2010-10-10: spin 1.76
It's been quite a while (nearly two years) since a release of spin, but I
finally got around to fixing a handful of bugs. The main bug fix was in
processing the output of external converters (like pod2html or faq2html)
that caused spin to duplicate the <body> tag in the resulting HTML output
and make the HTML invalid. Thanks to Julien ÉLIE for the report!
The other change was something I needed for multi-column output using a
table. The \tablerow processing already had special handling of a table
cell wrapped in a <span>, lifting the attributes of the <span> to become
attributes of the surrounding table cell. Now, \tablerow also does the
same processing with a <div>. When making that change, I also noticed
that \tablerow wasn't establishing a boundary, so tags could be left
unclosed across <td> tags creating another type of invalid HTML; that is
now also fixed.
You can get the latest release from my web
tools distribution page.
2010-10-10: podlators 2.4.0
I finally got around to fixing the way that output encoding was done in
podlators when the utf8 option is used so that it doesn't require PerlIO.
Pod::Man and Pod::Text now require Encode and use Encode to convert output
to UTF-8 if there isn't a PerlIO translation layer already in place.
This release also splits the style guide for writing POD documentation out
of the pod2man page, where people mostly didn't see it, and into a
separate perlpodstyle man page. I may have to do another point release to
change how that's done to play well with the rest of Perl, but what I have
seems to work for a standalone installation.
Thanks to Kevin Ryde, this release fixes a bug in Pod::Man when S<>
whitespace was at the end of a line. Pod::Man was leaving a stray
backslash without the whitespace in the output, which caused *roff to
escape the newline instead and led to weird results.
Finally, I discovered that ExtUtils::MakeMaker will deal with the
#! munging that I was previously doing by hand, so I now just use
that facility rather than trying to handle it with .PL files, which
makes the packaging much simpler and easier to work with.
You can get the latest version from the podlators distribution page.
2010-10-10: release 1.42
I had a request a while back to create symlinks in my software archive
site with a persistant name so that people can just link to and download
the current version, whatever version that happens to be. I finally got
around to implementing that in my release script today, although I haven't
gone back and added the symlinks for all my older software. That will
start happening as I release new versions, and I might go back and add the
symlinks for everything later.
While I was at it, I removed support in the release script for generating
and copying MD5 checksum files for tarball releases. They're pointless
now that I'm always generating GnuPG signatures (and were probably
pointless before that).
You can get the latest version from my
scripts page.
2010-10-12: spin-rss 1.23
The entry in my web site change log for the last release of spin revealed
a problem with spin-rss, which I use to generate the RSS files for my
journal and web site. It previously supported two different modes: full
journal entries got CDATA wrapped around the HTML of the entry, and the
web site changelog just had the change description dropped directly into
the RSS. The problem with the latter is that it doesn't work properly
with HTML tags in the description, even if they're escaped.
Now, spin-rss uniformly wraps the description in CDATA no matter what its
origin. This means that the contents need to be valid HTML, so the
description taken from a .rss file is now wrapped in <p> tags as well.
This seems to clear up all the remaining problems in various different
readers, although let me know if you still see something weird.
Thanks to Julien ÉLIE for the testing help!
You can get the latest version of spin-rss from my web tools distribution page.
2010-10-13: pkg-config Generation
A little while back, as part of a discussion on debian-devel, I spent some
time bad-mouthing pkg-config, and then later realized (with the help of an
IRC conversation) that I was doing so unfairly. So as penance here is
some documentation for how to add a pkg-config configuration file to a
typical Automake project.
This information is also in my build
system coding style and will be maintained there (so if you see this some
time after I wrote it, check that page for more up-to-date information).
pkg-config is
a tool to provide the flags required to compile or link against a shared
library. It's a replacement for complex Autoconf probes and for all of
the incompatible and occasionally buggy *-config scripts.
To install a pkg-config configuration file, provide a template pkg-config
configuration in a file named after the library but with a .pc.in
extension. Here is an example:
prefix=@prefix@
exec_prefix=@exec_prefix@
includedir=@includedir@
libdir=@libdir@
Name: <library>
Description: <short description>
URL: <upstream url>
Version: @PACKAGE_VERSION@
Cflags: -I${includedir}
Libs: -L${libdir} -l<library>
Libs.private: @KRB5_LDFLAGS@ @KRB5_LIBS@
Replace <library> with the official name of the library (which isn't
necessarily the library name with lib removed). This is only
informational, may contain spaces, and isn't used to locate the file. Its
filename is used for that.
Replace <short description> with a short description of the purpose of the
library. Often the short description of the package from the start of the
README file works well here.
Replace <upstream url> with the URL of the package's distribution page.
Normally, all Cflags needs to contain is what's indicated above,
which lets the compiler find the header files if installed in a
non-standard location. For Libs, note that pkg-config
distinguishes between the shared libraries that must be linked against on
a system with proper transitive dependency support and the libraries that
must be linked for a static build or on a system with poor support for
shared libraries. For a well-designed shared library, one should rarely
need anything in Libs other than what's listed above.
Libs.private, on the other hand, needs all the LDFLAGS and LIBS of
everything the library itself links with external to this package. In
this example, the shared library is linked with the Kerberos libraries and
therefore needs the Kerberos LDFLAGS and LIBS; modify as needed for your
example.
If the dependencies of the shared library also use pkg-config, just list
the other pkg-config file names in Requires or
Requires.private instead of using Libs or
Libs.private for them.
Finally, add the Automake code to build and install the pkg-config
configuration file. It should look like this:
pkgconfigdir = $(libdir)/pkgconfig
nodist_pkgconfig_DATA = lib/libfoo.pc
lib/libfoo.pc: $(srcdir)/lib/libfoo.pc.in
sed -e 's![@]prefix[@]!$(prefix)!g' \
-e 's![@]exec_prefix[@]!$(exec_prefix)!g' \
-e 's![@]includedir[@]!$(includedir)!g' \
-e 's![@]libdir[@]!$(libdir)!g' \
-e 's![@]PACKAGE_VERSION[@]!$(PACKAGE_VERSION)!g' \
-e 's![@]KRB5_LDFLAGS[@]!$(KRB5_LDFLAGS)!g' \
-e 's![@]KRB5_LIBS[@]!$(KRB5_LIBS)!g' \
$(srcdir)/lib/libfoo.pc.in > $@
Replace libfoo with the actual name of the library and change its
path in the source package as needed. Note the pattern above and use it
for any Autoconf substitution variables that you need to replace in the
pkg-config template. The above example adds KRB5_LDFLAGS and KRB5_LIBS to
the variables; you may have other ones you need, particularly to construct
Libs.private.
The above installs the pkg-config configuration file under
$(libdir)/pkgconfig. $(datadir)/pkgconfig is appropriate
instead if one is certain that the flags required to link with this
library will never vary by architecture, but that's not the case for most
libraries due to Libs.private.
Note that the Automake documentation recommends using comma as the sed
delimiter for doing this sort of trick, but LDFLAGS frequently contains a
comma since it's the separator for parts of a linker-specific option. I
use an exclamation point instead.
2010-10-14: pkg-config and Autoconf
Five different people asked or commented, in reply to my previous journal
post about pkg-config files, why I didn't just have Autoconf generate the
pkg-config configuration file directly. One could use the same template
that I proposed in the previous post, but rather than adding the sed
fragment to Makefile.am, instead add libfoo.pc to AC_CONFIG_FILES
and let configure and config.status generate it directly.
This is simpler, but it has two problems:
Autoconf variables may depend on other Autoconf variables (in other
words, the value of the variable may contain another unexpanded
variable), and Autoconf won't expand all those variables. This means
that you need to list each variable and expand it in the pkg-config
configuration file so that pkg-config can expand all the variables,
but which variables you need isn't well-defined and is to some extent
an implementation detail (and has changed in the past). The above
solution using a Makefile.am fragment will cause make to expand all
the variables for you.
Running configure with one prefix setting and then overriding
that setting when running make should build software using the
overridden prefix. This isn't necessary very often, but there are
times when it's very useful, particularly when rebuilding parts of the
tree. Generating the pkg-config configuration file from the Makefile
ensures that this works properly.
I therefore prefer this approach, even though it's a bit more complex. I
think it's more robust against both unusual ways in which people want to
build my source packages and any future changes to Autoconf. Note, for
example, that it's possible and sometimes useful to configure a package
with a command like:
./configure --libdir='${datadir}'
(admittedly, more common to do that the other way arond) but that would
fail with a pkg-config configuration file generated directly from Autoconf
unless I'd anticipated that usage and added both datadir and
datarootdir to the pkg-config template even though I wasn't using
either.
I've updated my build system coding
style page to include this rationale.
2010-10-15: Women writing SFF
There's a discussion going on right now in various science fiction and
fantasy blogs about gender balance in science fiction authors (and, to a
lesser extent, fantasy authors). It mostly started with an
excellent interview of Tricia Sullivan and then continued with a long
discussion of gender balance in the Clarke awards at
Torque Control.
One of the many interesting constructive reactions to that thread was from
Martin Wisse, who analyzed his own reading and found that only about 10%
of the science fiction and fantasy that he read was written by women, and
that a good place to start would be for he personally to read more books
written by women. I love this sort of reaction to this sort of
discussion: personalize it, find the small local thing that one can do,
and own one's own possible subconscious or cultural bias without obsessing
over fault.
So, I did the same thing today with my own reading out of curiosity. Of
the 421 books that I classify as science fiction or fantasy (I tend not to
differentiate between the two) that I've read since I started writing
reviews, 228 of them are by men (54%), 192 are by women (46%), and 1 is by
Raphael Carter. It's interesting to me that this is so much higher than
other people have seen (or that is reported in the pattern of submissions
to the Clarke award); I wonder why that is. Maybe the pattern of where I
get book recommendations from is different?
For those who are looking for more good science fiction by women, I
recommend:
- Elizabeth Bear
- Lois McMaster Bujold
- Octavia E. Butler
- Julie E. Czerneda
- Nicola Griffith
- Ursula K. Le Guin
- Elizabeth Moon
- Chris Moriarty
- Karen Traviss
- Jo Walton
- Connie Willis
Several of these authors also write fantasy, but I can also supplement
that list with a few more authors who I've only read in fantasy:
- Jacqueline Carey
- Ellen Kushner
- Laurie J. Marks
- Robin McKinley
I could add more, but that's a good list that I'm fairly confident of.
While I seem to be doing okay on gender balance in reading, my big hole, I
know, is reading works by people from cultures other than Europe and North
America and by people living in Europe or America who aren't white. I've
only made the barest of beginnings at broadening my reading there.
2010-10-17: reminder 1.15
I'm about done with vacation and thinking about how I'm going to structure
work when I get back to the regular daily grind, and it occurred to me
that it would be a lot easier to generate a daily to-do list the night
before if I had an easy way to get reminders that were going to become
active the next day. So this release of reminder adds a next command,
which is like active but also shows reminders that will become active in
the next day.
You can get the latest version from the reminder distribution page. A Debian package of the script is available
from my personal repository.
2010-10-23: California general election
Probably only of interest to California residents.
Time for the general election voting. I'm a bit late this year compared
to most years, but here's a record of how I'm voting this year.
Propositions:
Proposition 19: YES. Legalizes marijuana. I'm quite
happy to pick this fight with the federal government. The way we handle
drugs in this country is ridiculous. Other countries have had very good
results from legalization, and marijuana is no more dangerous than drugs
like tobacco and alcohol that are already legal.
Proposition 20: YES. Extends the redistricting reform
already enacted for state offices in Proposition 11 to congressional
districts as well. I think the effects of gerrymandering are overstated,
but I'm strongly in favor of non-partisan districting and strongly opposed
to having it be a legislative action. The Democrats are opposed to this,
presumably because they like drawing the districts to their advantage.
Even though I agree with them more than the Republicans, this is bullshit;
districts should as closely as possible be simple divisions of the state
into manageable chunks in a non-partisan way.
Proposition 21: YES. Increases vehicle registration
fees to fund state parks. A fee increase, a fee on cars, and support for
parks and wildlife programs. Fee increases are unfortunately somewhat
regressive, but for me that's balanced by having it be a good idea as a
matter of public policy to make owning and driving cars more expensive to
make the cost closer to the real full cost to society.
Proposition 22: NO. I'm sympathetic to the argument
from local governments that having their budgets played with by the state
causes huge problems in local areas. However, protecting redevelopment
programs is a bad idea; those are often giveaways to local (and even
non-local) businesses. And I'm in general opposed to limiting government
spending flexibility, since lack of flexibility has been behind a lot of
our budget problems.
Proposition 23: NO. The worst proposition on the
ballot. It's not only actively regressive, it's also actively deceptive.
It purports to be a pragmatic suspension of a difficult requirement until
the state economy is better, but the standard it uses for "better" would
postpone any environmental action until the state economy reached a
roaring pinnacle of runaway economic success that's been vanishingly rare
in state history. In other words, in practice this is a flat-out repeal
of state air pollution laws. We cannot improve state economy (even
putting aside the fact that it's far from obvious air pollution laws are a
net loss to the state economy) by killing people with air pollution and
making the state's pollution problems far worse. This simply isn't right.
The proposition is, unsurprisingly, funded by out-of-state oil companies.
Proposition 24: YES. Repeals a business tax loophole
passd by the legislature that makes the state tax code more complicated
and provides businesses with an unnecessary tax break (allowing them to
not just carry forward losses as a tax deducation in future years, which
is reasonable and still permitted, but allowing them to reduce previous
year's taxes retroactively). Businesses are undertaxed already as far as
I'm concerned and don't need new tax breaks, particularly complex time
travelling tax breaks. That the federal government allows this is no
excuse; the federal government shouldn't allow it either.
Proposition 25: YES. Repeals the two-thirds majority
required for passing a state budget. The most important proposition on
the ballot. Vote for this. This is the second most positive reform that
we can enact to fix the state budgetary and financial process (the most
effective would be to repeal Proposition 13).
Proposition 26: NO. Yet another attempt to prevent
people from paying more taxes, particularly if they're rich. After all
the paralyzation caused by similar measures, we need to put a stop to
this. Local communities need to be able to raise taxes to fund local
services, particularly when the state government is not able to fund local
programs the way that it has in previous years.
Proposition 27: NO. The gerrymander reinstatement
proposition. Repeals the redistricting reform passed in Proposition 11.
The major political parties appear to be desperate to avoid losing control
over their own districts. I'm completely unsympathetic.
State offices:
For all state-wide partisan offices and for Congress and local assembly
positions, I'm voting a Democratic ticket, unsurprisingly. As always,
it's the lesser of two evils. The only one there I'll particularly
emphasize is that it's very much worth voting to keep Barbara Boxer and
prevent Carly Fiorina from being elected. Even apart from her regressive
and odious politics, I can't believe anyone would want to vote for someone
who was so vastly incompetent and useless in her career at HP. If one
wants to vote for a business executive, at least vote for one who didn't
do her best to destroy a company.
Superintendent of Public Instruction: Tom Torlakson.
The Mercury News endorsed Larry Aceves, but their caveats about him bother
me much more than they apparently bother the newspaper. Having a hostile
past with citizen groups is a very bad sign. I also like Torlakson's
statements of priorities, and I want to elect someone who's skeptical of
charter schools, since that represents my beliefs as well.
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court: Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye:
YES. My inclination is to vote against any Republican appointee
since we should hopefully have a change of party for the governor and will
then are likely to get a better judge. However, my inclination is also to
vote in favor of a Filipino woman for this sort of office. What I've seen
on-line inclines me towards her moderately, she seems to be thought of
very highly for fair and intelligent rulings, and overall I think the
diversity issue beats the political leaning for me.
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court: Ming W. Chin:
NO. Dissented on the decision to legalize gay marriage, so
automatic no vote from me.
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court: Carlos R. Moreno:
YES. Very strong history of rulings in support of gay marriage.
Local measures:
Measure A: YES. Increases property taxes to pay for
child health care insurance, replacing lost funding from the housing
collapse and the state budget crisis.
Measure B: YES. Increases the vehicle registration fee
to pay for local transportation programs. The vehicle registration fee
should be way higher than it is now, so I'm all in favor.
Measure C: NO. Term limits for Santa Clara Valley
Water District representatives. I'm not generally a fan of term limits,
and I'm particularly not a fan of term limits for obscure offices, since
the resulting more-frequently-contested elections tend to go to whoever
has the most money and political insider support. I'd rather tend towards
going with the incumbant unless something is going wrong that raises
enough interest to have a well-informed election.
Measure E: YES. Increases local property taxes to fund
the local community college district. This is a slam-dunk for me. I'm a
strong proponent and supporter of community colleges, and I think our
property taxes should be much higher than they are.
Measure R: NO. Amends the city charter to place a
permanent requirement on the number of Fire Department personnel the city
must employ, requiring a measure to change it. This is nonsense. It's
this sort of bullshit micromanagement of budgetary decisions by voters
that has caused the mess the state budgetary crisis.
Measure S: YES. Realigns local election timing to match
state and federal elections so that the city doesn't have to run its own
separate election. Obvious cost savings. The only argument against is
that local measures may be lost in the partisan election, which I don't
think is a good enough reason to spend the extra money.
Local offices:
Santa Clara Valley Water District (District 7): Brian
Andrew Schmidt. I like that his background is in environmental law,
since the primary thing I want from the water district is solid support
for enviromentalism and proper handling of natural resources. He's also
been endorsed by progressive and environmental groups. His opponent is a
Republican who's arguing for spending cuts, and I've had enough of that.
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