appaji

Meld is this awesome diff and merge tool that earns plenty of coolness points for all the amazing features that it provides [three way merges, directory diffs, tabs for multiple simultaneous diffs, syntax highlighting, user defined editor, cvs/svn plugins, all those pretty curves in the diffs ;) etc.]. It is by far the best diff and merge tool that I've come across and shows diffs accurately where other tools like xxdiff, vimdiff etc. are not able to do anything sane. Infact meld happens to be the only reason why there are some gnome libraries on my not-so-studly desktop.

If it bothers you that meld doesn't have a 'Save As' entry in the File menu and the toolbar, try this patch. The patch is not Debian specific and can be applied upstream.

Update: Part of the patch has been merged upstream and should be available in the next version of meld.

This is one among the very important reasons why I like free software.

I use IMAPFilter to filter my email on a remote IMAP server. Turns out the recent glibc versions detect double frees and memory corruptions, and IMAPFilter was crashing with a "*** glibc detected *** corrupted double-linked list: 0xc001babe ***" error, rendering it useless. Somebody reported the bug which troubled me as soon as I upgraded glibc on Debian unstable. After poking around a bit, I have a patch to fix the issue.

Here is how you would go about ( tracking the root cause for errors like thisCollapse )

A few lines of PHP calling into MagpieRSS, and I have the RSS feed of this journal parsed, HTMLized and making an appearance in all its glory (:-P) at http://www.appaji.net/blog/. With the same stylesheet that I use all over.

There are rough edges, and a few things are still missing ...

1. The Tags are all concatenated as one string.
2. Even if the Current Mood and Current Music are empty, the labels show up.
3. The number of comments is not displayed (as it is not a part of the RSS / ATOM feeds).
4. There are no <lj-cut>s.
5. acedia's Little Gent isn't displayed yet.

... I'll fix the fixable sometime later, but I am a happy man!

And I am looking for a free-to-modify RSS and Atom feed aggregator. Key features that I'd like to see are:

1. It should be a firefox extension (run from within my brower tabs, use the same cookies etc.).
2. Capability to mark specific posts as read / unread just like those newsreaders (atleast as long as they are in the feed).
3. Presents one big list of all the posts arranged chronologically from all the feeds merged (Like the LJ friends page).
4. OK, I might sound greedy with my wish-list now, but local caching would be a nice-to-have feature.

And in other blognews, Mr. Fanti K made a sudden appearance as fantom007 the other day. But knowing him (and like a lot of people that I know in meatspace, who I forced to get a livejournal.com account), I am pretty sure he will not last long. But I'll wait and watch! ;-)

Debian has a concept of alternatives, where a capability is given a name, like X Terminal Emulator would be x-terminal-emulator and there may be several programs (like gnome-terminal, konsole, xterm, rxvt, aterm etc.) that provide the X Terminal Emulator capability. Each of these programs indicates that it Provides: x-terminal-emulator. In the post installation scripts of the program package, the alternatives are updated (using update-alternatives) to register the program with a certain priority for the capability, and the pre-uninstallation scripts remove that alternative. The highest priority alternative is choosen as the best alternative, and that program is used when x-terminal-emulator or man x-terminal-emulator are invoked. The rest of the software in Debian would have to use x-terminal-emulator and this ensures that the same program is available for use consistently whenever a terminal needs to be opened from anywhere.

Turns out that multi-aterm (tabbed terminal emulator with fast pseudo transparency based on aterm) was recently uploaded to unstable. I was using it for a while and wanted to package it myself, but oh well!. So I tried out the Debian package and found that:

1. multi-aterm does not Provides: x-terminal-emulator
2. The alternatives are not updated from the postinst and prerm scripts
3. The X menu entries are not registered after installation

So, here is a bug report for the above, and a small patch that I wrote to fix the issue.

Now, xfce4 happens to be my desktop environment and it uses the xfterm4 script to account for the quirks in the command line arguments of each terminal emulator program for exec-ing other programs and for setting the title. Unfortunately, multi-aterm doesn't have a -title option, so the script doesn't work and I have to use x-terminal-emulator directly within the xfce panel. A fix for that will be for later.