Hi Planet Debian!

After being away from the planet for more than a year now, I'm finally back My plan to migrate to ikiwiki got postponed a lot of times as I had more important things to do. The migration of the content of my old wiki is still not complete, but I hope to finish that soon. Why I've migrated away from Dokuwiki? Mainly because I really prefer to have a git backend and being able to add content with vim. The other reason is that php sucks. Dokuwiki really rocks otherwise, and I'll keep recommending it to the not-so-geekish people.

Be prepared to see more posts from me soon In the meantime it would be great if you'd tell me if therere CSS problems somewhere, I've tested it with Iceweasel only. Thanks in advance!

One of the things I was missing in my favourite windowmanager awesome was a calendar widget. So I spent some minutes and coded it. Moving the mouse over the time widget will show a naughty popup with the current month, use your mouse buttons (and the shift key) to scroll trough the months. The only annoying thing was to figure out how to change the text of an existing notification: notification.box.widgets[2].text = "new test" is neither easy to figure out nor to use.

But here's the code for your rc.lua - in case you want to have a license for it - the code is published as public domain or under the ISC license, what ever you prefer.

Update: With thanks to a hint from madduck, the naughty popup is now aware of the screen your mouse is pointing to.

function displayMonth(month,year,weekStart)
    local t,wkSt=os.time{year=year, month=month+1, day=0},weekStart or 1
    local d=os.date("*t",t)
    local mthDays,stDay=d.day,(d.wday-d.day-wkSt+1)%7

    local lines = {}

    for x=0,6 do
        lines[x+1] = os.date("%a ",os.time{year=2006,month=1,day=x+wkSt})
    end
    lines[8] = "    "

    local writeLine = 1
    while writeLine < (stDay + 1) do
        lines[writeLine] = lines[writeLine] .. "   "
        writeLine = writeLine + 1
    end

    for x=1,mthDays do
        if writeLine == 8 then
            writeLine = 1
        end
        if writeLine == 1 or x == 1 then
            lines[8] = lines[8] .. os.date(" %V",os.time{year=year,month=month,day=x})
        end
        if (#(tostring(x)) == 1) then
            x = " " .. x
        end
        lines[writeLine] = lines[writeLine] .. " " .. x
        writeLine = writeLine + 1
    end
    local header = os.date("%B %Y\n",os.time{year=year,month=month,day=1})
    header = string.rep(" ", math.floor((#(lines[1]) - #header) / 2 )) .. header

    return header .. table.concat(lines, '\n')
end

local calendar = {}
function switchNaughtyMonth(switchMonths)
    if (#calendar < 3) then return end
    local swMonths = switchMonths or 1
    calendar[1] = calendar[1] + swMonths
    calendar[3].box.widgets[2].text = displayMonth(calendar[1], calendar[2], 2)
end

mytextbox.mouse_enter = function ()
    local month, year = os.date('%m'), os.date('%Y')
    calendar = { month, year, 
                naughty.notify({
                    text = displayMonth(month, year, 2),
                    timeout = 0, hover_timeout = 0.5,
                    width = 200, screen = mouse.screen
                })
               }
end 
mytextbox.mouse_leave = function () naughty.destroy(calendar[3]) end

mytextbox:buttons({
    button({ }, 1, function()
        switchNaughtyMonth(-1)
    end),
    button({ }, 3, function()
        switchNaughtyMonth(1)
    end),
    button({ }, 4, function()
        switchNaughtyMonth(-1)
    end),
    button({ }, 5, function()
        switchNaughtyMonth(1)
    end),
    button({ 'Shift' }, 1, function()
        switchNaughtyMonth(-12)
    end),
    button({ 'Shift' }, 3, function()
        switchNaughtyMonth(12)
    end),
    button({ 'Shift' }, 4, function()
        switchNaughtyMonth(-12)
    end),
    button({ 'Shift' }, 5, function()
        switchNaughtyMonth(12)
    end)
})

While working on the Debian packages of navit I stumbled upon gypsy, as the libgypsy is used by navit to listen to notifications about location changes via D-Bus.

As maintainer of the gpsd package I started to wonder what the opinion of the gpsd developers about gypsy is - especially after reading that "Gypsy was designed to fix the numerous design flaws found in GPSD". Well, here is their answer, which I support fully.

I'm blogging about it as I think it is important to know about this details if you plan to do something useful with a gps device, for example on mobile phones like the OpenMoko Freerunner. gpsd works very well on embedded devices, and if there's a feature missing just contact the developers. They're very responsive and like to implement useful features, if they can get a spec to do so (and even better, the hardware to test it). So I'm really wondering if it wouldn't make sense to replace the minimal NMEA/UBX implementation in the FSO Framework Daemon by gpsd, even if that means to compile code instead of writing Python code, which is much faster for rapid prototyping, of course.