Advogato blog for joey

the case of the missing 's'

Thu, 9 Oct 2008 17:03:51 GMT

Ran into a freakish epiphany/gmail bug yesterday where gmails's "new" interface somehow ate the 's' key, preventing it from working in epiphany at all. Even after logging out of gmail.

If any readers of this blog have contacts inside the gmail team, I've filed bug #501691 on epiphany with details about this scary situation.

Personally, a web that can eat 's' keys is not the web I want.

feature creep

Sat, 4 Oct 2008 17:05:27 GMT

The original spec for today: Go out to Anna's. Run some cables.
Use case: Joey is in yurt. Joey has power, and even interwebs.

But this means parking the truck in the area where it got stuck the last two times. Ok, let's add in getting a load of gravel to fix that. Hmm, if we're going to get one load of gravel (over one ton already!), might as well get two...

Hmm, we didn't notice that unloading tons of gravel, for three people with shovels, is 95% of the planned work for today. Oh well, let's do it anyway...

Darn, that super-long ethernet cable that was part of the original plan doesn't work. No link at all, no lights on the cable tester. (Bisection shows the problem affects only half the cable.) At least the power cable worked. I guess that ethernet will have to be dealt with in version 2.0..

another first

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 01:03:52 GMT

Just to make it a day of firsts, and perhaps because someone else spent four hours messing with wire and such in my mouth and I needed to take some control back, I also crimped my first ethernet cable today.

Plan is to see if a 400 foot out of spec cable will reach the yurt. If not, I'll cut it 100 feet back and add a hub in a can to be a repeater.

happy happy joy joy

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 22:08:44 GMT

First root canal today. There were some interesting parts. I'll spare you.

If I seemed a bit annoyed with awesome 3 configuration in the last post, this has put it well in perspective.

One nice thing about awesome 3 is that it has good system tray support built in. So I've at least temporarily mainstreamed my laptop, so it's using the gnome power manager, and network manager, instead of hibernate and sleepd and my own scripts.

awesomely frustrated

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 06:09:04 GMT

Just spent a good two^Wthree hours trying to configure awesome 3.0 to match my awesome 2.x setup. Docs are effectively nonexistant. So far, I'm stuck on several fronts:

I want to be able to left click on a titlebar and drag to resize. Without pressing the modkey. But the definition for that is set deep within awful.lua, which is not a configuration file, and so I cannot see a good way to configure it.
Why can't I resize an xterm to 80 characters wide? It jumps between 79 and 81.
Why is it that despite using the same font as with 2.0, enough additional vertical space is used by the title bar and status bar, that I get one less line in all my xterms? It's using only a few pixels more than before, but that's too much..
How do I configure a textbox so that, if I click on it, a command is run? Update: Figured this one out, for example: mympd:mouse_add(mouse({ }, 1, function () os.execute("awesome-mpd show &") end)) (Note that if the command isn't run in the background, and opens a window, it will deadlock awesome.)
Can't figure out how to use awesome-client to add a value to a graph widget. (I'm sure this is simple, but I haven't stumbled over an example. I'd use wicked, but it's not packaged.) Update: Figured it out via the source: mpgraph:plot_data_add("foo", "10")
Can't figure out how to make a textbox widget have a fixed width and truncate the text in it. Since it's displaying the currently plaging song, using the default dynamic width would make everything on my status bar jump around. Update: mytextbox.width=100
There's no emptybox widget aymmore, so how do I add horizontal padding between widgets? Best I've managed so far is an empty textbox with a defined width.

Anyone else hate lua, or at least build-your-own-WM-in-lua config files for window managers that used to have simple config files?

pawnshop row

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 01:05:22 GMT

Leaving Doc Watson early, I headed up State St. in a hurry, taking the sidewalk to avoid the crowd in the road. But I had to stop to listen to a few classics from a five-piece string band, sitting under the awning of Uncle Sam's Loan Office, in front of the display of old stereos and swords. Bunch of real old-timers. Pulled myself away only to pass by an even better, six-piece band in the entrance to The Gold Man pawn shop. The fiddle was played by a girl who couldn't be older than ten. I wanted to listen to them some more, but I managed to pull myself away in time to get into the Paramount and get a good seat for the Red Stick Ramblers.

Conclusion: This town needs more pawn shops. And it's Rhythm and Roots time in Bristol.

Best bands so far: Mike Marshall's trio, Cephas and Wiggins, Larry Keel and Natural Bridge, Chatham County Line.

time

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:07:37 GMT

Sitting next to the fire after heating up fajitas for dinner. Making sure that no hot coals make it over to the canvas topped yurt. Maybe I should have made the fire further off. I've gotten 1/3 of the way through Anathem, and Neal Stephenson has thoroughly hooked me now. I know I won't have enough battery power to read all I'd like to tonight. But for now, I've been enjoying the evening, which has been unusually long today. Maybe it's a remnant of Hurricane Ike that's led to such a cool, cloudy day, but it's seemed to be on the verge of dusk for hours.

Someone asked if the yurt has wifi. Nope, but I measured the distance today, and at 400 feet it's too far for cat 5 ethernet w/o a repeater.

Anyway, I seem to be in a very good frame of mind for starting Anathem, and am enjoying its take on the Long Now. Out at the falls this weekend I kept imagining how they'd change in geologic time, tracking where the water seemed to have fallen earler, downstream. And sitting up under the overhang of the falls, was briefly nervous about it coming down (as it will in oh, a few thousand years perhaps), before getting back into the present moment.

abram's

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 21:05:45 GMT

Ran out to Abram's falls today. Very nice. Was going to take pictures again, but again my camera battery mysteriosly died before I got to the falls. It was gorgeous.

contact update

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 04:03:54 GMT

Maybe because email is eating less of my time, I've started using instant messaging. My jabber address is the same as my email address, joey@kitenet.net. Since identi.ca integrates so nicely with jabber, I may use that too.

thoughts on chrome

Tue, 2 Sep 2008 17:03:44 GMT

Using a separate process for each web page and each component has been something I've always wanted a web browser to do. It's so conceptually clean and has such nice properties, and processes are so cheap in linux. Hats off to the people who made that a reality.

On the other hand, I'm guessing that chrome's guts will be tied into the google backend services so tightly that you can't really tell where the one stops and the other begins. Since I'm not interested in being a sharecropper, and would prefer to see people empowered with services they control, I have worries.

It's easy to forget how much of the modern browser's er ... chrome ... is based on web services that could change, go away, or be DNS hijacked at any time. I'd like to see a web proxy that takes all traffic to *.google.com and rot-13's it, to demonstrate how many things rely on this one company.