While fungi’s weather parses US METAR data, such data is usually only available for airports in India. But the IMD has a nice Google maps-enabled page which shows the weather from the different AWS. The data is available as a CSV file with the weather encoded in SYNOP format, which this tool decodes and shows on the terminal.

The code is available at http://github.com/abhidg/inwthr.

First, you have to get a font which has the Indian Rupee symbol, which has the Unicode codepoint U20B9. As of writing, I know of two fonts which support it (at the correct Unicode location instead of replacing other letters), the Ubuntu font and the Rupakara font.

If you are using Ubuntu maverick (10.10), then the Ubuntu font already comes out of the box, so you don’t need to install anything. If you are using older Ubuntu versions or Debian then you can

• Install the Ubuntu font, which you can get here.
• Install my Debian package for the Rupakara font.

These packages can be installed by using sudo dpkg -i filename.deb at a Terminal.

To type the rupee symbol, you either need to replace one of the existing characters on the keyboard or use the AltGr key, using which one can use the extended keyboard and get a lot of extra glyphs. If you are using the standard keyboard layout (US English), you do not have an AltGr key and have to remap one of the existing Alt keys. Users with the US International or US Alternative International or UK keyboard layouts have the right Alt key mapped as the AltGr key. [ You can find out which keyboard layout you are using now by going to System » Preferences » Keyboard and selecting Layouts. The top option is your default layout and if you have more than one layout in the list then the keyboard indicator icon at the top right should show the current layout. ]

An alternative to switching to the US International/UK layout is to simply remap your right Alt key to the AltGr key, which can be done in Keyboard preferences » Layouts » Options. Select Keys to choose 3rd level and tick the Right Alt option. Also check Enable extra typographic characters under Miscellaneous compatibility options (Figure 1). A way of doing this from the command line is to use the first part of the tutorial given here.

Figure 1

Once you have an AltGr key, the next step is to assign the Rupee symbol to AltGr+a key of your choice. I choose 3, so AltGr+3 will give you the rupee sign. To do this open a text editor and type:

keycode  12 = 3 numbersign 3 numbersign U20B9 sterling U20B9 sterling

Save the file with the name .Xmodmap (note the dot at the front) in your home folder.

This will assign the rupee to AltGr+3 and the pound (£) symbol to AltGr+Shift+3.

Log out and log back in, Gnome should ask if you want to load the .Xmodmap file, click on the file and then click Load. Enjoy the rupee symbol!

PS If you are use Openbox or a lightweight window manager then you should put xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap in your ~/.xinitrc or ~/.xsession. Of course, if you already have a .Xmodmap file then append the previous line there.

My first music player was iTunes 4 or maybe Winamp. My music collection could be counted on fingers and I never really used playlists (I still use them rarely). Then I moved on to Linux and started using audacious and rhythmbox. I tried out banshee for sometime, but that really hogged my system.

So my ideas for the next generation of music players:

1. Someone implements rainct’s suggestion and it is also media player independent
2. The volume goes up and down depending on how far you are from the computer (using some sort of algorithm which is used by say, blueproximity for locking the screen when you are away)
3. Building on #1, sync popular tracks to the media player (hopefully players also get the same kind of stuff as #1).
4. Remember the volume used for each track. This should be simple to implement.
5. All of this is in a nice data store (zeitgeist/couchdb). Sync with Ubuntu one or similar services to get zeroconf sharing of settings across all computers.
6. A simple way of using blueproximity like things is to shift music playing from different speakers as one moves around the house.
7. Integrate with shackleton, which is an awesome tool for detecting context. Example: in the office, turn off loud rock and roll songs and switch to ambient music.
8. Filter by language of the music and/or instrument *without* any manual tagging.
9. Integrate live data from social networking (twitter/jabber status), so if your friends are playing something which is in your library you can listen to it, right now!

And we need good speech recognition, soon. Then we can take the leap to sci-fi music players

• Install notify-osd-bzr from Hugo Doria‘s repository. You can enable the repository by putting these lines at the top of your pacman.conf:

  [archlinuxbr]
  Server = http://repo.archlinux-br.org/i686/
  

  For those of you on 64-bit you can install the notify-osd-bzr package from AUR.

• notify-osd shows dialogs for notifications with actions which looks quite ugly. So quite a few applications have to be patched to remove actions for notifications wherever possible. Patched versions of some applications can be found in AUR. Some of these are also available from the archlinuxbr repository.
• Install human-icon-theme from AUR and use it to get the icons in gnome-power-manager and networkmanager notifications (unfortunately, these icons not yet standardised and only come with the human theme).
• Enjoy the new notifications! Note that you must logout and log back in before the new notifications can be active.

For more information on the new notification system in Jaunty you can read up the specification at: http://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotifyOSD.

The first thing to do is to allow changing the accelerators (keyboard shortcuts) in the GNOME configuration. This can be done by issuing the following command at a Terminal:
gconftool-2 -t bool -s /desktop/gnome/interface/can_change_accels true

Then I mapped Ctrl to the Alt key (which is just in the place where the Command key is on the Mac) and the Alt key to the Windows key. This can be done in GNOME by going to System »Preferences » Keyboard » Layout » Layout Options… and changing Alt/Win key behaviour. This is not really necessary, but mapping the Ctrl key to the Alt key made it a lot easier for my fingers.

Now to change the keyboard shortcut corresponding to any menu in GNOME, you simply have to select the menu item and press the shortcut you wish to have associated with the menu item. However, this does not work for all GTK programs. The programs for which I could change the shortcuts using this way included Nautilus, Rhythmbox, Pidgin, Totem, Terminal, Gedit, Image Viewer. For example, I changed all the preferences shortcuts to Control+comma. Keep in mind that if the shortcut you assign is already assigned to some other function, then the shortcut will be reassigned to the menu item you’ve selected and the previous functionality corresponding to the shortcut will not have any shortcut assigned to it.

Some other shortcuts that I changed in Nautilus are: Control+I for Properties (this is consistent with the same shortcut for Firefox’s Page Info and the Mac OS X Finder), Control+D for Duplicate, Control+Shift+Delete for Empty Trash and Control+Shift+C for Computer.

Of course, we also have to change the shortcuts for the window manager we’re using. Since I’m using Compiz, I used ccsm (Arch: ccsm, Ubuntu/Debian: compizconfig-settings-manager package), to change the shortcut for closing an window to Control+W (in General Options » Key bindings). Also I changed the default shortcut for Run Command… from Alt+F2 to Control+space in Gnome Compatibility. Since I’d gotten used to pressing Alt+Tab for switching windows, and now Alt had become the Win key, I also had to change the shortcut for switching windows to Control+tab (in Application Switcher).

Firefox: I used the Keyconfig extension to change the keyboard shortcuts in Firefox. I changed the Preferences, Back and Forward shortcuts, as well as the shortcuts for switching to tabs 1 to 9. Since Control+W was now used to close the window, I assigned Control+Shift+W for closing the tab (the same applied for other applications which use tabs a lot, like Gedit).

VLC. I tried to change the shortcut for preferences in VLC to Control+comma but I could not find any way of doing so. There is an option for changing the hotkeys, but that does not include Preferences. So I’ve to stick with the default for the time being. GIMP had a nice shortcut editor, using which I could easily change the shortcut for Preferences.

After all this, you might want to turn off the ability to change accelerators in GNOME by issuing this at the terminal: gconftool-2 -t bool -s /desktop/gnome/interface/can_change_accels false

Update (18 Oct 2009): Registered the uniform-keyboard-shortcuts blueprint in Launchpad.

In case anyone thinks I’m nuts, I’m talking of setting up a planet like this (or this). A planet here is just a collection of blogs, and I’ll talk about how to set up one using the software called planet venus. To get started just download the tarball. Extract it into a directory of your choice (using tar zxvf venus.tgz), and you’ll see the directory structure as on the website. The documentation is quite detailed, but if you want a planet quickly, you won’t have to read most of it.

Here’s what I did: I made a directory and copied the file themes/classic_fancy/config.ini to this directory (you might prefer some other theme, in this case choose the appropriate config.ini). Edit the file accordingly; mostly you’d need to change the [planet] section. The other important settings to check are cache_directory and output_dir. It’s better to set the full path here and in the other places which require a directory (template_files) — this helps when running the cronjob later. All the generated files will be in output_dir. You can find the index.html.tmpl (index.html template) in the theme directory and the other templates (Atom, RSS feeds) in the themes/common directory.

Remember to put planet.css and other relevant images in the proper places, otherwise people will see an ugly page!

Now add the feeds which you would like to have in the planet in the following format:

[http://blah.wordpress.com/feed/] # This should be the feed url
name = My Name

You’re done! Now switch to the directory where you untarred the planet venus code and run python planet.py /path/to/config.ini. This will download the feeds, store them in the cache and generate the index.html, Atom and RSS feeds.

Finally set this thing to run as a cronjob (using crontab -e); the snippet below will make planet.py run hourly:

0 * * * * /usr/bin/python /full/path/to/planet.py /full/path/to/config.py

Christmas evenings are a nice time to talk about lots of things, so I’ll talk about the trip to the Science Conclave at IIIT Allahabad which I attended along with my friends (eight of them, to be precise) and a scientist from our institute. This science conclave was attended by quite a few nobel laureates and other expert scientists.

Five of our friends had reached IIIT Allahabad in the morning of the 14th of December (the conclave duration was from 15th to 21st December). We reached via a different train at nearly midday; it was quite nice that we got a room on the same floor as the other group. The conclave was due to begin the next day, so there was actually nothing that I could think of doing, and that’s what happened. We were staying at the boys’ hostels on the ground floor (almost literally; what separated us from the floor was a blanket). There were nice blankets on top also to keep out the cold (of which there was a lot).

The next day was the first day of the conclave; as usual I got up a bit late; breakfast was done in a hurry and we’re off to the lectures. The morning lectures were held at a pandal on the campus. Since I don’t remember the order of the lectures, I shall not now be going into the details of them (not too much, anyway any details become foggy after a few days). After the lecture there was a felicitation ceremony and speech by the director of IIIT-A. By this time, I was feeling hungry (always happens after lectures) and soon my stomach was satisfied (at least I thought so, I did not know then what was to happen a week later!). The second day passed like the first day, with one exception.

One evening, someone suggested that we should play the game of “mafia”. I wondered what that was and why others seemed so excited about it. I’ll leave the explanation of the game to wikipedia; what was amazing was how I changed from a bored bystander to a fan of the game (apparently, this always happens in this game). We had lots of rounds of Mafia, and I managed to guess people correctly quite a few times, though as the night wore on, my guesses wore out I slept at around four o’ clock and woke up with a nice attack of rhinovirus. Oh well.

The interaction sessions were held at the computer centre; interaction sessions were divided according to discipline; though I didn’t much like it, for in my viewpoint I consider science to be indivisible, it would be infeasible for all of the almost over thousand students to interact with the Nobel Laureates — that would only result in chaos of the non-interesting kind. The questions ranged from nice, profound to downright silly, so one could almost plot a Gaussian there. The nobel laureates were very helpful and listened to all the questions carefully. We had interaction sessions with Prof. Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Prof. Jerome Friedman, Prof. Martin Perl and Prof. Harry Kroto. I slipped into a Mathematics interaction session once where I could interact with Prof. A A Slavnov of Steklov Mathematical Institute.

We heard nice lectures from all the nobel laureates; most of them were on high energy physics and the Large Hadron Collider and the interesting prospects the LHC opened up for a new generation of research. Arguably the most inspiring one was however, Sir Harry Kroto’s. I never knew that I would like a chemistry lecture so much! The presentation started with a very loud sound (to wake us up) and continued in a fashion which was like a well arranged salad: flashes of humour, beautiful animations, pictures from the past and visually striking, simple images which make us understand in an instant what his research is about, and on why he loves bucky balls aka fullerenes. I’ll never feel the same way about chemistry, or at least fullerenes again. He gave two lectures; both were different but in some way carried the same spirit.

In the evenings were the cultural programmes. I didn’t expect a cultural programme of this magnitude at a science conclave, but then there it was. Many eminent people performed at the cultural programme, including Hema Malini, Peenaz Masani, Anoop Jalota, Dr. Shobha Naidu and Bhupinder & Mitali Singh. There’s no need to say how they were: they were all astoundingly brilliant and beautiful.

Thus as you see, a lot of things happened at this conclave. We had lots of fun, listened to interesting lectures and talked with interesting people. Space and time, restricted they are; to tell everything of what happened at the conclave would take days and more words than I’ve the patience to type. However, it was a memorable experience and I thank all those who made it happen.

Oh by the way, as to what happened a week later: I had a nice stomach upset.

Update: added links.


#!/bin/sh
# Prints the date.

x="$(wget -q -O - http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/timer.pl | grep UTC | cut -c 5- | sed s/\,//g)"
date -d "${x}"


Put this file somewhere in your $PATH, make it executable and run it. It’ll print the
date in the local timezone. Here’s how it works:

1. It gets the date from http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/timer.pl and dumps it on the
   terminal.
2. It gets the first line in UTC using grep
3. It cuts out the
   .
4. and removes the comma which causes date to choke
5. Finally date -d converts the date into the local timezone and displays it.

I’ve this script running with watch -n 5 to give the date every five seconds in the terminal.

! This works with Trust Silverline Direct Access keyboard
! Use ! for comments

keycode 222 = XF86PowerOff
keycode 223 = XF86Sleep
keycode 236 = XF86Mail
keycode 229 = XF86Search
keycode 230 = XF86Favorites
keycode 178 = XF86WWW

keycode 162 = XF86AudioPlay
keycode 164 = XF86AudioStop
keycode 160 = XF86AudioMute
keycode 144 = XF86AudioPrev
keycode 153 = XF86AudioNext
keycode 176 = XF86AudioRaiseVolume
keycode 174 = XF86AudioLowerVolume

As you can see, the various keycodes have been assigned to the X key
symbols; this enables whichever window manager you use to understand
the keysym. Now you can associate the keysyms with commands, etc. In
Arch a list of keysyms is at /usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB. To apply
these settings simply run xmodmap ~/.xmodmap

multimedia keys control whichever application is active

There are many programs which do not natively support the multimedia
keys, for example the Totem media player. Also you can bind only one
command to be the keybinding for the keysym. So I have made a small
script in bash which detects the active window, and depending on what
window it is, gives the appropriate commands. For example, the script
for the play key is:

#!/bin/bash
# Program to start playing in whichever application
# is the focussed one.

# Abhishek Dasgupta
# get focussed window id
focus=`xdpyinfo | grep focus | cut -c 16-24`
# grab WM_CLASS
info=`xprop -id $focus | grep WM_CLASS | cut -c 20-`

if [[ "$info" =~ .*Audacious.* ]]
then
  audacious --play
elif [[ "$info" =~ .*Totem.* ]]
then
  totem --play
else
  mpc play
fi

You can grab the full set of scripts:
mediabuttons-scripts-20070508.tar.gz

Currently, as you see the scripts support audacious, totem and mpc.

There are a few important things that one needs to remember when configuring Arch – one is that most of the configuration is done through plain old text files; no clumsy or hand-holding GUIs here to help you out. Secondly, most of the configuration files in Arch are in exactly the same place where you would expect them to, i.e. Arch interferes very little with /etc allowing programs to place the files there, without moving them to a special place. Most distributions keep a special system for managing configuration files, Debian has debconf, Gentoo has etc-update, Arch has none, and it needs none. When a configuration file is to be overwritten, Arch will give you a warning; if it does not you can be sure that it’ll not overwrite and instead the new config will be placed with a .pacnew extension.

I am a bit of a console freak, so first off I installed gpm. GPM is this really cool
program which allows you to use the mouse in the console. I did need to a do a bit of tweaking in /etc/conf.d/gpm and I added this line:
GPM_ARGS="-m /dev/input/mice -t imps2"

(other great console apps: irssi, centericq, and of course mutt!)

Another good thing that I like about Arch is its bleeding edge packages. The magic command
to sync up on the newest stuff is pacman -Syu. Also I made sure to install the latest version of pacman (version 3.0.4 as of writing). It seems a bit faster, the progressbar for installing also looks neater; of course there are lot of changes underhood too. The other good news for those wanting to try out Arch for the first time – they’ll release a 2007-05 version (codename Duke) soon with the new kernel 2.6.21. So wait a few days and download that instead of 0.8!

Then I installed slim (the simple login manager) and beryl, compositor-king. In Arch if you know the name of a package, then you can install it with pacman -S package. If you don’t sync frequently you can also tag a -y to it like pacman -Sy package. That’ll make sure you get the repositories refreshed with the changes (-y stands for refresh). You can also search for a package by this package -Ss whatever.

Arch has a few repositories. To put simply, a repository is a collection of binary packages maintained by Arch developers, or other members of the community. The official repositories are current, extra, unstable, testing, community. Out of these current and extra contain stable packages. testing contains the absolutely new stuff, and one that could (but never has, in my case) break your system (like say, a new kernel version or a new video graphics driver). unstable contains, well unstable code. I don’t use it and it doesn’t contain many packages anyway. community is a repo of software that users wrote PKGBUILDs for (I’ll be coming to what PKGBUILDs are, soon) and they have been voted or are important enough, that binary packages are provided for a few of them. (Did you know, that
anyone can upload packages to the Archlinux User Repository?)

If you want to enable some of those repositories, go to /etc/pacman.conf and uncomment out the repos you need, you can also add other repos if you want.

Installing stuff is a no-brainer as I told before. I quickly installed openoffice-base, pidgin, seahorse (manages GPG keys), muttng (grabbed a few configs from codemac, thanks codemac!), screen (the wonderful terminal multiplexer), nitrogen (a wallpaper setter), alunn (excellent notifier for new packages, quietly sits in systray), totem movie player, VLC, etc….

Now onto configuring NetworkManager. First I had to install the required packages (networkamanger and gnome-network-manager if you use GTK+/GNOME or knetworkmanager if you use KDE). Then you have to go to rc.conf and disable the interfaces which we want to use. You must also remember that your wireless card uses a different interface than your ethernet port. That you have to find out by trial-and-error. In my case it was eth2. So in my rc.conf, I now have:

  lo="lo 127.0.0.1"
  eth0="dhcp" #if you don't want dhcp put something like this:
  #eth0="eth0 192.168.1.3 netmask 255.255.255.0" where the first address is the IP you want
  eth2="dhcp"
  INTERFACES=(lo !eth0 !eth2)
  #
  # Routes to start at boot-up (in this order)
  # Declare each route then list in ROUTES
  #   - prefix an entry in ROUTES with a ! to disable it
  #
  gateway="default gw 192.168.1.1"
  ROUTES=(!gateway)

Then you need to install the appropriate drivers for your wireless card (if you haven’t done so already). My card is a Intel IPW3945ABG so I installed the ipw3945 package. For this driver, I also need to startup the ipw9345 daemon, so I added to the DAEMONS array. While using networkmanager, we have to disable the network script, so put a ! before it and also add dhcdbd and networkmanager to the DAEMONS array. Next time you reboot, NetworkManager will take over your network settings from rc.conf. So now my DAEMONS array looks like this:

  DAEMONS=(syslog-ng ipw3945d !network alsa dbus hal @powersaved @mpd dhcdbd netwo
  rkmanager @lastfmsubmitd @lastmp @netfs vsftpd crond slim)

(the @ before some daemons means that daemon will be started in the background)

To use the GNOME applet, you can put nm-applet --sm-disable in your .xinitrc or whatever system your DE uses to autostart apps on login. The reason --sm-disable is required is that otherwise nm-applet gets confused and multiple instances of it startup

Lastly I configured mpd. For anyone who does not know, mpd is a daemon which plays your music in the background. So even if you kill X, your music goes on. There are many good frontends for it; I prefer Sonata which supports editing tags too.

Next time, I will write about how drop dead simple it is to make your own packages in Archlinux. Have a look at the wiki; and till next time happy pacman -Syu’ing!