Valkertown Blog

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Last time I logged into MS Windows(tm)

February 26th, 2009 by Carlos Perilla
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Two years ago and a laptop ago I booted into windows, and noticed it was still showing the Packard Bell desktop also that I had barely installed anything on it. I had been using the laptop for like six months.

After realizing that I thought, this is stupid, I could use this space for something useful.

So I did: Reboot, fdisk, mkreisesrfs, vim fstab, mount -a and there you go, fresh new space for multimedia files.

On this laptop, that OS hand’t a chance. Two partitions: one small for easy boot and the rest just a big lvm storage that I can mess as much as I want.

Nowadays I log into Windows on other machines for various reasons but I find myself thinking. Why you have to use the mouse so much? I feel clumsy and that I spend way too much time doing simple tasks. Why the harddisk is always being hit? Why it’s so needy with all those popups?

I’m glad that a friend of mine showed me that with proper software setup and installation even windows can have a decent ui, finally my poor deepsabbath can get an usable workstation for hers Industrial Design tasks.

But. Hey, it’s software isn’t? I’ll be worried the day we can’t change the way our software behaves.

EOT

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Denting-mode mercurial repository

February 20th, 2009 by Carlos Perilla
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Well I have setup a proper repository to track the changes to denting-mode, I have received a patch from Christian Cheng with some really nice and welcome changes:

  1. Support Laconica deployed to a context that is not the root.
  2. Support retrieval of the public timeline.
  3. Fixed to handle wierd characters in response body.
  4. Enhanced to show no. of characters exceeding message limit

The url of the repo is http://hg.valkertown.org/denting-mode.hg/

I guess this will make easier to everyone to work and hack with denting-mode.

Enjoy!
EOP

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Small updates for denting mode

February 17th, 2009 by Carlos Perilla
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I have just added a small modification to denting-mode:

  1. (defun denting-update-status-from-region (beg end)
  2.   (interactive "r")
  3.   (if (> (- end beg) 140) (setq end (+ beg 140)))
  4.   (if (< (- end beg) -140) (setq beg (+ end 140)))
  5.   (denting-update-status-if-not-blank (buffer-substring beg end)))

This small function will try to post to laconica the region, if the
region is over 140 characters it will cut it down to 140 characters left
to right.

Now I have setup a couple of keybindings on my .emacs so I can dent
stuff from my emacs buffers

  1. (define-key global-map "\C-c\C-d" ‘denting-update-status-from-region)
  2. (define-key global-map "\C-c\C-s" ‘denting-update-status-interactive)

The updated version it’s here:

http://hg.valkertown.org/denting-mode.hg

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Emacs Denting mode for laconicas (including identi.ca)

February 16th, 2009 by Carlos Perilla
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Denting Mode

I guess one of the main advantages that laconica has is being twitter compatible because if you have the source you can get a twitter only app to work on any laconica instance, so I found the twittering mode for emacs here:
http://lambdarepos.svnrepository.com/share/trac.cgi/browser/lang/elisp/twittering-mode

Then I decided to port it to laconica so I could use it to post to Brainbird, which is my own laconica instance.

I added the denting group for customization and I would like to use a password system like the one that weblogger.el uses. Now you can set the laconica instance you want to use by setting the laconica-instance variable.

The bindigns as always with emacs modes are the most sexy part, so here they are. I added none Im just posting this to make it easier for the interested to get to know which they are.

  1.      (define-key km "\C-c\C-f" denting-friends-timeline)
  2.       (define-key km "\C-c\C-s" denting-update-status-interactive)
  3.       (define-key km "\C-c\C-e" denting-erase-old-statuses)
  4.       (define-key km "\C-m" denting-enter)
  5.       (define-key km "\C-c\C-l" denting-update-lambda)
  6.       (define-key km [mouse-1] denting-click)
  7.       (define-key km "\C-c\C-v" denting-view-user-page)
  8.       ;; (define-key km "j" next-line)
  9.       ;; (define-key km "k" previous-line)
  10.       (define-key km "j" denting-goto-next-status)
  11.       (define-key km "k" denting-goto-previous-status)
  12.       (define-key km "l" forward-char)
  13.       (define-key km "h" backward-char)
  14.       (define-key km "0" beginning-of-line)
  15.       (define-key km "^" beginning-of-line-text)
  16.       (define-key km "$" end-of-line)
  17.       (define-key km "n" denting-goto-next-status-of-user)
  18.       (define-key km "p" denting-goto-previous-status-of-user)
  19.       (define-key km [backspace] backward-char)
  20.       (define-key km "G" end-of-buffer)
  21.       (define-key km "H" beginning-of-buffer)
  22.       (define-key km "i" denting-icon-mode)
  23.       (define-key km "s" denting-scroll-mode)
  24.       (define-key km "t" denting-toggle-proxy)
  25.       (define-key km "\C-c\C-p" denting-toggle-proxy)

The icon mode is nice, since it displays in recent emacs the avatars ofthe laconicats youre following. You can download the denting-mode.el here:

http://hg.valkertown.org/denting-mode.hg

If you hit one of the many bugs this code might have, please comment here and I might try to solve it. But bear with me Im not an usual emacs lisp programmer and this quialifies more to a hack than a proper release.

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First post

February 1st, 2009 by Carlos Perilla
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Well this is my first post of the year and Im glad I found lt;a href=quot;http://blog.nethazard.net/emacs-weblogger-mode-with-wordpress-tags-support/quot;gt;Emacs Weblogger with Tagslt;/agt; for wordpress, WP 2.7 dashboard is cute but an online editor will never be as good as emacs or it will be so easy for me to create a blog post even when using firefoxs its all text.

I have been working a while testing strophe a javascript library for xmpp. Its really insteresting how using xmpp you can create applications that interact with users in realtime with little overhead. After some time of testing and some examples I can say setting up something like speeqe its quite simple with strophe. Now I would like to start seeing more complex applications, maybe one that uses PUBSUB. On the downside of strophe is that the documentation is seriously lacking and you might want to read other examples in other frameworks and be sure to know how to deal with XEP so you can get the most if and get some ideas of what you can do.

Ill be posting the second part of the previous post about setting lt;a href=quot;http://blog.valkertown.org/2008/12/21/setting_up_redmine_with_archlinux/quot;gt;Redmine in Archlinuxlt;/agt;, with my particular setup. I think it would be handy when I need to setup it again.

So thats all for now, once again Ill try to update sooner.

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Setting up Redmine with archlinux

December 21st, 2008 by Carlos Perilla
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Introduction

This time I’m going to write about how I did setup Redmine in one of my servers, since It was a rather “special” setup I decided to publish how I managed to do it.

Before going into the details I want to describe exactly the setup I did.

  • Redmine SVN, a svn checkout of redmine
  • Mongrel, the production ready RoR server
  • Apache 2
  • Mercurial, distributed version control system
  • hgweb, Perl cgi script to serve mercurial repositories
  • Use gmail smtp service from redmine

Since describing this setup might be lengthy, I might need to break it into several posts.

Redmine is a project management tool, for some time I used trac but I never managed to get the kind of setup I have just done with redmine. Redmine it’s based on Ruby on Rails(a.k.a RoR,ror,ROR… whatever) it isn’t the fastest or it would be my first pick, yet some amazing work is done with it day to day and it just get better with time, it’s one of those fun projects that gets a lot of love/hate reactions but that manages to keep the project hot and interesting.

From what I heard ( I have very little experience) getting RoR play nicely with apache it’s hard and troublesome so I decided to try finding a easier way and I did, it was using mongrel as server and apache as proxy. Overall it’s fast enough for my current project yet RoR is as slow as expected, I think it just needs a lot more knowledge on my part to get it run faster yet that’s not what you expect. Keeping a server up,running and secure is already a pain in the ass the less you *need* to fiddle with the stuff you run I think it’s better.

Setting this all on Archlinux is fairly easy since most of it is already on their repos or you can install it using gems. Some people do not like gems and prefer distribution type packages. I simply don’t care, I keep my installed software count low and I like freedom to break my system.

Getting everything prepared

First you need to get some stuff installed in your system, the path for the checkout and everything is up to you so are the permissions, ssl for apache and users that are going to run the daemons, but that’s security stuff that I’m not going to talk about here.

Ruby, Gems, Apache, Mercurial

On arch is just this:

  1. pacman -S ruby rubygems mercurial apache

Installing RoR

Well it’s just one line if you use gems:

  1. sudo gem install rails

Installing Mongrel

Same as ror:

  1. sudo gem install mongrel

Checking out Redmine

Another one-liner

  1. svn co http://redmine.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk redmine.svn

Ok now the basic stuff to get started is there and now it’s time to configure and get it running, but that’s is going to be in the next post

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Wordpress 2.7 and new theme

December 11th, 2008 by Carlos Perilla
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The new wordpress 2.7 update came just in time with my decision about changing the theme for valkertown, this time I picked a less colorful them, a bit more serious yet I’m thinking on adding some colour to it by adding a nice photograph of one of my trips to the header banner.

I find the new look and UI of wordpress quite refreshing and certainly it has a big improvement in usability and the information it presents it’s really useful. I feel I’m going to like a lot this QuickPress widget on the right side for quicker posts.

There’s still stuff to see, I’m writing this just from seeing the new dashboard and I just want to test the quickpress.

Anyone has heard of any troubles so far with 2.7?

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Arreglando un robot de Planeta Linux para identi.ca

December 8th, 2008 by Carlos Perilla
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Bueno, colocar los “feeds” rss del universo de Planeta Linux resulto un poco más complicado de lo que pensé, no por alguna dificultad real sino por el pésimo servicio que presta ETB(www.etb.com.co), simplemente cada ~30 segundos decidía no transportarme ningún dato durante ~30 segundos, esto se convierte en una pesadilla cuando se trabaja con servicios de tiempo real como identi.ca.

Una falla en el “bot” decidia enviar 5-10 mensajes y repetirlos a los 5 minutos, esto para las personas que usamos track(seguimiento en tiempo real de los envíos públicos en identi.ca y otras instancias de laconica) se convierte en spam rapidamente. Durante una hora trate de establecer conexión con Valkertown para detener el bot, pero ETB simplemente no me lo permitía.

El bot que utilice como plantilla para este nuevo bot fue feednotice.py escrito por Florian Birée, de una forma muy utiliza el API de laconica que fue desactivado recientemente a pesar de tener una fecha de publicación relativamente reciente, me pase de ingenuo y trate de utilizar este “bot” tal cual venia empacado y este fue uno de los orígenes de los problemas que describí anteriormente.

Básicamente el feed de PlanetaLinux utiliza el formato de fecha RFC 822 que utiliza los nombres cortos de los días y meses (“%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z”) para describir la fecha de actualización del envío, esto causa problemas con el modulo feedparser que no sabe como interpretar la fecha correctamente tuve que añadir esto y lidiar con el lío de las zonas horarias para corregir el problema.

Ahora en la sección de mis repositorios de mercurial hg.valkertown.org se encuentra la versión modificada y que estoy utilizando ahora para manejar la cuenda Planeta Linux en identi.ca, vamos a darle un tiempo para probarlo antes de decir que esta completamente listo.

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Valkertown en planeta linux y el planeta en identica

December 7th, 2008 by Carlos Perilla
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Recientemente descubri que mi blog hace parte del Planeta Linux que es una comunidad latinoamericana de blogs que hablan sobre GNU/Linux, personalmente trato de apoyar tanto como pueda a esta clase de iniciativas.

Cuando visite el sitio del planeta vi que teanian una cuenta en Twitter, esto me sorprendio un poco, pensé que seria más interesante promover identi.ca. En ese momento decidi escribir un correo para solicitar los feeds del planeta en identi.ca. Desafortuandamente no recibi una respuesta tan pronta como lo esperaba y me apresure a resolver la situación por cuenta propia.

Ahora el servicio corre por cuenta de Valkertown, se puede seguir el Planeta Linux en identi.ca.

Por ahora lo que hace es redirigir el feed rss del Universo a identica haciendo polling cada 5 minutos. Sin embargo lo mejor seria tener información en tiempo real de los envios, yo utilizo un
Identica Tools Para enviar la información de mis envios, esto podria eliminar totalmente la necesidad de hacer polling y mejoraria inmensamente la idea de los planetas.

Bueno queda todo listo y espero comentarios sobre la configuración

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Awesome-WM settings and workplace setup

December 6th, 2008 by Carlos Perilla
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It has been quite a while since I uploaded a screenshot for my “desktop” environment, it hasn’t changed much but I have tweaked it a bit and spent some time upgrading it to today Awesome git clone.


Awesome is a great tiled window manager that is completely configurable, basically it gives you the tools to write the window manager you want it to be. I use it as minimal I can get but I’m used to have a lot of information about the machine I’m working on so I can act before problems arise, in example a memory overflow basically I can see the program eating up the memory on my monitors, or I can notice if a program is consuming too much memory and it wasn’t supposed to be doing that, same goes for network leeches and system temperature.


I don’t have setup many “launchers” besides the ones that comes from the monitors that I rarely use but are handy when quick reaction is needed. To startup programs I just use the keyboard, Mod4 some keys launches a program for me, like Mod4+f fires up Firefox.


One of the things that I like most from Awesome is that I can get rid of the taskbar, overlapping windows etc. I don’t like looking up for the app I want, I just want to know where is it, and that is where awesome tags are really handy, Alt 1-9 switchs to the proper tag, Mod 1-9 moves the current window to the according tab. I have a strict use for every number, 1 music, 2 chat, 3 browser, 4 emacs, 5 terminal, 6-9 buffer tags for varied stuff, most of the time 6-7 are for xpdf . I got this habit from Fluxbox and other wm with virtual desktops, but awesome gives you a little bit more, you can temporary merge them so you can have two apps side to side on a buffer tag and still keep them single in the usual tags.

Here’s the screenshot, I hosted it on flickr so I could add some notes over the image, you can follow the link on the image to Flickrs page and see the comments

Desktop Screenshot

Here’s the config file for Awesome, I don’t recommend if someone want’s to try it, to use it right away since It has so much stuff that it’s different from conventional keybindings, locations and it uses some scripts I haven’t published. Like Murxvtc that picks a random color for the transparency or awimap who does the check and uses awesome-client to print out the messages you see on the screenshot for mail.

The icons I use for this are from Nuvola, and the current background you see I can’t give credit since I don’t get to know which image is that since it comes from Flickr’s Interestingness at random. I hope the owner pardons me for using his image for this background, if you know/are the owner please leave me a word so I can comply with the license you have over the image.

Finally and for the reader, I wonder how much time/effort people spend customizing their workspace like I try to do, I feel I can work faster and I concentrate more using this setup, but your experience might be different, would you mind sharing?

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