The reason for this is that Ubuntu now utilise a “whitelist” for which applications can be displayed in the notification area. You can (maybe not that) easily add any application to the whitelist by invoking the command gsettings in the following way:

gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist ['app-1', 'app-2', 'app-3']

Now, this can be quite a difficult command to remember and since you will need to first grab the whitelist, alter it, and then put it back. Since I’m lame at Bash I thought it would be a nice misson to create a Bash script that makes this interference simpler, just to pick up some more Bash knowledge. So I did!

The script can be used like this:

# Add MyApplication to whitelist
systray-whitelist add MyApplication

# Remove MyApplication from whitelist
systray-whitelist remove MyApplication

# Show applications in whitelist
systray-whitelist show

And that’s that.

Download systray-whitelist

Since Roxen CMS have event hooks this module listens for newly published files and when found automatically notifies Twingly about it.

The only thing needed is to set up a config file in the SiteBuilder’s workarea so that this module knows under which paths newly published content should notify Twingly and with which arguments. But all this is documented in the module.

One note! If you run a replicated environment install this module on one of the frontend servers, not the backend. If installed on a backend Twingly might head over to your site before the new content has been replicated.

The Pingly Roxen module

This is how it works

  

       &_.name; wrote at 
      &_.body;
    

  

Download the Gravatar Roxen module

Look at PHP

…why not look at the source code of PHP and see how the PHP functions utf8_encode and utf8_decode are being done. So I downloaded the source of PHP and with a little find . -name *.c -print | xargs grep "utf8_encode" I found the functions in xml.c. Thankfully they weren’t too complicated – when dug out from the rest of the XML functions – so I didn’t take too long before I had them as standalone functions.

This is how they are used:

#include "utf8.h"

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
  char *iso_str = "Pontus Östlund";
  char *utf8_str;

  utf8_str = utf8_encode(iso_str);
  iso_str  = utf8_decode(utf8_str);

  return 0;
}

And it seems to be working quite OK!

Sources at Github

Say you get an email saying: Can you change … to … on http://some-front-end.com/some/path/to/a/page.html. You click on the link, since you’r lazy, and then have to change the domain in the address bar to your backend domain and 40% of the time you misspell and have to go up there again and…

Anyhow! I got tired of this so I created a domain swapping extension to Firefox. It adds a context menu (right-click on any page) where you can choose to change to another domain – the URL will stay intact.

So if you are working with replicated sites the extension is free to download at:

http://www.tekniskaverken.se/fishnet…pper/index.xml

All wallpaper are in 1680×1050px

Chocolate – Made with Photoshop

Fairytale – Made with Photoshop (image and butterfly from Stock exchange)

Gnome Shield – Made with Photoshop

Gnome Shield 2 – Made with Gimp

Gnome Shield 4 – Made with Gimp

./ApplCon.cs(232,24): error CS0122:
‘System.Net.Sockets.TcpListener.Server’ is inaccessible due
to its protection level

An explanation of the error can be found at MSDN. The reason seems to be due to TcpListener.Server being a protected property but I tried to access it as public. The strange thing is that I didn’t get an error about it nor on my machine at home or at work. Now I created a derived class of TcpListener.Server so that I can access the protected property.

We’ll see if it works!

Roxen Application Launcher

BTW: For those of you not knowing what the heck Roxen’s Application Launcher (AL here after) is here’s a brief explanation: Files in Roxen CMS is stored in a CVS file system which means that you don’t deal with files the way you normally do. To manage files you use a web browser interface (which is a darn good one I might add) but sometimes you actually want to edit files in your standard desktop application. And it is here the AL comes to play. You can download a file through the browser interface so that the file is opened in the AL. AL will then open the file in the desktop application you have associated with the file’s content-type. When you make your changes and saves them the AL will directly upload the changes to the server. So in short I could have said: The Application Launcher is a means to edit files on a remote Roxen server with a preferred desktop application.

The obstacles

I must say I’ve learned a lot from this project!

First off: If you download a file for editing and the AL is already started you don’t want to start a new instance of AL (this is something I have never ever thought about before – in general terms, not just concerning AL) but when you do think about it you find that it’s not a piece of cake to solve. I solved it the way it is solved in the original AL. The first instance of AL that is started also starts a “socket server” that listens for incoming traffic on a given port on the local IP. When a new instance is started it first checks if it can connect to said port and if it can it sends the arguments through the socket to the first instance which then handles the request. The second instance is simply terminated when it has send the data though the socket.

So there I had to do some socket programming. Great fun

Secondly: Stuff happens in the background of AL – data send through the socket remember – which means that nothing happens when you try to update the Graphical User Interface. (NOTE! This is the first more advanced desktop application I’ve done.) After “Google-ing” around a bit I came to know that this was a real newbie problem The thing is that the GUI can only be updated through the same thread that started it so when using background threads – implicitly that’s what I’m doing although handled by the asynchronous callback infrastructure of C# – you need to make sure the GUI is updated through the main thread. This is the most simple way so solve it:

Gtk.Application.Invoke(delegate{
  CallFunctionToUpdateGUI();
});

That’s not too difficult when you know it

Thirdly: The AL is sending data back and forth through the HTTP protocol which means we have to use some sort of HTTP client. C# has a couple of ways to do this but unfortunately they came up short, or I couldn’t use them anyway. I didn’t manage to figure out exactly why I always caught an exception saying something like: A protocol violation occurred!. I’m far from the only one who have fought with this and it has something to do with the headers sent from the remote server. You can invoke “unsafe header parsing” but that was to much of a hassle so I created my own little HTTP client.

One big annoying thing with C# is that is seems almost impossible to turn data from streams into strings without having to use any one of the System.Text.Encoding.* classes/objects which in my case meant that images and files in binary form got seriously fucked up. I manged to solve this my never turning the data into a string but keeping it as a System.Text.Encoding.* all the way from request to response to saving to disk. It was rather irritating but at the same time nice when solved (and I learned a whole bunch about System.Text.Encoding.*, System.Text.Encoding.*, System.Text.Encoding.* and System.Text.Encoding.*.)

Finally: Of course I learned a great deal more about C# but this blog post is starting to get pretty excessive so I will round it off by saying that MonoDevelop is starting to become pretty darn good! I just upgraded to the latest version of Ubuntu and that also meant that I got the latest MonoDevelop and I must say it’s more stable than ever (although it occasionally crashes) and a whole bunch of new features are in place. One I havn’t used before – although it might have existed before – is the “Deployment” stuff. It creates a package with configure and make files for optimal compilation. Really smooth!

Source and screens

I will finish off by adding the source files and a few screen shots:

Roxen Application Launcher

Screen shot 1: Just a standard view

Screen shot 2: The panel applet in action

Screen shot 3: The Application Launcher in Swedish

Screen shot 4: Adding support for a new content type

There are “one liners” for this but I wanted a bit more flexibility and ease of use so I wrote the a script that also lets you define regexp patterns for files you don’t want to add even if they exist in the directory structure.

This is how to use it:

# Add all new files
svnadd path/to/repository/
# Add all new files except those matching the regexp
svnadd -s ".*.txt|tmp/.*" path/to/repository/
# Add all new files except those matching the regexp in
# the file defined by the "-f" flag
svnadd -f regexp.txt path/to/repository/

Quite easy! If you don’t feel like remembering the pattern for files to skip, put the regexp in a file and use the svn add thefile flag.

#!/bin/bash
##########################################################################
#
# Script for adding all new files in a directory structure to an SVN
# repository.
#
# copyright © 2007 Pontus Östlund 
#
# The svnadd script is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
# modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your
# option) any later version.
#
# The svnadd script is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General
# Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation,
# Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA  02110-1301, USA.
#
##########################################################################

while getopts "s:f:h" opts
do
  case $opts in
    s) skip="$OPTARG";;
    f) if [ -f "$OPTARG" ]; then
         skip=$(head -n 1 $OPTARG)
       else
         echo "$OPTARG doesn't exist!"
       fi
       ;;
    h) help=1;;
  esac
done

shift $(($OPTIND - 1))

if [ -z $1 ] || [ "$help" ]; then
  echo "About: svnadd enables you to add all new files in [dir] to a "
       "subversion repository"
  echo "Usage: svnadd [flags] [dir]"
  echo
  echo "  -s
  Regexp pattern for files to skip"
  echo "  -f
     Path to file containing regexp for files to skip"
  echo "                The regexp should be placed in line one!"
  echo "  [dir]         The path to the repository"
  echo
  echo "Example: svnadd svnsrc/"
  echo "Example: svnadd -s 'tmp/.*.xml' svnsrc/"
  echo "Example: svnadd -f regexp.txt svnsrc/"
  echo

  exit 0
fi

dir=$1

if [ ! -d "$dir" ]; then
  echo "$dir is not a directory"
  exit 1
fi

while read status file; do
  if [ "$status" = "?" ]; then
    res=$( echo "$file" | egrep -o "$skip" )
    if [ -z "$res" ]; then
      svn add "$file"
    fi
  fi
done<