We recently moved our IRC channels from Freenode to OFTC. I almost forgot to register my IRC nickname at the new service, and having just done that, I take the opportunity to describe how that’s done for my fellow - maybe newbie - IRC user.
Configure Vision First, you’ll have to configure Vision (or another IRC client) to connect to the OFTC network.
Enter the Network setup and add a new network with the popup menu at the top.
I have an ActivityMonitor replicant showing network receive/send info on the Desktop. I’d also like to have something showing cpu usage. However, a combined cpu usage ActivityMonitor doesn’t show individual core usage, and having a graph of all cpus often isn’t that informative either, because the 8 doodling lines of my cores are easily confusing. ProcessController’s bars are too narrow.
Here are both, showing their inadequacy:
Pulse (from the Demo folder) in mini-mode has everything I need: adjustable column width and colours.
Only slighty bigger than 2017's "Kernel Debugging Camp" in Toulouse, this year's regular BeGeistert 031 (on its last day affectionately mottoed "The Dirty One") was held from November 1st to 4th in Hamburg.
As in the past when BeGeistert was in Düsseldorf, we had a nice conference room in a Youth Hostel, just with a slighty less nice bedroom. Toiletts and showers on the floor instead of in every room.
Haiku’s GUI is in principle entirely scriptable. You can change a window’s position and size and manipulate pretty much every widget in it. The tool to do this is hey. It sends BMessages to an application, thus emulating what happens if the user clicks on a menu, checkbox, or other widgets.
The seminal work on this application scripting is the BeOS Application Scripting chapter of the BeOS Bible by Chris Herborth.
HaikuPorter is a python tool that takes a so-called recipe that describes the dependencies of a software and how to download, build and package it.
The HaikuPorts Wiki has all the info to get started writing recipes. But it gets into too much detail if all you want is use HaikuPorter to build stuff with existing working recipes.
Here’s a quick step-by-step guide how to do that.
Opening issues for an application at github, for example, is a good way to help improving software. Often it's only a small detail and something a non-programming user could easily fix. Maybe it's just a typo or improved documentation etc.
Doing the changes yourself and contributing these fixes directly via a so-called "pull-request" is even better, as it saves the precious time of the developers/maintainers. Also, this dabbling in code might be a nice way to slowly ease yourself into more ambitious contributions.
BeGeistert 029 was once more a quite small gathering, with 14 Haiku users attending, plus one father, girlfriend, wife and baby.
Puck was there the second year in a row, bringing Colin’s desktop machine with him, which was left behind when Colin moved to New Zealand. (How is Colin these days?) Another new face to BeGeistert: Markus “TwoFX”, one of our finalists in the Google Code-In 2014 and contributer of various patches since. He brought his girlfriend Leslie, who pleasantly doubled the number of attending females.
After a nice short walk through the light drizzle of the slowly condensing mist that completely shrouded the top of Düsseldorf’s landmark Rhine Tower, I arrived pretty early at the Youth Hostel. Entering our conference room I was greeted by its single occupant: Matthias, who I haven’t seen at a BeGeistert for some years. We were chatting while I was setting up my gear and one by one more people entered our conference room. Most of them coming from breakfast; they already arrived the day before. I was glad to see most of the regular core developers did manage to come to BeGeistert after all!
A bit late, but finally I managed to process my recordings of the talks at BeGeistert 026 “Marathon”. The quality isn’t terrific, looks like the picture was much better last time at BG 024, when we apparently didn’t darken the room so much. Audio might be slightly better, as I have used compression and a bit of filtering following advice from Haikollegue Sean Collins. I used Avidemux under Linux for de/muxing the audio track and encoding the final AVIs, and Audacity for processing the audio.
As this was one of the smallest BeGeistert meetings, this report
will be quite short as well...
I arrived at the airport on Saturday morning at about 9:15 and
made it to the nice location at Düsseldorf's youth hostel at 10
o'clock. After weeks with temperatures up to 20 °C, the good weather
took a day off and I made the 10 minute walk from the station
"Luegplatz" to the hostel in a very fine drizzle and shivering 10 °C...
