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This entry is not really about computers, technology, or other work-related topics, but more about a hard-hack that I wanted to try for a while. How to make a kilt !!!

After a bit of duck-ducking, I decided to follow this excellent tutorial.

It's true, sometimes the title of my post try to be more as web search engine-friendly as possible...

Yesterday I was very unhappy of the new behavior of awesome. All of the sudden windows were not receiving focus automatically on screen change, forcing me to either use the mouse of to do some other keyboard action. so for the first time I decided to have a look at the awesome config file. At file I've to admit it's a bit intimidating. I don't know a word of lua and it's syntax is not really intuitive.

First a word about my setup. I use xfce4 + awesome.

I had for a while a tenvis mini319W network camera. this camera is the usual consumer Chinese product, built on the cheap, bad packaging and sold in low end computer shops. Anyway, it was a cheap and dirty solution for a project of mine and despite everything it does the job ok.

The Tenvis mini319W is actually the same as foscam FI8918W and when I say the same, it means different casing, but same exact identical board. It's just a re-branding. For some reason there are a lot of clones of this model.

If you use iceweasel / firefox and privoxy , you might want to let privoxy do its job more effectively and to remove all ads from your webpages. In the past I've used the adblock firefox extension, but I've the gut feeling that letting privoxy handle the ads removal might be more effective.

There is a very nice script here to convert adblock plus rule to privoxy rules.

If you have an intel sound card and you are concerned about battery life, probably you have seen this in the powetop output...

    100.0%                      Device         Audio codec hwC0D0: Conexant

After much duck-duck-ing around I found this enlightening comment on the lesswatt mailing list. It turns out that to enable power management on this device, the device must be open first.

I'm blogging about this small configuration issue as it took me some time to figure out how to configure cupt and smart to solve this problem. The reason I'm playing with cupt and smartpm is that I'm working to compare again a number of package managers in debian against the state of the art cudf solvers using mpm, and I'm suffering quite a bit to configure my virtual environment. Last year I promised to revise and fix our results.

just a quicky. If you use the xfce terminal and you like to have more then one tab-terminal open, you might have niticed the the middle button closes it, without confirmation... I just discovered that this annoying feature can be turned off.

Following the freedesktop spec, you can just edit the file .config/Terminal/terminalrc and set the option MiscTabCloseMiddleClick to False.

There are many other settings . The full list is here : http://docs.xfce.org/apps/terminal/advanced

Lately I've been concerned about the performances of dose3. Soon we will have a package in the official debian archive (containing the new distcheck) and we also plan to use dose3 as foundation of an upcoming apt-get future (external solvers !). This week I tackled a couple of problems.

First I wanted to understand the poor performances of my parser for the debian Packages format. The parser itself (written by J. Voullion for dose2) is a home brewed parser, it uses a Str based tokenizer and it is pretty efficient.

After the latest Xorg upgrade I started experiencing multiple problems concerning the suspend/resume cycle on my laptop. Today I took sometimes off to debug the situation. It seems that the culprit is the activation of the KMS on the XOrg package that landed in unstable in December.

RedMine is a hosting solution for Open projects conceptually similar to Trac. At first sight, the main difference with trac is that redmine is multi-project, while trac has a narrower vision where each trac instance is a project. To be fair there are extensions in trac to administer multiple projects at once, built this is not shipped with the system.