iXce’s blog

Months ago, we were setting up Shound.org‘s VPN and we were willing to produce a good looking map of the network status. We quickly chose weathermap4rrd, the software which is usually used for that kind of purpose. However the result looked graphically a bit rough, with aliases lines and so on, so that I had to fix it. I rewrote the rendering bits of the PHP version so that they use one of the PHP Cairo wrappers.

The usual sceenshot :

I bundled the whole stuff you might need to deploy it with a howto and additional infos (sorry, the docs are written in French, I will translate them when I’ll have the time to) into this tarball, or you might just grab the weathermap4rrd patch.

And here is Compiz Fusion 0.7.2, meant to be used with the freshly released Compiz 0.7.2.

The official announcement is available in Compiz Fusion Community list archives ; 0.7.2 should hopefully ship with the next release of your beloved distro

It’s now official, Enso, a really awesome tool that integrates smoothly into your desktop and enables you to perform several otherwise boring actions by just using your keyboard in a very simple way (check Humanized website for a better description), has just been open sourced under a BSD-like license. It’s written in Python and uses Cairo for the rendering, and the end result is really neat.
One of the great news of this is that it’s going to work on Linux (and probably even BSD’s, though it requires compositing & a compositing manager for full functionnality, which is (afaik) only available on FreeBSD) very soon :). I’ve got it working on my laptop right now, after some python-xlib/pycairo/pygtk love ; it just now needs some more testing and polish before it goes live, but it’s gonna be great

Long life Enso!

Huge thanks to Novell, OpenSuse and jpr for this awesome T-Shirt I love it!

Sorry, I look completely tired and I’ve got too much hair these days

It’s been almost a year that this project has started, more than six months it has been having a name, it was about time to get it a neat forum theme.

So, well, here it is, check it out on http://forum.compiz-fusion.org/ (it’s not enabled-by-default right now, so you’ll have to select it using the style switcher at the bottom of the page). Please report any bug (there’s quite a high probability some icons will still be missing) in the appropriate forum, ie Forum/Wiki feedback.
Here is a couple of screenshots:

Huge thanks to Rico “RYX” Pfaus for the base layout, to Patrick “marex” Niklaus as well as the gnome-icon-theme team for the neat icons, and to onestone, Fyda and crdlb for the useful feedback, it was highly helpful. May I auto-congratulate myself for actually putting the bits together into an usable theme? *cough*

The project homepage theme is ready as well, we’re just waiting for some minor technical details to have it go live. The wiki will get a similar theme someday as well (I can’t really promiss anything right now, I’m damn busy)

Wrote a quick python script for blender to generate paraboloïds a while ago. Feared I might have lost them. Posting them here today. Could be reused as a base for any parametric surface as well. Three flavours included. Have fun.

Hyperboloic Paraboloid Mesh Script
Paraboloid Mesh Script (with basis)
Paraboloid Mesh Script (circular)

Si vous le rencontrez un jour, il vous dira que l’ascenseur de l’hôtel de Crillon l’a amené plus haut, beaucoup plus haut qu’il n’aurait pu l’imaginer. Il vous dira aussi qu’il était parti chercher l’âme d’un vieil Indien, et que c’est la sienne qu’il a trouvée.

English:
If you ever meet him, he’ll tell you that Crillon Hotel’s lift brought him higher, much higher than he could have thought. He’ll also tell you that he left to search for an old Indian’s soul, and that he found his own.

Dear Google friend,

Could you please keep this little tip safe and warm?
If your friendly Xen hypervisor stops outputting during the boot process at some point and completely freezes, or just stops until you get X or so, just add “console=vga vga=keep” to your Xen kernel line in your GRUB configuration, so that it looks like this:

title Xen 3.1
root (hd0,4)
kernel /xen-3.1.gz console=vga vga=keep noreboot
module /vmlinuz-2.6.19-4-generic root=/dev/mapper/lvm-root ro console=tty0
module /initrd.img-2.6.19-4-generic


Thanks dear.

Christof: You can speak. I can hear you.
Truman: Who are you?
Christof: I am the creator… of a television show that gives hope and joy and inspiration to millions.
Truman: And who am I?
Christof: You’re the star.
Truman: Was nothing real?
Christof: You were real. That’s what made you so good to watch. Listen to me, Truman. There’s no more truth out there than there is in the world I created for you. The same lies, the same deceit. But in my world, you have nothing to fear. I know you better than you know yourself.

The Truman Show

I discovered pamusb a few days ago (actually, I had already heard about it, but never puzzled to try it), and WOW it’s great! In case you wouldn’t have guessed it yet, it lets you use an USB drive or a removable media (SD cars or so), as a mean of authentication for any pam-based application (su/sudo, keyrings, screensaver…). The setup is damn easy (it’s all about adding one line to a file in /etc/pam.d, typing two commands and adding an agent run on every session), and the whole thing works damn well.
It’s just really cool to just have to unplug an usb key to lock my laptop and replug it to unlock it, or to insert it upon login or… It’s just greatly useful. I’m still a bit reluctant to make it “required” and not just “sufficient”. It’d just be awful to be unable to login because I lose it or so…

Oh, just a little tip, to avoid “Unsafe disk removal”, just add the drive to /etc/fstab (you can reference it by label) and make it readonly and mountable by user.
LABEL=MY-KEY /media/auth vfat ro,defaults,user,noauto 0 0If you want to rename *your key, just head to the RenameUSBDrive article in Ubuntu Documentation

Here are 0.4.2 debs for hardy (which currently only has 0.4.0):

• libpamusb 0.4.2 deb for hardy
• pamusb-tools deb for hardy

And a few handy links:

• Neat howto for debian based distros
• pamusb homepage
• Andrea Luzzardi’s blog (pamusb author)