nion's blog

Wooohoo, we finally released squeeze! Many thanks to everyone who worked on this the past 2 years and also it's nice to see the new "corporate" design going live!

I just uploaded the new release of newsbeuter 0.8 to Debian.
Like every release this one also has cool new features:

• It implements custom configurability of feed list and article list format like we know it from mutt
• improved reload speed
• special tags to rename feeds
• macro support, they let you define one key for multiple actions (open a feed and reload it for example)

The 0.8 release also adds ruby scripting support which is not enabled yet in the Debian package because it's undocumented at the moment.

This release also forked the mrss and nxml libs which caused a lot of breakage in newsbeuter related to ABI changes in the past and integrated them into newsbeuter.

I did not link the package against this fork because I think doing it this way is not the right solution for several reasons (fixing bugs in static code copies rather than just in the shared library is always a PITA) but I also can understand Andreas that he does not want to rely on the upstream author of these libs since he showed multiple times that he does not really have a clue of writing shared libraries and how to keep the ABI stable.

I have a different fix in the package which hopefully solves that two for future updates of these libraries.

I just noticed (a bit late) that the famous cross-platform browser Netscape 9 was released by AOLOL^h ^h.



There is also a list of new features. What I really wonder about is, what is the purpose of this browser and this release? I just tried it and (ok I am an opera user) it really feels and looks like firefox, the code is based on firefox code and apart from a better QA work I don't see any real advantage here.
Anyone knows more?

Opera released a 9.50 alpha version of their web browser.
It is available on: http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/9.50-Alpha-1/.
One of the most important changes is a complete rewrite of the rendering engine but there are also others.

Here is a small feature show:



I really like this new feature to reopen closed windows, not only tabs (I am sure the firefox guys will create an extension for this soon, if there is none yet )
The idea about having a menu to open a site in any other browser you have installed is also very nice and somehow shows that they are at least aware of possible rendering problems in some sites (even if I had no problems for a long time

To get a detailed list of changes have a look at: http://cybernetnews.com/2007/09/03/cybernotes-exclusive-opera-95-features-video/ and a 4 days old article in the dev blog: http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2007/08/31/focus-areas-during-kestrel-development.

I just released a new version of yacpi. yacpi displays various ACPI information like batteries, ac status, thermal zones, fans and some information about CPU.

The new release is a complete rewrite based on libacpi (yacpi is now the 3rd tool using libacpi).
For those of you already using yacpi here are the relevant changes:

• yacpi now depends on libacpi, compile, install, ldconfig


• -m option removed, default is to display just the present batteries, use -n if you want to see not found items too


• Removed interactive delay input in ncurses interface, restart yacpi if you feel like changing it


• Samples are not needed anymore, I rewrote the algorithm to compute remaining time in libacpi


• Immediate reaction on user input in ncurses interface, thanks select(2), fuck halfdelay(3)


• New options for every feature, the default is to print everything but you can now decide what you exactly want to see, check yacpi -h for new parameters.

Quite some things changed so if you use yacpi in shell scripts, check for the new command line options.

Ncurses:


Plain-Text (yacpi -p):
| BAT0 = 100% discharging rtime 04:49 h | ac = off-line | THRM = 50 C | gov = ondemand | cpu = 600/1500 mhz

Have fun: http://www.ngolde.de/download/yacpi-3.0.tar.gz, http://www.ngolde.de/download/libacpi-0.2.tar.gz.

I just uploaded the 0.5 release of the newsbeuter RSS feed reader to unstable.
Apart from improvements in HTML rendering and lock file handling the new release:

• adds unicode compatibility


• a new filter language


• support for notifications

and finally you are also able to freely configure all key bindings.

The new filter language is pretty cool, you can now filter feeds for title, url, author etc. (see the documentation for all fields) using regular expressions like:
rssurl =~ "^http:\/\/nion\.modprobe.*", you can use the comparison operators and you are able to logical connect them.

The regexp support also enables you to killfile certain articles using the new ignore-article option, ignore-article "*" "title =~ \"SuSE\"" for example ;-P (press F to try it out)

With the notification support you are allowed to execute a specified program if a new article arrives, easy and useful for blog junkies.

Hopefully newsbeuter will become a good alternative for raggle and snownews users now as the snownews author is not really working on it anymore and raggle seems to have a stalled development as well.

After asking for testers of a libacpi snapshot I got a fair amount of test mails. Thanks to all the people who tried it and helped me!!

Now I finished with coding, testing and documenting everything and happy to release version 0.1 of libacpi.

It is a general purpose shared library for programs gathering ACPI information. It fully implements information about fans, batteries, ac states and thermal zones (apart from trap points).

Try it out on: http://www.ngolde.de/download/libacpi-0.1.tar.gz.

There is also an online documentation (well doxygen generated) on http://www.ngolde.de/libacpi/doc/html/.
test-libacpi.c is an example on how to write programs using libacpi.

For more information download the tarball, have a look into the manual, test-libacpi.c, README and the doxygen documentation.

The next step for me is to port yacpi to libacpi which was also the reason for libacpi since I first wanted to rewrite it and thought it might be useful to have the functionality in a library. There are not yet Debian packages for it because I am really busy at the moment so if you want to maintain it, feel free to do so.

3 1/2 years after mika registered grml.org it's done. Congratulations! HURRAY!!!11!1!!

grml provides more than 2500 software packages! Excluding library stuff, more than 1700 packages remain. We don't ship KDE and OpenOffice, but more than 800 packages which Knoppix does not provide. You'll get sysadmins favourite tools, security- and network-related software, data recovery- and forensic-tools, LaTeX, many editors, shells, and of course many texttools.

grml provides several scripts and utils which make life easier. zsh is configured with the completion mechanism. grml-x is a wrapper for configuring and using the X window system. grml-crypt is a program that provides an easy wrapper arround cryptsetup, mkfs, losetup and mount. grml-vpn is a program to establish encrypted communication channels in a network, and so on...

Grml 1.0 release name Meilenschwein was just released.

I am tired of sitting in front of my PC for today, that's why I just link to the:
release announcement.

Ak just released newsbeuter-0.4.
Now I guess newsbeuter is the most feature-rich RSS reader available for text-mode. Not even raggle has more (AFAIK).

Here are the new features:

• introduced configuration option to disable cache cleanup


• introduced configuration option to set the HTTP user-agent header to a custom value


• significant speed improvement for reload and cache cleanup


• added Italian translation


• added an "include" configuration command to make it possible to separate the configuration into several files


• introduced global configuration file /etc/newsbeuter/config


• added support for Snownews/Liferea extension scripts

The support for extension script rocks, now you write shell scripts which generate output, newsbeuter uses as input for example!

I already uploaded the package to Debian unstable. While the buildds still compile, get it from incoming.

For those who want to attend some kind of party, due to the Debian 4.0 release we meet to drink some beer:
Today (09.04.2007, sorry for being a bit lit with the announce) at:
The Old Emerald Isle
Erkelenzdamm 49
10999 Berlin
U1/U8 Kottbusser Tor