program is based on a version by Florian Schaefer (thanks!) to convert from read-ical's ical files to Mozilla's Calendar, two different variants of these input and output formats. Changes to support ical and Evolution may have caused regressions for those programs (I cannot test them). The earlier version of this program had known problems with recurring events. This version has much better recurrent event handling and works for nearly all of the cases I found in my 15 years of ical, including weekly, bi-weekly, multi-day weekly, monthly, Nth Monday of the month, and annual recurring events, with exceptions. Whew. This version also will die when it finds things it doesn't know how to convert, allowing you to know what it doesn't. The experienced user (and are there any ical users left for whom that doesn't apply?) will then correct the code or at least comment out the die statement to allow things to continue. In addition to this testier error handling, this version fixes some bugs and many warnings. Hopefully the new bugs do not outweigh those removed. OPTIONS -d STRING Change default description to STRING -m MERGEFILENAME Merge the outfile with mergefile (the syntax has to be similar to the one created by this script), may be the outfile itself. -v Enable verbose output. --help Show help. --man Show full manual. The original program requested: please report bugs or send comments to florian\@netego.de. INSTALLATION AND RELEASE Releases of the extended version, such as there may be, can be found at http://www.isi.edu/~johnh/SOFTWARE/ICAL/. Florian's original version is at http://www.netego.de/hpc?p=download&l=en and http://www.netego.de/download/ical2ics.pl. COPYRIGHT AND AUTHOR Original author: Florian Schaefer florian@netego.de, April 2002. Original copyright: Feel free to distribute this file under the terms of the GPL. Extensions in ical2ics_la.pl by John Heidemann johnh@isi.edu. I added "la" (for Los Angeles) to decrease confusion about what version is what. The extended version is released with Florian's blessing (thanks!). Current copyright (a more explicit version of the original copyright): This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2, as published by the Free Software Foundation. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.