Projects on Silicone's web

xrootconsole

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 23:32:19 +0100

xrootconsole is a tool to display logs (xconsole) on your X background.

The upstream development seams stopped, the last release is from 2004-02-20.

However Axel Beckert relived the debian package and now we are updating it with patches.

The packaging (including the patches) can be found on debian’s collab-maint:
http://git.debian.org/?p=collab-maint/xrootconsole.git

ANSI color support

You can download the initial patch against version 0.6.
This is a patch I developed more than a year ago. But I’m going to update it.

The idea is to support ANSI escape sequences to have colored logs on the background.

Sample usage


tail --follow=name /var/log/full.log|stdbuf -oL ccze -A|xrootconsole

Notes:

Use ccze with -A parameter for ANSI as by default it uses curses.
Use stdbuf -oL to control stdio buffering otherwise your log will lag.

About the Code

xrootconsole uses a circular buffer organized in lines for managing the character to display. I added another buffer with color information (rendition options).

The rendition options are determined by parsing the text for ANSI sequence.

This parsing code and rendition information is inspired from aterm and rxvt code also from the explanations from ANSI escape code page on wikipedia.

Finally the text rendering is done by pieces of string that have the same rendition option (so the same colors)

UTF-8

That was a major limitation that stalled my work on xrootconsole, well Axel fixed it.

Other improvements

I just pushed a patch to detect Nautilus and display xrootconsole on it instead of the root window. So gnome users can use it too (I’m currently one, because I’m too lazy to configure something else with the features I need).
~~Fix ANSI parsing so that colortail and lwatch works.~~
ANSI color parsing is now optional with the command line option --ansi-color so users not wanting color will not get the extra processing time.
Detecting the background changes the Eterm way, tested with fluxbox and Gnome desktops for now.

Planned improvements and idea

In original xrootconsole code, the background image must be loaded before xrootconsole starts. After some browsing about it, there seam to be several solutions:
- implement pseudo transparency as Eterm and use _XROOTPMAP_ID as explained on the bottom of Eterm Technical Reference page on eterm.org .
- do as root-tail, don’t draw in a transparent window with a copy of the background, but directly draw on the root window. Anyway this does not allow tinting, shading, brightening or more complex image transformation above X.
- Use some X extension to get server side transparency. (xrender ?)

hreflang Flag

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 13:53:24 +0100

A wordpress plugin to add a flag icon to link corresponding to the hreflang attribute.

Description

hreflang Flag plugin uses css3 selectors to add a flag icon to your links depending on their hreflang attribute.

Installation

Upload the hreflang-flag directory to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
Go to setting -> hreflang Flag configuration and configure the flags you want to see (some sample flags are already filled in).
Use the hreflang attribute in the links you want to see flags.

Sample

bla bla English link bla bla
bla bla French link bla bla
bla bla link to USA bla bla
bla bla link to GB bla bla

The block above was written using the following html code:

bla bla <a hreflang="en" href="#">English link</a> bla bla
bla bla <a hreflang="fr" href="#">French link</a> bla bla
bla bla <a hreflang="en-US" href="#">link to USA</a> bla bla
bla bla <a hreflang="en-GB" href="#">link to GB</a> bla bla

wordpress.org

You can install the plugin from hreflang Flag plugin page on wordpress.org !

Translations

I recently added internationalization support to the plugin, so if you want to see it translated to your language, you can translate it !
If you do so, please send me your .po file so I can integrate it to next release, thanks.
Also if you think my english writing does not sound good, send me a patch 😉

Todo list

Editor plugin to assist link editing

Simply Hide Pages

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 22:16:00 +0100

A wordpress plugin to hide some pages from wp_list_pages output.

Description

Easy way to hide some pages from wp_list_pages output.
Simply add the custom field 'hide' with any value to your page, and this page will no longer appear on the page list.
You could already do this on the ‘Pages’ widget or by adding the exclude parameter to all your wp_list_pages template tags. But now you can do it directly form the page editor which is, I believe, the best place to do so.

You might want to hide pages if you need some pages to exist but don’t want them to appear on your page list. For instance as Cool URIs don’t change, but some services have been removed from your site, so you write a page explaining where to go to get the equivalent service now. (not a real redirect, but still useful sometimes). Of course you don’t want this page on your page list, you prefer to only have the new services listed 😉

Unlike other more complex plugins, it uses custom field to avoid adding tables to your database.

Installation

Download plugin archive and expand it: simply-hide-pages.zip
Upload simply-hide-pages.php to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
To indicate that a page should be hidden when wp_list_pages() is used, edit the page that you do not want to see and create a custom field with a key of “hide” and value of “true” (or anything else it does not really matter).

Screenshot

Custom field needed on page to hide

wordpress.org

Alternatively you can install the plugin from Simply Hide Pages plugin page on wordpress.org !

Netsed

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 21:37:15 +0100

Netsed, the network packet stream editor, is a program originally written by Michal Zalewski.

I maintain new versions of Netsed.

Resources:

News:

Are posted on the blog under the tag netsed.

Gengo

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 20:50:08 +0100

Gengo is a multilingual plugin for wordpress, the one I use on this site. It’s main difference over other multilingual plugins is that it does not stores the translations inside one post but links different posts with different languages together.

Official gengo plugin site

Important Update

Gengo is dead… I no longer use it on this site, I use Polylang now.
In the migration process, I wrote Gengo to Polylang a plugin to import translations informations from Gengo to Polylang.

Random comments about Gengo

Well now MPML uses the same paradigm… But after a quick read, it seams to me that it can only display one language at a time (no fr+en like with gengo). The feature has been added to some extend: Default language fallback for posts.

For my personal use, I wanted to changes some features of gengo, so I did it. I did submit some patches to the mainstream, but never got any response, so the rest is only here now.

Some reasons for this fork are:

Original can be considered dead, because THIS PLUGIN IS BROKEN.
I registered on http://groups.google.com/group/gengo-hackers a long time ago and never was accepted.

Well, there might be hope: Do You Still Want Gengo?

Update: on Sept 2, 2010 Paolo Tresso aka pixline sent a new message to gengo-hackers giving new hopes for gengo. I could tell him about my fork and he is now looking at merging the changes ! That’s cool 😉

I should also look at:
tickets on official gengo
WordPress forums tagged gengo

My blog post related to gengo have the tag gengo and could also interest you.

Known Important Issue

The gengo_append_urls option is broken (infinite redirect loop). However, for now, I implemented a redirection the other way around. When the option is unchecked (which currently is the only way to get it work) the URI ending in language codes are redirected to the normal URI, so external links are not broken. ~~This is available in my hack/disable_append_urls_redirect_lang_uri git branch.~~

Update: I fixed the infinite loop. You must take care to save the permalink structure in worpress admin after changing anything related to permalinks in gengo.
Also if you don’ use it, you don’t need my hack/disable_append_urls_redirect_lang_uri branch because it was already done by the original code, I just did not understand it when I first wrote the hack for my blog.

New features

show translation title in original language

translated tags

mixmode: basically try to translate all post metadata to the post lang. This is probably not SEO friendly but I don’t care!
Based on this main feature, if I ever publish this fork to wordpress repository, I could name it gengo-remix or something similar.

git usage

The repository is here: gengo.git.

Note that I’m still heavily changing this and using rebase a lot to keep the new features (in branch hack/*) out of the main bug fixes.
Also wip/* branches are not guarantied to exist any time long, so don’t track them.
I’ve been using (and abusing) git rebase recently, now I moved master a bit higher in my stack and expect to use more merge now. So anything before master can be cloned safely.