Advanced notification options

Using the 'Contact came online' event as an example, if you run the following as your 'script', inserting the name of a contact using the %sname variable, it looks like this:

notify-send "%sname is now online" -i skype

And for messages, you can use %smessage to insert the Skype message into a notification popup.

notify-send "%sname" "%smessage" -i skype

Skype message received

Much better!

A list of available variables is here.

gmailpopup 

My script also stores your password hashed (unlike some of the alternatives in Software Centre), in a hidden file in your /home.

Installation

To install, run the following:

sudo apt-get install curl gnome-gmail
wget -q -O ~/gmailpopup http://ukstokes.com/scripts/gmailpopup
chmod +x ~/gmailpopup
sudo cp ~/gmailpopup /usr/bin

To configure it just type gmailpopup in a terminal and enter your Gmail address (GApps domains also supported) and password. If you have accidentally fat fingered the password and get an error, you can start again with gmailpopup --reconfigure. On subsequent runs you won't get a popup unless your unread email is different from last time.

This doesn't seem to run if inserted into the crontab. But it works fine if this is added as a startup application:

while true; do ~/bin/gmailpopup && sleep 1m; done &

Of course, this doesn't just work on Ubuntu. Any distro which uses libnotify will do. By the way the gnome-gmail package is just required for the Gmail icon. There is probably a better way of doing that, which I'll have a think about, but installing gnome-gmail has the added advantage of making Gmail your default mail client for mailto links etc. If that is not what you want, go to the "Default Applications" in "System Info" to set it back.

Thats it. Leave me a comment and let me know what you think!

Tip 1: Maximise and Minimise

If you thought Ubuntu were naughty moving the buttons to the left, you aint seen nothing. Gnome completely removed the maximise and minimise buttons. To get them back run the following (as you, not using sudo or su):

gconftool-2 -s -t string /desktop/gnome/shell/windows/button_layout ":minimize,maximize,close"

To see the changes press ALT+F2, press 'r', and hit enter. Your shell will reload without closing any apps and the extensions will be applied.

Tip 2: Remove the accessibility icon from the top panel

This is done by installing the following Gnome 3 extension:

su -c 'yum install gnome-shell-extension-remove-accessibility-icon'

Tip 3: Enable 'Power off' in the status menu

Usually you have to hold ALT to see this, which is frankly bullshit. Luckily this is also easily remedied by installing an extension.

su -c 'yum install gnome-shell-extensions-alternative-status-menu'

Tip 4: Better window management

I don't really like the 'dock' for managing background applications which appears inside the activities area. My advice is to install Docky. Other docks are available such as avant window manager, but I think Docky is the best.

su -c 'yum install docky'

Edit: Docky crashes A LOT for me, on both F15 machines. I am going to try an alternative.

Tip 5: Add programs to 'startup applications'

The dialog box was removed from the settings screen. You can access it by pressing ALT+F2 and typing gnome-session-properties into the box.

Tip 6: Enable desktop icons/shortcuts

Another classic, you can't create shortcuts ANYWHERE in Gnome 3. WTF. But, there is a nifty program in the yum repos called gnome-tweak-tool that can fix that. Install it and then launch 'Tweak Advanced Settings' from the apps menu, then switch 'Have file manager manage the desktop' to ON.

su -c 'yum install gnome-tweak-tool'

Tip 7: Add icons

You might want to add icons for missing things like the gnome-session-properties tool. If you yum install 'alacarte' you get a menu editor (straight from Gnome 2) to create your missing shortcut items.

Tip 8: Change the ALT+TAB behaviour

Alt+Tab changed slightly in Gnome 3. If you have multiple windows of the same type open, for example 2 terminal windows, when you alt tab you only see one of them. Then when you hover over the item in Alt+Tab, the multiple instances are shown. I am indifferent about this but if you want to restore Window based, rather than Application based Alt+Tab, there is another extension to install:

su -c 'yum install gnome-shell-extensions-alternate-tab'

Edit: This extension causes my shell to crash. I wouldn't recommend it. ]]> http://ukstokes.com/blog/2011/07/19/living-with-gnome-3/feed/ 1 http://ukstokes.com/blog/2011/07/19/living-with-gnome-3/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Ukstokescom/~3/qK2MMuR-O0c/ http://ukstokes.com/blog/2011/06/15/htc-you-fail/#comments Wed, 15 Jun 2011 06:21:38 +0000 ben http://ukstokes.com/blog/?p=835 I'm the owner of a popular Android phone from yesteryear, the HTC Desire. It's been out for almost exactly one year from today and originally shipped with Eclair (Android 2.1), and was later updated to Froyo (2.2).

HTC Desire

HTC just announced via facebook that they will not be updating the HTC Desire any longer. Apparently it doesn't have enough storage space for Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) + HTC Sense 3.0. There are a few angry ways that users could react to this.

First of all, there is the argument that HTC are only refusing to upgrade the Desire because they want users to upgrade to new handsets. Extending the lifetime of their old phones doesn't make them any money. This is at the cost of customer satisfaction though, and it's sad because most users will have 2 year contracts, and like me, had hoped that updates would at least carry on for the length of your contract since this was one of HTC's flagship phones. I've owned my phone for a whole year already, but I would be pretty pissed off if I had bought it recently to then discover HTC had abandoned it. What version of Android will be out one year from now, and what will the resale value of your Desire be if the Android version is 18 months out of date?

Secondly, the Nexus One, which is basically a Desire in a different shell with a trackball, is quite capable of running Android 2.3. Google pushed it out a few months ago.  So it seems to be clear that the problem is HTC Sense, it has become too bloated and no longer fits on the small storage of the Desire. In an ideal world they should give us the upgrade option of Android 2.3 without Sense.

Thirdly, there are TONS of Android 2.3 roms that include HTC Sense on XDA. The fact that these exist and work perfectly well as a daily rom helps to argue the point that HTC's reasons for abandoning the Desire are a load of crap. Whether you root or not, you can see that this phone is capable of running Gingerbread.

Finally, there are the rooters. They don't care; they have been running Android 2.3 on the Desire for 6 months already. But it's been a tough journey - HTC went out of their way to lock the bootloader and the nand (storage), to make flashing custom roms difficult. Without groups like AlphaRev we would not have freedom to install whatever we like on our Desires and we would be chained to Froyo for the lifetime of our phones. It's sad because shouldn't have to be this way. Normal users will not hack their phones to run CyanogenMod. They will be stuck on Froyo for the remaining lifetime of their phones. They won't get any of the new features of Android, bug fixes, or security updates, and to me that just seems wrong.

Update: Apparently HTC will bring Gingerbread to the Desire after all. We'll see.

If you md5sum a bunch of files, you get this kind of output:

[ben@minitron ~]$ md5sum *.txt
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e  myfile.txt
cdbd2b665e14f8803d6bddc80bff1402  omg.txt
6353f9b2e7c47f73b48eef4544968bcd  otherfile.txt

I wanted to iterate through a list of files and their md5sums using a for loop, run a test and then take some action based on the result. But my script kept throwing unexpected output. I realised the for loop was parsing each word, rather than each line because of the spaces.

[ben@minitron ~]$ for line in $(md5sum *.txt); do
echo $line; done
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
myfile.txt
cdbd2b665e14f8803d6bddc80bff1402
omg.txt
6353f9b2e7c47f73b48eef4544968bcd
otherfile.txt

Sometimes putting spaces around variables can help bash to resolve values in the right way, but here it caused all line breaks to be removed:

[ben@minitron ~]$ for line in "$(md5sum *.txt)"; do echo $line; done
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e myfile.txt cdbd2b665e14f8803d6bddc80bff1402 omg.txt 6353f9b2e7c47f73b48eef4544968bcd otherfile.txt

I needed to preserve the original line breaks in order for my script to make sense of which md5sum matched up to which file. There are a couple of ways to do this. One possible solution is to use tr to translate the spaces into a different character:

[ben@minitron ~]$ for line in $(md5sum *.txt | tr " " :); do
echo $line; done
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e::myfile.txt
cdbd2b665e14f8803d6bddc80bff1402::omg.txt
6353f9b2e7c47f73b48eef4544968bcd::otherfile.txt

But for some reason md5sum uses 2 spaces for a field separator, if you wanted just one character between the md5sum and the filename, you could go a little more advanced:

[ben@minitron ~]$ for file in *.txt; do
echo -n "$file:";md5sum $file | cut -d " " -f1 ; done
myfile.txt:d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
omg.txt:cdbd2b665e14f8803d6bddc80bff1402
otherfile.txt:6353f9b2e7c47f73b48eef4544968bcd

This does give the output in the other way round but was good enough for me to make my script work.

Why Samsung N210?

It's undeniable the Next Big Thing is tablets. I love new tech and I kind of want an Android Honeycomb tab, but they are still waaaay over priced. I considered getting an iPad as Android tabs are still only just coming of age, but in the end I could not really justify double the cost of a netbook just for an alternate form factor and interface ... in my head I weighed up the following benefits of a netbook:

• More storage. The Samsung N210 has a 250Gb hard drive, big enough to fit all of my music and movies and still have extra room for iPlayer downloads - in fact it acts as backup for my desktop machine.
• Better for typing. For example, writing this blog post.
• Better for hacking. I guess this is debatable, since Android is a hackable platform.
• A more practical on call companion. I can install work tools and vpn client and use it to rdp to my desktop. This can also be done from a tablet OS, but controling a mouse-driven desktop with fingers is tricky. Plus on a tablet when you bring up the keyboard, half of your screen is obscured.
• Price. Netbooks are half the cost.

There are possibly a few reasons why a tablet would be better.

• More convenient during rush hour commuting. You can stand up and pull it from your bag to read or watch a movie.
• Battery life. I get about 6 hours from my netbook.  iPad  and competitors can go for about 9 hours I think.
• Better interface. Another debatable one, most would agree that new tablet interfaces are pretty slick though.
• More fun / better for gaming. But I don't really play games that much.
• Portability. A tablet is marginally smaller and lighter.

I think I am just not 100% sold on the tablet form factor yet, perhaps I will change my mind when tablets are more affordable.

So back to the N210 - by current netbook standards it pretty much falls into line with an Atom 1.6Ghz hyper threaded processor and 1Gb of RAM (I also purchased the 2Gb DIMM option from Amazon for £30). It only really sets itself apart from other similar netbooks by having a matt screen rather than glossy, which makes it more readable and less reflective in sunlight. I am averaging just over 6 hours of battery life between charges, this is with wireless and bluetooth always on, and usually with music streaming to bluetooth headphones or with video playing at full screen. The battery life is just below advertised but I am pleased with it. Amazon were selling it for just over £200 a few months ago because the Samsung were about to launch the successor to the N210 (which is pretty similar in specs but has a dual-core Atom chip).

Why Fedora?

In my early days with Linux I hopped between distros a lot, but I had settled on Ubuntu and been a Ubuntu user until recently. But when I gave Ubuntu netbook remix (UNR) a test drive for a week I absolutely hated it. The UNR desktop called 'Unity' is a watered down experience for a power user, I couldn't even add an icon to the launcher bar and was frustrated that things like the file manager were difficult to access.

I don't resist change if there is good reason for it but I am getting annoyed by Ubuntu's deviation from standard conventions ... moving the close/maximise/minimise buttons to the left for no reason was their first bizarre move, and now moving the desktop experience to Unity on all Ubuntu installations has pretty much ended my interest in them.

A second reason, is since I use CentOS at work I thought I might get some technology previews by using it's upstream contributor - Fedora. I'll be able to get familiar with things like SystemD before they trickle down to Red Hat and derivatives.

I've also decided to use the traditional Gnome desktop rather than a netbook optimised environment, accepting that it will have a slightly bigger memory footprint than others - since this shoudn't be an issue for me with the 2b RAM upgrade.

Configuration

Like most netbooks the N210 doesn't have a CD tray, so I used Unetbootin to make a Fedora 14 USB stick and booted from that. And I was surprised to find almost everything worked from a fresh install! Desktop Linux has really come a long way since I first got my feet wet in 2005 ...

I noticed the Fn keys did not work, but the Fn volume control started working after I had updated all packages. The Fn controls for screen brightness were the only ones still not working, that was fixed by following instructions here and rebooting. The only major failure was the WiFi card which was not detected. The N210 uses a Realtek RTL8192E which is in the staging tree of the Fedora kernel, however rather than recompiling the kernel I chose to compile the driver from source as it seemed like less effort. The driver source can be found here - installing is straightforward:

su -
tar fzxv rtl8192e_linux_2.6.0014.0401.2010.tar.gz
cd rtl8192e_linux_2.6.0014.0401.2010
make
make install
reboot

Note: WiFI drivers will break if the kernel is updated. Just return to your source directory and rebuild again (make && make install) and it will be fixed. Or select to skip updates to the kernel package.

I was surprised to learn the touchpad on most Samsung netbooks are multitouch capable and let you use 2 fingered gestures for scrolling. To enable that in Fedora add the following to a file, make it executable and then set it as a startup application in the gnome preferences menu:

synclient VertTwoFingerScroll=1
synclient HorizTwoFingerScroll=1
synclient EmulateTwoFingerMinW=5
synclient EmulateTwoFingerMinZ=48

Credit goes to here for that discovery. Failing that, just enable the "edge scrolling" feature in Gnome, which lets you scroll up and down using the right-hand edge of the touchpad.

Sounds good to me

I use Nokia BH-905 stereo bluetooth headphones paired with the netbook for music and video. This actually works out of the box, but A2DP is not enabled by default. After pairing your headset you have to open the Sound preferences dialog, on the Hardware tab choose A2DP, and on the Output tab you should then see you can select Stereo next to the headset. This is then remembered the next time you reboot.

Nokia BH-905

With all the hardware problems sorted, the biggest problem in Fedora is with missing codecs for my movie files, I guess I should have known what I was getting into there with Fedora ... There isn't a package in the Fedora repos (like ubuntu-restricted-extras)  that sorts out codecs in one big hit. The bundled "Movie Player" causes selinux security failures if you try to let it find codecs automatically, and if you disable selinux and try again you will just get a Unable to find codecs message which links you to the fedora FAQ (it basically says go and use Google, you're on your own).

So a bit of a FAIL by Fedora there, the codec discovery feature from "Movie Player" is basically completely broken and may as well not even be there. Oh well.

Making it look pretty

The standard Gnome desktop on Fedora is plain and simple and doesn't look very spectacular. I was looking for netbook optimised GTK themes and came across the faenza icons set (and the bokeh effect wallpaper from the same page), and Equinox GTK theme for Gnome which look great. I also scrapped the bottom panel and replaced it with Docky for window switching and app launching.

My Desktop

I use VLC as my media player for Video as it plays any file format without separate codec packages to be installed. I found a dark theme for VLC on their site that goes with my desktop theme.

The Plymouth boot screen was defaulting to an ugly failsafe mode. I just needed to rebuild my initrd and it looked good after that. I installed the Fedora Spinfinity theme which looks pretty good.

Wrap up
Time to wrap up as this is already getting a bit waffly. I'm pleased with my Samsung N210. It's no powerhouse but with F14 installed it certainly runs faster than it did with the factory installed Windows 7 image. With a bit of tweaking everything in Fedora 14 is supported, and I think it's worth the effort. If you get stuck there is loads of support available. And with the regular releases you can ensure you're running the latest and greatest of everything, if like me, you're into that sort of thing.

1. Cycle Hire Widget - Market Link

This is quite a cool little app, despite the name there is more to it than just a widget. The widget hides under a homescreen icon of an Android riding a bike. When tapped, it reveals the directions of the 3 nearest docks, colour coded, the colours showing whether you can get a bike or a slot at the locations. This is very handy if you know your way around and can know which 3 docks it's pointing to.

Home screen widget, map view, and list view

You can also view the docks in a list view, which is a relief as waiting for a) the map to build and b) the location/gps lock can be a bit tedious. I also discovered you can add docks to a list of favorites, if you pay for the premium version. I will probably do this as I am quite a fan. In terms of looks and usability, it rates quite high. The interface is obvious and easy to use. The dock data also seems to be accurate and up to date.

2. SpotCycle - Market Link

I quite like SpotCycle, this is the one I've ended up using the most over the last few weeks, mostly because of the favorite docks lists. I guess most people in the cycle scheme are like me and visit the same docks every day. I've found going to a list of these is always going to be quicker than opening a map view, waiting for the map data to load, waiting for location and GPS lock, etc. I have to admit though, I had to spend some time to figure out how to create the groups for storing favorites. Those options are hidden away in a place where you don't expect.

SpotCycle: Favorites and Map views

The map view is pretty decent, it shows you circles of varying sizes and shades of red, to denote availability of bikes or docks. The data has always been up to date with this app, I've never turned up and been completely surprised at how wrong it was. A few criticisms: sometimes it stays on the splash screen for an unacceptable long time. Not sure what it's busy doing, maybe getting location data or refreshing the lists, but it's quite annoying. It also frequently says "Can't get cities list, make sure you are connected to the Internet" - well, it's a smartphone, I am always connected to the Internet! Another annoyance is it throws errors into the notification area when it can't update the dock data, to be honest I don't really want to see those. I would prefer it if could just try again later and keep quiet about it. Over all I like it though, it's very configurable and despite annoyances it's reliable, and offers a lot of features. Being able to keep lists of favorites is a big win.

3. London Cycle Hire Live - Market Link

Your mileage may vary, but I didn't really have success with this app. It only has 2 stars in the Market which I guess is a fairly accurate measure of it's quality. It worked sometimes, but usually crashed with the error in the screenshot below. I have had apps Force Close on me before, but never seen anything like this.

Holy crap.

This may be worth coming back to if the dev is still working on it, I didn't spend much more time checking it out though.

4. Boris Bikes Live - Market Link

I like the eye-catching icon of our beloved Mayor of London riding the bike, but sadly you don't get a good first impression when you open this app. The landing screen is ugly as hell, the icons are lousy. Putting its initial appearance to one side though, the functionality should be pretty good. It basically offers a map, a list of docks ordered by proximity, list of favorites, and a timer (which is not yet implemented) so you can keep an eye on your journey times (because journeys that take less than 30 minutes are free). The presentation in the rest of the app is fine, and from the list views you can select a dock and get directions to it.

Boris Bikes Live. It's got a nice icon.

With those functions it should really tick the boxes, but I seem to have issues with the bike data being out of date. The last thing you need to to turn up to dock your bike and unexpectedly find all the slots are taken. The update interval is not configurable so I don't think there's much that can be done about it. For that reason and because of the lack of aesthetics, I kept falling back to SpotCycle.

5. London Cycle Hire - Market Link

This is a paid for app. It's only £1.50 but to be honest is not really worth it. Although it's quite well presented, it really just consists of a map with the docks overlayed over the top, but they aren't colour coded or anything like that so at a glance you really can't see any helpful data apart from the location. Clicking on the dock locations then shows you the live data and a button which plots a route there from your current location.

More of the same, but more expensive.

I emailed the dev and they said they are actively working on this app and they intend to release an updated version which has user maintained lists. Until then I guess I will use something else.

Conclusion

My testing is by no means exhaustive, but so far I reckon SpotCycle and Cycle Hire Widget are the best. Cycle Hire Widget probably has an easier to use interface, but once you have SpotCycle set up with your favorite groups, you will rarely need to use anything else.

Notes
One thing I have noticed with command line Java utilities, is they always output to stdErr. So if you want to grep or awk the output of the commands you have to redirect that to stdIn first, hence the "2>&1".

• Replace user:pass with the JMX username and password set in jmx.properties
• Replace server with the first part of your server name
• Replace the port numbers with the JMX ports your servers are using.
• Finally you'll need to change the paths to the log file and the JMX client.
• The variables "one","three", "five" and "seven" can be changed to anything you want. It makes sense to call them this in my environment.

#!/bin/bash
while true; do

 export now=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)
 export log=/path/to/ajp_all_tomcat_${now}.log
  if [ ! -f $log ]; then
   echo -n "Start AJP thread count log
Time" > $log;
   for s in $(seq -w 1 30); do for i in 1 3 5 7; do echo -n ",server${s}tc0${i}" >> $log; done; done
   echo >> $log
  fi

 echo -n $(date +%H:%M:%S) >> $log
 for s in $(seq -w 1 30); do
  export one=$(/usr/bin/java -jar /path/to/cmdline-jmxclient-0.10.3.jar user:pass server${s}:7601 "Catalina:type=ThreadPool,name=ajp-7501" currentThreadsBusy 2>&1 | awk '{print $6}')
  export three=$(/usr/bin/java -jar /path/to/cmdline-jmxclient-0.10.3.jar user:pass server${s}:7603 "Catalina:type=ThreadPool,name=ajp-7503" currentThreadsBusy 2>&1 | awk '{print $6}')
  export five=$(/usr/bin/java -jar /path/to/cmdline-jmxclient-0.10.3.jar user:pass server${s}:7605 "Catalina:type=ThreadPool,name=ajp-7505" currentThreadsBusy 2>&1 | awk '{print $6}')
  export seven=$(/usr/bin/java -jar /path/to/cmdline-jmxclient-0.10.3.jar user:pass server${s}:7607 "Catalina:type=ThreadPool,name=ajp-7507" currentThreadsBusy 2>&1 | awk '{print $6}')
  echo -n ",$one,$three,$five,$seven" >> $log
 done
 echo >> $log

done

Add the following to the end of your .bash_profile:

export DISPLAY=$(who am i | awk -F "(" {'print $2'} | awk -F "." {'print $1'}):0.0

Then on my Windows 7 laptop, I installed xming and configured xlaunch to start automatically when the computer is started (with the "no access control" box ticked).

Now I can just SSH to servers and launch X apps, and they appear on my desktop with no configuration required.