- minimize/close to system tray in Python GTK
- A markdown editor/viewer in Python
- Red Phone Mumble Test
- Saturday Sassafrass
- A Friday Frolic
- Toshiba laptop review
- Google no longer uses Microsoft
- regarding Heybuddy and python stuff
- I'm calling you!
- heybuddy identi.ca client
- making a change holder thing
- Did I win? Yes and No.
- photograph sticker
- share this on facebook
- the damn computer died
- kilt alteration
- audcast streamer in vala with gstreamer, gtk and webkit
- The Mullet Adventure
- A Letter to the California State Legislature
- will dogfooding the frenzy leave me bitter?
- basic sitemap file maker in Python
- rock and rolling down the street
- Time to Celebrate
- game of life : Vala, SDL
- game of life : python, clutter
- networked timed text-to-speech goodness
- battery status in a screen session
- Bright Bike
- turning gears
- incremental screenshot namer wrapper
- a nice little feature/bug
- drawing circles
- broken VHS fixed
- cloudy phone number finder
- network quitter fixer
- the hot sauce experiment
- non-delivered emails sent to AOL domains
- GIMP mathmap experiment results
- tri-force tuna gift
- leave early, take your time, enjoy the solitude
- N37°49'8 W122°28'48
- rotary phone computer interface in action
- python script to play the latest version of an audio broadcast
- rotary phone computer input device
- server log spam from Microsoft?
- creating a CAPTCHA
- hello HTML 5, it's nice to meet you
- How does that increase security?
- getting familiar with GWT, a porting experiment.
- You're Not Carnival Personnel!
- "disable" a web app's buttons using javascript and css
- litterbugs and jaywalkers
- a basic web-app with pyjamas
- shell script to aid in compiling Vala projects
- Banjo part 4: she's finished
- Accent Characters in Linux with Xorg
- Terminal emulator part deux!
- Community
- Terminal Emulator in Vala using GTK and VTE
- Where is the MPAA on this one?
- pyclutter stage fullscreen hack
- Banjo part 3
- from necessity comes something
- If you build it, they will spam
- writing blogging software ( using data from blogspot )
- From WBEZ Chicago......
- Simple Switch Input to Enter a Command
- perplexing ponderence, pertaining penguin presents
- baby steps: the evolution my feature-free PHP framework
- ruining a perfectly good lamp?
- thank you bazaar
- quick not-so-little bikey bag
- Vala musings : int to string, packages, and starting with main
- my motor vehicle warranty is about to expire? really?
- Bike Trailer Part 2
- getting dandy with a hair pretty
- a not so elegant fixer up
- use python and gstreamer to get the tags of an audio file
- trials with gstreamer, pygst, and goom visualization
- Gaarrrrrrrrr!
- more pyclutter: get a move on - behaviourpath
- scrollwheel css div Internet Explorer 7 problem fixed
- Hello World using pyclutter - a half assed tutorial
A bit of Computer Repair
My good buddy Constance has a rather old computer. Actually, it is an original ibook with a speedy 300Mhz processor and a whopping 192M of RAM.
OK, the RAM has obviously been updated, but other than that, the computer is still original.
One day, Constance told me a tale of tripping over her computer cord and then the adapter started sparking. Crap! The machine may be crap, but it is all she has and it has all of her writings on it.
Ah, the slow as dirt machine. See that "yo-yo" power adapter? Aside from always burning out, those things are $80 from Apple. I'll be damned if I let Apple get any of my poor writer friend's money. Let's fix that shit!
First thing first: find out where the cord is fried. Well, I'll be damned, it just happens to be fried where every other "yo-yo" adapter gets fried.
(That's me being sarcastic)
It went like this:
1. cut off part of the plastic housing
2. cut and strip wires
3. determine that the amount of exposed wire is to too short for my pathetic soldering skills
4. cut off all of the plastic housing
5. discard the metal housing under the plastic housing
Hit it with some magic!
After soldering the wires, I used hot glue to re-attach part of the plastic housing and then I wrapped the wires with electrical tape. Just to be save, I slather on a crapload of hot glue to keep everything together.
Solder, electrical tape, and hot glue. Shazaam! That's three adhesives in one project!
When the repair was completed, I put the machine in bag and pedaled over to Constance's house, where I was greeted ecstatically. It should be noted however, that there was a serious lack of cookies/coffee/beer/scotch waiting for me when I got there. cough cough, cough cough cough, hint hint.
Now quit reading, and go repair a crappy 11 year old laptop.
P.S. If anyone has an old laptop gathering dust, and the laptop isn't as crappy as Constance's current piece of shit, let me know. (Constance really needs an upgrade)
Quite a few of my coding projects have a large text field where the user is expected to do a lot of typing. Actually, it would appear that none of my projects have a large text field. I suppose I should make markdowner and scripsi official jezra.net projects. Anyway, both of the previously mentioned apps have a large text field where the user types and types and types( hey, they are text editing programs ).
- scripsi is a special purpose dual paned text editor written in Vala
- markdowner is a special purpose text editor written in Python
Both applications use the GTK+ toolkit to create the user interface.
The Problem
When a GTK TextView widget is used to create a large text input area, if the user's cursor travels past the viewable area of the TextView, which happens when typing to the bottom of the screen, the cursor is below the visible area and the user will need to stop typing and scroll the TextView until it is visible. If the user were a typing ninja then I suppose they wouldn't care about typing without knowing what text is showing up in the TextView. Well, I am not a typing ninja.
The Solution
There is probably a more elegant solution to the problem, but I couldn't find it so you are stuck with what I figured out, and this is my solution:
When the text changes, get the coordinates of the cursor and scroll to those coordinates. This will ensure that the cursor is always visible to the user. How would you like to see a working example in Vala?
Enter the Vala
using Gtk;
public static void main( string[] args) {
//initialize gtk
Gtk.init(ref args);
//make a window
Window window = new Window();
//make a textbuffer
TextBuffer textBuffer = new TextBuffer(null);
//make a textview with our buffer
TextView textView= new TextView.with_buffer(textBuffer);
//let the textview wrap at word or char
textView.set_wrap_mode(WrapMode.WORD_CHAR);
//we need to know when the text buffer changes
textBuffer.changed.connect( ()=>{
//make a textiterator
TextIter iter = TextIter();
//what is the cursors x coordinate?
int x = textView.virtual_cursor_x;
//what is the cursors y coordinate?
int y = textView.virtual_cursor_y;
//get the text iter at the cursor's coordinates
textView.get_iter_at_location(out iter,x,y);
//scroll to the cursor's text iter
textView.scroll_to_iter(iter,0,false,0,0);
});
//make a scrolledwindow to hold the textviw
ScrolledWindow scroll = new ScrolledWindow (null, null);
//set the scrollwindow's scrolling policy
scroll.set_policy (PolicyType.AUTOMATIC, PolicyType.AUTOMATIC);
//add the textview to the scollwindow
scroll.add (textView);
//add the scrollwindow to our window
window.add(scroll);
//show all the widgets
window.show_all();
//run the gtk main loop
Gtk.main();
}
Save the above code in a file named "cursor.vala" and compile with
Now I need to port the code to Python and implement the change in markdowner.
Now quit reading, and go fix a problem with a dirty hack.
Also, I'm still working on that FOSScon blog post; depending on how things go, you might even see it today!
The Warm Up
Not very long ago, I made three stickers from a photograph of yours truly. Because the original intent of making the stickers was never met, I decided to give away the stickers with a simple contest.
Sticker #1 has gone across the Atlantic Ocean an now resides in Germany.
Sticker #2 has traveled across the United States and now resides in Upstate New York.
Sticker #3: well this sticker is probably going to travel more than #1 and #2 combined (and then possibly doubled).
Wait, didn't the third postcard come from Switzerland? How can the sticker have such an unknown travel distance? I'm glad you asked.
allow me to spin a yarn....
A few weeks after sticker #2 was shipped off, I received a message from my buddy asking if I could fix his computer. I heartily agreed and five days later I was picking up the computer at the post office. Yea, the machine was so bad my friend mailed the computer to me.
The machine itself was a sweet little Asus netbook that was infected with Microsoft Windows XP. Asus really did a disservice to computer users everywhere by putting Windows on their netbooks. By itself, XP made the machine sluggish and all of the extra bells and whistles that were tacked on ( and tacky looking ) by Asus didn't help.
Aside from slowing down the machine significantly, XP made the machine vulnerable to the plethora of malicious code that seems to be floating about these days, and the machine had a few trojans and a rootkit. Damn, that machine was fucked up, and it took quite a while to clean; but clean it I did and it was time to send it back to my buddy.
My buddy rides bicycles and he goes on bike adventures. I'm not talking about pedaling 5 miles across town for a cup of coffee at a new café (now that is my kind of adventure). I'm talking about really really riding; packing camping gear on a bike and riding for days, weeks, months, and years. Right now, he's in New Mexico, having recently ridden the Continental Divide Trail.
Anyway, it was time to send the computer back to my buddy. Before shipping the machine, I added a few items to the computer bag:
- a stamped envelope addressed to me
- a stamped blank envelope ( he should write to someone else on his adventure)
- a sticker of me,to adorn his bike (AHA!, so that's where it went)
If you are interested, you can check out his blog at http://pocket-thunder.blogspot.com/ and I found out that the package had arrived safely when I read his blog post about it.
The Quandary
It had been a few weeks and I didn't think that anyone would send a postcard for the last sticker. As life would have it, three days after shipping the netbook to New Mexico I received a phone call from the bartender of a local drinking establishment who informing me that I had some mail at the bar. What do you know, it was a post card for the sticker contest thingy.
I must say, the newest postcard followed the rules of the contest to a "tee", which is awesome! Yet here I am with no more stickers. What is a Jez to do? Make more stickers of course! ( I should start numbering them)
It looks like I've got a busy week ahead of me.
Now quit reading, and go make more stickers than you think you'll need.
Now quit reading, and go make more stickers than you think you'll need.
She will make some cookies when you tell her which kind.
(Are Tacos a cookie? )
seriously
The connector port cracked on the inside of the laptop case, so I took it apart and soldered in some braided wire that exits the chassis. Then I put a phoenix connector on the end. I then snipped off the end of the power adapter cord, and wired it into a phoenix connector also.
Works perfectly now. Common problem due to the stress on that connector or something.
I had to solder it back on, and then tape it in place because the solder points would be the only thing holding it in place otherwise. It sorta works now, but you have to be ginger with it.
As for newer laptops: I don't have anything past the Pentium I era that functions (and most of those don't function, either), but I'll make sure to keep my eyes open.