Chronicles of a tall guy

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/lib/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 :-)

Ahoy!

Just writing a quick post to pimp my new Ampache "bindings", which are called ampyche, naturally ;-). I slapped them together one afternoon mostly to get an understanding of the Ampache API, so that's why I used my native language. I have no specific plans for any python applications using them, but I'm interested in improving the stability of Android-based Ampache clients, as well as adding support for Ampache to Clementine, so I thought this would be a good place to start.

In any case, I hope someone finds them useful! Happy hacking!

For a while I have been using a Google Voice number as my primary texting number since it doesn't cost any money and has the additional benefit that when I'm at a computer, I can type text messages on a regular keyboard instead of on my tiny phone keyboard. This is all well and good, except I don't particularly care for the web interface; not because it's bad, but simply because it requires you to have a web browser open.

To solve this, I wrote an ncurses based "chat" client, gvchat. It provides and instant messaging interface for the most recent text message your GV account has received. When someone new texts you, it seamlessly switches to that new thread. At this point there is no way to initiate new texts, but I plan on growing the feature set in the coming months. However, for now it fits my needs so I thought I'd put it up for other people in the same boat.

Additionally, the client has a class 'Chat', which implements a crude ncurses based chat interface. As this improves, my hope is to add an XMPP backend for it as well. Any ncurses tips and tricks (or pointers to libraries which already have this functionality and are built on top of ncurses) are much appreciated!!

Ahoy! At the recommendation of one of my friends, I've recently begun using a tiling window manger. Although he recommended xmonad, I decided to instead to go with a different project, qtile. I got myself a github account, since that is the primary avenue for qtile development. This means you can run the same WM code as I do :-). (I also posted the code for the framework that powers this blog, something I've been meaning to do for a while but have not gotten around to.)

I wrote a widget for displaying the currently playing track from your favorite player which implements MPRIS, and I would be interested in any feedback other qtile users have, so feel free to send me or qtile-dev e-mail if you play with it! The widget can be found in both my fork of qtile and in the main fork. It depends on python-dbus, things like Ubuntu's update-manager do too, so it's probably installed for most users. To use it, you can simply put

widget.Mpris(objname='org.mpris.awesome_mpris_player')

in your qtile config.py. objname should be whatever the name of your MPRIS player is. You can figure out what this is by running dbus-notify and starting your player, and see what name it requests when it issues RequestName. For example, Clementine's is org.mpris.clementine (and is also the default).

Happy hacking!

Perhaps the most complicated part of the application in my recent post was the authentication with Gmail. Although my final method boils down to only a few lines of python, Google describes several different ways to authenticate (additionally, putting the username and password directly in the URL). I didn't like any of these options, as some seemed much too complicated for what I wanted to do, some didn't work, and some were too insecure. However, it turns out that the atom feed supports HTTP's basic access authentication. In python, this is fairly easy to do:

$ python
>>> import urllib2, base64
>>> username = "me@gmail.com"; password = "secret"
>>> url = "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/"
>>> req = urllib2.Request(url)
>>> authstr = base64.encodestring("%s:%s" % (username, password))[:-1]
>>> req.add_header("Authorization", "Basic " + authstr)
>>> urllib2.urlopen(req).read()

Note that the above also works for Google apps users you just have to stick "/a/example.com" in the appropriate spot in the URL. Hopefully this will help out someone else who is hopelessly bashing Google's servers with failed login attempts ;-)

Several years ago I discovered a fantastic system monitor named conky. Over the years I've been tweaking my .conkyrc and it has really evolved into a little command center all on it's own. However, I read my e-mail through a mutt, and thus to check it I have to open mutt and look and see if I have any new mail. This is often obnoxious, because I'll either forget to check and miss something until later, or I'll check a lot and not get any e-mail. Today it occurred to me "hey, computers are good at repetitive tasks!", so I decided to automatically check my e-mail and render the results in conky. I also have heard lots of noise about libnotify, and how wonderful it is, so I decided to use that as well. The result is a script which checks a user's Gmail (using a password stored in a keyring), updates conky, and shows a libnotify notification if necessary. It also supports querying of arbitrary Gmail labels, allowing you to display unread counts for other e-mail addresses you might possibly have mapped to your Gmail account.

You can get your own copy to play around with if you like. It's fairly well documented, but I'll answer any questions anyone has. The dependencies (at least on Ubuntu) are python-notify python-keyring and your favorite of: python-keyring-gnome or python-keyring-kwallet.

I've released it under a beerware style license, in hopes that someone, somewhere, might find it useful. Feedback is appreciated!