tg

Releasing etvdb

2014-05-06T23:26:43+02:00

After having used it for quite a while, I feel it is time to announce the release of etvdb.

etvdb libary

etvdb is a high-level C library frontend to The TVDB. It is based on Eina and Ecore of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries and easy to use in EFL apps, but can just as easily be used in other programs. It does not depend on a mainloop. Additionally it uses libcurl, so the dependencies are quite small.

The current release is version 0.3.0 and you can get it from my Github Repo. The API documentation is available on my site.

Right now it only has a synchronous API, but I do plan to add a asynchronous one at some point in the future. This means, that you'll have to run it in a thread for interactive applications for now.

etvdb command line tool

In addition to the library, there is etvdb_cli, which is basically a command line frontend to The TVDB based on etvdb. It has currently 3 basic usage modes:

CSV-like output

In this mode you can get a CSV-like output that you can write to a file. This is the default mode.
query mode

In query mode you can query single properties from TV show episodes. For example:

etvdb -n Futurama -s 1 -e 1 -q ename Space Pilot 3000
rename mode

In this mode you can pass files to etvdb and they will be renamed. It supports templates so you can rename it however you'd like. It can run without user input (in scripts e.g.) or interactive.

Try it out, it is easy to use. Just run etvdb --help to see all the options. It currently only depends on libetvdb itself. You can get the current 0.1.0 release from my Github Repo.

Gentoo users can get ebuilds from my Gentoo Overlay.

Check it out and let me know what you think, patches and comments welcome!

Moving to systemd

2011-11-10T00:30:00+01:00

I'm back from Sweden, and while I was away, ELCE was held. The nice people from Free Electrons luckily put up all the conference videos in webm format, so whoever missed it can catch up. One of the first videos I watched was Integrating systemd: Booting Userspace in Less Than 1 Second, held by Koen Kooi, who I remembered from the time I used Openembedded on Openmoko devices.

Some know that I like to show off my neat little Thinkpad x200s for its boot time; so far under 5 seconds (from bootloader to X) using Gentoo, OpenRC, and Enlightenment. I wanted to try systemd for a while but never really was in the mood to do the actual work. The video inspired me to actually give it a try now.

Installing systemd is incredibly straight-forward, just read the gentoo-wiki articles and make sure you have your "init scripts" (or .service files in systemd jargon) ready. Enough talk, just let me finish with this: I was utterly impressed how well systemd works and I'm looking forward to it replacing all other init systems currently out there (including OpenRC which I actually liked). But look for yourself:

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Some stats:

Linux version 3.1  
systemd version 37  
udev 175

Linux -> systemd: ~1s  
systemd -> e17: ~1s  
e17 -> ready: ~1.5s

If you have questions or need config files, just ping me via mail/jabber/irc.

Pyneo for Gentoo

2010-11-14T14:10:00+01:00

Something I wanted to do for a while, but never actually got started: Get pyneo supported in gentoo. So I finally wrote some ebuilds, starting of course with pyneod and its dependencies gsm0710muxd as well as python-pyneo. More to follow soon.

The packages are based on the 1.32 tag in pyneo's git and pretty much identical to upstream, with the exception of the initscripts. My ebuilds replace them by proper gentoo-style initscripts that work well in openrc.

How to use it

Using this overlay is easy. Make sure you have layman installed, using the git USE-flag, and set up, e.g. as described here. After that you just have to add this overlay using:

layman -o "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tg--/gentoo-pyneo/master/overlay.xml" \
-f -a pyneo

That's it!

Check it out on gitorious if you like!

http://gitorious.org/tg/gentoo-pyneo

Bluez and the Keyboard

2010-11-01T06:28:00+01:00

I recently bought a nice little bluetooth keyboard. Being bluetooth based and supporting the standard hid protocol, I didn't expect any trouble at all.

But I was wrong.

After charging the keyboard and putting it in pairing mode, I tried hidtool scan - but it didn't find it. I checked my other bluetooth devices, and they were found - but they also found the keyboard.

Long story short: Turns out it was a bluez bug - thanks to Pacho Ramos for the hint.

As all howtos and so on only cover some GUI frontends for Gnome and KDE, as well as the old (and deprecated) hidd, it wasn't that trivial to get the keyboard to work even after it was finally discovered by hcitool.

jhe in #bluez-users on freenode gave me a brief description on how to do pairing without all the stuff mentioned above:

Install bluez with USE="test-programs" set

Set the device to pairing mode

Use hcitool scan to get the device address

Run simple-agent hci0 $(hid device address)

Enter PIN on both sides, PC first, Keyboard second

Run bluez-test-input connect $(hid device address)

After that it works fine.

Using a frontend might be more viable though, seems the bluez distribution is not supposed to include the necessary tools, the test-programs are only optional.