tech « Dylan's Journal

Archive for the ‘tech’ Category

XMonad

Sunday, June 10th, 2007

I have been using dwm for months now. Actually, I’ve been maintaining a fork of it, with patches that I like and such.

Being a lurker in #haskell I have been aware of the development of xmonad, which is a dwm-like window manager written in haskell. I tried xmonad a few months ago, and it was okay. It was missing some features of dwm that I thought I needed, like tags. I continued using dwm.

XMonad development has continued on, with many contributed extensions being added (including novel layout algorithms), and as of yesterday I decided to take the plunge and start using it.

So far, it requires a lot less changes to the config file to behave the way I want.

(Footnote: In fact, I first heard about dwm from Don Stewart, who is also one of the hackers behind xmonad.)

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New GPG Key

Sunday, March 11th, 2007

Chani brought to my attention today that I.. no longer have my GPG keypair. That is, good ol’ FB5312C2, which I’ve had since 2005, is dead. Luckily it expired…

I seem to have quite a few expired gpg keys.

Actually, except for 2006, I have made a new GPG key every year since 2001. This is not so good.

I have created a new GPG key pair (712EBBE1) which I hope is the last key I create for a while. Its fingerprint is 412C CCE9 DDA2 4FE9 C34F 754B 0863 0EA6 712E BBE1.

It’s been signed by at least Chani, and I’ll work on getting some meatspace people to sign it too.

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Leap Forward

Sunday, March 11th, 2007

Last night was leap-ahead night in the US, thanks to Congress changing when DST accures. Almost all my computer-based clocks updated properly, except for my handspring visor. The poor old thing is incapable of such updates, since all its programming is in ROM.

I will have to set its clock forward manually, and later set it back manually. As it thinks DST should happen in about three weeks. Fun stuff.

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R.I.P. Loki

Monday, February 19th, 2007

So, we’ve been redecorating since the flood, and things are looking nice around here. We’ve got a lamp in the bedroom/computer room!

The bad news is my desktop machine, Loki, decided to die.

It’s the power supply, which toasted the motherboard. RAM, video card, and most importantly SATA harddrive should be okay.

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Planet SLUG

Wednesday, February 7th, 2007

I’ve set up a planet for SLUG. For those that don’t know, planet is an RSS/Atom feed aggregator.

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Productive Saturday

Saturday, February 3rd, 2007

Today was a remarkably productive. Resuming the work I started last night on my remind2pda script, I figured out why it was crashing my handspring visor. Apparently it doesn’t you can’t have repeating entries with a frequency of 0! Oops.

The second problem was not my fault, but the documentation of Palm::Datebook. The perldoc states:

The number of the week on which the event occurs. 0 means the first week of the month, 1 means the second week of the month, and so forth. A value of 5 means that the event occurs on the last week of the month

However, that is a lie! A value of 4 means the last week of the month, and a value of 5 causes a strange bug that makes all events appear on the 00th day of the next month.

I also got tired of parsing devtodo’s XML files, so I rewrote devtodo in perl, and using YAML to store todo lists in. More on this later.

Spoony and I tried to get cables to sync our phones using bitpim I was able to find a cable for my phone (a nokia 2810i or something), but not for spoony’s LG VX3400. However, the phone cable I got doesn’t seem to be acting like a proper USB device.