Planet samurai-x

NMBS well done!

2010-06-20T10:04:25+00:00

Let's say a student creates an interface to allow mobile clients to look up train hours in an easy way. Let's say that the student informs the train company 2 years ago?

What would you a normal company do: Hire him and pay him to make it better. What does the Belgian NMBS do? Send a cease and desist!

Link below: (Dutch link) http://blog.tuinslak.org/2010/06/stopping-irail-be/

To the Belgian NMBS: A year ago I had to take the train (for 6 months) to my work. I've never been late that often and I couldn't keep evening appointments due to you abominable service. I wish there would have been a better online tool as on my mobile (not an iPhone) your website runs as smooth as a car with rectangular wheels and with an engine of an 20 year old lawn mower!

Just to be clear: I will do my utter best to avoid taking a train from now on. I rather sit in traffic for an hour more than support a company that has no respect for the people who pay them and takes legal steps against a student that provided a service that you couldn't.

laptop woes

2010-06-14T06:39:20+00:00

\\//!

The last few weeks I've been looking for a new laptop for SeJo-IT. I had following wishes:

13" (not 14" nor 11")
4G mem
256 ssd
>=5h battery time
bluetooth
wireless
1Gb network
decent CPU (core duo or intel 5/7), no atom nor mobile stuff.

I've researched and contacted (not all though) HP, Dell, Sony, Lenovo, Acer. Basicly Sony does not allow me to build to order, nor does Lenovo. Dell doesn't offer that with a 13" machine and neither does HP. Acer doesn't offer it neither.

I've been known to always want Apple machines, well I really did my best to find one that wasn't apple. The closest I got was a Vaio z series, but those have 4x64G ssd and you need a software raid to get a bigger disk.. (not doing that!).

I had 2 options:

buy the laptop I wanted (apple did offer it)
lower my standards

I bought a Macbook pro... I hope I explained myself well enough for all you Open Source Zealots who think I am in an alliance with the devil... *grin*

llap!

Mail migration postfix-dovecot to zarafa with SASL on Centos

2010-06-10T06:47:13+00:00

\\//!

One of the first tasks at hand was to switch from a simple virtual mail setup to zarafa. I'm going to use the calendar a lot and wanted to be able to share my calendar. I did not want an external company to have control over my appointments so Google Calendar was out.

I checked out all the options and settled for zarafa. The setup is not that hard, pretty easy. The hardest part was getting saslauthd working with OR sql OR rimap. I spent a while trying to get it working with sql but in the end I just switched to rimap.

Took me a lot of research but it was well worthed. I have full syncing with my n900, easy maintenance and no more manual file editing to add users to my mail setup.

w00tness!

llap!

freelancer

2010-06-09T05:41:37+00:00

\\//!

As of today I can finally tell the world that I'm starting as a freelancer. As of July first you will be able to hire me for all things related to system engineering, team or project management!

All information can be found here: http://sejo-it.be

w00t!!!!!

llap!

PS: Yes that means I'm no longer an Inuit from that point on!

mobile internet

2010-05-07T08:26:46+00:00

\\//!

I'm currently searching for a good international mobile internet solution. I prefer an usb stick that I can use with my laptop. At this time Proximus' solution is just too expensive. Remember that I do not own a company nor have a VAT. Thus I'm looking for a not too expensive solution...

Anyone an idea?

llap!

redmine awesomeness

2010-04-02T10:15:39+00:00

\\//,

For Inuits (and some clients) I've setup Redmine. Redmine in it's core is a very good tool but with plugins it's pure awesomeness. Let me describe how we use Redmine.

With Inuits we have several internal projects that need to be managed. Because we all are consultants we cannot continuously work on internal projects nor are we sitting in the same office. So the need of a good management tool is a must. Hence Redmine. The way we use it now (with the scrum_pm and Kanban plugins), it allows us to define sprints, setup our stories, manage the backlog and have a nice Kanban overview.

We also installed the scheduler plugin that allows us to manage the schedule of the consultants who move a lot over different clients. This allows us to have an overview of who is working where and when they will be available.

Admitted there are some things that could improve but that's the greatest part, over time we see the new updates on the different plugins and sometimes they are useful and other times not. But we get to use the features others like and implemented for free! Open Source awesomeness at max speed!

Let me draw a small overview of our plugins:

Kanban is written by Eric Davis and allows us to use the Kanban methodology with redmine.
scrum_pm is written by Marcin Jędras and allows us to use the SCRUM Methodology!
scheduler is written by a company named goyello and is used to manage the resources.

llap!

PS: I also want to thank the guy that introduced me to Redmine: Frederic Descamps

It's been a while

2010-03-30T07:00:07+00:00

\\//,

It's been a since I updated my blog. Real time and online things came together and didn't exactly make my life easier. A small summary of the last few weeks.

Open Source Days in Copenhagen
I was happy that Raf could drive me to Copenhagen as I was not allowed to drive after my knee surgery. We drove from Belgium with 3 Raf, Ingmar and me. The trip to Denmark was pleasant and with regular stops I did not have much issues with my knee. Once in Copenhagen we met up with Alexander. This to drop of Ingmar. We decided we would go for dinner in the city. Raf and me proceeded to drop our stuff off at the hotel and relax a bit. The Hotel was pretty nice, the rooms weren't that big but we had all the luxury we needed. Before we went to dinner we made a quick stop at the venue where Alexander could set some stuff up. We met up with Bryan there and had a nice chat. Afterwards off for dinner at Jensen's Bøfhus where we had a good meal, but as we were completely dead from driving we made it an early night.

Day 2 we went to the venue and met up with Pim and the exherbo team. We there decided to start helping out with the exherbo Infrastructure team. We didn't see that many interesting talks that day as they were mostly commercial minded and we had some work for Inuits to do. Also I kinda needed to prepare my talk.

The evening was spent in the center of Copenhagen with dinner and afterwards Pim, Raf and me went to the hotel for a small drink and our beds.

Day 3 was more interesting there was Pim's talk, mine and the android talk that we really looked forward to. Pim and I did great (eh eh eh) but the android talk was basicly not good. The guy talked about setting up android on a never heard before board and all the steps he did to get it (not natively) working. I fell asleep. For lunch Raf and me went to Haiku Sushi and kinda liked it, so we decided to take Pim, Bryan, Ingmar and zlin (exherbo KDE dev, has no blog) for dinner there. They will not easily forget us there and we will not really forget in neither! Sushi was great Sake was better and plenty grin. Back at the hotel Pim, Raf and me made plans to take over the world and went back to sleep.
NOiV Conference in Utrecht
I went to the NOiV conference in Utrecht where the day was filled with information about Open Standards and how to use them with Open Source software in Governments. There was one talk that was extremely good and that was the talk of Olle Johansson about Open Communication. He talked about his experience with communication (phone, email, jabber,...) and the things that are lacking to make all communication open. He also stated his belief that the new phone number will be in the email format. I don't know if his talk is public but I'm thinking about inviting him for FOSDEM.
Renovations
I am in the midst of some home renovations (well only 40% of the house will be rebuild so technically it's still a renovation). Currently we are redoing one of the bedrooms to be our new bathroom and hopefully by the end of next week it's finished. Also the top floor will be redone with wooden floors.
Exherbo infra team
I joined the Exherbo infra team to help them with their infrastructure, right now we are waiting on some hardware to be colocated, but once that arrives Raf and I will be jumping on the work. First thing we will do is setup a redmine server and an openldap. The redmine is to allow Raf and I to follow up our sprints.
Freenode staff resignation
Due to lack of time I resigned my staff position at Freenode. It's been a blast and I really enjoyed it but lately I couldn't find enough time to help out users on the network. So I decided I should stop as I want to focus on all the infra jobs I do in the OS world. I will miss the team and the job also but I can still help out when I find time. And you can still find me in a lot of channels there.

On a side note I switched my laptop from Fedora to Exherbo. The problem I had with fedora is that I needed to compile my own kernel, and a dozen more apps to have a working system for me. And If I use a distro I want the distro to do it for me. Basically I think I've been using source based distributions too long to be able to enjoy others :p.

I will not promise to update this blog more regularly as I prefer to blog when I have something to say :p.

llap!

Almost no Open Source Days in Copenhagen for me!

2010-02-23T22:01:02+00:00

\\//!

Sunday I was in my garden burning some small wood. When I crouched to pick op a piece op paper and got up again, I got a pain shock in my knee and couldn't stretch it any more.

As I used to play a lot of basket and already had some issues with my knees that always disappeared in an hour or two I decided to wait it out. That didn't help, so my wife took me to the ER.

At the ER they informed me that I needed surgery but they suggested to wait until Monday to get it confirmed by the surgeon. I really liked that idea (and hoped it wouldn't come to that) so Monday morning I was at the Hospital.

I didn't like what he said though... I needed the surgery... He did give me a heads up and told me that if it was only the meniscus it wouldn't be that bad...

This did impose a possible problem. My talk @ Open Source Days in Copenhagen would be an impossible thing to do :/

This morning I had the surgery... I had a really rough time getting awake no idea why. Last time I was put under I woke up and after an hour I was ready to go home... Now it took me more than 4 hours (recovery room included) to be awake. It's almost midnight here and I never thought I would be awake like this (read can't sleep).

About the knee: Part of the meniscus was torn off and blocked the joint. But good news is that it was only a block and that there was no damage to the joint nor the ligaments. This means that by next week Thursday I should be enough recovered (especially as I can walk on the leg already).

There were a few remaining problems...

I can't drive to Denmark (not allowed): solution --> Raf Nijskens will bring me
Need someone to help me with the luggage etc: solution --> Raf Nijskens will help me!
Extra hotel room and ticket to the event: solution --> OSD will take up the bill!

So as you can see Open Source Days organisation and Raf really helped me out to make sure I can still present Djagios at the event. I should mention that the company I work for Inuits sponsors the 2 days for me and Raf Nijskens, Which is a nice and cool effort!

Thanks!!!!

llap!

Squid and Surftracker

2010-02-18T06:54:41+00:00

\\//!

A client of mine asked for a proxy and an analyser for the results. This because their site is in use 24/7 and they wanted to verify if all traffic is legal/SFW.

So we quickly decided to go for squid, I set it up against their AD so only users that are in their domain could access the web. The easy part was changing the browser settings as they can only surf through Citrix.

As analyser we tested a few that are listed on the squid website but only one passed the bar for the client. And that's Surftrackr. A Django (jeej) based analyser that is clean and easy to use. The only negative point for that tool was it's non-compliance with Django > 1. I needed to install Django-0.96. That done the tool does it's job pretty well. I'm currently contemplating whether I'm going to pursue the creator and help him convert it to the latest Django version... I probably should do it, but my time schedule is cramped already.

I did some more goodies over there but that will be part of another post :p

Syncevolution

2010-02-15T07:44:29+00:00

\\//,

Today I installed SyncEvolution on my n900, with this app my last peeve about not being able to sync my calendars has been removed.
So as of now my n900 does everything I need and even more! I also installed and tested bluemaemo which will help me a lot with presentations!

If you have more cool n900 apps to tell me about, do not hesitate to comment!

And before I forget: I bought World of Goo and it totally rocks!!!!

Import wordpress into django-mingus

2010-02-13T23:31:28+00:00

\\//!

Ok I fixed a small script that added all my wordpress posts to django-mingus.
How did I do it?

1. Export the wordpress posts (tools/export)
2. write import_posts.py like below

     import sys
     import os 
 
     from django.core.management import setup_environ
     import settings
     from django.template.defaultfilters import slugify
     from django_proxy.models import Proxy
     import elementtree.ElementTree as ET 
     from basic.blog.models import Post, Category
 
     tree = ET.parse('/tmp/wordpress.2010-02-13.xml')
 
     for item in tree.findall("channel/item"):
         post = Post()
         post.title = item.find("title").text
         post.slug = item.find("{http://wordpress.org/export/1.0/}post_name").text
         post.body = item.find("{http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/}encoded").text
         post.created = item.find("{http://wordpress.org/export/1.0/}post_date").text
         post.status = 2
         post.publish = post.created
         post.save()
 
         categories = item.findall("category")
         for c in categories:
             try:
                 cat = Category.objects.get(slug=slugify(c.text))
             except:
                 cat = Category()
                 cat.title = c.text
                 cat.slug = slugify(c.text)
                 cat.save()
             post.categories.add(cat)
         post.save() 
         p = Proxy()
         p.title = post.title
         p.description = post.body_markup
         p.pub_date = post.publish
         p.active = {'status':2}
         p.content_type_id=15
         p.object_id = post.id
         p.save()

3. put the file in your django-mingus/mingus folder
4. run it with python import_posts.py

llap!

First Post in django-mingus

2010-02-13T18:34:30+00:00

\\//!

I’ve updated my blog to django-mingus, Simple reason in that as a Django lover I should at least have my own blog in Django.

Django-mingus does already a lot and has been written by reusing as many existing projects as possible. Which is the Django way of working. Also it allows me to write my blogs in reStructuredText and that is awesome!

anyway I’m going to try to import the blogs I wrote on wordpress… let’s hope it works!

oh one more screenshot

2009-07-24T20:16:20+00:00

xcompmgr + samurai-x + (bodged) rounded corners

rounded corners... just

2009-07-24T17:27:18+00:00

It looks pretty... the code is rubbish!

And fred said, "let there be color.. i mean pango.. urr who?"

2009-07-16T22:39:36+00:00

yahiko term works!

2009-07-15T22:59:56+00:00

I rewrote yahiko term to use my own term code instead of that from TermEmulator. No specific reason but I thought I could do better. Anyway - here is irssi and vim running! Just need some color now... /me looks at fred ;)

It cant be....

2009-07-11T17:57:38+00:00

Is that window titled yahiko-term? I hope its not a pure python terminal ....

Happy Birthday samurai-x!

2009-07-10T19:26:11+00:00

sx is one year old today! ( or close enuff anyway ). We've come a long way but still plenty to do...

Talking of which lately Iv mostly been working on a status bar/panel for sx. Iv implemented configurable "slots" which are how you build up your status bar and Iv written slots that work as labels, clocks, active desktop and active app all of which also support updating via dbus. The status bar is in yahiko if you want to try it out for yourself.

Unfortunately the status bar code has brought up some problems with sx-desktops not handling sticky ( and other ) windows correctly which means Im now working on a new focus stack

Anyway ( Im writing this while cooking pasta )... Thanks to all who have worked on, tested and helped with samurai-x. I cant wait to see sx in another years time!

Good news everyone...

2009-06-29T12:04:17+00:00

(Because I know fred will never blog about it... ;)) samurai-x is now using a new DBus module called yaydbus. Why? Because its written in pure python ( we like that! ) and no more nasty gobject loop, perfect!

Plus I think I know how Im going to write the new statusbar Im working on ( which will use DBus a fair bit ).

Exciting...

(You can find yaydbus in the samurai-x git repo btw)

Interactive sx

2009-06-28T18:27:07+00:00

Interactivly editing yahiko styles via the sx-web plugin

sx update

2009-06-21T19:14:48+00:00

Well after the release we had about 6000 visitors to the sx site! woo! Thats about 5500 more than usual! ;) Not got much more to say about the release except that Iv now fixed the download problem with ooxcb.

What we've done since? Fred has re-arranged ooxcb quite a bit and started wrapping some more extensions *whisper* composite *whisper*. Ive been trying to get bbpager ( and hopefully other pagers ) to work and have been looking at ewmh stuff. Now plugins can tell the app what hints they provide support for.

Cant think of anything else right now...

samurai-x 0.2 is OUT!

2009-06-16T18:05:54+00:00

firstly: Yay!

The release announcment looked like this ( just in case you missed it ):

We are happy to release version 0.2 of samurai-x. samurai-x is a
window manager written in pure python using ctypes, xcb and cairo.

A lot has happened since version 0.1 including:

    * a new plugin system - the core samurai-x is now very small
      with all other functionality added via plugins

    * a new xcb binding - ooxcb - for more information
      see http://docs.samurai-x.org/ooxcb/

    * lots of plugins! we now have plugins for most common
      features found in other window managers

For more information, including installation instructions check
http://samurai-x.org or join us in #samuraix on irc.freenode.net

Big thanks to all have helped out with samurai-x but especially to
Friedrich Weber for writing ooxcb and all the other work on
samurai-x he has done and also to Jochen Maes for hosting the
project.

So whats in store for sx 0.3 and beyond? Hopefully:

better config management - we need some schema or something so plugins can validate configs and also show something in --default-config
pypy support - hopefully fred is going to make us some nice rpython for ooxcb but also I hope to get sx running on pypy
did someone say compositing...?

So stay tuned! Lots of exciting code to come!

Almost like a real window manager...

2009-06-10T20:11:52+00:00

Almost looking like the real deal now! Plus its got ultra smooth after I made quite a crucial optimization to yahiko ( now it doesnt repaint the window every time its moved! ). sx-moveresize has also been updated to fix a few bugs and add a few options.

Release at the weekend I hope...

Yahiko background images

2009-06-09T21:53:11+00:00

Yahiko ui now supports using images for backgrounds!

Yet more eye candy

2009-06-08T22:30:02+00:00

Yahiko decorator module runs properly!

sx-autoclient

2009-06-08T17:22:57+00:00

A plugin that has been asked for a few times ( ... ok - once! ) was something to allow putting clients onto specific desktops. What was really needed was just a simple plugin to perform actions on new clients. So now there is sx-autoclient which means you can do things like this in your config:

import logging
log = logging.getLogger(__name__)

def test_rule(screen, client):
    log.info('test rule!')
    client.actor.configure(x=100, y=100)


config = {
    'core.plugins': [
        #...
        'sxautoclient',
    ],

    #...

    'autoclient.rules': [test_rule],
        
}

...and all your new clients will be moved to 100,100.

Ok its still a bit low level, but once Iv added some simple rule functions for matching window names and classes and some easy actions it will be much better.

More on eyecandy...

2009-06-07T23:18:37+00:00

Trying to write a new window decorator for samurai-x at the moment. Not an easy task!. Its using my yahiko library which has led me to fix a few bugs. Widget libs are always such a pain in the ass! I see they are discussing one on the pyglet google group at the moment. If only we had a compositing wm we could use their code in an opengl window - zoom zoooom... *evil grin*

Anyway yahiko seems to be working ok with a X window as a child widget...more later

fbpanel and samurai-x

2009-06-06T18:54:29+00:00

Just some eyecandy...

DBus

2009-06-05T23:48:39+00:00

Grrrrrr... it just wont work with samurai-x. I can run a service outside of sx and talk to it with a client, but I cant run the service inside sx!. http://samurai-x.org/browser/sx-dbus/sxdbus.py I even created a gobject main loop plugin to run this! more grrrrr's....

Anyway... I went back to a bit of hacking with the sx-web plugin and made it use webob and mako templates. Mixed in with a theme and some js magic from jquery and we've got something that looks rather nice!

Documentation yay!

2009-03-11T16:57:21+00:00

Thanks to Sejo and sphinx, samurai-x and ooxcb do now have online documentation, regenerated per hour from the git repo: for ooxcb and for samurai-x2.

There is not much content right now, but I am working on this. ooxcb and samurai-x need good documentation, because both shouldn’t be only usable for us ;-)

What the samurai is doing.

2009-01-27T11:30:55+00:00

Our samurai is doing much at the moment. After our 0.1 release in December, we decided to throw away most of what we’ve done till then and to rebuild everything.

First: We won’t use our XCB binding (called pyxcb) for samurai-x2 any more. It was nice to use, but not nice to develop. If we’d have wanted to continue developing on pyxcb, it would have been a pain to complete the binding to xproto, and even more of pain to add bindings for other X extensions. pyxcb was a hand written wrapper for an autogenerated ctypes wrapper of libxcb. So we actually used a Python wrapper for a C wrapper for the X protocol - you see, there’s one wrapper level too much. There always have been xpyb which is an autogenerated wrapper for the X protocol, using only few of the libxcb core functions. However, we don’t like Python C extensions, so I started to port xpyb to pure python using ctypes (code here, seems to have some bugs). And finally I decided to somehow ‘fork’ xpyb to write an object oriented wrapper generator - called ooxcb. That’s a bit trickier than xpyb, because it needs an interface file that wraps requests to objects and defines convenient methods, request default values and so on. And the interface file needs someone who writes it. So I started to write an interface file for the core X protocol - that’s less work than wrapping all these functions for pyxcb has been - but only few requests are mapped yet. Actually only the requests we need for samurai-x2 - but the wrapper will be completed one day!

I think that way is the most consistent and reliable one - and ooxcb just works fine for samurai-x2 ;-)

The ‘new’ samurai-x2 itself will be a bit different from samurai-x2 0.1. Since extendable applications are much cooler than static ones, we decided to make samurai-x2 as extendable as possible. The samurai-x2 does depend on the setuptools and ooxcb (which depends on libxcb). However, samurai-x2 without plugins isn’t really usable. You can neither move nor resize windows, you have no desktops and no decorations. All these features are added by plugins. Plugins are just eggs that are living in the plugin path (at the moment /.samuraix/plugins) and register themselves for an entry point. samurai-x2 then loads all plugins defined in the configuration file, and the plugins register as event handlers. The whole core API uses events as much as possible to allow plugins to get as much control as needed - but without monkey patching.

The current git revision of samurai-x2 is already usable (without crashing! :D) - and it provides some usable plugins:

sx-actions: a basic action framework usable by other plugins. Other plugins can provide actions or emit actions. So it’d be possible to bind the ‘next desktop’ action to a key event as wellas to bind the ‘quit samurai-x’ to a button event - with an unified interface.
sx-bind: a plugin that connects actions to key presses (hotkeys)
sx-desktops: provides virtual desktops and a layouter interface
sx-moveresize: provides actions that move or resize the current client
sx-simpledeco: a plugin that draws a simple decoration window using the xproto api (so no cairo needed). That’s more a proof-of-concept - we want to create a cairo decoration plugin plugin in the future.
sx-tiling: a very simple tiling proof-of-concept layouter. Not really usable for the tiling lover yet, but it should be easy to complete it.

So, it should be possible to make a plugin doing everything you’d love to see in a window manager, and that’s nice.

I hope you now have an idea what the samurai is doing. If you have any questions or want to help with development - you are welcome to join our mailing list and our IRC channel #samuraix on irc.freenode.net.

Hi samurai-x!

2009-01-21T18:31:09+00:00

Look at me! I am a post about samurai-x. Please ignore me.

Samurai-X

2008-07-14T11:03:29+00:00

Finally Ive done it and written a window manager in pure python, lots and lots of ctypes, but no actual c code. Presenting Samurai-X

The feature set is pretty small at the moment, just window resizing/moving, virtual desktops and a statusbar (drawn with cairo). Not sure exactly what the full feature list will look like, probably something like awesome/fluxbox - but with more python goodness

Planet samurai-x

NMBS well done!

laptop woes

Mail migration postfix-dovecot to zarafa with SASL on Centos

freelancer

mobile internet

redmine awesomeness

It&#39;s been a while

Almost no Open Source Days in Copenhagen for me!

Thanks!!!!

Squid and Surftracker

Syncevolution

Import wordpress into django-mingus

First Post in django-mingus

oh one more screenshot

rounded corners... just

And fred said, "let there be color.. i mean pango.. urr who?"

yahiko term works!

It cant be....

Happy Birthday samurai-x!

Good news everyone...

Interactive sx

sx update

samurai-x 0.2 is OUT!

Almost like a real window manager...

Yahiko background images

Yet more eye candy

sx-autoclient

More on eyecandy...

fbpanel and samurai-x

DBus

Documentation yay!

What the samurai is doing.

Hi samurai-x!

Samurai-X

It's been a while