Battery Monitor

I use a rather spartan windowing manager called awesome in all of my machines. This has been a fine setup until I used it on my netbook due to one small issue, battery monitors.

On my desktop machines and the laptop I use gkrellm to monitor cpu and memory and for the laptop it has a handy battery usage label. With the netbook however, screen real estate is quite valuable, so I opted for finding something to sit in the system tray.

After a quick look it seems there was nothing which was lightweight or simple or not requiring me to install the entirety of gnome.

In the end I made my own called rbatmon, then packaged it up for use in the AUR. If you have a substandard flavour of linux, not to worry, You can grab the script from my githib page here.

The most interesting challenge of this was building a package for the first time. There is a great package for Archlinux called abs (available on pacman) which fills /usr/share/pacman with some example PKGBUILDS for standard sources of gettings code from VCS's.

Page on my site regarding this is here.

AUR page is here.

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Website Layout

I have modified the layout of jimhi to be user friendly. It still has a bit of improvement to be had, but at least you can find pages other than the start one now!

I shall put a feature in the site which puts it back into ridiculous interaction mode soon.

Very basic Makefile for LaTeX documents

So I wanted to make a basic makefile for my tex documents, so I took the Makefile from http://www.acoustics.hut.fi/u/mairas/UltimateLatexMakefile/ and modified it to be amazingly simple.

Heres the Make file:

CC=
FLAGS=

LATEX= latex
BIBTEX= bibtex
DVIPS= dvips
PS2PDF= ps2pdf

SRC := $(shell egrep -l '^[^%]*\\begin\{document\}' *.tex | sed -e 's/.tex//')
TRG = $(SRC).dvi
PSF = $(SRC).ps

all : pdf

dvi :
  $(LATEX) $(SRC) && $(BIBTEX) $(SRC) && $(LATEX) $(SRC) && $(LATEX) $(SRC)

ps : dvi
  $(DVIPS) $(TRG)

pdf : ps
  $(PS2PDF) $(PSF)

clean :
  rm *.bbl *.aux *.blg *.dvi *.log *pdf *.ps

Fairly simple and lets you choose your toolchain.

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Blogs and Wonder

Hello!

I have got the barebones of a new site up at http://www.jimhi.com so go and have a bit of a browse!

Also the Lancaster Computing Society has a development blog up!
Find it at http://compsocblog.blogspot.com/

Short post from me, all developmenty stuff is going on the Computing Society blog.

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Article is actually ... up!

Wow, it has been ... 5 months since I said I would write that article? Well ... here it is! A link to it anyway: http://www.jimhi.com/content/articles/ .

Will be writing a nice auto table of contents generator and folding javascript now, so it looks a bit nice and follows the site a bit more.

Probably wise to add a link back too !

Next article to be written will be on a java version of the Enigma machine I wrote. Then I shall write up a maze generator and solver which Stephen Wattam and myself built for the Computing Society.

Laters

Possibly the third attempt to start using this.

Yo.

Well, as everyone who has a blog is aware, its hard to actually find anything to put in it, never mind actually remembering to write it.

Ok, so personal stuff. Started my studentship at Lancaster University within the EIS(http://eis.comp.lancs.ac.uk) research group. Still unsure of an actual topic, although I will probably swing towards the algorithmic side of localisation in WSN.

Still, I rarely have time to do any personal code, yet some stuff happens. Recently wrote a basic heightmap generator in Ruby, currently porting to Lua, and it outputs some nice images using image tools like RMagick or just plain VT100 colour output.

Post to follow explaining the code.

NSTA - Progress

Woo Progress!

NSTA was progressed to a fully fledged prototype. It now outputs the node position and the connections in the logical graph. Shall do some message browsing and a quick propogation algorithm and release it for you viewing displeasure!

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