darkness

I’ve finished the first attempt at my Metacity patches. I’m using them now. I’ve already found and fixed two bugs, just in a few hours. My patches:

• Keep clicks on a client window from raising the window in sloppy focus
• Keep new windows from stealing focus (basically, new normal windows are never given focus, unless the mouse pointer happens to be in them; this behavior is like Sawfish)
• Makes windows appear focused as you cycle through them with alt-tab
• Gives you raise on cycle and an icon box in the center of the screen (Metacity seems to only offer one or the other normally)
• Temporary raise on cycle

Maybe some other stuff. The patches are all ugly: code duplication, #ifdef 0ed sections, and the whole “make windows appear as focused” does so by essentially screwing up a state variable in the Metacity structure that tracks windows. So far, it seems to work like I want it to–which is to say, like I have Sawfish configured to work. I hope I won’t regret putting this work into kwin later.

Almost a month ago my W and E keys started breaking on my trusty Dell QuietKey keyboard. They would only register as a key press when you pressed them very hard, or maybe on a certain part of the key (that I didn’t usually hit). So I decided to put my keyboards in the dishwasher. One is the one I just described with the broken keys, the other an identical model that I had stashed away. Its problem was a sticky key; if I recall, I spilled something sugary in there. I know lots of places on the Internet describe pulling your keyboard apart and washing all the pieces, but that is way too much work for me, so I just slammed them in there as shown. (That other thing on the bottom is part of our meat grinder attachment for the mixer. It didn’t get quite clean.) Note that I did put a full load of detergent in there, and I give no guarantees about whether or not the rinsing agent (Jet Dry) was full or not. I think I washed them normally, except without heated dry.

Everyone says to let them dry out for a week, which seemed pretty reasonable. I didn’t get around to trying them until today, though.

The keyboard with the sticky keys: still has sticky keys. Though I swear it looks a lot cleaner down there, the apostrophe still sticks.

The keyboard with the non-working keys: still has non-working keys. Plus, the writing on some of the keys is either coming off, or has accumulated some sort of detergent residue turning it (the writing) kind of white.

So that experiment was a failure. Again, I might be able to get somewhere with that sticky key keyboard if I felt like taking it apart. I just don’t care that much. I whipped out another Dell keyboard I had lying around (not a QuietKey, though; did they stop making that model?) which should do just fine.

In FC4 new, my Firefox crashed again today, again when I used Tab Mix’s “Close Right Tabs…” function. Still using nss_ldap from FC2 since I’m convinced it works better, even though I can’t prove it. I looked at my firewall today when I needed to get apcupsd going and I realized that FC’s system-config-securitylevel sucks. It lists about six services, none of which were “apcupsd,” and the way you add additional ports doesn’t let you specify a source host. I have NFS mounts in /etc/fstab, yet FC made apparently no effort to open up some NFS ports, which I really think it needs to. (Correct me if I’m wrong.) So I’ll disable that and use my own scripts.