I have just tagged and released qtile 0.6! This release comes exactly 6 months after our last release (not intentionally, it just happened to work out that way). You can check out the full release notes for a list of most of the changes.

I thought I'd discuss a bit about the breaking config changes we made. A few of them were long standing TODOs in the code, but the major one (and the one that motivated cleaning up all the rest) was creating a new config module where all of the objects used in configuration live. The primary motivation for this change was to remove a lot of crazy hacks we had in the test system to get around circular imports, since the configuration objects and main manager were all in the same file. However, it also makes sense from a code organization standpoint, because manager.py was getting huge. I think user impact will be minimal, because configs can be updated with a simple regex. That said, I will only be updating the Ubuntu 13.04 packages, so as not to break configs for existing users on older packages with a simple dselect-upgrade.

As always, questions or comments are welcome on qtile-dev!

Woah! tycho.ws looks totally different. Recently, I switched from using my old custom blogging framework to a new static site generator that I wrote called haggis. Both haggis and the source code for this blog are available, so you can check them out and perhaps build your own haggis-based blog if you want.

I did haggis as a static site generator mostly because I could. There's no inherent reason for blogs to re-compute their pages on every request, especially when there are very few comments on the blog (I think I've got around 70 comments right now across all my posts). The comments support I wrote for this blog is in fact totally separate from haggis -- the templates have a form which does an AJAX post to a small script which basically dumps the result in a database (after sanatizing it, of course :-). Haggis needs to know nothing about the "dynamic" nature of the site. Then, the script simply re-invokes haggis, which regenerates the whole blog.

Now, if all of the sudden I write a super popular post, my blog (probably?) won't go down: the page is statically generated, so all the web server has to do is read it off the disk and dump it on to the wire. No sessions, no computation, no nothing. I'm using apache because I'm lazy and it's what I know how to set up, but if I really wanted to, I could use some other more performant web server for static files, thus increasing my capacity even more.

What happens, though, if lots of people start commenting all the time? Then I spawn off N processes, which could confuse the web server if they're all over-writing the files all the time. So, instead I check whether to re-generate the blog once a minute, and only do it if necessary (i.e. if there is a new comment). With this setup, hopefully I can handle a reasonably large load with very few resources. And, of course, I can edit my posts in vim using markdown, and manage the blog in git which were all requirements as well.

So, haggis probably performs much better than a GTFO-based (or any other dynamic framework based) blog does, but why not just turn GTFO into a static site generator? Well, the other reason for haggis is that I've been interested in learning haskell for a while, and this was a perfect first project. Anyway, haggis should be reasonably stable at this point, although there's still lots of work left. Please report any bugs on the github page!

Recently I began rewriting the framework that powers this blog (gtfo) in haskell. Among other things, I needed a good tree rewriting utility for processing templates and generating content. I've been using Lift at work for a while now, so I built hquery, which is basically an implementation of Lift's CSS Selectors over xmlhtml trees. You can see some examples of the kind of transformations it allows in hquery's readme. Additionally, it is available from hackage via cabal install hquery.

Feedback is welcome, as this is my first haskell API. Bug reports and patches are of course welcome too :-)

Ahoy! I've updated the packages in my Ubuntu 12.10 PPA to be version 0.5. Please let qtile-dev know if you have any problems!

Hello! Today, I'm proud to announce the release of Qtile 0.5. A wildly incomplete changelog is available here. Qtile 0.5 comes more than two years after the release of 0.4. There have been many major improvements and bugfixes by nearly 50 contributors. Many thanks to everyone who was involved, and long live tiling window managers!

Ahoy! I have put up new packages for qtile for 12.10, so I thought I'd write a bit about what's actually in the packages. First, they're available via the standard:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:tycho-s/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install qtile

A few things to note about these packages. First: they now install a qtile.desktop file, so any compliant freedesktop.org login manager should see qtile as a login option. Note that this just invokes qtile directly with no arguments, so you'll have to put your configs in the standard location. If you want to run a custom .xsession, you'll still need to set that up yourself.

Second, these packages no longer depend on xpyb-ng, but depend on xpyb (1.3.1) directly. I did this for a few reasons. I've had several users report that 1.3.1 works directly for them (i.e. xpyb-ng is not actually required to run qtile). If there is no problem with using the stock implementation, I felt like we should switch to that. Naturally, if problems come up and we need to move back to our fork, I'm happy to rebuild, however, I think that's unlikely.

Third, which hash are these packages based on? They're based on 87dc6924cb, which is on the development branch. I've been running this code both at home and at work for several months now, as well as several other people. While there are still several bugs (patches welcome!), I feel that it's much more stable and user friendly than the master branch.

Fourth, based on some statistics that Launchpad provides, it looks like there were about 100 installs of the Ubuntu PPA. One or two of those were probably my test VMs, but that means there were a fair number of other people who checked qtile out. Very cool!

Feel free to e-mail me or qtile-dev with any feedback! (Unfortunately, I've been inadvertently banned from qtile-dev somehow. Still waiting on a resolution to that, so if you find a bug with the packages, go ahead and just file it on the github tracker and I'll fix it ASAP.)

By not-so-popular demand (:-), I have built some packages for qtile and its dependencies for 11.10. You can now install my branch of qtile via:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:tycho-s/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install qtile

Feel free to e-mail me or qtile-dev with any feedback!

Recently, there has been some discussion on qtile-dev about installing the latest and greatest version of qtile. Unfortunately, the install process has historically been a journey into dependency hell, since distributions didn't have the latest versions of some libraries required by qtile. The good news is that this has mostly been fixed (although very few documents anywhere state this), so it's hard to know what to install by hand and what you can use packages for.

To complicate matters more, there are several versions of xpyb floating around, none of which have working build systems! If you knew enough about pkg-config and weren't afraid of manually installing files, you could get everything to work, but it did bar the "normal user" from installing qtile. Hopefully this blog post will clarify a few things.

First, what dependencies do you need to install? Contrary to what the docs say, in 11.10 (and presumably later versions of Ubuntu), you don't need to build your own cairo or xcb. You can simply:

sudo apt-get install xcb-proto libxcb1-dev python-xcbgen
libcairo2-dev

You will have to build three things by hand: xpyb, py2cairo, and qtile itself. The other day I sat down and fixed the build system for xpyb, so you should be able to just:

git clone git://github.com/tych0/xpyb-ng.git
cd xpyb-ng
sudo python setup.py install

After that, you'll need to install py2cairo. The waf based build doesn't appear to detect xpyb correctly, so you'll need to go the autoconf route. Even with autoconf, the build system is slightly broken, so you'll need to be explicit about what directories to look in for xpyb.h. If you used the above build of xpyb, you can:

git clone git://git.cairographics.org/git/py2cairo
cd py2cairo
CFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include/python2.7/xpyb ./configure
sudo make install

Then, you can clone your favorite qtile repo and everything should Just Work! If you want to clone my copy of qtile (which includes several bug fixes and enhancements):

git clone https://github.com/tych0/qtile
cd qtile
sudo python setup.py install

If you have any questions or problems, feel free to mail qtile-dev or me directly. I am going to try and package qtile and put it in a PPA, but I doubt I will get to that for another few weeks. This should help anyone who is interested enough to build it in the meantime, though!

Recently at work I've been using Viridan to listen to music at work. It has its warts, but generally works pretty well. There's even an XMLRPC server built in, so you can control it remotely. However, there's not a huge number of clients out there, so I wrote my own little script so that I could start and stop it from a Qtile keybinding, and I thought I'd put it up here for anyone else who is interested. Here's an example session:

smitten:~$ ./vif.py 
./vif.py [rpc_call(s)]
   availible methods are:
     get_current_song
     get_state
     get_volume
     next
     play_pause
     prev
     set_volume
     volume_down
     volume_up
smitten:~$ ./vif.py get_current_song
{'artist_name': 'Meshuggah','song_title': 'Stengah', ...}
smitten:~$ ./vif.py next
True

Hopefully someone else finds it useful :-)

Hello! I just completed another successful two and a half weeks touring the Colorado mountains. Although the snow was not great (Winter Park only has around a 15 inch base, and over half the mountain was closed), I still had a good time! Rather than do a lot of aggressive skiing (the conditions would have made aggressive skiing fairly dangerous), I tried a bunch of new things instead! The most interesting new thing was probably the ski bike, and I am now a licensed snow cyclist! My dad and I both took lots of pictures, and he's posted both the ones from his camera and my camera on his web page.

I did three summits during the trip, two of Mt. Charles which is roughly 12,050 feet, and one of Mt. Prospect which is roughly 11,700 feet. I took a panorama (which I've yet to stitch together) of the view on Mt. Prospect, and my dad took one of Mt. Charles, so eventually when we get those stitched together, I'll post them as well. Anyway, if you're heading out west, here's to hoping you have more snow than we did! Even though the backcountry was bare in spots, we still had a lot of fun goofing around (you might notice some defilement of a USGS marker in the photos ;-).