jd:/dev/blog

I've just turned up a quarter of century.

A lazy morning again, so you'll enjoy another short list of changes in the upcoming awesome 3.1 (first one is still here):

• Text can now be spread across multiple lines, using pango ability to wrap text;
• New full screen layout;
• awful.clients.swap.bydirection function;
• Images get crop_and_scale() method;
• New module: invaders, a space invader game;
• New module: naughty, notification module (like GNOME's notification-daemon);
• More hooks: "clients" for client list changes, "tags" for tag list changes and "tagged" for client's tag list changes;
• Wiboxes's widgets can now be composed of arrays of arrays, specifying a DAG structure, unless of a simple array. A reference is kept to it so it can be retrieved later. Any array can be modified with awesome being notified using a proxy table system.
• Taglist and tasklist widgets are gone from core and are now written in Lua, using the above system.

Not too much changes, I've spent something like a week thinking and writing the 2 last points. I've now a bunch of things to finish and I think we'll go for a RC release in something like a couple of weeks.

Tuesday evening I was at the Olympia to see Nada Surf, the french New York guys, on tour. The show was very nice. I've already saw them 2 years ago, and it was already very cool, so nothing new.

They played lots of different songs from all albums. I really appreciated this since I'm not a big fan of their latest ones. That was funny to see most bitches fidgeting on their seats when they played some recent successful songs and becoming totally quiet and passive when they announced that they were going to play Telescope from Karmic (a EP from 1995 before their first album).

But well, that still was a great show and was pleasant to be there.

I'm lazy this morning, so I'll write a quick changelog about what's coming next in awesome 3.1, as of now.

• awesome-client is now a true REPL: so it now returns things like errors;
• mouse events now support button release;
• awful has been splited in several modules;
• the window stacking has been reworked and handled special windows (dock, desktop) much better;
• window type is now exported and correctly handled;
• any window can go fullscreen;
• widget can get an event when the mouse enters in it;
• placement (smart, under_mouse, etc) has been move into awful;
• statusbars and titlebars has been merged in a common type: wibox;
• wibox can be floating (i.e. you can now write your own conky-like with wiboxes);
• _NET_WM_STRUT_PARTIAL is now supported so panel and dock automagically puts padding around the screen;
• sticky windows are handled like sticky windows and are not tagged anymore;
• windows that get reparented are now unmanaged (that fixes view of PDF etc in your browser);
• a new image type has been introduced so you can manipulate image directly in awesome and use them;
• a new imagebox widget has been (re)introduced to use image objects;
• a real minimize/iconify state is now available;
• awesome gets a --check to check Lua syntax file; restart is now also checked for syntax file by default.

And of course some bug fixes.

Following my first idea of a blah script for irssi, I've wrote the same thing in Python for filtering some mail. IMHO, it's better than killfile.

  1 #!/usr/bin/python 
  2  
  3 import email, sys, re 
  4  
  5 def blaahw(match): 
  6     w = match.group(0) 
  7     l = len(w) 
  8     if l == 1: 
  9         return "o" 
 10     elif l == 2: 
 11         return "he" 
 12     elif l == 3: 
 13         return "lol" 
 14     a = "a" * (l - 3) 
 15     return re.sub("\w+", "bl%sh" % a, w) 
 16  
 17 def blaah(text): 
 18     rc = re.compile('\w+') 
 19     return rc.sub(blaahw, text) 
 20  
 21 mail = email.message_from_file(sys.stdin) 
 22  
 23 mail.replace_header("Subject", blaah(mail["Subject"])) 
 24  
 25 def blaah_payload(pl): 
 26     if type(pl) == list: 
 27         for i in range(len(pl)): 
 28             if pl[i].get_content_type() == "text/plain": 
 29                 pl[i].set_payload(blaah(pl[i].get_payload())) 
 30         return pl 
 31     elif type(pl) == str: 
 32         return blaah(pl) 
 33  
 34 mail.set_payload(blaah_payload(mail.get_payload())) 
 35 print(mail) 

Then can use a procmail rule like:

:0 fw
* ^From: asshole <asshole@asshole.com>
| $HOME/bin/blahmail.py

EDIT: I've updated it to a more robust version which support multipart messages.

I've been quite busy last weeks, between real life and awesome stuff.

awesome 3.0 final release is getting closer. No more release candidate version should be expected since there's only 9 small patches into master from rc6. Final release should be out real soon now, before the end of the month. Also, the next branch already contains already nice stuff for the upcoming 3.1 version.

I've done some grunt work on XCB also, pushing other patches and fixing padding stuff in XML protocol description. This was very boring, but well, had to be done, so… I did it.

That's all for now. Stay tuned.

I had this books since 2 years under my screens to raise them at work. Never though of opening them, I just realized what they are some days ago.

That's probably why I became awesome without even knowing it. The truth is out there.

Recently I came with the idea that my big computer is just useless. I know I was not using its entire CPU power, so I decided to take a look at CPU frequency scaling.

Last time I tried, it was a PITA, required something like a daemon, and just did not work. With recent hardware and/or kernels, it's just easy as Debian.

etch

• Look at /proc/cpuinfo to determine your CPU and the cpufreq module. If it's a Pentium, you can try p4-clockmod, powernow-k7 for AMD, or acpi-cpufreq for both. Well, if none loads, let it go, it won't work unless you get newer hardware or maybe newer kernel.
• Add this module in /etc/modules to get it loaded at boot time.
• Run apt-get install cpufrequtils
• Edit /etc/default/cpufrequtils to enable it at boot time, and specify the governor if you want. I usually use ondemande, which is just fine.
• Run /etc/init.d/cpufrequtils start
• Play with cpufreq-info and cpufreq-set as you wish.

lenny

• Run apt-get install cpufrequtils
• Edit /etc/default/cpufrequtils to enable it at boot time, and specify the governor if you want. I usually use ondemande, which is just fine.
• Run /etc/init.d/loadcpufreq start
• Run /etc/init.d/cpufrequtils start
• Play with cpufreq-info and cpufreq-set as you wish.

On my box, the 3 GHz CPUs (Core 2 Duo) are running at 2 GHz (the lower value) at 99.13% of the time. That's almost a bit less power wasted.

Saw in base-files changelog:

base-files (4.0.5) unstable; urgency=low
[…]
* It's still soon to change /etc/debian_version. Please be patient.

-- Santiago Vila <sanvila@debian.org>  Tue,  5 Aug 2008 18:06:06 +0200

Applause.