Poor-man's Bells

One of the things the Queen and I have been trying to do is get everyone on the same schedule and to have a family routine around that schedule... I stole a page from the monastic play-book and setup bells to ring at 0900, 1200, 1500, 1800 and 2100.  I had tried to find a simple little program that would let me do this, but there were none that didn't either cost $20USD or suck emensely, so I cooked-up a quick little batch file I run on our media-center PC:

@echo off
net use t: \\lnx-dc1\shared
t:\bin\nircmd.exe mutesysvolume 0
t:\bin\nircmd.exe setsysvolume 32768
"C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" --qt-start-minimized --no-repeat t:\sounds\bells.wav vlc://quit
net use t: /delete /y

So, all I do is have this little script execute via the Windows Task Scheduler at the desired times, and it works like a champ!

My thought was that the 0900 bell would be our official "start of the day" bell, the 1200 bell would be lunch time, 1500 would be mid-day, and 1800 is dinner.  At 2100, its time to head for bed.  One could easily use this method to create school bells for their home-school (to mark breaks, and such) or to mark the passage of the Liturgical Hours, etc...  And, its totally free.  I used NirCmd and VLC as well as a WAV of bells I found on-line.

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python: XML-RPC over SSL

For quite some time I have been looking at writing a simple management agent that is cross-platform, extensible and secure.  My primary interest is that there are often times where I would like a means of performing some task on a remote system, without the necessity of actually connecting to those systems.  My thinking on this little project really got ratcheted into high-gear when I was studying for one of my recent certifications, wherein I was studying the architecture of an enterprise management platform.

For my part, I have the framework of the server in place, and will be fleshing-out the bits to transport and execute arbitrary plugins/modules and configurations.  Once that's done, the sky is basically the limit.

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LastPass

If you haven't switched over to LastPass, you need to, and NOW.  This is the coolest password manager I've ever seen.

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vSphere on Windows 7

Whew! Running the vSphere client on Windows 7 was getting to be a bit of a dire need... got it sorted with some help from the interwebs.

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Times Person of the Year

This morning, the first thing I heard when I got in the car was a report from NPR about Ben Bernanke being named as Time's Person of the Year. My immediate response was the same as when I had heard that Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. "Really?"

As I sat, listening to the litany of blessings Mr. Bernanke has bestowed upon the whole of Western Civilization -- including navigating one of the most difficult financial eras in history. Okay, I'll admit that Poor Old Ben inherited something of a shit-storm, but in the same token, I don't think that the "landing" of this economy has been as well as it could have been. Moreover, the whole "bailout" is counter to everything we hold sacred as a free-market/enterprise society.

If I were the Bernanke, how would I have done it? From the bottom-up.

There are an estimated 308,000,000 people in America. Statistics have shown that only about a half of those are tax paying persons. So, if you took the $8.5 TRILLION dollars, and distributed it evenly among the 154,000,000 or so tax paying persons... we would have each received a check for $55k, roughly.

So, how is it that giving everyone a check for $55k would solve anything? Well, two points:
1) most people would be depositing that money into their bank accounts. This would bolster the balance sheets of the banks, thus fixing the "corporate paper market" issue.
2) most people would be spending that money straight-away. I don't think I'm unreasonable in speculating that a LOT of people would use said money for one of two purposes: to buy a home, or a car. Either of these would result in solving the problems with the housing and auto industries... except... not enough people would be buying American cars to sufficiently save GM and its various brands.

That brings me to the second half of my diatribe against Bernanke: government taking ownership of what was heretofore privately or publicly (as in stock-market, not Gov't) owned companies is just flat-out wrong. If the company sucks so bad that it can't survive without being on Federal Life-support, then it shouldn't be allowed to persist! Let it die and the void it leaves will be filled by new businesses that are better able to adapt to the changing world, provided that the niche left is genuine!

Long story short, Bernanke deserves the Person of the Year as much as Obama deserved the Nobel Peace Prize... not one damn bit. If you ask me, the Obama administration is using its media-savvy and clout to effectively buy these designations to bolster their image in the public eye and to gloss-over the fact that they have done basically nothing as we approach the one year anniversary of the administration.

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console-kit-daemon

Periodically, I pop-open `htop` and see a slug of threads for `console-kit-daemon`. I've tried to find what the heck this thing does, and failing that I've tried removing the package... problem is, its required by everything I actually use. After reading an interesting bug report on console-kit, I've implemented a fix suggested there: created /usr/sbin/console-kit-daemon to contain simply:

#!/bin/sh
exit 0;

This has solved my console-kit-daemon glut, but has no appreciable impact otherwise. Oh well. I'm still trying to figure out why Ubuntu 9.10 is such a dog on this box -- UrT and a variety of other apps are just absurdly slow, for no apparent reason. :-(

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Awesome WM

Its a well-known fact, among my friends, that I am a UI-bigot. That is, I think roughly 99% of user interfaces are pure garbage. Its not really a transcendent fault of user interfaces as a whole, but rather the awkward puberty they've gone through over the last twenty years. So, it may come as no surprise (to my friends) that I've found my forray into the Awesome Window Manager (heretoafter referred to as simply, "awesome") something of a blessing. Awesome, for those that don't know, is window manager for X11 that defies the conventional wisdom of window managers and forces all windows to one of a few fixed layouts.

Tiling window managers, such as awesome, started out as a joke. Some whit was flaming a news-group about a drug-induced coding frenzy in which the window manager was simply a distraction. Out of that satirical post rose a breed of window managers called "tiling wm's". They are more than a bit obtuse to the average user, and at first blush I think I was even put off by the superficial neanderthal-like clubbing Awesome did to my windows. Having now run Awesome for a week and some days, I have concluded that awesome is in fact probably my favorite window manager of all time.

Granted, I may still be in the honey-moon phase with this thing, but let me tell you why Awesome is awesome:

• No frilly window decorations cluttering my desktop
• No wasted space for panels, widgets and whatsits
• Configurable to a ridiculous degree (more on that in a moment)
• FAST AS HELL
• VERY light weight

Those benefits being what they are, Awesome is not without its foibles. Most notably, Awesome's configuration. There are two reasons Awesome's configuration sucks:

1. the DEFAULT configuration file is over 300 lines.
2. your configuration is written in LUA.

Taking each of those in turn...

No configuration file should be 300 lines. Honestly. Consider that you can configure MySQL, Apache, AND Postfix -- TOGETHER -- in fewer than 300 lines, it is a travesty that Awesome's config is so vast. Proponents of Awesome's configuration system say that its complexity is the price for its flexibility... while that may be, its still unnecessarily complex for anyone short of a supreme power-user.

Who has ever heard of LUA before? Certainly not I. LUA isn't even on the top 20 languages most programmed... more people have used SMALL than LUA. While LUA is fairly trivial to pickup (hell, I learned big chunks of it today) its still unreasonable to require a user to learn a whole programming language and various API's just to configure their window manager.

SO, that said, I think the good out-weighs the bad and Awesome is Awesome.

(P.S. I am afraid Awesome suffers the same plight as Enlightenment in that its principle author(s) are ego-maniacs with little concern for fixing bugs vs. adding features. Oh well, I used E for years despite Rasterman's obtuse and sporadic personality.)

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