Better window placement for every WM

I’m using xfce window manager since a while now. I’m only using the taskbar and the wm in fact. But i was looking for a feature for a long time. Xfce wm doesn’t support matched window placement (ala sawfish).

For example, there is no way to place gkrellm on every workspace, or tell Kmail for stick on workspace 2. Yesterday, while surfing, i discover devilspie.

Example:

<!-- For gkrellm: place on every desktop, and hide in the tasklist -->
<flurb name="gkrellm on all Desktops">
  <matchers>
    <matcher name="DevilsPieMatcherWindowName">
      <property name="application_name" value="gkrellm"/>
    </matcher>
  </matchers>
  <actions>
    <action name="DevilsPieActionSetWorkspace">
      <property name="pinned" value="TRUE"/>
    </action>
    <action name="DevilsPieActionHide">
      <property name="skip_tasklist" value="TRUE"/>
    </action>
  </actions>
</flurb>

<!-- stick Kmail on desktop 4 -->
<flurb>
  <matchers>
    <matcher name="DevilsPieMatcherWindowName">
      <property name="application_name" value="KMail"/>
    </matcher>
  </matchers>
  <actions>
    <action name="DevilsPieActionSetWorkspace">
      <property name="workspace_index" value="4"/>
    </action>
  </actions>
</flurb>

Comments of this blog

I really enjoy the quality of the comments published on this blog. Beside, my post aren’t really interesting for most people, this blog get a lot of feedback from the Python community, and Linux Users (mainly wifi related).

The main issue is that most of comments aren’t read by other people because they aren’t aware of the post. so I decided to make to comment RSS feed public.

The comment RSS feed is: http://www.larsen-b.com/comments_rss .
So take you favorite rss reader (bloglines is really fine, but slow right now) and add this :)

That’s why Bush will be the next president ..

Oh god, read this on slashdot:

  • "Geeks, what are you using for home defence ?",
  • first answer: "Buy a gun .."

Here in France, quite nobody have a gun, and guess what .. if you kill an intruder you will go in jail! and that’s fine. I’m wondering if you look at me as a love-and-peace smoker, but i’m not. That’s the law, you can imagine killing an intruder just because he has break your car ? I’m not.

I have the feeling that U.S.A is a country where:

  • you can kill for a cigarette
  • you have to believe in Jesus
  • vote for Bush
  • forbid cigarettes, alcohol..
  • eat junk found

Slahdotters are you killers ?

I think, I should ask for everybody reading this blog:
"Do you have a gun ?", and ban people that say: yes

Ouch !

I write a couple emails to the commercial service of Weemote, to buy some dV remote. This guys are pretty cools, and they are going to ship the weemote to France, even if they official doesn’t support it.

And tonight i receive this:

Just to let you know, we are being threatened by a major hurricane here in
South Florida so we may not be able to ship quickly. However, we will do our
best.

John

Plone too complicated ?

Who said that Plone is a too complicated ?

Check out the Plone Concept Map to be sure you know what you mean !

– Enjoy the road :)

Full featured SMTP in Python ?

In a recent post Ian explain he get a lot of trouble w/ the configuration of his mail system. I ran into the same issues a little time ago. Now i’m using postfix and courier-imap and maildrop to dispatch the mail between. This setup is really easy because Postfix just accept incomming mail, and maildrop deliver it in the right imap folders. By this way, i only have to tweak maildrop to add some users. And works fine with virtualhost. In my current setup, i’m using a home-made spambayes deamon (sb_global_server), to spam-tag all incomming mail. (even for virtual host users)

Now, i need to setup a mailing list manager… and issues are back again :( I read the mailman howto, and no, it doesn’t support virtual-hosting out-of-the-box. Play with a bunch of alias? no thanks… I can use another one of course, but intregation w/ postfix is not so-trivial for most of them.

So why not write a full featured SMTP daemon in Py? We will get:

  • a system that can scale easily ..
  • support for most of db-backend without a pain
  • can embed spambayes .. or any other filtering system in only one piece of code ..
  • only one users configuration (not to use LDAP or others to glue..)

Right now, if you want to have a good mail system you need to use a bunch of stuffs, written in a bunch of langage .. and use a bunch of tricks to glue each others… But everybody wants a nice/simple mail system ?

What ‘s wrong w/ Sony Vaio K115S Designers ?

Yes, i get another notebook on my desk. In fact, i buy a Sony Vaio K155S for a uncle. I won’t publish a long post about installing Linux on this, because he will use Windows XP. I spend some hours to install several things: OpenOffice, WinSCP, Mozilla etc etc ..

This notebook run really smoothly, it has great CPU, and video card. Playing RTC, is really fun!

It has been a long time since i played w/ XP. I now i’m remember why i don’t like it. I spend most of the time to ask me: my name, my company and my serial number. And yes, this is too intrusive for me… and I’m wasting my time! Every vendor, want to know everything .. my sex lenght? nobody ? :))

Anyway, despite I found this notebook really kool, I think the design is really bad:

  • Most of users are right hand mouse user? But Sony put the USB pub on left !!
  • Sony put the power supply connector on the right .. so the cable is under the DVD tray …
  • The battery capot sound cheap .. it make noise in fact :(
  • The PCMCIA seems to be cheap too, inserted card aren’t well lock ..

I’m currently writting a Knoppix DVD edition on this stuff to test :)

Linux Kernel Hackers remove the Philips USB Webcam support

Everybody hate binary kernel module: that’s clear, but sometimes that the only way to use some hardware.

This is really a bad news to all webcam users: USB kernel hackers decide to patch PWC kernel driver to avoid the use of the extended kernel module which is binary only. Check out this for more infos.

update: read this thread. Why Philips doesn’t provide spec ?

ATI Radeon on Linux / *BSD …

I always hated closed source drivers, and ATI is one of the big guy in video card. There is a petition online to ask ATI for specification or better drivers. I sign it because my ATI 9100IGP doesn’t have TVout support right now..

Expérience et Hip Hop

Je viens d’écouter la Session d’Expérience sur France Inter. Et whoa .. j’aimais bien les paroles de Diabologum mais là.. Le sound a pris un petit coup de HipHop .. et whao pas mal du tout. Je vous conseille tout particulièrement ‘Ils sont devenus fous’ (à 64min)