Random notes from mg

Netspeed is a GNOME panel applet that shows your current upload/download speed in bytes (or bits) per second. I love it. Except... you have to manually say which network device to monitor. If you're switching between wireless and wired, this gets old really quickly. There's an option, Always monitor a connected device, but it is buggy and usually gets stuck monitoring some stupid network interface like wmaster0 or vmnet8.

Today I spent a couple of hours fiddling with netspeed's source code and fixed the bug! Patches attached to the bug report and tested with netspeed-0.14 on Ubuntu Hardy.

While doing this I created a local Bazaar branch for playing with the source code. Sadly, Bazaar decided to hurt me again: bzr viz, instead of letting me look at my commits in a nice GUI window, barfs AttributeError: 'KnitPackRepository' object has no attribute 'get_revision_graph' and stops. Apparently the latest version of bzr-gtk (trunk from launchpad) is not compatible with the latest version of bzr (1.6rc2 from the Hardy PPA).

It's becoming a pattern: every couple of months I give Bazaar a try, and I hit a new bug that prevents me from doing whatever I wanted to do. Why do I even keep trying?

Dear lazyweb,

Where's the GNOME applet that can show me my laptop's power usage in Watt? I cannot believe that nobody has written one yet.

On my laptop (Pentium M, 1.6 GHz, 1 GB RAM) it takes exactly 68 seconds from the time I press Enter in the GDM login screen, until the GNOME desktop is completely loaded (the last applets appear and the disk activity stops). This is GNOME 2.16.1 from Ubuntu Edgy.

This is after a fresh reboot (so, nothing in disk cache, except for what Ubuntu's readahead loads). The startup process is not interfering (I waited until the disk activity stopped before I logged in).

What does GNOME load? A large wallpaper (2304x1280 -- I use dual-head), xcompmgr, Tomboy, Network Manager applet, a bunch of GNOME applets on three panels (netspeed, gweather, battery, sound volume, two clocks, window switcher, workspace switcher, two window lists, two system managers, CPU frequency, trashcan, 7 launchers). And the usual GNOME processes (nautilus, gnome-settings-daemon, etc.).

Still, 68 seconds is too much. I ought to figure out how to hook bootchart to this thing and start filing bugs.

Before:

After:

Patch: libvte4-drop-shadows.patch.

Inspiration: Eterm, Keith Packard's xterm hack.