A colorful grey world

I recently decided to give iTerm a try, so I needed a way to launch shells and other things requiring a terminal the same way I launched them inside rxvt-unicode: using Quicksilver.

I suppose I could use AppleScript to do this, but…

1. I don’t really like its syntax;
2. I’m currently addicted to python;

So I made qslaunch, a very small python package to help do the job, and this little post to tell how to use it :)

In this post, I’m assuming some knowledge of python, regular expressions and how to use a shell.

I won’t detail things too much either as I think the code speaks by itself.

As I said in a previous post (“Repeat command” in TextMate), one of the things I use a lot in jed editor, my favorite terminal editor, is the “repeat command”: pressing ESC, typing a number and then something will repeat something number times. This also works in emacs and bash.

It can also be used with other commands like delete, yank (paste) and such. I don’t do that often, but I do use this for lines of '-' or '=' quite often.

The previous solution I posted was a “snippet”. It implied typing a number, “:”, what to repeat, select that text and then hit some hotkey.

Slow, and annoying because we have to toy with the shift + arrow keys to select the text.

Here’s a new version as a “command”.

In a terminal, I need both the “option” key to access alternate glyphs, like “•”, “∞” and French accents, like “é”, and to act like a “meta” key, which essentially sends an “escape” character followed by the key value.

Obviously a key can’t be two things at the same time, at least on Os X. On other Unix-like systems, you often have the left “alt” playing the role of the meta key, and the right “alt” playing the “altgr” role.

Some of the shortcuts I use the most are word navigation, using meta-left-arrow and meta-right-arrow, and word deletion, with meta-backspace (or “meta-delete” on Macs) to delete the word on the left, and meta-d to delete the word on the right.

So here are my recipies to bind those keys in iTerm.

iTerm's key mapping system allows for a number of possible “actions”:

• “send escape sequence” simply sends a “\e” followed by the text as-is;
• “send hex code” scans for one 8-bit code, and sends that;
• “send text” allows for “\e” (escape), “\n” (newline), “\a” (bell), and “\t” (tab), and normal text.

The goal of this small patch is to add two escape sequences to the “send text” action:

• “\\” to send a single backslash;
• “\xAA” or “\xBBBB” to send an arbitrary unicode character specified in hexadecimal.

For example, to bind the conventional “backward-kill-word” to option-delete (or alt-delete or meta-delete, or “backspace” on PC keyboards), you can simply add a key mapping for “delete”, checking “option”, selecting “send text” as the action, and typing, in the text box, “\e\x7f”.

From then on, hitting option-delete will delete the word on the left of the cursor :)

Five minutes after I placed my new django-based website online, I got my first spam. Yesterday, I got as many comments (all spam) as I used to get in a month when this website was based on ExpressionEngine!

Of course EE’s captcha was enabled, so it helped, but spam still got through – a few every other day.

So, what can I do about it?

• Conventional captchas are not so efficient (cracked, cheap human labor, …), and they are often as tough on humans as they are on scripts;
• Akismet: I don’t want to depend on external entities unless I have exhausted all other possibilities;
• The popular reCAPTCHA – apparently often cracked, and doesn’t fit my external policy;
• “Are you human” thingies, like simple mathematical formulas – I strongly believe “1+4” to be easily parsable and calculable by any script, and I find most other solution I found too annoying to implement and/or use (like “drag the pencil image to some box on the right”).

So what about bogofilter?

First, Wordpress, then, for a year, ExpressionEngine. And now, since yesterday, this website runs under django!

Well, it actually runs on much more than django:

• django for the basic web stuff, URL handling, admin interfaces and such;
• the awesome jinja 2 template engine;
• the clean and flexible reStructured Text markup language for my own posts;
• the fabulous pygments syntax highlighter;
• for the comment markup, markdown;
• the search system is, as always, the overly-fast Sphinx full-text search engine;
• redis for the caching;
• django modules like mptt, tagging and imagekit;
• and so much more…

Just like the previous version, based on EE, used much more than EE. For example, its search system was also Sphinx-based. (And the humanized markup language I used was called “HTML” – I don’t really like Markdown nor textile, and reST is only in python :)

Why the move? Well… such a simple question deserves a simple answer: I personally have much more fun pythonning than PHP-ing. Maybe because I did so much PHP, and python is still new to me. Or maybe my mind works more like python :P

Anyway, my first complaint: using django’s native comment system certainly attracts spam! So I suppose I’ll have to do something about that, yeah! More pythonning to do! >:)

(Note: this post is superseded by “Repeat command” in TextMate revisited)

The text editor I used the most in the past ten years is definitely jed. I still use it a lot, both local and over ssh, but I now mostly use TextMate when programming.

I love it for the most part. The feature I miss the most from emacs and jed are split views. Can't do much about this however.

The second feature I miss the most is the “repeat command” (press ESC or Control-U, a number, and something, to repeat “something” “number” times).

As I said on stackoverflow, it's actually quite easy to do.

First, open the Bundle Editor, then create a “New Snippet”, preferably in a personnal bundle (I put personnal things in “_Serge”). In the new snippet, add this:

1
2

`python -c "print ':'.join('$TM_SELECTED_TEXT'.split(':')[:-1]) * \
 int('$TM_SELECTED_TEXT'.split(':')[-1])"`

To use, simply type the text to repeat, “:”, then a number, select the text, and run the snippet.

Here are some examples:

When I ported this to EE, I made an ugly greyish skin that I still can’t believe I placed online.

Well, that junk is now gone, replaced by something I believe to be much cleaner. Maybe I’ll also make me sick in a few days, but for now I like it way better!

So, it should display correctly on Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. It should also look OK on IE6-8. I still believe IE8 to be a big piece of junk. Somehow, Microsoft can’t seems to read specifications.

Posted the patch for php 5.3.0 on the project's page PHP/GD: Better Freetype2.

Also fixed another bug causing segmentation faults when using imagettftext() instead of imagefttext().

The patch giving more control over Freetype2’s parameters in PHP/GD has been updated!

The nasty bug that made the optional parameter $extrainfo not really optional (omitting it caused no font output) was fixed at last (a minor fix, but laziness is hard to overcome sometimes).

Also released new patches for PHP 5.2.8 and 5.2.9.

See project PHP/GD: Better Freetype2.