The quest for the perfect panel

Pics to follow on the next post (this is a quickie). I’m in search for a panel for my openbox desktop. I’m used to the dwm top bar, and wish I could have something simple like that, but haven’t found anything yet. As of now I’ve tried all the popular panels (xfce4-panel, gnome-panel, tint2, pypanel, fspanel, bmpanel) and I’ve liked tint2 (what I’m using now), and xfce4-panel was alright. I think I might try bmpanel again. This is all foreign to me, since dwm has been my only WM for a long time. The only reason I’m moving to something else is because I have a tablet PC, and I need a little mouse support. Also it’s a major bummer that Cell Writer doesn’t work with dwm. Meh…
——

^ tint2 panel ^

On a side note openbox sucks, well unless you configure it. And I’ve configured it a little, but I would like it to emulate dwm, with Ctrl-Alt-Shift (Move Windows), and a few other dwm specific things.

——

I’m using pytyle to get the whole tiling wm’ish feel, but it’s not anything like the real thing. I really miss dwm, and am pissed that I bought this Lenovo X200 Tablet, and am having issues finding a good WM for it

Screenshot Of The Month

I think I need to find a place for this on my theme, or get a new theme (even though I like the wordpress theme that I have at the moment.) Well this screenshot is from my wonderful X200 Tablet, Enjoy.

On a side note, flickr manager doesn’t play well with wordpress 2.8. Quick Google search yeilded: http://seoishard.com/seo-tool/flickr+manager+2.8 which forces it to play with wordpress 2.8 Enjoy the screenshot because of the wonderful people at seoishard.com

Teach mpd a lesson about stealing your CPU cycles

MPD by default is setup to use whatever it can output to (audio wise), even though such sources might be very inefficient. I was noticing that mpd was using upwards of 30% of my dual core CPU, and it got me to googling for an answer. Well after reading up on mpd configuration tweaks: http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Tuning I got my configuration file to use alsa, and now I’m seeing 1-3% cpu usage from mpd most the time it’s off the radar completely.

I’ve posted my whole mpd.conf below, yet the information I modified was the ‘audio_output bit.

# See the mpd.conf man page for a more detailed description of each parameter.

music_directory         "~/music"
#playlist_directory "/var/lib/mpd/playlists"
db_file "~/.mpd/mpd.db"
log_file "~/.mpd/mpd.log"
pid_file "~/.mpd/mpd.pid"
state_file "~/.mpd/mpdstate"
#
user "fsk141"
#
audio_output {
type            "alsa"
name            "My ALSA Device"
#       auto_resampler "no"
#       format          "44100:16:2"    # optional
mixer_device    "default"       # optional
mixer_control   "Master"        # optional
#       mixer_index     "0"             # optional
options         "dev=dmixer"
device          "plug:dmix"

}

Procrastination

We all do it, and it’s hard to get away from. The word of the day is procrastination. I spent my day taking a break, and working through the rest of my photo collection to finish a task that has “long been put off.” Why is it that we put off “important” tasks, until we get “tired” of procrastinating. Or that out life demands that these such tasks are done in a timely manner. Case in point, I never seem to procrastinate about eating. I have food in my house, and when I have the slightest hunger pain I go to the fridge or pantry and get something to eat.

Why do we put off tasks, and waste time watching television, or laying around? The only thing that being a lazy bum gets you is, well nothing. It makes you fat and incompetent. I’m not demeaning myself to a couch potato, cause I at least picked up a couple books today, and worked through a few chapters of Robinson Crusoe. Sorry to get off topic. But what I’m trying to say is that procrastination is a bitch, and everyone does it for a reason.

http://www.counseling.caltech.edu/articles/procrastination.html

… Sorry just got distracted for a few minutes on a tangent. Eh, distraction should be tomorrows word of the day. I’ll write about it later . While I’m at it, I’ll write something up about sarcasm. hehe… Anywho I get hit with the “perfectionism” aspect of procrastination a lot. Also with the “matter of approach” aspect. Both are explained in the link above. I would like to achieve a jumble of things in any given day, and am held back by the interior force that dictates what I “can” do in any given day.

This “can” do attitude, that normally results in my not getting anything done is a bad approach. Instead I’m going with a new approach (I’m working out the details, but it will revolve around having a set plan for the day, and sticking to it the best I can). This gives me a few things that I can work off. Not only does it give me a rough outline of what I should get done in my day, but it helps in holding myself accountable.

I’m not quite sure how I’m going to setup my daily lists, since I’ve tried moving away from “paper,” but I will think of some cool digital something or another. I love todo.txt, and I wish there were some way to have it work with Google tasks, but that is a pipe dream for now since I’m a lazy programmer. …I procrastinate too much.

The summary of this spiel is to say “f you” to procrastination, and get to work on the things that you “want” to get done. I’m going to build something into my daily ritual to show myself what needs to get done, and somehow chart that the things actually get done. Maybe a time tracking application or the like.

Until then I leave you with a few famous quotes. I first looked at my 20,000 quips and quotes book, but procrastination wasn’t in there? So I had to go to Google.

Image Organization | In-N-Out NAS

It’s painful, but I’ve been meaning to get my images in good order for a long time now. Well I made a little script to rename all the JPG & AVI extensions to lower case, and remove the IMG_0 crap.

#!/bin/bash

mmv "*.JPG" "#1.jpg"
mmv "IMG_0*" "#1"

mmv "*.AVI" "#1.avi"
mmv "MVI_0*" "#1"

chmod 755 *

mmv is a powerful tool, and I’m using a very simple implementation of it. I’ve gotten all my images in order at the moment, and right now I’m pushing everything into Picasa 3.5 to get all the faces recognized. This is an excellent selling point of Picasa 3.5. It works pretty well, and my overall experience with Picasa has been excellent. Well I’m off to sleep for now, but an update is soon to come with my overall experience of Picasa.

——
The In-N-Out NAS is at a major standstill at the moment. I didn’t think a 32 bit system would be a problem when I purchased the VIA board. Yet I forgot about the “performance benefit” with ZFS & 64 bit. Well come to find out, 32 bit is restricted to 1TB or less. Anything higher is rejected with a nice little ‘f you for using 32 bit’ message in ‘/var/adm/messages’ In the mean time I’m trying to get a new motherboard, prolly core duo mini-itx intel board. The overall experience of this homebrew NAS has been an unsavory experience, yet it looks great, and once everything is worked out, I should have a wonderful NAS setup.

Dissapointments | In-N-Out NAS

I was very letdown with the latest FreeNAS RC1 & RC2. I was hoping the ZFS would be usable, and all the services (ssh, ftp, nfs) would happily work. Well that wasn’t the case. I was planning on using FreeNAS for my latest project the In-N-Out NAS. More on that after my FreeNAS rant… So before all this started I tested out FreeNAS a few months ago to figure out if it was a viable alternative to my current OpenSolaris headless machine. Well it didn’t quite cut it because FreeNAS is has an uber old version of ZFS, and they don’t plan to upgrade until they migrate to 8.0 release of FreeBSD. Well I don’t feel like waiting that long, and everything is pretty sketchy so I’ll stay with the sure thing (OpenSolaris).

Onto more pressing issues. I have been working hard on a new NAS box for my network, and came up with a few designs, most of which were too complicated for me to build. So I came up with a simple box design made out of metal (pics once I finish). Well I’ve been busy, and haven’t gotten the metal bent yet, so I spent a few hours working on a working NAS setup so that I can move my data onto the new hardware. I decided to build the system from an In-N-Out tray that I “borrowed,” indefinitely. It turned out very awesome, yet I have ran into problem after problem with this little beast. First the Pico PSU that I purchased was borked, so I need to get another one of those. Then the standin PSU started overheating cause the fan wouldn’t go on. I threw that out, and replaced it with yet another PSU. Eh, then I was having FreeNAS install issues, and finally once it was installed, it works horribly. Plus I think I might have a sata cable problem, but I’m unsure as of now. I kinda just replaced all my nice 6″ cables with “reliable” 12″ standard red ones.

My predicament at the moment is to go with a sure bet, and stick with OpenSolaris. Since ZFS reins supreme on Solaris, and it’s a solid OS. I had a power surge a few months back, and it reset all my wonderful uptimes, but my current OpenSolaris setup has been up for around 80 days, with no problems whatsoever. I’m downloading a new disk image as I type, and will prolly install it before I rest for the night.

Anywho the software is always the most time consuming of any project, and I will expand on my final decision in the full writeup for the In-N-Out NAS.  Just to tease I’ve uploaded an image of a semi-finished In-N-Out NAS. I have a few more tweaks, and I have to get the Pico PSU all fixed up…

Onward and upward

I was getting tired of editing core crap with habari, and wanted something that works, doesn’t have a giant base, and has a giant ass community. Well wordpress fit the bill.

I did a quick google search and found a migration script to migrate habari to wordpress:

http://chrismeller.com/2009/08/migrating-habari-to-wordpress

It worked very well, and I’ve had to do very little tweaking. I’m glad that it was mostly painless. I’m hoping that I might be able to move back to habari at some point because I really loved how it was laid out, and it had a wonderful codebase. Yet it seems like development is a little slow, and there isn’t as large of community behind habari as there is behind wordpress.

——

I still have a lot of tweaking to do for wordpress to work well for me, but I suppose it will be a lot easier since there are already people that have built plugins and stuff for me to use.

Habari on Lighttpd

I’ve used apache for the longest time, and it has served me very well. I still use apache to host this site, and many other sites. Yet I’ve grown an itch to try something new, and have ventured to lighttpd. It’s painless to setup, and the config file is one of the simplest around. Anywho after I switched over I tried to setup habari and hit a little snag. Habari uses a .htaccess file with apache to take advantage of mod_rewrite. Well lighttpd doesn’t support .htaccess, or any other directory independent configs . Anywho it’s simple enough to setup a rewrite in /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf. Yet if you set the rewrite for the localhost, you are left with the habari site, and then anything else you want to develop has to mangle together. I wanted a simple solution that would allow me to run habari, yet not in the root of my web directory. Also I wanted ‘http://localhost’ to display my webroot contents (who needs an index file?)

Step 1) Edit your /etc/hosts, and add another faux host besides localhost:

#
# /etc/hosts: static lookup table for host names
#

#      
127.0.0.1       localhost.localdomain   localhost Minifsk
127.0.0.1       fsk141.localdomain      localhost Minifsk
# End of file

Step 2) Fire up your editor, and open /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

#uncomment "mod_rewrite" module

#add index.php to index file names
index-file.names = ( "index.php", "index.html",
                                "index.htm", "default.htm" )

#add a vhost
$HTTP["host"] =~ "^fsk141\.localdomain$" {
  server.document-root = "/srv/http/Web/fsk141"
  url.rewrite-once =  (
        "^/(?!scripts/|3rdparty/|system/|doc/)(.*)$" =>  "/index.php"
  )
  server.errorlog = "/var/log/lighttpd/fsk141/error.log"
  accesslog.filename = "/var/log/lighttpd/fsk141/access.log"
}

#enable dir listing
dir-listing.activate       = "enable"

#uncomment fast-cgi stuf:
fastcgi.server             = ( ".php" =>
                               ( "localhost" =>
                                 (
                                   "socket" => "/var/run/lighttpd/php-fastcgi.socket",
                                   "bin-path" => "/usr/bin/php-cgi"
                                 )
                               )
                            )

Save and Close!

Now all you have to do is go through the standard habari install steps. As per the directory you setup as your vhost. for the example above I must put my habari files in ‘/srv/http/Web/fsk141′, and to start the install process I open ‘http://fsk141.localdomain’ Oh and btw the vhost includes the rewrite!!! Don’t forget about the rewrite rules otherwise habari will bork…

Linux | Firefox 3.5.2 Google Finance Fix

Recently I tried to edit the settings in my google finance portfolio to no avail. I have the newest version of Firefox. Ie. Shiritoko 3.5.2. Come to find out google finance was disabling the features because of the UserAgent that was specified in about:config. To fix, open up about:config and enter the following for the User Agent

Preference Name:
general.useragent.extra.firefox

Value:
Firefox/3.5.3pre

This will make everything work how it should.

Before:

After:

LISP (again), More links

I’ve started up learning LISP once again. I’m going to start from the beginning of SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming) I’ve gotten the introduction knocked out. If you would like to follow along check out my notes here. ATM I’m using DrScheme, but am looking for a simpler way of going about things…

——

I’ve added more static links to my array. Over the past couple days I’ve been trying to get my computerspace organized, and in the process I’ve added a lot of content to my blog. I hope it wasn’t all for nothing, and that at least someone reads it