bodom_lx at task3 dot cc

About a year after the creation of bd-theme-zen Wordpress theme, I decided to switch to a new theme. The new theme is monochrome

The reasons behind are simple: unfortunately, 2009 has totally been not a Zen year for me. Many things have not gone as I thought they should have been. Many other important things have been melted. Lot of things have changed.

I hope 2010 will be the year of the Phoenix, in which everything aggressively changes again and turns better. For everyone, for sure.

Therefore, I decided to switch to a new theme, monochrome by mono-lab.net. This theme is very modern, yet minimalistic and elegant. And surely, more nice-looking than those themes written by me.
I’m still happy with bd-theme-zen, I liked its initial orange version and I appreciated the glacial blue one I decided to switch to around August (the color switch was also significant for me).

But this is not time for being Zen. It is time to be reactive.

I wish everybody a fucking explosive 2010.

For those of you asking if I was spending my time to write this post on 2009-12-31 at 00.00: I wrote this post on 2009-12-26 and scheduled the publish to the beginning of the new Year.

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It’s a pleasure for me to announce Dycapo-0.0.1, the very first release of the project.
Dycapo-0.0.1 is part of the pre-alpha-dontuse releases, to only illustrate some functionalities.
Here are the release notes:

2009-12-26 Daniel Graziotin <daniel DOT graziotin AT gmail DOT com>

Dycapo 0.0.1 is just for showing out some functionalities of the system and
testing the underlying technologies.
Dycapo 0.0.1 incorporates and shows:

• OpenTrip Core adoption and OpenTrip Dynamic data structures proposal (in Django Model format)
• Use of XML-RPC with Django (rpc4django over HTTP and HTTPS)
• (Sort of) integration of Dycapo models with Django and rpc4django
• Authentication
• Insertion of a trip by a driver
• Start of a trip by a driver
• Search of a trip by a rider
• Accepting a ride

No one exported XML-RPC function will surely be included in the final API!
No one exported XML-RPC function is either optimized or completely working!

Code is (somewhat) documented. Expect a completely better work for 0.1.0

You can read much more about Dycapo and download it at Dycapo official project page. Project page also hosts installation instructions and configuration steps.

The research behind Dycapo (Dynamic Carpooling system) is illustrated here.

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I’m doing some refactoring to the code and writing some useful documentation for the first pre-alpha-dontuse version of Dycapo (a.k.a. DyCaPo – Dynamic CarPooling system).
Dycapo 0.0.1 will only be for illustrating some functionalities of the system and the integration of the technologies.
The following is an explanation of our version codes:

• 0.0.x releases are all pre-alpha-dontuse releases, to only illustrate some functionalities.
  API will likely change very often.
• 0.x.x releases are still alpha-releases, that cover some internal development cycles but have
  important features that will appear on a stable releases. API for the important parts of the
  project will likely not be changed.
• 1.0.0 will be considered a stable release that can be used for testing in a small reality. API
  will be frozen.

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At the end we decided to adopt OpenTrip. I could propose the Dynamic extension of the protocol, over XML-RPC.
By the way, I opened a GitHub repository to host the source code of Dycapo. At this moment I just implemented and documented the models.
Dycapo project source code is hosted on: http://github.com/BodomLx/dycapo.

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I love to be back to Slackware, my very first distribution. However, there are a couple of things that I’m missing from the other more comfortable distributions. From among them, I totally miss Network Manager.
I saw many people asking in forums on how to install Network Manager in Slackware 13.0. There is Wicd, already present in Slackware “repositories”. Every Slackware maniac will tell you that it does the same job of Network Manager, but I don’t agree. It does not always work and is more complicated to be configured than NM.

Anyway, I’m going to explain to Slackware newbies the dirty way to have a fully working Network Manager on Slackware 13.0. This method is totally against Slackware philosophy and will also replace some important libraries of the system! Anyway, the packages being replaced are prepared from the guys behind GNOME SlackBuild, a project to bring Gnome in every Slackware release.
You have two way to have Network Manager in your Slackware: either install the entire Gnome from them (or any other similar project) or use slapt-get against their repositories and just install Network-Manager. Here are the instructions. All the following actions must be performed as root user:

1. Download, install and configure slapt-get. Instructions are provided on their website.
2. Update your system with:
   

   slapt-get –update
   slapt-get –dist-upgrade

3. Add GNOME SlackBuild repository in /etc/slapt-get/slapt-getrc:

   SOURCE=http://mirror.switch.ch/ftp/mirror/gsb/gsb-current/

4. Update the list of available packages and replace some system packages:

   slapt-get –update
   slapt-get –add-keys
   slapt-get –install –reinstall alsa-lib bluez glib2 gtk+2 libwnck

5. Now install Network Manager and its GTK applet:

   slapt-get –install NetworkManager network-manager-applet

6. Be sure that dbus, hal and NetworkManager daemons will be loaded at boot time:

   chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.messagebus /etc/rc.d/rc.hald /etc/rc.d/rc.networkmanager

7. Add your user to the plugdev group. Edit /etc/group, find the line

   netdev:x:86:root

   Add your username after root (bodom_lx is my case)

   netdev:x:86:root,bodom_lx

8. You are quite finished now! Log back as normal user and create a startup script for network-manager-applet:

   cd ~/.kde/Autostart/

   Create a file called nm-applet.sh with the following content:

   #!/usr/bin/bash
   nm-applet –sm-disable &

   Give it execution permission:

   chmod +x nm-applet.sh

   .

Reboot your system. Everything should work fine now.

To uninstall Network Manager and restore the system as it was before the installation follow these instructions, as root::

1. remove any GNOME SlackBuild package using:
   

   removepkg /var/log/packages/*gsb

2. Comment GNOME SlackBuild entry in /etc/slapt-get/slapt-getrc:

   #SOURCE=http://mirror.switch.ch/ftp/mirror/gsb/gsb-current/

3. Update your slapt-get sources and re-install the replaced Slackware packages:

   slapt-get –update
   slapt-get –reinstall –install glib2 libwnck alsa-lib gtk+2

4. Toggle execution permission to the auto-started network-manager-applet. Log back as normal user and type:

   chmod -x ~/.kde/Autostart/nm-applet.sh

Feel free to comment any suggestion.

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While searching for solutions on adopting Django for the server side of our Dynamic Car Pooling system, I found two very interesting projects:

• WAPI – a framework which abstracts the details involved in publishing an API and translates class methods to API methods, serializing the objects returned when possible. WAPI handles authentication, too, and other advanced functions. It’s an amazing, fully Django compatible system that currently works over ReST (JSON, XML, YAML) but not with XML-RPC. Therefore, I contacted the author to have some information about the status of the project. It would be very interesting in our system, to provide API and XML-RPC services just by using his layer
• RPC4Django – provides XML-RPC and JSON-RPC support to an existing Django project. It promises a XML-RPC interface by just adding the decorator @rpcmethod to an existing python function. It also fully integrates with Django authentication framework

I’m going to experiment with these two tools. Obviously the first one is the most interesting because of its ability to “export” services in more formats. But the most important protocol for us is missing. Let’s hope it will be added soon!

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