Entries by Nico Golde

Today I found Feed43 which is a site offering the creation of RSS feeds for sites without one.

It is not that flexible that it could follow links and get their content like I did it with the Heise feed but you are able to parse all the information you want in a very easy way. You just specify the text on the site and put tags like {%} everywhere you want to extract information and then you just create a template for the output where you insert these tags.

I used Feed43 to create a feed of the Debian QA site for Orphaned packages with wrong maintainer site since I like
to do uploads for them if I am somehow bored but I don't want to go to the website every time.

The result is: http://feed43.com/orphaned-packages.xml

And what is really cool, you are even able to edit this feed using: http://feed43.com/feed.html?name=orphaned-packages

Ok there is a small advertisement in every article like "-- Delivered by [1]Feed43 service" but I can live with it.

Clifford just released version 0.8 of his Structured Terminal Forms Language/Library stfl.

STFL is a library which implements a curses-based widget set for text terminals. The STFL API can be used from C, SPL, Python, Perl and Ruby. Since the API is only 14 simple function calls big and there are already generic SWIG bindings it is very easy to port STFL to additional scripting languages.

A special language (the Structured Terminal Forms Language) is used to describe STFL GUIs. The language is designed to be easy and fast to write so an application programmer does not need to spend ages fiddling around with the GUI and can concentrate on the more interesting programming tasks.

The new version just fixes (finally you will be able to use page-up/down in newsbeuter) some minor issues but also includes proper locking for mutexes now which was needed for newsbeuter.

Just uploaded to unstable, test please

Another nice piece of code made by ESR you know, the guy who writes books about "The art of UNIX programming" for example

From sink.c:


This code will segfault if the fopen call in line 4 fails, sinkfp will become NULL then which leads
to a segfault when writing more than once into it with fprintf/fputs.

What I find funny now is the check in line 17 to test the error indicator for the stream pointed to by sinkfp AFTER actually writing into it.
But what is even more funny is that also the check would segfault in this case since ferror will if it gets a NULL pointer.

Today I wanted to learn for my examns and thought I'd make a quick dist-upgrade before, looked at the packages, found nothing important to make a backup and DANG

All installations with debconf usage didn't succeed like here for example:

dpkg: error processing samba-common (--configure):
subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of smbclient:
smbclient depends on samba-common (= 3.0.24-6); however:
Package samba-common is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing smbclient (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured

I straced, asked in #debian-devel, read source code and really didn't find the problem.
Thanks Mika for noticing the same problem before I did and the fix was sooo easy.
ln -sf /bin/bash /bin/sh

Never ever link /bin/sh to zsh on Debian

I think this is old but I am blogging it anyway, haven't seen it often in zsh rc files.

local knownhosts
knownhosts=( ${${${${(f)"$(<$HOME/.ssh/known_hosts)"}:#[0-9]*}%%\ *}%%,*} )
zstyle ':completion:*:(ssh|scp|sftp):*' hosts $knownhosts

Enables host completion for ssh, scp and sftp based on what you have in your known_hosts.
Don't forget to set HashKnownHosts no in ~/.ssh/config

I just uploaded newsbeuter 0.3 to unstable (get it from incoming until it hits the archive).

The release is mainly a bugfix release but there are also some cool new features and improvements.
- The html rendering especially encoding issues are fixed now.
- Everything is stored as UTF-8 internally and gets converted on-the-fly.
- libidn is not needed anymore
- gettext support (at the moment just german translation, translators wanted)

And last but not least podcast support.
For this there is a new tool included in newsbeuter named podbeuter. When updating feeds newsbeuter searches for podcast files and
adds them to a download queue. podbeuter then is the download manager to do automatic or manual downloads of the podcasts.



Have fun and test it.
Oh and YVFI we hang around in #newsbeuter on freenode now

warez.debian.net ;-P

warez.debian.net. 2804 IN A 127.0.0.1

Thanks Marco this made my day.

Today I got accepted as Debian Developer. I would like to thank the following people (in random order) for their involvment in my NM, mentoring and sponsoring uploads.

Philipp Kern, Michael Schiansky, Daniel Baumann, Héctor García, Norbert Tretkowski, Werner Heuser, Marc Brockschmidt, Lars Wirzenius, Christoph Berg, Jörg Jaspert, James Troup, Martin Krafft (feel yourself added if I forgot you, hopefully not)

Oh and congratulations Holger.

Ok I talked to the heise guys and they really don't want you to use their news different than described on http://www.heise.de/news-extern/.

So use the script in private, find it on: http://nion.modprobe.de/heise.sh

No I am not proud about my shell scripting skills that why I didn't publish it first ;-P

Have fun!