Recent blog entries for gilbertt

code
I think I'm going to add IPC support to feh. I've had requests for joystick support, LIRC support and all sorts of input/control mechanisms. Rather than integrate them all, I figure I'll just add IPC support and people (including me) can write little IPC clients to interface with their input devices.

life
I'm currently out of work and cruising the sucky London job market. Things are really really slow right now, although it feels like things might be picking up a tad..

Trying to screen out all the fake, cv-harvester jobs on job sites is highly annoying :(

Lately I've been writing fun little helpers for my sony laptop, and whacky bluetooth apps for my laptop and phone.

The thing I love most about these kind of apps, is that you can crack them out in a day - from idea to full functionality. It's instant gratification compared to some of the longer term projects I'm working on, and it gives me a nice break from them :-)

The reason ruby is so great for writing things like this is that it's so easy to extend. Writing ruby C modules is easy to do, so there's no real barrier - you write a little C module to do the tricky low level stuff, and manipulate that module from a higher level in ruby. Writing extensions for most other languages is complex and tedious in comparison (for me :-))

Having a lot of fun playing with bluetooth and thinking of interesting ways to use it - I just wish the bluez implementation had better docs..

So this weekend I decided to do something different. I got married! :-)

It was a lot funner than I expected :)

raph: filtering by rating sounds nice, however I'd much rather be able to filter by the ratings I've set on people's diaries, rather than the ratings everyone else has set. That way I can control which entries I see.

If I only wanted to see stuff that everybody, on average, found interesting, I'd watch TV :)

daniels writes:

There are no signatures on individual .debs, so it's a security check to stop people hijacking servers, and redirecting the libc6 deb to a trojaned version, or the like. It's a deliberate omission.

How does not following redirects help, exactly? Surely the level of "hijack" required to add a redirect to the webserver configuration is just as high if not higher than that needed to replace the libc6 deb on the server itself.

chakie: I agree with you, I can't think of a good reason why apt shouldn't follow redirects.

chakie: 302 found is an http redirect. Perhaps because http://civil.sf.net redirects to http://civil.sourceforge.net/

Hrm. Gonna have to hack on gnome-pilot some I guess. Apart from galeon it's the only part of gnome I use, but I do use it every day.

gpilot-install-file (thank heaven for tab completion) dies if it can't connect to an X display, even if you are using --later (which doesn't display anything at all and just marks a file for later installation). I want to use it in cron, after a sitescooper/plucker run, but this simply won't work if it needs X.

Also gonna have to hack on the backup conduit - if I install a prc file, and hit the sync button, the damn backup conduit sits there for 5 minutes doing stuff. If I then install something else, off it goes again! I'd like to say "only backup once a day" or whatever.

Gee I hope the source is clean :)

Verbage
mirwin: as members and users of this site, we all have a responsibility to keep our diary entries relatively terse, and not drone on for page after page after page. Please stop ignoring this responsibility. If you have nothing better to do that rehash the same stuff again and again in far more words than necessary, please create your own website for doing it. I'd just like to scroll down recentlog and not have to ignore the half of it that comes from you. It's annoying to me that just one of your entries makes 10 entries from people I actually care about scroll off the bottom of the page.

ldunbar: Haha. Well for one thing, I've been told by another reader that "Anybody who calls you the famous *anything* (except famous slutmonger) is insane". Wise words indeed ;-)

As to the LCD, it was fairly easy to set up, it's an LCD 2401 from Matrix Orbital. The only tricky bit was wiring up power - a mate tried to do the same thing a month later and blew his up - so you have to be real careful. (It was quite impressive btw, it apparently literally exploded...)

After that, a serial cable, wired carefully out and back into the case, a hacked hole in the front of a drive bay and I was all set. Software wise, lcdproc is very cool, it runs as a daemon you connect to and ask it to draw widgets on a panel. The clients can have as many panels as they like, and they get cycled according to their "priority". So I coded up a little perl client that spouted mp3 info about the currently playing song and it was job done :) You can check out the client here btw. It's that easy.