Category Archives: Projects

Diodon now with a zeitgeist

Projects,

Diodon version 0.9.0 has been released today which is basically a maintenance release so it runs smoothly on Ubuntu 12.10. However, behind the scenes a few more things have changed.

For instance is there now a unit testing framework in place which I wrote about in a previous post.

What I want to introduce you in this post though is a start into a new Diodon era using Zeitgeist. You might ask yourself: What is Zeitgeist?

That’s a good question and I think best answered by the Zeitgeist folks themselves. So here is a quote from there website:

Zeitgeist is a service which logs the users’ activities and events, anywhere from files opened to websites visited and conversations had.

It makes this information readily available for other applications to use. It is able to establish relationships between items based on similarity and usage patterns.

As Diodon is basically keeping a history of the last users’ copy events it makes perfect sense to store those events in Zeitgeist. Therefore is there now a Zeitgeist plugin (a so called Data Source) available for Diodon. You simply have to install the package diodon-plugins and enable the plugin by going to Preferences -> Plugins.

What this plugin for now basically does is storing a description of what has been copied at a certain time plus the path to the original application content has been copied from. It also points to a clipboard id. However as items currently get deleted when a certain history size has been reached, this id can not be used to execute a copy/paste event again. There are some ideas though for the future that it might be possible to replace the current xml based storage with Zeitgeist completely. This is however only an idea so far. This Diodon Zeitgeist Plugin therefore is a playground to really see what Zeitgeist is capable of and how well it works with a clipboard manager. So if you have any feedback where we can go further from here, please let me know.

Will keep you updated about more exciting news when it comes to Diodon.

Tunefish is no more

Projects

Ever heard of Tunefish? If not this post is most likely not for you. However if you have or are interested what it is respectively is not anymore then please keep on reading… ;).

Years ago when I still was at high school we had to write an essay on a Windows related topic. At that time I did not really know much about Linux so I did not mind as much as I would probably do today. I chose to focus on the Windows settings system mainly the Registry. In addition to the essay I also developed an application which is basically an interface to many Windows global settings available. After a while I polished this application a bit and published it as Open Source under the name “Tunefish” on SourceForge. I wrote the application in Delphi which used to be quite popular at that time. I maintained it for a while. However when I completely switched over to Linux quite some time ago I lost interest and gave it up for adoption ;). Unfortunately up to today, there is no-one who wanted to take over this project.

A few days ago when I was crawling through my current projects it occurred to me that not very often, but occasionally people still seem to download Tunefish. However, as it gives you access to many basic Windows settings and has not been tested since Windows XP SP2 it most likely will do more harm then anything else. So I have decided that I delete the project with all its files and executables altogether.

However as there might still be some valuable knowledge in the source code and its thorough documentation the Subversion repository remains for now. So please feel free to have a look at it and use it under the term of the GPLv2 or higher. If someone still wants to take over the hole project please have a look here. That would be awesome. If there is any issue with the current terms the code is licensed under, please talk to me. I am sure we find a solution.

For all former users of Tunefish I just wanted to point out that there are plenty of alternatives out there which do a similar job Tunefish used to do. If you have any other alternatives you use I am sure people would appreciate if you share them as comment on this post.

So Goodbye Tunefish. Let’s head for new shores…

After long time of silence: CleverCleaner 2.1.1

Projects

CleverCleaner has been around for quite a while. And although there has not been any recent update there are many users using it every now and then. As I have been using Linux since years I have put my focus on developing applications for that platform. Recently though due to change in my job I have been using CleverCleaner more often. A great opportunity, I thought, to follow up on a maintenance release for CleverCleaner fixing some annoying bugs. I will see how often I get around to continue developing CleverCleaner. However this will also depend on what feedback I get from you guys. So if you find any bugs or have any feature request or feedback, please have a look at the support page to see how you can submit your request. Your are also always welcome to submit a translation. The current translations are not perfect either, so fell free to have a look at them and send in your corrections.

Here what has changed in version 2.1.1:

  • Changed Office configuration exception to OPA??.bak to not remove configuration files of new office versions >=2007
  • Fixed negative size of deleted files when large amount of files have been deleted.
  • Added winsxs to the directory exceptions to speed up search process
  • Added French translation

Download the new version.

Diodon available for testing in the Arch Linux User Repository

Projects,

Thanks to Jose is Diodon now packaged for Arch Linux and available for testing.

If you are an Arch Linux user this is now a great opportunity to check out Diodon on your system. However note that the package is still in an early stage. So expect that the build won’t go as smooth. It also depends on libindicator3 and libappindicator3 which are also not official packages.

Even more do those packages need testing. Although I can say that I was able to build diodon on my test arch installation and that it runs smoothly.

So let’s start with the instruction how to go about getting Diodon up and running on Arch. As diodon is only available in the Arch User Repository and also depends on other AUR packages, an easy way to go about this is to use yaourt. If you haven’t installed it yet you can follow these instruction.

As soon as you have yaourt installed, you can simply run following command:

yaourt -Sy diodon

and follow the instructions. If this step has been successful you can then simply run the command diodon.

Note: If one of the package fails to compile/install, best comment directly on the package itself on AUR. When you find bugs when Diodon could start smoothly, please report those on Launchpad. There is already one bug reported specific for arch linux. If you suffer from this bug as well, please add some comments.

It is exciting to see Diodon running on other Linux distributions. So which will be the next one?

Saving power with Diodon 0.8.0

Projects,

Today, Ubuntu Precise has been released. Is this not a good time to release another Diodon version as well?

Well, here it is ;). This new release of Diodon, however, does not bring many new feature but is a polish of the application you are (hopefully) already used to. Changes have been done so it compiles smoothly in Ubuntu Precise with its new Unity Lens api. And now you should be able to use python plugins without any hassle as well.

But there is one small change which might interest you much more, if you often use Diodon on your laptop running on battery…

You might now ask yourself, what does Diodon have to do with my battery? Let me dive into this a bit deeper by explaining how Diodon works.

So to be able to create a history of clipboard items Diodon has to tell the clipboard that it has to call Diodon when there is any new content. Diodon will than add such to its history.

This works great for the normal clipboard which you use with Ctrl + C. Unfortunately the clipboard is not able to tell Diodon, when a primary selection has changed (an area on the screen which is selected by the mouse). To get around this, Diodon has to check in a regular interval whether the primary selection has changed. This works quite well on desktop machines and plugged in laptops.
However, imagine when your CPU wants to go to sleep and just before it wants to the interval is over and will check whether the primary selection has changed. This of course will wake up the CPU again. As this happens over and over again it will discharge your battery faster than it would be really necessary.

There is now good news to this. In Diodon version prior to 0.8.0 there was no way to stop this timer but closing Diodon. In this new version, however, you can simple go the preferences and uncheck “Use primary selection”. This way you can still use Diodon (of course whit the restriction that the primary selection is not added to the history) but not uselessly waking up the CPU and therefore saving power.

Here you can find the new version to be installed for Ubuntu Precise. Let me know what you think.