Das Blog

It's a rather disorganised trip, and I know I've lost touch with many old friends, so send me an email (rob _at_ corporatism.org) or SMS me on +61434247158 and we'll see if we can meet up at some point. I'll be in Sydney for a little while at the start of the trip, and in Newcastle for a bit, but I'll probably travel up north for a couple of weeks. I'll be accompanied by Sophia.

— by Robert Thomson, created 14th Aug, 2010, last modified 20th Aug, 2010 | Tags: World

A command line interface to XBMC's Navi-X plugin's browser: http://github.com/rmt/navix_cli

XBMC not required.

It's still a little buggy (patches welcome), but I use it on a daily basis already.

— by Robert Thomson, created 24th Jun, 2010, last modified 24th Jun, 2010 | Tags: Tech

The Awesome window manager has me slightly impressed.. who knows whether I will continue to be impressed in a few days, but for now, I am. I found myself somewhat frustrated with the standard GNOME desktop when using multiple monitors in a Xinerama layout (the default if you just plug a screen in). Awesome is a tiling window manager.. in the past, I haven't been inclined to use one, because I work mostly on a single screen, or I have enough screen space for all my current work to be focused. My current work environment, however, involves a bit of task switching, and having a big monitor on my desk as well as the small laptop screen means I want better control of my windows.

The key feature for me is the ability to have independent virtual screens on each monitor, despite it being Xinerama. Most of the time I want the Windows VM showing on the laptop screen, but not always. In my current work environment, having tiling windows is actually proving quite nice, and it's helping me to be a little more organised. I split my tasks between virtual screens, and keep an eye on the Windows VM & outlook on the laptop, so context switching is easy.

Of course, some windows should be floating, and Awesome supports that just fine, as well as allowing each virtual screen to have its own layout style, and easily switch between them.

— by Robert Thomson, created 20th Apr, 2010, last modified 20th Apr, 2010 | Tags: Tech

A little while back I bought an ASRock 330HT as a media PC. Aside from the fan being a little noisier than I hoped, the remote control had no Linux driver so I bought a Hama MCE remote control after reading that it works well under Linux. Unfortunately, while it works fine under Linux, it's got hardcoded key values and not every key is unique. As an example the "i" info button is actually a prolonged right click, a couple of the keys send *exactly* the same keycodes as others (Play and Pause), and there are a bunch of buttons which generate Control-Shift-foo and Alt-bar and so on. I guess under Windows Media Center these all serve a specific purpose. Under Linux and its media center programs (such as XBMC) they don't (and XBMC's input layer is a bit restrictive).

I had my toys, but things weren't working exactly as I wanted. What's a guy to do? I got hacking, of course.

The Linux Input Subsystem is pretty clean nowadays and detecting the correct device and reading a few bytes from /dev/input/eventXX isn't all that hard. Within a couple of hours I was reading the bytes from the remote and pretty printing them as I received them. Unfortunately, this lead to the realisation (as shown above) that the remote's a little screwy and that a few hacks would be necessary to make things work as I wanted. But I was having fun and I was learning something.

The next step was deciding how to use these key events. XBMC has an interface to LIRC and another chap had written a python script making the HAMA MCE remote produce LIRC events. I tried it, fixed some bugs, and it worked.. but it was unsatisfying.. the MCE remote also has a mouse cursor (there are two input devices generated - a mouse and a keyboard - but the mouse device also sends a few key events that I care about as well as the all-important info button).. I started to explore the uinput device which lets you create a fake input device and write to it. Figuring out how to initialise it was a little tricky but I found some similar code and worked it out.. after that it's just writing input events to the device.

My initial idea of just reading all input, munging a few things, and passing the remaining events directly through proved somewhat problematic. If you leave a stranded Control or Alt key pressed down then you have a serious problem and in my tests I had to kill my X session a few times. A better way is to read all the input and have a virtual keyboard that handles the MOD keys, does the processing of normal keystrokes, does the translations, and then converts the translated events back into input events for uinput, ensuring there're no dangling modkeys.

The final step was to create a versatile translated step. I decided that I wanted a configuration file, instead of coding the translations all in python.

Here's some snippets from my config file:

# simple 1-1 translation
KEY_HOMEPAGE-down = send KEY_ESC-down
KEY_HOMEPAGE-up = send KEY_ESC-up
# the info button/right click magic
BTN_RIGHT-down = set rightclick time.time()
BTN_RIGHT-up = if (time.time()-rightclick) > 0.3; send KEY_I; else; send BTN_RIGHT
# compound key sequence example
Alt-KEY_F4-down = wait
Alt-KEY_F4-down KEY_F4-up = send KEY_ESC; clear

The wait action means to add the current key event to the match criteria for the next keystroke. clear then clear's the list.

Code will be online soon at http://github.com/rmt/pyinputevent/

— by Robert Thomson, created 3rd Feb, 2010, last modified 4th Feb, 2010 | Tags: Tech

A couple of months ago I discovered the joys of an Internet Explorer bug revolving around HTTP.. If a HTTP redirect is returned from a server but the Location: header is not in the same TCP packet, Internet Explorer would have some serious issues. This seems to affect MSIE6, MSIE7, & MSIE8. This suggests some poor separation of the network layers in Windows & IE, but it also highlighted the strangeness of SimpleHTTPServer's implementation, which is used by paste's default server.

Every time it sends a header, it flushes the buffer.. the end result is that you often get one TCP packet for each header, and then the data afterwards.. obviously this isn't the most efficient use of the network. Headers and data should be buffered before sending.

The solution was to switch to using FLUP & FastCGI for both the testing and production environments. We're using Nginx, and this combination proved very robust. Wireshark certainly showed much nicer results.

— by Robert Thomson, created 19th Dec, 2009, last modified 19th Dec, 2009 | Tags: Tech

I decided to splurge and purchase this baby: The AsRock ION 330 HT for all my media center needs.

People seem to have got it working fine with Linux, except for the remote control... but I'll look into that.

Now, all I need is a TV (or monitor), and a keyboard+mouse for it. Time to head to Saturn and start evaluating TV sets.

Update: It arrived today, and I didn't have a keyboard nor screen for it... I've now bought a decent Samsung monitor and a cheap microsoft wireless keyboard+mouse. The TV can come in a little while - too big a purchase to buy under pressure.

— by Robert Thomson, created 21st Nov, 2009, last modified 25th Nov, 2009 | Tags: Tech

WE DO! 8-)

Tonight we received two lovely leather sofas and a matching armchair.. and a dining room table..

Sophia's aunt & uncle bought some new sofas, and they asked if we wanted theirs.. Naturally, we replied with an emphatic "Yes!" We initially wanted to buy a Sofa-Bed, but we couldn't find one that we liked (for less than €800).. We looked in quite a few places.. so we started to look for normal Sofas that someone could sleep on. Yesterday, I suggested that we start considering second hand sofas, and today we get a phone call. :-)

So, we now have a complete set of loungeroom furniture, for just the cost of delivery. (And the cost of repairs to some plaster & paint, but that's a lot less than it would've cost to get the furniture, and now I can learn how to repair plaster damage! .. Yes, I'm an eternal optimist. :-)

— by Robert Thomson, created 6th Nov, 2009, last modified 6th Nov, 2009 | Tags: World

It's been almost two weeks since we moved into the apartment.. It's looking okay, but we still have unpacked boxes and bags full of clothes. We still need to buy some cupboards (and surface area) for the kitchen, a sofa, and a wardrobe for me.. some nicer ceiling lights would be good too. Once we have the sofa, we should be ready for visitors. :-)

— by Robert Thomson, created 3rd Nov, 2009, last modified 3rd Nov, 2009 | Tags: World

I finally have keys to put on my keyring again.. We just have to choose a moving company now.. hopefully in under 2 weeks we'll be in.

— by Robert Thomson, created 14th Oct, 2009, last modified 14th Oct, 2009 | Tags: World

This works, but is there a better way, like only modifying a Widget or a Field?

class TextCheckboxSelectMultiple(widgets.CheckboxSelectMultiple):
    """
    Set checked values based on a comma separated list instead of a python list
    """
    def render(self, name, value, **kwargs):
        if isinstance(value, basestring):
            value = value.split(",")
        return super(TextCheckboxSelectMultiple, self).render(name, value, **kwargs)

class TextMultiField(forms.MultipleChoiceField):
    """
    Work in conjunction with TextCheckboxSelectMultiple to store a
    comma separated list of multiple choice values in a CharField/TextField
    """
    widget = TextCheckboxSelectMultiple
    def clean(self, value):
        val = super(TextMultiField, self).clean(value)
        return ",".join(val)

— by Rob, created 15th Sep, 2009, last modified 15th Sep, 2009 | Tags: Tech