dams: April 2008 Archives

What window manager do you use ?

That's a question that was very common, hype and geeky, 8 years ago. At that time, I was about to use icewm on all my boxes. Icewm was already not hype anymore at that time :). Its features and user interface have been polished by the time and careful maintenance of its code base.

I think it is the best "light" window manager : it is damn light but very well balanced. You can have it look like a traditional kde-like desktop, or strip it down to a minimal manager, reduced to your needs and nothing else (needless to say that's how I use it).

icewm is an old software, but its code has been maintained and improved with carefully chosen features, without removing its lightness and speed. Its memory footprint is really small (smaller than blackbox and clones for instance), yet it provides nifty features and powerful configuration, and can be compiled without annoying library dependencies.

Icewm development is not about including new trendy useless or not that useful features (tabs, 3D effects, etc...), it's all about making sure you can rely on it. I do rely on it for 10 last years, and I will for the next 10.

P.S. : icewm is used on the new Asus eeePC .

I'm trying to solve the hassle of synchronizing and maintaining my contact lists accross different computers, accounts, tools, software, etc... I'm nearly there, I'll probably write a longer entry about it later. Anyway my solution involves thunderbird, Apple's Address Book, plaxo, gmail, linkedin, and my mobile phone.

Today I just wanted to briefly mention A To G, a small free mac application that simply exports all the adress book data to a csv files that gmail can import.

It's nearly 2pm and I'm bored. I am halfway through migrating my old home page to this new Movable Type blog - well actually it's more like a CMS.

The features are nice and it looks great, plus the statically generated content means it's fast to deliver. But it's quite a pain to add and edit all the pages through the web interface. I'm quite new to Movable Type, so it might be that I just missed the powerful editor.

Anyway I kind of like it as a whole, but I ca't wait to use advanced features that made me choose MT in the first place : blogging from an iphone, installing new plugins, and editing my templates.

Right. Back to the time when I got my first mac, it was an ibook G4 800Hz (it's only 4 years ago) and it was running Linux (gentoo ppc if you want to know). I think it was the good choice, because OS X was quite slow at that time, and the ibook wasn't particularty powerful.

Anyway one thing that didn't make me regret to not be using OS X, was that I didn't have to use the Horrible Dock :) What can I do ? I never liked it, and I never understood why it was supposed to be a so great idea. But now I'm using Mac OS X and althought I like the OS (I might talk about the reasons later), I still had to live with the Dock. Until now :

• DragThing : not free, but really an awesome piece of software, get it here. It allows you to create panes and panels from diffrent shapes, style and content. screenshot here. The icons on the left aren't on the desktop, they are in a transparent panel in the foreground.

• Switcheroo : minimalistic, does less things, but can be useful. Get it from versiontracker

This blog now runs on apache + mod_fastcgi. I can feel the difference, especially given the fact that the hardware is not that powerful. I was curious aboud mod_fcgid, which claims to be better but compatible, but I'm not sure why exactly (I think something to do with better timing in spawning / killing cgi persistents processes).

I was willing to move to lighttpd as well, but it looks like it's more work than just installing and configuring mod_fastcgi for apache. By the way, you have to make sure that FCGI (the Perl module) is installed otherwise Movable Type will refuse to work.

This server this site is running on has a VIA CPUwith PadLock features enabled. That allows fast hardware accelerated encryption, namely AES, SHA1, SHA256. With modern kernel and openssl, there is no special patch needed. However, some application using encryption still need a patch to use the hardware feature.

If you are running a PadLock enabled Via CPU, this page has a list of patches for various linux programs. Look at the bottom of the page for contributions, and see if you're using any of these software. Even if you are using the same version, I recommend you to check if the patch hasn't been already applied by the maintainers of your linux distribution.

I applied the patchs for openssh, lighthttpd and a couple of other software.

I finally found a way to work around the issue on my macbook Pro, so I thought I would talk about it.

The problem : my mac is very slow to go to sleep. When you close the lid, the small white light on the front is on, and instead of staying on few dozen of seconds (then starting glowing), it stays on, and take ages (1 minute) before glowing.

What happens exactly ? As soon as the lid is closed, the system starts writing down on the hard drive the content of the memory. That's to provide the ability to wake up even after a power failure. During that time, the white light stays on, and it is recommended that you don't move your laptop (the hard drive is heavily used for writing) When it's done, the white light starts "glowing".

Try it yourself : take your mac (if you don't have one, go buy one now, it's a good way to spend money anyway), close its lid, wait until the whit LED glows, then remove the battery. Plug the battery back in, then open the laptop so that it wakes up, and see the laptop wake up from so-called "Safe Sleep". Here is what it looks like :

For unknown reasons, my mac takes quite a lot of time to dump the content of the RAM to the hard drive. I believe it's a small hardware issue, as reinstalling Mac OS X from scratch didn't help. It's a small step back compared to the powerbook or ibook, which went to sleep very quickly - few seconds - and was pretty reliable. Why are the intel based laptop slower to go to sleep ?

That's because the powerbook and ibook didn't have (afaik) the "Safe Sleep" mode (which is called by normal people "suspend-to-disk") feature.

The good news : we can actually switch back and forth between the different sleep mode on the intel based mac. It works on my macbook Pro, I'm fairly confident that it will work on ibooks too. The comand is called : pmset (here is a link to its man page). I read a nice blog entry explaining how to fiddle with the "Safe Sleep" mode

The solution for lazy people is however to use Smart Sleep.prefpane . It allows you to switch between normal sleep and memory only sleep, and introduce the smart sleep feature, where the system will decide which sleep mode to use depending on the level of battery left. Neat !