Braintube » opensource

New Deskbar Plugin

Matthew — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 21:33:17 +0000

Since I’ve been stuck at home and can mostly only type one handed, I decided to work on my Deskbar plugins to try and keep myself busy and forget about the pain in my sholder and back. As a result, I put together a new Deskbar plugin called Wayd(What Are You Doing) that allows you to update multiple micro-blogs at once(twitter, jaiku, etc…). It currently supports Twitter and Jaiku but I hope to add Facebook and Pownce once they have an API available. If anyone knows of other micro-blog services I should include, please let me know in the comments. Since the Deskbar plugin API changed, you’ll need the 2.19+ version of Deskbar for this plugin to work.

Short update

Matthew — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 23:59:29 +0000

Forgot to blog about it when I released it, but I put together a Twitter plugin for Deskbar. Also I released a new version of the Gajim plugin. You can download both them from my Deskbar plugin page.

OpenID

Matthew — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 00:08:21 +0000

You can now sign in with an OpenID when you leave comments on the blog. Why did I added this? To do my little part to try and break some of the ID silos.

If you have a LiveJournal account you already have an OpenID account.

Latest hacks

Matthew — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 01:49:17 +0000

Lately I’ve fallen in love with Deskbar(think OSX Quicksilver). I put together a couple of plugins to make it more productive for me.
Also upgraded my laptop and desktop at home to EdgyEft. Edgy continues Gnomes slow steady progression of polish, speed and simplicy. It rocks!

In other software news, Brian pushed out an amazing IMAP interface to gMail.

Switchers….

Matthew — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 15:07:04 +0000

Some people are finally getting it.

VM

Matthew — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 01:45:41 +0000

On my laptop I have a 10G XP partition. It’s the only Windows I own and came with the laptop. Currently, I have a need for Windows, to run SharpDevelop(WinCE code for the GPS project) and for testing of another “secret project”. Since the HD on my laptop is on the small side, I’d like to reclaim XP’s 10G and not have a dedicated Windows partition anymore. I’ve been reading that Qemu is relatively decent currently so I decided to try and go the virtual machine route. I don’t have any XP installation media(thank you IBM for shipping only “recover” CD’s!!!) so I figured I could turn my current working XP partition into a disk image for Qemu.
Build the qemu image.

dd if=/dev/hda2 of=winxp.img bs=1M

Convert the raw image into vmdk. Why I did this I’ll explain later.

qemu-img convert winxp.img -O vmdk winxp.vmdk

At this point I had made a mistake. I had turned a partition into a disk image, no partition table, no boot record, etc. How to get around that? Create another vmdk image, partition that correctly and move the XP image into the proper partition of the new vmdk image.
I had a Knoppix CD laying on my desk, booted that under qemu.

qemu -cdrom /dev/hdc -hda WinXP.vmdk -hdb new.vmdk -boot d WinXP.vmdk

where WinXP.vmdk is the broken image of XP from my laptop and new.vmdk is the new(not yet partitioned image).
from Knoppix

cfdisk /dev/hdb to partition new.vmdk

into 2 partitions. A 10M Ext2 and a 10G NTFS bootable partition.
Next also from inside Knoppix, running in qemu, I move the contents of the XP image into the new NTFS partition inside the new empty image.

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb2 bs=1M

Then, also from Knoppix, install Grub on the new disk image.

grub-install /dev/hdb

So why did I use the vmdk image format? vmdk is not only supported by qemu but also VMWare/VMPlayer. VMPlayer is supposedly a few times faster than qemu so using vmdk allows VMPlayer or qemu to be used as the VM.
The moment of truth.

qemu new.vmdk

I get a grub prompt.

rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
boot

And………. nothing! Sits and spins…. Anyone have a clue?

Gnome and Mono

Matthew — Mon, 21 Jul 2003 13:01:00 +0000

Maybe it’s a good thing…
I’ve been reading a good bit about some cool Gnome projects[1][2].

What makes me uneasy about these projects is that they both plan to or are using C# as the language choice. Following a MS technology like this is bound to bite you/us at some point.

Bulington

Matthew — Sat, 22 Mar 2003 08:43:00 +0000

Had to go to Burlington last night, I loath shopping, but this trip had pleasant surprise.
Shannon is checking out, I’m standing there and look up at a cash register screen across the counter. It’s interesting because these registers don’t have the typical cash register looking screens. They have what looks like a 15″ flat panel.
So the register I’m looking at isn’t being used and is at a login prompt. I notice a familiar looking logo and walk over to have a closer look.
It’s the RedHat “shadow man” logo! So these registers are running X and Linux. I smile, Shannon pays, we head home.

Dillo

Matthew — Sun, 09 Mar 2003 15:36:00 +0000

Playing with Dillo again tonight. It’s amazing what you can do in 256KB. What’s really nifty are its “dpi” plug-ins.

Adobe can bite me

Matthew — Thu, 30 Jan 2003 16:04:00 +0000

Just found out, Gaim and the Gimp have both been served with cease and desist letters from Adobe because of there use of “dragable” tabs. I’m going to scream now!!!!

What is…

Matthew — Mon, 20 Jan 2003 16:42:00 +0000

Geekdom:

1. Lusting after a t68i.
2. Feeling a tinge of awe at seeing a CVS commit entry – “64 minutes ago by RMS”.
3. Listening to WOPN and liking the music.

A good read:

A diary by a manipulative control-freak audio engineer who is recording a first album for some anonymous band who has been chosen to be the Next Big Thing by the record industry.

Ext3 has issues

Matthew — Thu, 26 Dec 2002 11:30:00 +0000

So I’m sitting in front of my PC not doing anything really at all, I notice shell commands are taking a long time to execute, the system is still responding, but slowly. X shuts down after a lot of grinding and I reboot the system. Grub prompt comes up, the kernel inits, then boom no root.
Luckily I had just recently migrated to this disk and had the old install on another drive, so I could fall back and recover. To make a long story short, multiple attempts to recover the partition fail, I re-init the new drive, migrate again from my old drive and it’s functioning fine now. Normally I would chalk this up to a fluke or a bad drive, but the exact thing happened to James not a month ago.
Me thinks something evil is lurking in the Ext3 source.

So Christmas was fun. We had dinner here, cooked loads of food. Both our families dropped by and ate.

This my first attempt at posting from Emacs using ljupdate, please pardon any strangeness.

Ding, fries are done…