This is the archive for July 2006. Recent posts can be found at the main blog page.

Converting Flac to Ogg Vorbis

Tuesday, July 11, 2006 ★ 11:58 ★ Categories Misc, Linux ★ Permanent url

Some of my digital music is in the lossless Flac format, which is way too large to carry around on my laptop. I use the following GStreamer magic to convert the Flac files (other types work too with this pipeline) to high quality Ogg Vorbis files:

for file in *.flac; do gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location="$file" ! decodebin ! audioconvert ! vorbisenc quality=0.8 ! oggmux ! filesink location="$file.ogg"; done;
rename 's/\.flac\.ogg/.ogg/' *.flac.ogg

I’m just blogging this because otherwise I’ll forget how to do this when I need it again…

Update: Yes, I know that oggenc -q8 *.ogg does basically the same, but oggenc won’t preserve ID3v2 tags on Flac files (people do this, don’t ask me why), while the GStreamer pipeline seems to preserve the metadata just fine.

GNOME Foundation member

Monday, July 10, 2006 ★ 10:02 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

My application for the Gnome Foundation has been accepted. My name appears on the Membership List and I’ve already sent a request for a gnome.org mail address. My Gnome geekiness is official!

Alternative main menu

Sunday, July 9, 2006 ★ 14:11 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

After seeing the demo at the Novell Code 10 launch party last week, I decided to try the new ‘Computer’ applet Novell uses as their main Gnome panel menu and the ‘Application Browser’. The source code can be found in the slab module of Gnome CVS and I had no problems compiling the thing. (Update: the module name in CVS is now called gnome-main-menu.)

The computer menu

Overall I’m quite impressed, it certainly looks good for a first version. Some random comments:

I don’t use Beagle so I don’t have the search entry in the menu. A fallback to search just for applications in the main menu (just like the Application Browser tool) would be nice
To be useful as a standard Gnome (non Novell specific) main menu the “Install Software” functionality has to be wiped or adapted to use distro-specific backends
The code uses EggRecent, which will be obsoleted by GtkRecent in the near future. Understandable of course, since Novell doesn’t ship GTK+ 2.10 and Gnome 2.16.
The ‘Help’ item in the context menus for application entries in the Application Browser doesn’t work. The ‘X-GNOME-Doc’ entry in the .desktop files is used for this.
The Control Center tool (Application Browser for gnome-control-center) doesn’t use top-level entries, but most entries are in there. I guess this is different in Novell’s own desktop.
The Network entry on the bottom right prints (gnome-main-menu:25751): WARNING **: network_status_tile_open: could not find NetworkManager's applet.glade to the console, but I do use NetworkManager and it’s running alright.

The disk space button on the bottom right only takes the root partition into account. I use several logical volumes for /home and other parts of my file system, but those aren’t displayed.

The Application Browser

All in all I think this applet is really promising. With some more love it could certainly replace my standard Gnome ‘Applications, Places, Desktop’ menu, but in its current shape it’s just a bit too immature and lacks a few features to be a full replacement.

Tango terminal

Friday, July 7, 2006 ★ 15:12 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

I’ve been using the color palette from the Tango Desktop Project in gnome-terminal for a while now. It is quite easy on the eyes and integrates well with the Tango icon colors used in my Gnome desktop.

Before: default colors in gnome-terminal

After: Tango colors in gnome-terminal

You can do the same by using the gnome-terminal interface, but that is a lot of work. Luckily, editing a gconf key does the same: fire up gconf-editor and edit
/apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/palette (you can also change another profile) and set the value to this string:
```
#2E2E34343636:#CCCC00000000:#4E4E9A9A0606:#C4C4A0A00000:#34346565A4A4:#757550507B7B:#060698209A9A:#D3D3D7D7CFCF:#555557575353:#EFEF29292929:#8A8AE2E23434:#FCFCE9E94F4F:#72729F9FCFCF:#ADAD7F7FA8A8:#3434E2E2E2E2:#EEEEEEEEECEC
```
The small script used for the screenshots can be found here: ansicolortable

Update: Let’s get this upstream! Bug and patch over here. The patch adds the Tango palette to the list of built-in color palettes.

Update: Patch committed, so this can be enabled by default.

Update: This color scheme is now the default in recent Gnome terminal versions!

CPU temperature applet

Tuesday, July 4, 2006 ★ 14:57 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

A tip for the hot summer days: apt-get install lm-sensors sensors-applet and add the sensor applet to your panel. Setup the sensor and use this as the alarm command: notify-send -u critical 'CPU Temperature too high!'. It will popup a notification bubble if the temperature becomes too high.

Update: it seems that newer sensor-applet versions use libnotify directly: the notification bubble points to the sensors applet and has a nice icon too. Debian packaged this version just 1 day after I posted the notify-send trick… I suspect a conspiracy.

Some call me sick

Monday, July 3, 2006 ★ 11:52 ★ Categories Programming, Misc ★ Permanent url

However, I think this is a perfectly normal workflow if you need to create an overview of several documents that follow the same format:
- create a single XML document from multiple HTML source files;
- write a hacky XSLT stylesheet to transform the XML document into a LaTeX snippet;
- include the resulting snipper in another hand-crafted LaTeX document;
- write a Makefile to do the XSL transformation;
- automate the document compilation using the same Makefile;
- send the resulting PDF file to a printer.
  Why bother doing boring copy/paste/formatting jobs over and over again if you can automate using a little bit of creative hacker imagination?