Older blog entries for mrcsparker (starting at number 69)

qt
When I got a Zaurus, I took some time out and learned qt. Great library, warts and all. Okay, so I did not like the moc systen very much, but it was a blessing compared to my win32 days of programming for one major reason - the documentation kicked serious ass. Trolltech - being that the library was GPL - could not hide anything for me. I could explore the language warts and all. Now, you current and ex win32 programmers I know can understand this - win32 is a huge pain in the ass for ANYTHING out of the ordinary. You want to do anything that is not documented you are up shit creek - browsing forums, looking on groups.google.com, doing searches on that impossible documentation hole called microsoft.com. I have spent waaay too many nights searching for answers to problems all over the internet just to find that my solution is either a work-around for a bug or some undocumented trick.
I really hope that this year qt and gtk can learn to live together - maybe even become friends.

GNOME Cron Frontend
I am calling it gnome-system-cron but I am up for name changes. Got pretty far on it - it parses the output from crontab -l (or /etc/crontab if you have the right permissions). I am also making it spit out some legible output - things like "Run command every Sunday at 7:00" rather than 10,15 * * *... ls -l. Anyways, I will be releasing this, not sure when though. I have not gotten to the "Edit Task" dialog yet, and I am up for suggestions - please if anyone has pointers to a clean looking interface let me know. The current cron frontends look too busy to me.

I love cigarettes, The way they taste, the way they smell - the way that they make me feel after I take that first, second, third drag. I am not a smoker but if cigarettes were better for me I would smoke ALL OF THE TIME.

I don't understand people that say they hate cigarettes - or at least hate the way cigarettes make a person feel. Long day full of frustrating crap and that drage makes all of those problems go away - like sex but not as much of a public taboo.

So, there are a whole lot of smart people around here - invent something that gives me what I want in a cigarette without all of the nasty side effects. Come on, you will make millions of bucks and have a life-long friend.

Snot was one of the greatest bands that no one seems to know about.

GNOME Frontend to Cron

Found one here called GCronTime but it crashes on me when I try to run it.

gnome-vfs-ssh
Okay, so I wrote and wrote about how I was working on this, and I promised to release the source code but I never did. I got lots of great email and interesting feedback and came to realize that the way I was reading from a pseudo-terminal was a hack and that there are much better ways of going about this - a few being gnome-ssh-askpass and the really really cool lussh utility (http://lufs.sourceforge.net/lufs/) from the equally cool LUFS project. Thanks for the feedback.

Novell/Linux Desktops
Just was notified that we are licensing a few Novell/Linux desktops (15 or so) to test at out facilities. I know two years ago we were looking at an IBM solution that never panned out, but this could be a really big rollout (by the way, I am NOT a decision maker, so no emails from Novell marketing people please). Pretty much if the product integrates into a current Windows/Novell environment, it is a go. I will be posting any feedback that the server guys get, but I doubt that I will be working on any of the systems unless there is a rollout (I am a programmer after all).

Zabbix
I am going to be working on this for one of my projects here at work. Currently a few boxes are being set up by one of the Unix adminstrators for testing, but I have grabbed the source code and it looks nice and clean. On Friday I plan on converting it to use the auto* tools and pulling out some code that looks like it should go into a library. Any Zabbix developers around here?

Gnome Crontab Frontend
So I started on a GNOME frontend on the plane on the way back from a trip. Just to make sure that I am not duplicating any work - are there any current projects that are doing the same thing? I hate duplicating code. My project is in C, and it is using g_spawn_async_with_pipes and grabbing the output of "crontab -l" and listing the jobs.

Sugar is not addictive and does not cause hyperactivity

Reading in the dark will not damage your eyes

Any others?

Finally

Gotten a bit more caught up at work and I am working on gnome-vfs ssh-module again. I had lost the original code so I started it over. I PROMISE that I am going to post the code this week.

Right now it accepts ssh://username:password@hostname. Thanks KDE folks for inspiring me with your fish module.

Update: 2:59 AM

Couldn't sleep and now I have ssh-method.c working. Going to clean up the code a bit (still will be a bit hackey when I turn it in) and also add a password dialog box so you won't have to put your password in the uri.

Mark Finlay: Thanks for the response. I will post the hack this weekend.

Work Work Work

Stayed up till about 2 this morning working. phew. The code isn't great, but a whole lot of problems were fixed and I am going to make a major release on SourceForge in about 2 weeks. The people around here really like it and it is about to go into testing. Lots of bugs, lots of bugs.

Unix Unix Unix

I think that I saw the new Unix guy around here. As soon as I am sure, I am passing him the backups. Apparently the guy had a long weekend. We needed to install some patches on one of the machine and he had no clue what he was doing. Applying one patch took him 6 hours, and after that they just gave up when he still coudn't figure out how to install a HP-UX depot. Not shitting about that.

And School

Just missed a class. Had to work. Well, I have an exam next Tuesday and not showing up might have not been the best idea, eh? Well, I have another class in about half an hour I guess I should make.

GNOME

I have asked this before, but why doesn't gnome-vfs-ssh use the pty? I have written a hack that makes a password dialog work and pass through a pseudo terminal. This is what the KDE guys do with fish. I am asking here because I know there are a whole lot of GNOME guys that post here. I would like to send in my patch, but I have assumed that the GNOME guys haven't done this before is because it might not be portable.

This is a test from gnome-blog.