Long time linux/unix hackers know of the plethora of window managers and user interfaces that have been and currently are available for Linux and BSD operating systems.  I’ve had great times in the past trying out different window managers such as Elightenment, Sawfish, Black Box, IceWM, xfwm, KDE, Gnome,  and others.  These days the two most popular which are shipped with the more popular distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu) are KDE and Gnome.

However, I remember back in the day when I was using a Enlightenment, or Ratpoison, doing strange and cool things (at the time) like applying transparencies to your windows and modifying the the window borders to be anything but normal and square.

I used to share screenshots of my desktop with others who are also into “desktop eyecandy”, where I’d have floating or docked window maker panels, and monitoring applets anchored to the desktop as if they were part of the background wallpaper.. and this was around 1999.  It was fun times.

One of the more interesting things that I was into at the time was increasing the efficiency and usability of my desktop by trying to reduce the need to reach for my mouse.  I’ve been very accustomed to this already being user of vi and the GNU Screen terminal multiplexor, but the window managers never seemed to try to attain the same level “hacker cool”.  That is, of course until I came across Ratpoision. Ratpoison was exactly what the name implied, a window manager that killed your dependency on the mouse (or rat).  It was awesome, but it wasn’t scalable and didn’t evolve much to keep up with modern technological advancements and requirements such as multi-monitor support.

I recently thought that those days were long lost, until I recently had the urge to streamline my desktop environment.  I now have a 28″ Monitor, and was certain there was a better way to interact with the desktop than the standard Ubuntu/Gnome environment.  So I went looking.  I started looking of course at things I was already familiar with - I looked up Ratpoision to see if there were any major improvements over the years.

I took a look at a Ratpoison again, but it was showing it’s age.  I looked at it’s successor, Stumpwm, but I didn’t feel the love.  Then I tried out Xmonad, created by Spencer Janssen, Don Stewart, and Jason Creighton - and written in Haskell.  I immediately fell in love.

If you haven’t used GNU Screen, Gnome Multi-Terminal, Ratpoision, or any minimalist Window Manager before, then it will be hard to explain why Xmonad is worth your time.  Instead, visit the Xmonad website here: http://www.xmonad.org/

Here are some suggestions on how get Xmonad working on Ubuntu 8.10:

Install Xmonad:

apt-get install xmonad

We’re going to create another X window session, so that we don’t mess with your existing one. That way, if you don’t like Xmonad, you can go back to using your existing window manager without worrying about breaking your configuration.

Set up your second X window session. Press “ctrl + alt + f2″ - this will take you to the command-line terminal where you will start your second X session. Start the session using following command:

xinit -- :1 vt12

This will start up another X session which will sit at virtual terminal 12 - meaning that you have to press ‘ctrl-alt-F12′ to get to it.

Once at your new X session, you should see nothing more than an plain old xterm window. Type “xmonad’, and the terminal window should now be maximized. Xmonad is now running.

Type ‘man xmonad’ to view the help documentation on how to use it.  It’s pretty straight forward, and a joy to use!

I woke up early this morning with a mission on my mind, to finally organize my server rack the way I’ve always been meaning to, but for some reason (*cough*laziness*cough*) , I never got around to it.  I had recently bought some new hardware to re-build a system which I thought was dead, but which turned out not to be.  I didn’t really feel like returning the hardware, because this was the chance to build an up-to-date server to migrate all my VMs over to, which is something else I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time.

In any case, I finally got around to re-organizing my server rack today, and I’m proud of how it turned out.  With that accomplishment in hand, I decided to install our living room air conditioner (starting to get a tad warm, especially for computer systems). I headed out to Home Depot and purchased some wire mesh, or “screen” as one of their reps called it. Last year we found that we had a lot of mosquitoes and small flies coming in through the air conditioner. Considering it was a fairly inexpensive one, I figured that I got what I paid for. I decided to turn my $100 air conditioner into a $300 air conditioner, but adding on some custom filters in order to block any debris which it may collect through it’s many open vents. The roll of mesh cost around $15, and was easy enough to cut and shape. The end result turned out better than I had expected, and so this year I expect we will have a lot fewer bugs getting in.

And so the air conditioner was installed - this too had been completed.  I was on a roll and feeling good.  I decided then to try my hand at building my new server from scratch.

I had an old rack-mount server case¹ which I gutted, and started building the new server in there.  The new components included a new motherboard - the Asus M3N78-VM, an AMD Athlon 1640 CPU, and 4GB of OCZ Dual Channel SLI Ready RAM. The Micro-ATX form factor of the motherboard made it super easy to fit into the monster rack-mount case. With a few simple connections, I was ready to test boot-up, and things should have been smooth from there. It wasn’t.

The system wouldn’t power on - at all. My first mistake was that I plugged the front panel connectors into the wrong pins on the motherboard. No sweat, figured that out, and moved forward. Switched it on again, saw the motherboards “SB Power” LED come on (which was a good sign), fans started spinning, thought I was getting close, but nothing. I couldn’t get it to POST anything, no errors, warnings, or beeps at all. I decided to rip out all the peripherals and go bare-bones in order to isolate the problem. Still nothing!! Removed RAM, nothing.. Removed the CPU, nothing. So at this point, aside from being frustrated, I’ve been able to narrow it down to one of two things, it’s either the motherboard, or the power supply. The power supply should be fine, because it worked with the old hardware that I had in the case originally. However, there is a chance that the power supply isn’t compatible with this motherboard in some way.

If it’s not the power supply, then I’ve received a motherboard that was DOA. I’m hoping this is the case! I’d hate to take this thing back to Tiger Direct tomorrow, have them test it out, and find out that it’s just fine. That would be both embarrassing and frustrating.

Anyway, after all these triumphs and frustrations, I decided to finish off the night with a double shot of Tequila, and damn did it go down smooth :)

If this blog post seems at all incoherent, it probably has to do with the fact that its late, and I’m tired.  Oh, and maybe just a little to do with that double shot of Tequila.

1. solid steel, heavy beast [↩]

I’ve always wanted a web-based application to help me manage all my stuff. “WebPIM” (as I’ve nick-named it for now), is currently one of my main personal projects that I have been working on.  I started this project back in 2003 as a simple web-based file manager, and have been slowly hacking away at it in my spare time ever since. “WebPIM” can act as a central reference point for all personal or project information. The way I’ve implemented my custom PIM is purely based on the way I work, so it may not be to everyone’s liking. However, I think it could really help individuals who need a way to organize tasks, projects, documents, and general files in a free-form, yet hierarchical and accessible way. Much of the thinking behind the way WebPIM is being developed relates to GTD¹, and how to get “stuff” off your mind, and into a system.

Here’s the general idea - you have a lot of “stuff” - stuff that’s just sitting around on scraps of paper, on your hard drive, in your e-mail, and every other place you can’t seem to remember. This may be un-important stuff, or it may be severely important stuff - but none of it is organized into any kind of easily reference-able and “trusted system”².

You have several options; the first of which is to do nothing. Unfortunately, ignoring the problem and hoping it will go away won’t solve the problem. Lets assume you want to change your situation, and we’ll use my experiences as a baseline for discussion.

I have tried many personal information managers over the years, and all of them have been incomplete in one way or another. Also, with the new wave of hosted applications like Google’s GMail, Calendar, and Google Docs, I am becoming more and more uncomfortable storing all my stuff on a remote, corporate server over which I have no control³.

My solution to this dilemma has been to write my own PIM, and so far, I’ve been happy with the results.

The way WebPIM currently works is by operating as a front-end to a linux based file-system. From WebPIM, I can create directories, create text files, upload files from my local hard drive, and move files around from one directory structure to another. This is the simple stuff that I think any web-based file manager should be capable of. More than this however, WebPIM provides the following features:

• Move multiple files from one directory to another (batch move)
• Text-dialog editing of all files (you can edit HTML and XML files in the interface)
• Full path display when traversing directories, which allows you to go directly to any directory within your current absolute path via a hyper-link
• Web-download functionality allowing you to download a copy of your favourite web page or web-accessible file into your current directory.
• Recursive web-download, so that you can download an entire website for later reference (implemented using HTTrack⁴ in the back-end).
• Project short-cuts, so that you can create short-cut groups to access multiple directory structures on the same interface. This allows you to access general reference information, along with specific project information all within the same interface, and without disrupting your overall PIM hierarchy.

I think the idea can be better explained with a screenshot of the main interface:

- WebPIM Interface (Click on the image for a larger view) -

Obviously there is still a lot of polish required before this becomes useful to the general public, but I really do believe there is a market for it.  If anyone is interested in trying this out, leave a comment and let me know.  I can probably set up a demo, or provide the source code as-is so that you can give it a shot on your own system.

1. Getting Things Done - David Allen [↩]
2. GTD terminology [↩]
3. This has become more and more of a concern for me, having accounts on Google, Facebook, and others. Maybe I’m just paranoid. [↩]
4. www.httrack.com/ [↩]

I’ve had many different kinds of wallets and credit card holders over the years.  A long time ago I used to have what is sometimes known as the “butt brick” or the “Costanza wallet”¹, but that time has thankfully passed.  I quickly became familiar with money clips, business card holders, day books, organizers, and so on, as ways to organize the items that I liked to keep on my person at all times.

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1. Urban Dictionary - Coztanza Wallet [↩]

WxWidgets GUI Programming

I’ve been thinking about creating an application using the WxWidgets GUI API.  I’ve read a lot about it, and many seem to really enjoy the results of the applications they’ve created with it.

For my own purposes, I’ve been looking for the ideal GUI API that would allow me to quickly create cross-platform desktop applications for Windows and Linux platforms (Mac would be a bonus).  I’ve looked at QT, GTK, and MingGW.. but I’ve been turned off because they don’t seem to have strong Perl and/or Python bindings (although Perl strong with Tk, I’ve heard).

I’ve tried a small test Python program with WxWidgets (GTK version), and was pleasantly surprised at the simplicity of the code.  I think I’m going try some other tests, this time using Perl, as I want to note the differences in complexity between Perl and Python code.  Currently, Perl is my canvas of choice¹.

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1. Being that I see programming as an art, more than anything else [↩]

Right now my main point of communication with the rest of the world is this blog, which is just fine by me. But now and again I’m reminded by friends that these other services, such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, MySpace, etc., are out there, and that I should log in more often so that they can satisfy their interactivity needs by poking me, or making certain that I’m informed about what they happen to be having for dinner.

I am a proponent of building and maintaining social networks, don’t get me wrong. However I find it rather difficult (time consuming) to try and keep all these little social networks updated with my latest going’s on.

There are some solutions, such as allowing one service to update all others by providing them with your login/passwords to each of these other services (Facebook provides applications which does this). I don’t like this concept though, because I don’t like the idea of giving all my personal authentication information for all the services that I use to just one company (call me paranoid).

Therefore I’ve found small ways around this, such as including a Twitter update widget onto my WordPress blog, which doesn’t require any username/password information because it uses the Twitters “public timeline” service. It would be great if Facebook also had an application that allowed you to update Facebook’s status by reading the public timeline.

I haven’t found such a Facebook application, though I think it would be very popular. Then again, I don’t think this type of Facebook application will ever be created, because I believe that Facebook is all about driving people to log into their site to do their updates, and to prevent these updates from occurring outside of Facebook. I know that Facebook apps are mostly created by end-users, but I think there are some restrictions on what Facebook allows third-party developers to develop (just a theory), and this may be one of those restrictions.

To the other bloggers out there who are in the same boat, trying to organize and automate all your social networks - what tricks and hacks have you found that seems to be making your life easier?

Update:Trevor Mauch has a great article on the benefits and drawbacks of using Twitter vs Facebook.