Open Source = Easy Customization

I recently fell in love with GMPC, a terrific GTK based MPD frontend. It is very powerful, while looking very good. One thing I was unhappy with, however, was the tray icons. Also it didn’t fit in terribly well with the rest of my theme. So i decided to change it.

Another MPD frontend I like, Sonata, has a great icon set, but not such a great feature set. So I combined the best of the two. I took the Sonata icons, scaled and renamed as necessary, then replaced the GMPC icons with them. For others I used icons from the theme I use and love, Ultimate Gnome. Those are all SVG, so I had to export them as PNG in the appropriate sizes.

This was all, however, not too complicated. I made a conversion of the fresh tarball of 0.15.5, and changed the icons over. Recreated for your usage.

I am wary of licensing on this particular venture. GMPC and Sonata are both under the GPL v2, but the Ultimate Gnome theme is CC-BY-NC-SA. As an incompatible license, it causes problems (not the first time…). I wish to express to the author that I am sorry about the mixing, but this is inofficial and as such I hope okay.

The COPYING file for both of the players are in there.

Download here.

I love it when I can change things to fit my tastes or just if I want to. Hooray for OSS!

Amazing Bandwidth

Today someone sent me a link to this great animation. It’s called Animator vs. Animation, and it is on DeviantArt. The stats for this thing amazed me.

I noticed that:

• The animation has 5,162,441 views.
• I used Firebug to find the exact bandwidth of 1.7 mb for the page load and to watch.

This amazes me. Lets do some math:

5,162,441 x 1.7 = 8,776,149.7 mb of data transferred. That’s ~8,570 GB. 8.57 TB!

That’s just for one animation, one video out of the entire internet. Those are also *very* conservative numbers.

The internet amazes me sometimes. Be sure to check out that video.

This is bad.

I saw an article earlier, and it linked to a page that has an online WPM checker. It works (very well), and I liked it. It is here, btw.

The problem came when I went to view the source. I found this:

<!–

Page protected by ionCube - HTML/JavaScript Encoder
Copyright (c) 2003 RWJD.Com and ionCube Ltd.  All Rights Reserved.

Any analysis of this  source code,  embedded data  or file by any means and by
any entity whether human or otherwise  to including but without  limitation to
discover details  of internal operation, to  reverse  engineer, to  de-compile
object code, or to modify  for the purposes  of modifying behavior or scope of
their usage is forbidden.

–>

As a fan of open-source, I always viewed web pages as fairly open. You could always view the source. I didn’t realze things like this existed. I was just curious about how the page worked, and I was not allowed to view it.

Luckily, I was able to do so! I used the Web Developer toolbar’s ‘View Generated Source’ function. It isn’t perfect, but it does give mostly how the page works. It’s a pity that the developer doesn’t want their work seen.

Paranoia is bad. Maybe the person looking at your code wants to further develop it rather than steal your undoubtedly amazing code… [/sarcasm]

Easy way to make any window transparent w/ Compiz

I was using Cellwriter yesterday, and decided that it would be cool to make it transparent, so it doesn’t cover what is behind it. To do this I used Compiz.

To do this, make sure you have the advanced settings manager. It is located at System > Preferences > Advanced Desktop Effect Settings. If it isn’t there, install it in Add/Remove.

Now open it up. The top item should be ‘General Options’. Open it. Go to the ‘Opacity Settings’ tab. Now, you can add a new rule. The Cellwriter window has the title ‘Cellwriter’ always, and none of my other windows do (usually), so I based my rule off of that. Click ‘Add’. In the field, type ‘title=CellWriter’. Then type in 85 for the value. The change should be immediate.

Note that other rules can be created in this way as well.

Screenshot:

This post written with CellWriter =)

P.S. 5,000 blog hits!

Cellwriter

As a tablet PC user under Ubuntu, I searched hard for a decent handwriting recognition program. A while ago, I found one. It is called Cellwriter. This entire post is written with it, not much slower than typing. Although the author claims it is a very young program, its performance rivals that of the Windows keyboard. Rather than having built-in handwriting, you train it. Training takes all of a minute, and can be enhanced later with further training. Even on just the initial training, however, it works very well. One of its better features is a keyboard, for getting to keys and if it won’t recognize symbols. The program is a must-have for any tablet owner using Linux. The site offers Debian packages (use this for Ubuntu), and of course the sources.

One bad point is that docking does not work well with Compiz. Not a big deal; I prefer the floating mode anyways.

The site is here.

This is by far the best handwriting recognition software I have seen for Linux, and deserves a look. It makes using a tablet possible…

Here’s a screenshot:

Compatibilizer Update

My Compatibilizer extension, in dire need of an update, has gotten it! My bad bash skills when I made the first script are now better, so it works a lot better.

The big change is that now it accepts a filename as a parameter. Multiple .xpi files will not affect it at all.

Also I made the temp directory have a random name so as not to interfere with any existing ‘temp’ directories.

Usage:

compatibilizer2 extension-name0.02.xpi

That’s all. The script now even installs the extension for you! Note that this requires root priveleges, it runs gksudo to get them. Then it will open up a fresh firefox (technically it belongs to root) and install the extension. The extension is global, so it will be visible in your profile.

Download it here.

Source code (GPL):

#!/bin/bash
#Daniel's Firefox extension compatibilizer!
#Version 2 adds features!
#Warning! This script is untested on anything but my computer.

filename=$1
tempdir=compat_temp$RANDOM
echo 'Starting extension compatibilizer.'
echo 'Unzipping to temporary directory.'
mkdir $tempdir
unzip -q $filename -d $tempdir/
rm $filename
cd $tempdir/
cp install.rdf install.rdf.backup
echo 'Replacing max version number...'
sed 's|.*|5.0|' install.rdf.step
sed 's|em:maxVersion=".*"|em:maxVersion="5.0"|' install.rdf
echo 'Done replacing max version number'
zip -q -r temp.xpi *
echo 'Remade extension.'
echo 'Moving extension.'
mv temp.xpi ../[compatibilized]$filename
echo ‘Extension moved. Deleting temp dirs.’
cd ../
rm -r $tempdir
gksudo firefox-3.0 -install-global-extension $filename
echo ‘Done! Installed globally in Firefox.’

Thanks for getting me to do this, Tyler!

Tips for downloading Hardy

Here are a few tips for those of you about to download Hardy and do a new install:

1. Use a Mirror! Find one near you so as not to stress the Ubuntu servers too much. If you are at school (like me), try mirror.anl.gov, the mirror of Argonne National Laboratory. Much faster connections on school networks.
2. Use a download manager. I use DownThemAll, which is a Firefox addon (available for FF3). This speeds up download and has other nice features (keep reading!).
3. Check the MD5 sum to make sure you have a good download. See instructions below.

To check the MD5sum:

Get the MD5sums where you get your isos! i. e. If you use Argonne, use http://mirror.anl.gov/ubuntu-iso/CDs-Ubuntu/8.04/MD5SUMS. Note that they should be the same everywhere.

With DownThemAll:

When you start the download, there is a sum field. Put in the matching MD5sum and DownThemAll will automatically calculate it when it finishes downloading.

If you alread started the download, right-click on the download and click properties. There will be a field for the MD5sum.

Already downloaded:

1. Open up a terminal.
2. cd to the directory it is in.
3. Run ‘md5sum ubuntu-8.04-alternate-i386.iso’ (for instance).

Done!

On Windows, try WinMD5sum or Hashtab (look them up).

Hardy is OUT!

Well, Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron is officially out! I have all 3 i386 releases downloaded from my nearest mirror already. And a few minutes ago I saw this:

w00t!

Ultimate Claws Mail 0.5

Due to the recent release of Claws Mail 3.4.0, my Ultimate Claws Mail theme looks good now! It is PNG, a native export of SVG, so expect great things.

The size of the theme is increasing steadily. It has it’s own Google Code page (which is very nice, btw.)

That page is here. Excerpt below:

–
The Ultimate Claws Mail theme is a theme for Claws Mail with icons from the Ultimate Gnome theme for Gnome.

Screenshot

Issues

<liIncomplete Set - not all icons are present. Most common ones are, however. The theme is in development.
• PNG support - This theme is PNG, which requires Claws Mail >= 3.4.0
• Duplicates - I only have the icons from the set, so there are some duplicates where I used the closest available icon.

–

So get over there and download it! Here is a screenshot:

And here is version 0.3 for comparison:

Enjoy!

Claws Mail Update!

I’ve noticed that lately the Claws-MailGutsy repository I had set up wasn’t responding to apt-get. Then today I saw that there is a new version out. After a bit I found the proper repositories.

Here they are:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/claws-mail/ubuntu gutsy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/claws-mail/ubuntu gutsy main

Those work fine, and after an update the new version should install fine.

This version brings tons of new features. Here is the list from gnomefiles.org (and most likely from the changelog):

# Added support for /dev/mem_notify. This Linux kernel feature will allow applications to be notified that memory has to be freed before getting OOM-killed.

# Enabled moving/copying folders to root folders when using the folder selection dialogue.

# Global and per-folder templates can now override the From name.

# Added a tooltip with extended folder stats. (Hover the cursor over the short stats on the right, below the message list.)

# Implemented 2-line items in the message list when in three column mode.

# Added support for png themes.

# Added an icon for attached patches (text/x-patch and text/x-diff).

# When viewing a message that has a large amount of text, show a maximum of 1MB of text and add a noticeview to show optionally show the whole message.

# Added a button to the templates preferences to restore defaults for current language.

# Added search in filtering rules list.

# Bogofilter Plugin:
Added a “learn from whitelist” preference.

# MAEMO:
Added information when fetching large messages.

# tools/csv2addressbook.pl
Added support for Kmail/Kaddressbook.

# Updated translations: Brazilian Portuguese, Finnish, French, German, and Italian.

# Bug fixes:
o bug 1494, ‘Trayicon plugin breaks UI…’ (MAEMO)
o bug 1515, ‘large messages crash claws when syncing for offline mode’
o bug 1532, ‘”login refused” message insufficiently detailed’
o bug 1533, ‘Claws is unable to mark messages as “read” in IMAP shared folders’
o bug 1534, ‘Segmentation fault when doing some draft saving and then throwing away’
o bug 1539, ‘Program crashes’: Setup Gcrypt’s thread functions when built with GnuTLS
o bug 1541, ‘Deleting message from within read window displays next message then closes.’ (MAEMO)
o bug 1553, ‘File lock not respected’
o bug 1555, ‘Bug with the feature “save a copy of outgoing messages in this folder”‘
o bug 1559, ‘Claws Mail crashed deleting all common contacts’
o bug 1561, ‘Crashes leaving unsubscribed folder after ticking “Show only subscribed”‘
o bug 1562, ‘Claws-Mail does not completely respect settings in GTK2_RC_FILES environment’
o Fix blinking of the taskbar entry.
o Fix folder view’s scrollbar at startup if starting hidden.
o If no MH mailbox and no account exists, when creating a POP/Local account, just create it and use the default one instead of bailing with a “Mailbox doesn’t exist” error.
o Clean up session disconnection. Possibly fix Ubuntu bug #204290
o Fix RedHat bug 431735, ’segfault if /home is full’
o Fix compose template formats (in global preferences) getting translated under specific conditions.
o Fix updating of tags menu.
o Fix log size getting out of control (claws-mail getting SIGXFSZ): rotate if every 10MB.
o Fix debian bug 474712, ‘claws seg faults when IMAP connection breaks after an IMAP protocol error (BAD UID SEARCH Invalid parameter: $Forwarded)]’

Note the support for PNG themes! Now my Ultimate Claws Mail theme will be a *lot* easier to make…

Enjoy!