Philipp Bunge

There are only a few days left to go out and vote on the legislative body of the student union of the University of Bern. So if you are an undergrad, go and vote online (preferably voting for the Tuxpartei) while you still can.

Also, there is a ballot vote for an artificial restriction on what the legislative can and cannot discuss (you can tell by my tone what I think of the vote). So if you received a letter with your ballot card, go out and vote by Wednesday.

I’ve just spent the last hour or so perusing photos on The Big Picture from The Boston Globe. I can only encourage you to at least take a look at the three 2008, the year in photographs sections which provide some amazingly impressive and powerful images of items that were in the news this year.

U.S. soldiers search for weapons on an Afghan man, who works for a private security firm escorting truck convoys, after they found illegal weapons in his vehicle, in a village near Kandahar in this April 27, 2008 file photo. Forty countries are now contributing to the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) which has around 47,000 troops, but drawing up a strategy that unifies their work has proved elusive. In addition, the United States has some 14,000 troops serving in a separate force. (REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic/Files)

The photos are not only impressive because they manage to capture and convey the events we were confronted with this year so poignantly, but also because of their photographic merit that only heightens their intensity.

A man’s hand drips blood as he stands in front of riot policemen during a demonstration in Athens, part of a days-long series of demonstrations throughout Greece on December 9, 2008. (REUTERS/John Kolesidis)

And of course I am particularly proud that the images contain a photo of an exhibition at the natural history museum where my sister works and in which she was directly involved in.

A visitor looks at  a mock skeleton of the cartoon character Tom of “Tom and Jerry” by South Korea’s artist Hyungkoo Lee during a special exhibition ‘Animatus’ at Natural History Museum Basel August 26, 2008.  (REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth)

So I have finally released ldaptool as version 0.1!

ldaptool is a collection of utilities to ease the maintainance of an LDAP tree from the command line. It supports common unix operations such as useradd, passwd and the like. I wrote ldaptool as part of my job at the Linux Cluster of the University of Bern (UBELIX) and the Computer Services Deparment kindly gave me the permission to release ldaptool as an opensource project.

Ldaptool is invoked using a main command (ldaptool) and set of subcommands similar to the way you use subversion. For example, to add a new user jdoe you would enter the following:

ldaptool useradd jdoe

The commands take similar options as their linux/unix equivalents. For example, to specify groups for the aforementioned user we can type:

ldaptool useradd -g users -G admins,backup jdoe

Which will give jdoe the primary group users and the secondary groups admins and backup.

There is still a lot of work left with ldaptool. I have currently not yet created any usermod and groupmod commands. Also, ldaptool will support hooks to create directories and launch other actions when users are created or other commands are executed. I find the -m command of useradd a little limiting.

That’s all for now, I am a little tired from all the coding today and looking forward to sitting down with a beer, having a good dinner and to watch a movie. Please check out the ldaptool project page and the documentation. Feel free to drop me a comment if you have any.

As I have previously mentioned, I am quite a fan of the Tango color palette. In this installment, I want to show how to highlight code listings in LaTeX using the Tango colors like in the following Smalltalk example:

The screenshot above is actually from a full blown example which I have created for XeLaTeX. If you wish to typeset the example in pdfLaTeX or similar, you can just comment out the lines it complains about.

• Syntax highlighting sample (PDF)
• The original source (TEX)

Let’s go through the source. First of all, you will need the xcolor package to define the custom colors:

\usepackage{xcolor}

Then we can define the colors. I have simply converted the hex color definitions into rgb values acceptable to xcolor. For more information, see the xcolor documentation.

\definecolor{Butter}{rgb}{0.93,0.86,0.25}
\definecolor{Orange}{rgb}{0.96,0.47,0.00}
\definecolor{Chocolate}{rgb}{0.75,0.49,0.07}
\definecolor{Chameleon}{rgb}{0.45,0.82,0.09}
\definecolor{SkyBlue}{rgb}{0.20,0.39,0.64}
\definecolor{Plum}{rgb}{0.46,0.31,0.48}
\definecolor{ScarletRed}{rgb}{0.80,0.00,0.00}

Note that this is just a part of the color definition. See the source for all available colors.

Now that we have defined the Tango colors, we can use them to highlight our source. Depending on the language that you are wishing to highlight, not all numbered keywords will be applicable. I use these different keywordstyles to highlight the above Smalltalk source.

\lstset{
	keywordstyle=[1]{\color{DarkSkyBlue}},
	keywordstyle=[2]{\color{DarkScarletRed}},
	keywordstyle=[3]{\bfseries},
	keywordstyle=[4]{\color{DarkPlum}},
	keywordstyle=[5]{\color{SkyBlue}},
	commentstyle={\color{Aluminium4}},
	stringstyle={\color{Chocolate}},
	basicstyle={\ttfamily},
}

And that’s all you need to use Tango colors for you syntax highlighting in LaTeX. Again, take a look at the source code to see the above code in full.

I am not a fan of Gnome but ever since I installed an Ubuntu on my computer at work I have been a fan of using the Tango color theme for terminals. The colors feel smooth and work well in combination with semi-transparent terminal windows. I have applied the theme to other environments as well and when I recently started using Leopard on my new Macbook I realized I could not simply change the ANSI colors like I had previously on Tiger.

Turns out it is not so difficult on Leopard either, but you will need to install some additional software.

So, to get Tango colors in your terminal, follow the following instructions:

1. Download and install SIMBL which is a little hack to allow you to extend OS X applications.
2. Unpack Ciarán Walsh’s SIMBL plugin that adds customizable ANSI colors to Terminal.
3. Download and double click OS X Terminal Tango Theme.

Let me know if you have any comments.

So welcome to my second attempt to actually writing and maintaining a blog!

I can’t and won’t promise that this experiment will last nor that you will find anything of interest here. I have decided not to re-post any of the articles that were ever published here. They were few in number anyway and not of particular interest to anyone. I wish to make the content of the blog more technical in future. This way, I hope, I will actually be able to deliver some value to the reader or visitor that purposefully or accidentally finds himself on my page.