Blog
Something I have been promising for many months has finally happened...
We've been going backwards and forwards with so-called "release candidates"
for 0.8 that were really betas or new versions, I managed eight!
I have been having repeated problems where my desktop just powers off if its
overloaded. Its an Athlon XP 2400 and the CPU temperature was showing 79
degrees C and up (sometimes 129 degrees but I'm sure that was a bad
reading...)
Danielle and I went to the dentist today for the first time in around 10
We had a great
Bug Day
for the
Translate Toolkit.
I've set up a copy of
Zimbra, an open
source messenging server with a beautiful AJAX
webmail and calendar client
on a local machine. Planned a while ago to move my mail to an IMAP server with a nice
webmail frontend so it can be accessed from more than one place, and Zimbra seems
like the best of the bunch.
Was excited around Christmas to see
the Jingle signalling protocol
for Voice over IP through Jabber, which was jointly authored by Google and JSF
people and is used by
Google Talk.
Had an OpenOffice.org building day yesterday. Up to four concurrent builds. My
Fedora machine seems to overheat in such a circumstance and turn itself off
poof! Then won't turn on again for a few minutes. Frustrating.
All 11 South African locales
In about May I read about
Ndiyo, a
non-profit that's making ultra-thin clients called
Nivo (Network-In, Video-Out).
They're basically designing an FPGA that can support VNC or RDP and so creates
a tiny little box that has a network connection, keyboard and mouse
connectors, and a VGA out. Some of the team are the original VNC developers,
which must help.
SessionSaver is the most useful extension I know of for Firefox, and it's surprising it doesn't have a real home - it seems it gets passed from person to person to fix things up for different releases.
Basically it records the set of windows and tabs you have open in Firefox (including the history etc) so that if you quit or the browser crashes, they can be restored on startup (you can also save named sessions and switch between them). (It stores this in prefs.js which is arguably not the best for performance but seems to work fine without corruption).
Now, I just crashed my X server for some inexplicable reason. Which led me to think again to myself,
I wish I had a SessionSaver for Konsole. I tend to use both Firefox and Konsole as task lists - web pages I must look at / process, shell operations I'm busy doing.
A long time ago I coded up a Python program to periodically dump the different tabs open in Konsole along with the processes running in them, current directories and open files. The idea being you can run this in a cron job and at least be able to see what was happening if Konsole crashes rather than losing track.
I've now fixed this up and got it running again. It could do with improvement but it definitely counts as helpful. The file is at
http://davidf.sjsoft.com/files/konsolesessions.py and it gets run like this in a cron job:
export DISPLAY=:0.0
su username -c "python2.4 -m konsolesessions --html --output" 2>&1 | tee -a /tmp/konsole.log
This then produces an index of konsole sessions in /home/username/konsolelog/index.html, each of which has its own html file like this:
Konsole session at Mon Dec 5 16:47:02 2005