Ultra High

Undistract v0.2

I have posted a version 0.2 of my attention monitoring software “Undistract”. This release features the following changes:

• Uses libnotify instead of xosd, which looks a lot better in GNOME
  at least and should work fine cross-desktop.


• The most drastic action is now to minimize the distracting window
  rather than change virtual desktops, which was quite specific to my
  desktop usage. I have tried to manage the focus with this change too,
  so that the user doesn’t inadvertently send key presses to a different
  window.


• Uses GTK event loop which makes monitoring a lot more efficient.


• More sophisticated usage of libwnck to determine which windows are
  active at whether they belong to a distracting application.


• Simplified some of the code and tried to de-jargonize the config file.

You can download it at http://code.ultrahigh.org/undistract

Wengophone: What’s My SIP Address?

I’ve been using the ever-so-useable WengoPhone VOIP software, and I wanted to see if there was a public SIP address that i could provide to people on other SIP networks. Well, it took me a while to figure out, but there is. Just enter sip:username@voip.wengo.fr into any SIP phone and you’ll be cooking on gas. I tested this from Ekiga running on another computer and Wengo received the call just like normal.

BTW my Wengo username is ‘werkshy’.

Quickfix: libroot-python-dev for Ubuntu Gutsy

Since my last post on building ROOT packages for Ubuntu the resourceful Christian Holm Christensen has got the unofficial Debian/Ubuntu ROOT repository back online. One problem is that due to a dh_python bug in Ubuntu, the libroot-python-dev package (required for PyROOT) is broken for Gutsy (and probably Feisty too), since it depends on python < 2.5. I've hacked the 'control' file to remove that broken dependency and repacked the .deb file to make a package that is installable and doesn't break apt.

Download it here:
libroot-python-dev_5.17.05-3-quickfix_i386.deb

Steps to create this:

• Get the libroot-python-dev package from the repository
  wget http://mirror.phy.bnl.gov/debian-root/...
ubuntu/pool/main/r/root-system/libroot-python-dev_5.17.05-3_i386.deb
• Unpack the .deb
  ar -x libroot-python-dev_5.17.05-3_i386.deb
• Unpack the control data:
  tar -zxf control.tar.gz
• Edit the file ‘control’ to fix the dependencies and bump the version number
• Repack control data:
  tar -zxf control.tar.gz control md5sums postinst prerm
• Repack the .deb
  ar -r libroot-python-dev_5.17.05-3-quickfix_i386.deb debian-binary control.tar.gz data.tar.gz

I hope to help fix the underlying issue soon but right I’ve got a ton of thesis-related work to plough through so this band-aid will have to do for now.

Update 2007-12-11:
I spent a morning last week tracking down this ROOT Python bug. Turns out there was a file not being deleted during the ‘clean’ stage of the debian package creation which led to a dependency confusion with python versions. New source packages have been uploaded which fix this issue:
deb-src http://mirror.phy.bnl.gov/debian-root unstable main contrib

Binary packages should be up shortly.