BigSmoke

Smokes your problems, coughs fresh air.

Author: Rowan Rodrik (Page 13 of 27)

Rowan is mainly a writer. This blog here is a dumping ground for miscellaneous stuff that he just needs to get out of his head. He is way more passionate about the subjects he writes about on Sapiens Habitat: the connections between humans, each other, and to nature, including their human nature.

If you are dreaming of a holiday in the forests of Drenthe (the Netherlands), look no further than “De Schuilplaats”: a beautiful vacation home, around which Rowan maintains a magnificent ecological garden and a private heather field, brimming with biological diversity.

FlashMQ is a business that offers managed MQTT hosting and other services that Rowan co-founded with Jeroen and Wiebe.

Awesome window manager

May 2, 2010 /

I’m officially a convert. I finally went from a floating-only window manager to a tiling window manager. And it does floating too! Awesome seems to be everything that Window Maker just couldn’t be for me.

For a very long time I’ve known that a tiling WM would probably be nicer for me, but there were quite a few to choose from. After looking at the likes of Ion, I ended up looking at Ratpoison when I noticed that the successor to Ratpoison, StumpWM, was based on LISP. Since I never could get the hang of Emacs, this looked like another excellent opportunity to learn LISP.

Sadly, StumpWM is quite a piece of crap with only a very limited feature set and some initial stumbling blocks I just couldn’t get over. My first enthusiasm was tempered by some random errors and my inability to configure it in such a way that I could use my Windows key (Mod4) instead of the GNU Screen like Ctrl-f prefix. It turned out that I couldjust the Mod4 modifier. StumpWM seemed to insist on me using a kind of prefix made of any number of modifiers combined with a regular key.

Luckily, I came across Awesome, which, until now, really seems awesome.

The default configuration comes with a lot of niceness right away.

One thing I particularly like are its default key bindings, mostly because they all use some combination of the Windows/Mod4 key. Some defaults are even exactly the same as I had configured them in Window Maker, such as Mod4-r to type the name of a program to execute and Mod-1 through Mod-9 to switch between Workspaces called tags in Awesome. For as far as the key bindings are different, I actually like them more than what I’ve used before. Most of the key bindings, however, are of course new because they simply weren’t available in Window Maker (or other tiling window managers), often much to my chagrin.

I thought that when switching to a tiling window manager, I’d probably have to get something like Gkrellm for my system monitors and system tray and such, but Awesome actually sports many of these. The Gentoo default configuration even has the system tray already enabled in the statusbar. This is particularly nice because of the crappyness of the available systray DockApps for Window Maker that I had gotten used to.

I’m not yet done playing with Awesome. I like that I probably will never stop tuning it to my preferences and the Lua configuration format means I don’t have to. It’s a modern window manager which supports the latest FreeDesktop standards and it is infinitely lean, mean and flexible. What’s not to like? I’ll comment when I find out. 😉

MediaWiki thumb.php and rewrite rules

March 7, 2010 /

May, last year, I created an empty draft for this post, because, around that time, I had gone through quite some effort before I got thumbnails for foreign file repos working just right. Now, I’m taking a dive into my MediaWiki working dirs in preparation of the creation of a separate development environment, so it’s a good moment to rehash the past experience (almost as good as when I’d have done it right away).

This is how I configured the foreign file repo to be able to use images uploaded to the English wiki from the Dutch wiki:

$wgHashedUploadDirectory = false;
 
$wgForeignFileRepos[] = array(
    'class' => 'ForeignDBRepo',
    'name' => 'en',
    'url' => "http://wiki.hardwood-investments.net/media",
    'hashLevels' => 0,
    //'thumbScriptUrl' => "http://wiki.hardwood-investments.net/thumb.php",
    'transformVia404' => true,//!$wgGenerateThumbnailOnParse,
    'dbType' => $wgDBtype,
    'dbServer' => $wgDBserver,
    'dbUser' => $wgDBuser,
    'dbPassword' => $wgDBpassword,
    'dbName' => 'hardwood',
    'tablePrefix' => 'mw_',
    'hasSharedCache' => false,
    'descBaseUrl' => 'http://wiki.hardwood-investments.net/Image:',
    'fetchDescription' => false
);

To make thumbnails be generated by thumb.php on request I added the following to my .htaccess at the other end (and visa versa, because the Dutch wiki actually contains most of the images):

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^media/thumb/([^/]+)/([0-9]+)px-.*$ /thumb.php?f=$1&width=$2 [L,QSA]

Learning PC assembly language

February 18, 2010 /

Over the years, I’ve made a few half-hearted stabs at learning assembly language. In doing so I’ve discovered this great PC Assembly Language textbook by Paul Carter. Last October, Halfgaar and me took this free book as a starting point to rediscover the joy of programming.

Bareboot with ugly colors

Bareboot with ugly colors

Today, I’m getting reacquainted with what we did last fall. I’m also looking at some stuff that Halfgaar added without me. After fetching and merging his latest changes, I’m now greeted by the image of a nude person of the female persuasion with a somewhat psychedelic color palette.

The first goal of our assembly learning project was to have a bootable beauty, a simple disk-image of sorts which we can boot with Bochs or another emulator to display an image of a girl. Halfgaar has the lead because he crafted an 8-bit BMP image (with what he thought to be a proper color index), and he modified our code to traverse and display the image pixel by pixel.

Now I want to find out why the color palette of the image doesn’t quite match the BIOS’ palette, but, while I know the latter must be somewhere on Wikipedia, I’m having trouble finding it again… I can’t even find the nicely organized list of all the BIOS interrupts and arguments which we used to learn how to draw colored pixels. I’m left wishing that I wrote this post while I still knew where to find all this information.

Can you save me some googling, Halfgaar?

Very, very old homepage

February 15, 2010 /

Today, in the images-that-I-stumble-upon-somewhere category: an image of a very old homepage that I hosted at my ISP back in the day:

Old bigsmoke @Home homepage

I’m not even entirely sure if I was already pulling this stuff together with XSLT. Probably I was, because I vaguely remember that this was one of the alternate CSS styles and I can’t imagine myself adding more than one <link> tag to every source file. 😉 (Unlike a sense of esthetics, laziness is deeply ingrained in every somewhat decent programmer.)

Blog competition

February 15, 2010 /

Wiebe’s posting of the two-hundred-and-first post, made me think of this image of the front page I made a short while after the new design went life. The image clearly shows that we have a little competition thing going on in that we both seem to be pretty determined to have our face dominate the home-page. 😛

WordPress pretty pagination plugin

February 13, 2010 /

During the recent redesign of my blog, I decided that I wanted to have pretty pagination with numbers instead of the WordPress default Older/Newer Posts links. The plugin I decided to use was WP Page Numbers by Jens Törnell.

This is how the pagination for page one of my home looks now:

WP Page Numbers on page 1

For page six you can see more of what the plugin can do:

WP Page Numbers on page 6

And finally…

WP Page Numbers on page 20

Do I have twenty pages of posts already?

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