Hello, and welcome on my small web space. You will find here some software and documents I wrote. You can also browse some photos I took during my trips.

Software

I wrote some pieces of free software, often closely related to &emacs_xref;, because this text editor is awesome, and often in &python_xref;, because it is soooooooo greeaaat a programming language.

In short, Python:

• has a crystal clear syntax and quite a nice design;
• is very powerful;
• is reasonably portable;
• can be easily extended with C or C++;
• can be easily embedded in C or C++;
• is very well documented;
• is free software.

Moreover, writing Python programs is quite fun. I hear you: "But hey, there are at least two other major interpreted languages that are quite fun to play with!" Naaaa! Python code is maintainable, that is, not only by its author and one month after it was written.

Well, enough spoken, here's the beef.

TDBSF, the Trivial Database Searching Facility

&tdbsf; is a search engine targeted at small "databases" in a very simple text format designed to replace an old shareware tool that my father used during years (this tool had severe limitations).

The engine is written in &python_xref;, and the only really usable user interface in ELisp, for &emacs_xref;. However, &tdbsf; is designed to ease the addition of interfaces, so this is only a matter of whether there are people wanting to use it outside Emacs or not.

Since version 2.0, &tdbsf; has full &unicode_xref; support. More precisely, database files may be written in any Unicode-compatible encoding supported by both Python and the interface in use (i.e., currently, Emacs). The encoding of a database file is simply indicated with an encoding declaration, as usual for Emacs users and Python programmers.

You can download &tdbsf; or read its documentation. This program is released under the GNU GPL.

PyXMMS and PyXMMS-remote

PyXMMS is a &python_xref; interface to XMMS, a free multimedia player for X-Window¹. PyXMMS consists of two components as of version 2.00:

• a set of bindings for the xmms_remote* functions of the libxmms library, plus some higher-level functions
• a Pythonic interface to manage (including reading and writing) the main configuration file for XMMS.

In other words, PyXMMS can be used to control XMMS or manage its main configuration file from a Python program.

You can download PyXMMS or read its documentation.

PyXMMS is distributed under the GNU GPL version 2.

PyXMMS-remote is a &python_xref; program that allows you to control XMMS from the command-line (or another program). Command-line interfaces are very handy when you want to interface several programs or automate some task. PyXMMS-remote needs PyXMMS to function properly.

You can download PyXMMS-remote or read its documentation.

PyXMMS-remote is distributed under the GNU GPL version 2.

pythondialog

&pythondialog; is a &python_xref; wrapper for the &dialog_xref; utility originally written by Savio Lam, and later rewritten by Thomas E. Dickey. Its purpose is to provide an easy to use, pythonic and comprehensive Python interface to &dialog;.

This module is useful if you want to write quickly and easily text-mode² interfaces in Python. The abstraction level is quite high: you can directly ask for text boxes, input boxes, radio lists, etc. You cannot do low-level stuff with this program. In that case, you should look at ncurses or slang. For sophisticated text-mode interfaces, the Urwid Python library looks rather interesting, too. Document yourself and make up your mind!

I started working on the original &pythondialog;, mainly written by Robb Shecter. I made it more robust, complete and well-documented. During a few years (2004–2009), &pythondialog; has been in the hands of Peter Åstrand, who uploaded version 2.7 on SourceForge.

I am now resuming my work on &pythondialog;, and new versions are available here, because it is more convenient for me than using SourceForge. Numerous improvements have happened lately, mainly since version 2.09 (mostly, support for new widgets). Check it out!

Next things on my TODO list are &python3; support and properly dealing with Unicode strings. For now, non-ASCII characters are supported if you encode them before passing them to &pythondialog; (for instance, to UTF-8; of course, the terminal in use must support that encoding). However, I think it would be nice to be able to directly use Unicode strings, but since this area has seen significant changes between &python2; and &python3;, I don't think it is worth investigating the issue before the port to &python3;.

You can download &pythondialog; or browse its online documentation.

&pythondialog; is distributed under the GNU LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License).

Emacs interface for Mobiquid (obsolete)

With mobiquid.el and mobiquid-init.el, you will get a &gnuemacs_xref; interface for the service provided by http://www.mobiquid.com/ that allows one to know what was playing on a given radio channel at a given time (in France and for the channels supported by that site).

Debian

During my free time, I like working on the Debian distribution. You can find a few packages that I build or rebuild myself below (most notably, some backports for lenny). Use them at your own risk!

deb http://people.via.ecp.fr/~flo/debian lenny main contrib non-free
deb-src http://people.via.ecp.fr/~flo/debian lenny main contrib non-free

(for lenny)

and

deb http://people.via.ecp.fr/~flo/debian sid main contrib non-free
deb-src http://people.via.ecp.fr/~flo/debian sid main contrib non-free

(for sid)

Still curious? Make a quick tour through my projects directory and my dumping ground for Python code.

Documents

Emacs tutorial

I wrote an Emacs tutorial (in French). &gnuemacs_xref; is an extremely powerful text editor. It is also quite portable (it runs perfectly on most Unix flavours, on Windows, and at least in text mode on MacOS X—not to mention lots of older operating systems Emacs runs on).

If you are interested in this tutorial, you most probably can read French and will want to switch to this page's French version which is more complete on this subject.

LaTeX2e introduction

I wrote an introduction to LaTeX, a program based on TeX that is used to produce high quality documents, in a printable form or for screen reading (best accomplished with the PDF format nowadays). This document is written in French, so if you are interested in it, you most probably can read French and will want to switch to this page's French version which is more complete on this subject.

Footnotes

1. X-Window is the standard graphical layer of all Unix flavours (and therefore of GNU/Linux, which is today's most well-known Unix flavour).

2. Or even simple graphical interfaces with the Xdialog backend, as long as it is not too incompatible with &dialog_xref;.

I have an OpenPGP key (generated by GnuPG).

Last modified on 2010-03-18 at 12:27.