http://www.shlomifish.org/me/blogs/ http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/72971.html <p> If you are using <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travis_CI" rel="nofollow">Travis CI</a>, you can check the latest build after a failed build by going to the “Build History” tab in your project’s main page (= https://travis-ci.org/shlomif/fc-solve or equivalent), and selecting the new commit. </p> <h2>Licence</h2> <p> Copyright by Shlomi Fish, 2016. </p> <p> You can reuse this entry under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/" rel="nofollow">the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported</a> licence, or at your option any later version of it. See the <a href="http://www.shlomifish.org/meta/copyrights/#cc_by_intr" rel="nofollow">instructions</a> on how to comply with it. </p> Shlomi Fish ( shlomif@shlomifish.org ) linux tip tech open-source tech tip foss http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/72971.html http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/72971.html Fri, 27 May 2016 12:43:21 GMT http://fc-solve.blogspot.com/2016/03/freecell-solver-420-was-released.html <p> <a href="http://fc-solve.shlomifish.org/">Freecell Solver</a> version 4.2.0, has been released. It is available in the form of a source archive, from <a href="http://fc-solve.shlomifish.org/download.html">the download page</a>. Freecell Solver is an open source library and some command line applications, for automatically solving several variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell. </p> <p> This release sports the new configuration theme “-l conspiracy-theory” (or “-l ct”) which is somewhat faster than the best contender up to it, “-l amateur-star”, some relatively minor bug fixes, new compile-time options, and many small and somewhat larger code cleanups, refactorings, and optimisations. </p> <p> “conspiracy-theory” is a reference to the Jewish holiday of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purim">Purim</a>, which took place around the time of its release and an <a href="http://shlomif.livejournal.com/62243.html">old post</a> of mine about it. </p> <p> Enjoy! </p> Shlomi Fish ( shlomif@shlomifish.org ) freecell open source release solitaire solver solving tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-96099636168698788.post-3011534562121233530 Fri, 25 Mar 2016 16:14:00 +0000 2016-03-25T09:14:51.183-07:00 http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/72917.html <h2>2015-12-03: Tech Tip: Speed up building perl 5 by not installing the man pages</h2> <p> When building <a href="http://dev.perl.org/perl5/source.html" rel="nofollow">perl 5 from source</a>, one can speed up the "make" and "make install" stages significantly by not installing the man pages. To do so, pass the options “-Dman1dir=none -Dman3dir=none” to “sh Configure”. </p> <p> Cheers, and happy upcoming <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanukkah" rel="nofollow">Chanukkah</a>, and happy Christmas and/or Yulth or whatever winter holiday you celebrate. </p> <h2>Call for action</h2> <p> Creative Commons has set up <a href="http://creativecommons.org/campaigns/stop-the-tpp" rel="nofollow">a campaign</a> to stop <a href="http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/46455" rel="nofollow">TPP - the Trans-Pacific Partnership</a>. Please consider signing it and spreading the word. </p> <h2>Licence</h2> <p> Copyright by Shlomi Fish, 2015. </p> <p> You can reuse this entry under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/" rel="nofollow">the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported</a> licence, or at your option any later version of it. See the <a href="http://www.shlomifish.org/meta/copyrights/#cc_by_intr" rel="nofollow">instructions</a> on how to comply with it. </p> Shlomi Fish ( shlomif@shlomifish.org ) linux tip perl tech open-source tech tip foss http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/72917.html http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/72917.html Thu, 03 Dec 2015 16:37:51 GMT http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/72545.html <p> When pressing «Ctrl+B;"» in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tmux" rel="nofollow">tmux</a> to split a pane vertically there, one will notice that tmux splits the existing pane into two which can result in smaller and smaller panes. In order to fix this, one can type «Ctrl+B;M-2» (where “M” is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_key" rel="nofollow">Meta key</a> and is normally “Alt” on most keyboards.) which will make all the panes equally heighted. </p> <p> I found this feature after wondering whether it existed, and then searching for it in the tmux man page. </p> <h2>Licence</h2> <p> Copyright by Shlomi Fish, 2015. </p> <p> You can reuse this entry under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/" rel="nofollow">the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported</a> licence, or at your option any later version of it. See the <a href="http://www.shlomifish.org/meta/copyrights/#cc_by_intr" rel="nofollow">instructions</a> on how to comply with it. </p> Shlomi Fish ( shlomif@shlomifish.org ) linux tip tech open-source tech tip foss http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/72545.html http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/72545.html Fri, 06 Nov 2015 10:19:27 GMT http://fc-solve.blogspot.com/2015/09/freecell-solver-400-was-released.html <p> <a href="http://fc-solve.shlomifish.org/">Freecell Solver</a> version 4.0.0, has been released. It is available in the form of a source archive, from <a href="http://fc-solve.shlomifish.org/download.html">the download page</a>. Freecell Solver is an open source library and some command line applications, for automatically solving several variants of card Solitaire / Patience games, including Freecell. </p> <p> This release sports the integration of the scans of Tom Holroyd’s patsolve for improved atomic moves-based solving, some other new flags with bug fixes, a transition of the Python code to Python 3, and some other changes that are mentioned in <a href="http://fc-solve.shlomifish.org/docs/distro/NEWS.html">the NEWS file</a>. </p> <p> The most significant digit was increased due to the integration of patsolve. Enjoy! </p> Shlomi Fish ( shlomif@shlomifish.org ) freecell open source release solitaire solver solving tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-96099636168698788.post-4449217081539455140 Mon, 28 Sep 2015 14:51:00 +0000 2016-03-11T09:10:58.814-08:00 http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/72415.html <p> A constant annoyance when trying to use the Firefox extension “<a href="http://barisderin.com/?p=120" rel="nofollow">Personas Rotator</a>” was that downloading the favourites file from the Firefox addons site failed, which made it stop rotating. I recently found a solution for that which I'd like to share. </p> <p> First of all, login to <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/themes/" rel="nofollow">the Mozilla addons site</a> and access and bookmark <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/mine/favorites/format%3Ajson?src=" rel="nofollow">the JSON data file’s URL</a>. Save it to a file and host it using a local HTTP service (such as Apache, <a href="http://www.garyrobinson.net/2004/03/one_line_python.html" rel="nofollow">the one line Python HTTP service</a> command line, or <a href="http://opensource.dyc.edu/sthttpd" rel="nofollow">sthttpd</a>’s “thttpd -p $PORT” invocation). </p> <p> Then, go to Firefox’s “about:config”, access the “extensions.personas.favorites-feed.url” key and change it to the locally served one. It should work fine after restarting Firefox, and one upside to it would be that you no longer need to be logged in to addons.mozilla.org for it to work. </p> <p> Remember to save the file again every once-in-a-while, after you have added new favourites. A final note is that a “file://” URL may work fine as well, but I have not tried it yet. </p> <p> Happy rotating, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosh_Hashanah" rel="nofollow">Shanah Tovah</a> if appropriate! </p> <h2>Licence</h2> <p> Copyright by Shlomi Fish, 2015. </p> <p> You can reuse this entry under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/" rel="nofollow">the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported</a> licence, or at your option any later version of it. See the <a href="http://www.shlomifish.org/meta/copyrights/#cc_by_intr" rel="nofollow">instructions</a> on how to comply with it. </p> Shlomi Fish ( shlomif@shlomifish.org ) linux firefox tip tech mozilla open-source tech tip foss http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/72415.html http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/72415.html Tue, 15 Sep 2015 12:18:06 GMT http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/72038.html <p> In order to build <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Guile" rel="nofollow">GNU Guile</a> (or at least its version 2.x), it is important not to pass the “-j$N” flag to “make”. Without the flag, the compilation will be faster (counterintuitively I admit), because some of the build tasks spawn as many processes or threads as the CPU cores on the machine, and with the flag, they get congested and the build is slower. Cheers! </p> <h2>Licence</h2> <p> Copyright by Shlomi Fish, 2015. </p> <p> You can reuse this entry under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/" rel="nofollow">the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported</a> licence, or at your option any later version of it. See the <a href="http://www.shlomifish.org/meta/copyrights/#cc_by_intr" rel="nofollow">instructions</a> of how to comply with it. </p> Shlomi Fish ( shlomif@shlomifish.org ) linux tip speed tech open-source tech tip foss http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/72038.html http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/72038.html Tue, 01 Sep 2015 15:22:55 GMT http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/71746.html <p> <a href="https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/CPAN-Mini/bin/minicpan" rel="nofollow">minicpan</a> is a tool to create or update a minimal local mirror of CPAN (= the “Comprehensive Perl Archive Network”), that contains only the latest releases of CPAN distributions. Now, one problem I ran into when using it is that “minicpan” did not seem to delete the older downloaded releases after they were superseded by newer ones. A few days ago I found a solution to this problem. </p> <p> What you can do is: </p> <ol> <li> <p> Move away the minicpan’s mirror’s top directory (<b>do not delete it!</b>) </p> </li> <li> <p> Set up a localhost HTTP service on a high TCP port which will serve the moved minicpan directory. For that you can use <a href="http://www.garyrobinson.net/2004/03/one_line_python.html" rel="nofollow">the one line Python HTTP service</a> command line or <a href="http://opensource.dyc.edu/sthttpd" rel="nofollow">shttpd</a>’s “thttpd -p $PORT” invocation or whatever. </p> </li> <li> <p> Run the “minicpan” command while pointing the remote to the localhost mirror of the old minicpan mirror, using the “-r” flag or by temporarily editing the “~/.minicpanrc” file. </p> </li> </ol> <p> Voila! Now the mirror will only contain the latest releases, and you can remove the old, moved-away, minicpan directory, and cancel the HTTP service. </p> <h2>Licence</h2> <p> Copyright by Shlomi Fish, 2015. </p> <p> You can reuse this entry under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/" rel="nofollow">the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported</a> licence, or at your option any later version of it. See the <a href="http://www.shlomifish.org/meta/copyrights/#cc_by_intr" rel="nofollow">instructions</a> of how to comply with it. </p> Shlomi Fish ( shlomif@shlomifish.org ) linux tip perl tech open-source tech tip cpan foss http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/71746.html http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/71746.html Mon, 20 Jul 2015 10:54:09 GMT http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/71570.html <p> Let’s suppose you are packaging a software application using <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPM_Package_Manager" rel="nofollow">RPM</a> or a similar packaging system, and this application contains some automated tests that can be run using “make test”, “make check” or similar. You may opt to put them inside a “%check” section, but the problem now is that they may fail. </p> <p> The solution I used in this case (assuming fixing the tests was out of scope of my work as a packager) was to comment out the command that ran the tests, but this is not ideal because that way the tests will also be disabled in subsequent versions of the application, unless the packager remembers to reenable them. </p> <p> Recently, I discovered a better way to do that, after inspecting the source of a <a href="http://www.mageia.org/en/" rel="nofollow">Mageia Linux</a> package. One needs do something like that: </p> <pre> %define known_to_fail_version 1.82 %check if test "%{version}" = "%{known_to_fail_version}" ; then true else # Run the tests. make check fi </pre> <p> This way, the tests will get run again for subsequent versions of the packaged application, and if they fail again one can set “known_to_fail_version” to a new value. </p> <p> I hope you also find it a cool trick. Cheers! </p> <h2>Licence</h2> <p> You can reuse this entry under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/" rel="nofollow">the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported</a> licence, or at your option any later version of it. See the <a href="http://www.shlomifish.org/meta/copyrights/#cc_by_intr" rel="nofollow">instructions</a> of how to comply with it. </p> Shlomi Fish ( shlomif@shlomifish.org ) linux tip tech open-source rpm tech tip foss http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/71570.html http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/71570.html Tue, 14 Jul 2015 08:53:24 GMT http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/71385.html <p> In order to debug Mozilla Firefox’s User Interface code (so-called “chrome” code), you should toggle the “Enable chrome and add-on debugging” checkbox in the Developer Toolbar’s setting and then go to “Tools → Web Developer → Browser Toolbox”. Thanks to jdm on irc.mozilla.org for part of this tip. Cheers and happy <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_Day_%28United_States%29" rel="nofollow">United Stated Independence Day</a> (4th of July) in case you are an American. </p> <h2>Licence</h2> <p> You can reuse this entry under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/" rel="nofollow">the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported</a> licence, or at your option any later version of it. See the <a href="http://www.shlomifish.org/meta/copyrights/#cc_by_intr" rel="nofollow">instructions</a> of how to comply with it. </p> Shlomi Fish ( shlomif@shlomifish.org ) linux firefox tip tech open-source debugging tech tip foss http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/71385.html http://shlomif-tech.livejournal.com/71385.html Fri, 03 Jul 2015 08:39:31 GMT