I made 3 of them. the first was made entirely with paper and tinfoil and it worked fine, but I figured I would try making a couple more with different materials: 2 different strengths of card. It’s good I did that too, as I ended up using 2 of them and giving the paper prototype to Shirley’s friend who most likely has better things to do than build paper parabolas. (I, on the other hand, do not.)

What does it do? It turns your omni-directional antenna into a directional antenna with a stronger signal. The tinfoil does the radio wave reflecting and the shape (the parabola) just happens to be an efficient way to do that. Using this new direction, I’ve “pointed” the antenna on my wireless router towards my room – even on a bit of an angle through the floor. In my room, on my desktop PC, I’ve just pointed it horizontally in the direction of the access point.

The results have been great. Without any home-made boosters, I received 25-35%, with one on the access point, i received 35-55%, and with one on both the access point and my desktop antennas, I’m receiving a pretty steady 62-68% (see the graph, above). I still receive disconnects, but it’s now much easier to reconnect… usually happens automatically on the first try – I don’t even have to do anything!

So if you’re having wireless issues, give it a shot! It certainly doesn’t cost much.

Why Did I do this?

I didn’t do my taxes; an accountant did. But when I was reading about them, I stumbled upon a couple webpages and became interested in the differences among the provinces and territories within Canada and
different income ranges. That’s what started this mini Javascript project.

This is not a work of art

I wrote it mostly on the bus using my recently acquired Dell Mini 12 netbook (on Windows XP… ew). And from that experience, I can firmly say that writing even very simple things, it’s good to have a fair amount of time set aside in a relaxed environment. I would write a couple things here and there for 20 minutes or so… then not look at it again for a few days… it took me 5 minutes to figure out what I wanted to do the next time I opened it. The only times I made significant progress was when I sat down for more than an hour. The code wasn’t really designed, it was just… written. It’s messy, there’s lots of hard-coding, poorly named fields and variables (didn’t help with figuring out what I was doing last time), and if it were anything serious, I’d rewrite large chunks of it. And make it prettier. But as it stands, it’s just kinda fun.

In addition to being curious about the taxes in Canada, I was also interested in trying a javascript graphing library. I had been impressed with different javascript-generated graphs on the web and wondered how difficult they were to create. I used FLOT (with lots of copying and pasting from examples), and it seemed to work alright, but it depends on JQuery, which I wasn’t familiar with. Actually, I’m still not very familiar with it… and wrote almost everything in regular javascript. I know it’s worth learning, but I guess I’ll save
that for another time.

Let me know of any errors in tax calculation.. or code design, for that matter. There’s lots of those, but I’m sure I’m not aware of all of them! hah.

(I’ve been sitting on this post for about 2 months now. hah! Figured I might as well publish it.)

Download

• Browse source here.
• Download the source: bzr branch http://stevenbrown.ca/src/FileListApplet

Install

1. Install dependencies (Ubuntu package names given): sudo apt-get install python-xdg python-gnome2-desktop python-gtk2 python-pyinotify
2. Branch the source using the bzr command, above.
3. cd into the directory.
4. ./configure --prefix=/usr (the prefix is important!)
5. make
6. sudo make install
7. If the applet does not show up in your Add to Panel menu, try restarting the bonobo-activation-server: killall bonobo-activation-server.

Autotools

Autotools is pretty much the standard in source package management on linux. Except for the name, there is nothing automatic about autotools. Every encounter I’ve had with autotools has usually defeated me and left me frustrated and leaving whatever I was working on to do something else. For me, because I had labeled it the next step, it basically stalled the entire project for a while. Most people tend to copy and paste other projects’ autotools setup, but I figured that was overkill for my purposes and I didn’t find anything that quite suited me. I looked at gnome-blog, but it seemed like some stuff wasn’t quite working properly and some was completely unnecessary… in fact, this seemed to be a trend when looking at the autotools stuff in projects. Why is this? Autotools is not simple and due to this simple fact, I think it fails completely on many levels. Developers massage it enough to get it working, but few actually understand it all – I know I sure don’t! So please forgive the sloppiness and feel free to send patches. I gave up doing a couple things, like getting the revision number (bzr revno) and including it in the version string (see configure.ac). I know it’s probably something super simple, but I couldn’t seem to pass a variable containing a string as the version….

I feel that GNOME, as a platform for development, could seriously benefit from some kind of frontend to autotools that handled GNOME development nicely and hid as much as possible from the developer (including all those nasty config files that pollute the package tree). Anyway, I did not have an enjoyable time grappling with autotools, but I’ll end this mini-rant here.

(Link to video here if embedded object doesn’t show up.)

Last night, I took it apart and tried wiggling every LCD-related wire I could find, hoping to affect the display’s output and conclude it was a fixable loose connection.

Nope. Fine. Who needs a screen anyway?

I now have a very compact desktop – it even includes wireless, keyboard, mouse and speakers! It just needs a monitor. I haven’t decided whether I will make it a pseudo media PC to stream things from my desktop to the TV (a little work), or just to have it replace the family computer (almost no work!). The family usually gets my computer hand-me-downs.

Anyway, looks like I’ll need a new laptop sometime soon. I vowed to go smaller with my next laptop, but I’m not sure if a netbook would suffice. Of course, I would like it to run Linux (Ubuntu?), have long battery life, reasonable storage, support WPA2, have a built-in 1.3MP camera, and all that good stuff. Bluetooth would be nice, too. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

I picked up the Design Patterns book because the one I wanted, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, wasn’t there. (The library has 3 copies of it, but it’s always out with a wait-list of people requesting it. This list now includes me. ) Anyway, the one I picked up is extremely terse. There are UML diagrams provided, sample code, and a problem description… but not much in way of explanation. It’s format is kind of like this: there’s this problem, how do we address it? Boom, here’s a pattern. Boom, here’s a diagram. Done. Next. Or… but we could improve on this pattern with this other pattern. Boom, another diagram. Why? Figure it out.

This book is fine if you’ve been exposed to the patterns previously, and need a refresher, but it is not a good source to learn from. I’m familiar with some of the patterns, but even then, they may be called something different, or implemented slightly different, and it’s been a while, so it takes me longer to understand than if there was more explanation. Looking forward to picking up the other patterns book. If you have not been exposed to design patterns before, or are a relative beginner programmer, and definitely if you are not familiar with UML diagrams, avoid this book. It’s a book on design patterns (not a simple topic) that’s less than 200 pages, so you can’t really expect a thorough resource. I’m about half way through it. On one hand, I’m curious what such a small book has to offer, but on the other, I’m not sure I’ll finish it. I’ll probably concentrate on the XP book, for now.

This year has been pretty big. Naturally following up with lots of events from last year, these are some quick memories. My nephew, Rayden, was born on Feb 12th, six weeks early! This caused the father (my brother) to be indisposed for my dad’s (2nd) marriage on Feb 14th. I got bumped up to best man (but didn’t have to do much) and had a rather empty hotel room to myself in Vegas. I attended the Open Web Vancouver conference. I went to Whistler mountain for the first time in years and plan on going again soon. I went on a fantastic road trip down the west coast of the United States, something I will never forget. I slacked off most of the summer but managed to do quite a bit of rollerblading and outdoor activity hanging out with Kurt (visiting from Brazil). My brother, now a father, married the mother of his child on August 3rd. I was best man at this wedding, as well – with more responsibilities, but they were well received and totally worth it. Our beloved cat, Sky, met an early and terribly unfortunate end. We had our first encounter with bed bugs who are now the sworn enemy of our household. Vancouver, a city that sometimes doesn’t get snow all year, had its whitest Christmas ever with 60cm (2 ft) of snow! Perhaps we should have seen snow in April as a sign….?

That reminds me: Happy Holidays for 2008! Guess I was a little late on that… Here are some pictures of our insane weather in Vancouver.

Geekery

With my free time, I think I was able to really exercise my geekiness in 2008. I released a couple updates to the Rhythmbox Jump-to-Playing plugin, which led me to submit my first patch to an upstream project! Said patch was accepted and will be in the next version of Rhythmbox! Yay. It was just for some XML UI description, but it feels nice to have helped improve (even a tiny bit) a project that will be installed on thousands of computers in the next cycle. I also released a usable proof-of-concept GNOME Panel File List Applet which has stayed on my panel and I find quite useful. And I’ve done a couple little scripts and how-to’s that fall under the “nerd” category quite nicely. Oh yeah, and significant website updates. Next website todo item is to customize the attachment page for my theme, I think…. Also, I joined Twitter. And Identi.ca. And LinkedIn….

Art

Not many artsy things done this year. But with the significant improvements of tablet handling in Linux, I did some random doodles and a birthday card. I may not do it very often, but I still enjoy drawing, thank goodness.

Blog Stats for 2008

My Blog is by no means high traffic, but stats are fun! (These stats were obtained using the wordpress.com Stats plugin, and exclude the Feed stats, because I use Feedburner for that… although, I’m thinking I should revert that, now that I mostly use wordpress.com Stats.)

Top 3 Referrers:

1. http://live.gnome.org/RhythmboxPlugins/ThirdParty (402)
2. live.gnome.org/Boston2008/GUIHackfest (209)
3. siuyee.com (126)

Top 3 Posts and Pages:

1. Pidgin 2.1 UI Ideas (1,053)
2. 2D Game Art and the Virtual Console (580)
3. Rhythmbox Plugin: Jump to Playing 0.2 (455)

Top 3 Search Engine Terms:

1. rhythmbox (327)
2. bug (174)
3. pidgin (165)

Top 3 Clicks:

1. Pidgin UI screenshot attached to a bug (57)
2. Pidgin UI mockup (50) by Hylke Bons
3. SF2 HD Ken (42)

The fourth was launchpad.net/desktopdrawers with 38 clicks, so it’s kinda cool I helped advertise a small project a little. (A project I’ve submitted patches to, no less. )

Thanks

Thank you, everyone, for a wonderful 2008. It’s been interesting, and despite a failing economy, I’m looking positively toward 2009.

Happy New Year! (あけましておめでとうございます！)

I actually had to remove the Time Tracker (Hamster) applet to scale my 1280×1024 desktop down to 1024, but I think that was all. And I only just decided to try moving the Tomboy and Deskbar applets over to the top-left corner… looks a little odd, but it’s much more accessible. It’s good to try out new things, right? (When the keyboard will do, Alt+F12 and Alt+F3 for Tomboy and Deskbar, and Super(windows-key)+Space for Gnome-Do are good shortcuts to keep in mind.)

How about you? (If you run Ubuntu, read this – which is why I tried scaling my 1280 desktop to a 1024, in the first place).

How to Test

Plug in your tablet.

Run GIMP (included with Ubuntu by default).
Applications > Graphics > GIMP Image Editor

Enable Extended Input devices in GIMP.
Edit > Preferences > Input Devices > Configure Extended Input Devices

Find your tablet under the Device dropdown (mine is a Wacom Graphire) and select Screen or Window for the Mode. (It defaults to disabled.)

Create a new image, select the paintbrush tool and start drawing. To play with the features of your tablet, expand the Brush Dynamics section in the paintbrush options window (should be below the toolbox, where you selected the paintbrush). Here you can adjust things that pressure of your pen will control, like size and opacity. Fun stuff!

It’s not perfect (only works with the stylus – eraser doesn’t work without configuring), but it’s a HUGE step!! And the fact that this also includes the latest version of GIMP (2.6) makes this upgrade an absolute no-brainer for linux graphic-philes.

I found the new UI in GIMP a little strange at first, because I became so accustomed to the old one, but it is much better.

Upgrade Problems

Related to the upgrade, I lost wireless connectivity with my laptop upon doing it because the hostap_cs driver is used. I forgot about this issue that I had with previous releases and my super-cheap 1000yen wireless card. Blacklisting the hostap_cs driver and forcing the orinoco_cs driver fixed my problem again. The lesson: the upgrade wasn’t perfect and it should never be assumed that they will be – please backup your stuff! But do do the upgrade!

Here’s a bash script that you can pipe output into and tell it to run a specific program with the output as arguments. I’ve named it open-with and placed it in my personal script directory: /home/steve/bin/. Look within the script at a couple of the examples for how to use it.

#!/bin/bash
 
PROG=`basename $0`
 
DESC="Read arguments from standard input and run a specified program
with them.  Meant to be used as output for a pipe."
 
 
USAGE="OUTPUT | $PROG \"PROGRAM-NAME [OPTIONS AND ARGUMENTS]\""
 
EXAMPLES="
# List (with details), all the files that include \"downloads\" in their name:
  find /home/ -iname \"*downloads*\" | $PROG \"ls -l\"
 
# Queue all AVI files in current directory in vlc:
  ls *.avi | $PROG vlc
 
# View all time-related icons with eye-of-gnome:
  find /usr/share/icons/gnome/ -iregex \".*[^mul]time.*\" | open-with eog
"
 
function Usage() {
  echo "DESCRIPTION: $DESC" ; echo
  echo "USAGE: $USAGE" ; echo
  echo -n "EXAMPLES: $EXAMPLES"
}
 
# Quick check to see it's being called correctly, if not, print Usage and exit
if [ ${#@} -ne 1 ]
then
	Usage
	exit
fi
 
files=()						# empty array
while read -r					# read from stdin
do
	files+=( "$REPLY" )			# add result of read to array
done
 
# assume $1 is a valid program
$1 "${files[@]}"				# pass arguments to specified program

Motivation

You’re sitting at the command line and have a list of images (in different locations) that you would like to browse. Most image viewers let you iterate over a set of images, but only within the same directory. What would be great is if they accepted input from stdin through a pipe!

$ cat my_list_of_images | my_image_viewer

I didn’t find anything that did that, but using the open-with script, you can do something similar:

$ cat my_list_of_images | open-with my_image_viewer

Browsing a select list of images is actually kind of nice. It’s like a playlist for your image viewer – a viewlist. Anyway, I’m sure there’s some problems with this script. Feel free to provide suggestions in the comments. But I certainly don’t want to look at it for a while….

I hate shell scripting

With a passion. It’s not a great surprise… many programmers do. I’m willing to go on record and state that I hate it even more than PERL programming. I rarely do it, and when I decide to try something that seems like it would be simple, it turns out taking forever due mostly to quirks. The rest of this post is a bit about how I went about writing this script, which ended up being mostly given to me by some #bash gurus on IRC. And it’s a bit of a rant.

Although not many GUI programs seem to accept stdin as input, most accept filenames as arguments:

$ eog image1.jpg image2.jpg image3.jpg "/home/steve/image seven.jpg"

So I figured I would just have to convert the list of images into an acceptable format: quoted, absolute filenames, separated by space. Doing this depends entirely on the format the list is currently in, but it’s likely a list of unquoted filenames separated by newlines:

/home/steve/image1.jpg
/home/steve/my images/wow.jpg
/tmp/anotherimage.png

For me, my test list looked like this:

/usr/share/icons/gnome/48x48/stock/generic/stock_timezone.png
/usr/share/icons/gnome/16x16/stock/generic/stock_timezone.png
/usr/share/icons/gnome/16x16/stock/generic/stock_timer.png
/usr/share/icons/gnome/16x16/stock/generic/stock_timer_stopped.png
/usr/share/icons/gnome/16x16/stock/form/stock_form-time-field.png
/usr/share/icons/gnome/24x24/stock/generic/stock_timezone.png
/usr/share/icons/gnome/24x24/stock/generic/stock_timer.png
/usr/share/icons/gnome/24x24/stock/generic/stock_timer_stopped.png
/usr/share/icons/gnome/24x24/stock/form/stock_form-time-field.png

I was looking for icons of clocks or representations of time, and I obtained that list using find:

$ find /usr/share/icons/gnome/ -iregex ".*[^mul]time.*"

So I can’t pipe it into my image viewer, but I can use the output as the command-line arguments if I change the newlines to spaces. find has an option for formatting the output which is perfect:

$ find /usr/share/icons/gnome/ -iregex ".*[^mul]time.*" -printf "'%p' "
'/usr/share/icons/gnome/48x48/stock/generic/stock_timezone.png' '/usr/share/icons/gnome/16x16/stock/generic/stock_timezone.png' '/usr/share/icons/gnome/16x16/stock/generic/stock_timer.png' '/usr/share/icons/gnome/16x16/stock/generic/stock_timer_stopped.png' '/usr/share/icons/gnome/16x16/stock/form/stock_form-time-field.png' '/usr/share/icons/gnome/24x24/stock/generic/stock_timezone.png' '/usr/share/icons/gnome/24x24/stock/generic/stock_timer.png' '/usr/share/icons/gnome/24x24/stock/generic/stock_timer_stopped.png' '/usr/share/icons/gnome/24x24/stock/form/stock_form-time-field.png'

That’s great for me, because I’m using find. But not very useful if I’m not, so I wanted something more generic. Of course, there are many ways to do this, and again, I’m by no means a command-line guru. But here’s how I started:

$ find /usr/share/icons/gnome/ -iregex ".*[^mul]time.*" | sed -e 's/^/"/' | sed -e :a -e '$!N;s/\n/" /; ta' | tr '\n' '"'

This wrapped the lines in double-quotes and join them together with a space in between. The find command is the same as before, minus the formatting because that’s what I was trying to find an alternative to. The output of find is piped into sed, which adds a " at the beginning of each line. This output is then sent to another sed which replaces the newline character at the end of each line with a closing double-quote and a space, joining all lines into a single line. Finally, that output is piped into tr which replaces the one remaining newline with a final double-quote.

If the files don’t include spaces or other troublesome characters (mine didn’t), then you could get away with simply changing the newlines into spaces. But again, I wanted something generic.

$ find /usr/share/icons/gnome/ -iregex ".*[^mul]time.*" | tr '\n' ' '

Anyway, now that we have something that creates the desired input, we just have to wrap it in back-ticks and put the whole mess as the argument to the image viewer! In my case, I’m using eye-of-gnome (or eog).

$ eog `find /usr/share/icons/gnome/ -iregex ".*[^mul]time.*" | sed -e 's/^/"/' | sed -e :a -e '$!N;s/\n/" /; ta' | tr '\n' '"'`

Wait a second. That doesn’t actually work. Why not? Running the backtick contents by itself seemed to produce the correct output. Copying this output verbatim as arguments to eog worked as expected. The problem was that when the quoted arguments were manually entered on the command-line, bash (silently) escapes the filenames, removing the quotes, adding backslashes before space,s etc. But when the pipeline is wrapped in backticks, the result is not escaped, and eog complains about not being able to find files that begin with quotes. Fine. I was not about to write a bash “escape” script – something like that should already exist, right? And it should be built in to bash! Perhaps it’s even called “escape“. Well, if there exists such a built-in, I couldn’t find it. But I had to be going about this the wrong way. Heading over to IRC, it was kind of difficult to explain the problem, but ferret eventually gave me the meat of the script above:

files=(); while read -r; do files+=( "$REPLY" ); done < <(find /usr/share/icons/gnome/ -iregex ".*[^mul]time.*"); eog "${files[@]}"

It worked! I thanked him and began studying it. There were still a couple things I didn’t understand:

• Why two angle brackets with a space between them? I understand the first one is probably redirecting input, but I don’t understand that one next to the opening parenthesis.
  Answer: The <(command) actually puts command‘s output in a temporary file and produces that filename. So <(command) becomes tempfile. (Thanks, kojiro.)
• If I open some video or audio files in totem using open-with, there’s an odd delay. Using vlc doesn’t produce a delay, however.

And to think this was originally going to be a micro-blog post in Twitter and identi.ca. Wow. It’s safe to say I still hate shell scripting. ]]> http://www.stevenbrown.ca/blog/archives/474/feed 0