As the Sidewinder is an Microsoft keyboard, it obviously does all it can to not work at it’s full potential on GNU/Linux systems ;-) What my script does is watch for usb events, using usbmon, then it filters it searching for events from this keyboard, and then it filters out the discrete keystrokes for them. When such keystroke is found, we launch an bash script located in actions/S##.sh which can then do anything you want it to do – fire up intellij, or send keystrokes. I’d advice the second idea – use xdotool to send keyboard events, which you then map in Intellij or Netbeans or KDE/GNOME. Such keycode send looks like this:

xdotool key --clearmodifiers ctrl+shift+F1

That’s about it. I also wanted to thank some guys on github, who found my project and it really helped them out :-) Just to cite my fav email:

[...]
I’m amazed to see that somebody made this keyboard work under linux, I was beggining to lose hope. Great job!
[...]

Thanks for the feedback, it’s what keeps me going with opensourceing projects like this :-)

The G73 has an backlit keyboard, which may come in handy while late night coding without lights on as I like to code sometimes. (I’m using a X6 Sidewinder, even with this Notebook so it’s not like it’s keyboard matters to me most of the time ;-)) As usual with such “super cool addons” the funtion keys regulating the keyboard backlight seemed to only work on Windows – which I’m only using for gaming (but rarely) and testing if the software I happened to write runs ok on it. Anyways, turns out that the keyboard does really well integrate with linux, and you just need a few simple commands to use it, I’ve made them available on github :-)

https://github.com/ktoso/g73-keyboard-backlight-sh <- Go here to check it out :-)

Download the MP3 file: three_dead_trolls_in_a_baggie-every_os_sucks.mp3

And here are the lyrics:

(spoken introduction)

You see, I come from a time in the nineteen-hundred-and-seventies when computers were used for two things – to either go to the moon, or play Pong… nothing in between. Y’see, you didn’t need a fancy operating system to play Pong, and the men who went to the moon–God Bless ‘em–did it with no mouse, and a plain text-only black-and-white screen, and 32 kilobytes of RAM.

But then ’round ’bout the late 70′s, home computers started to do a little more than play Pong… very little more. Like computers started to play non-Pong-like games, and balance checkbooks, and why… you could play Zaxxon on your Apple II, or… write a book! All with a computer that had 32 kilobytes of RAM! It was good enough to go to the moon, it was good enough for you.

It was a golden time. A time before Windows, a time before mouses, a time before the internet and bloatware, and a time… before every OS sucked.

*sigh*

(singing)

Well, way back in the olden times,
my computer worked for me.
I’d laugh and play, all night and day,
on Zork I, II and III.

The Amiga, VIC-20 and the Sinclair II,
The TRS 80 and the Apple II,
they did what they were supposed to do,
wasn’t much… but it was enough.

But then Xerox made a prototype,
Steve Jobs came on the scene,
read “Of Mice and Menus,” Windows, Icons
a trash, and a bitmap screen.

Well Stevie said to Xerox,
“Boys, turn your heads and cough.”
And when no-one was looking,
he ripped their interfaces off.

Stole every feature that he had seen,
put it in a cute box with a tiny little screen,
Mac OS 1 ran that machine,
only cost five thousand bucks.

But it was slow, it was buggy,
so they wrote it again,
And now they’re up to OS 10,
they’ll charge you for the Beta, then charge you again,
but the Mac OS still sucks.

Every OS wastes your time,
from the desktop to the lap,
Everything since Apple Dos,
Just a bunch of crap.

From Microsoft, to Macintosh,
to Lin– line– lin– lie… nux,
Every computer crashes,
’cause every OS sucks.

Well then Microsoft jumped in the game,
copied Apple’s interface, with an OS named,
“Windows 3.1″ – it was twice as lame,
but the stock price rose and rose.

Then Windows 95, then 98,
man solitaire never ran so great,
and every single version came out late,
but I guess that’s the way it goes.

But that bloatware’ll crash and delete your work,
NT, ME, man, none of ‘em work.
Bill Gates may be richer than Captain Kirk,
but the Windows OS blows!

And sucks!

At the same time!

I’d trade it in, yeah right… for what?
It’s top of the line from the Compuhut.
The fridge, stove and toaster, never crash on me,
I should be able to get online, without a PHD.

My phone doesn’t take a week to boot it,
my TV doesn’t crash when I mute it,
I miss ASCII text, and my floppy drive,
I wish VIC-20 was still alive…

But it ain’t the hardware, man.

It’s just that every OS sucks… and blows.

Now there’s lih-nux or lie-nux,
I don’t know how you say it,
or how you install it, or use it, or play it,
or where you download it, or what programs run,
but lih-nux, or lie-nux, don’t look like much fun.

However you say it, it’s getting great press,
though how it survives is anyone’s guess,
If you ask me, it’s a great big mess,
for elitist, nerdy shmucks.

“It’s free!” they say, if you can get it to run,
the Geeks say, “Hey, that’s half the fun!”
Yeah, but I got a girlfriend, and things to get done,
the Linux OS SUCKS.
(I’m sorry to say it, but it does.)

Every OS wastes your time,
from the desktop to the lap,
Everything since the abacus,
Just a bunch of crap.

From Microsoft, to Macintosh,
to lin– line– lin– lie… nux.
Every computer crashes,
’cause every OS sucks.

Every computer crashes… ’cause every OS sucks!

A quickly hacked up version of an simple shell script to kill this tomcat could look like (I still suck at awk…):

The above obviously sux, as we’re using two awk commands after another… Ans also in the above examples, I’ve assumed that tomcat is listening on 8080, this may not always be the case, since with mod_proxy_ajp, there is no need fot it to listen on it’s default port and just the one to communicate by AJP. Let’s use it’s name to find it’s PID, we’ll use ps and grep and awk – life is simple with them. :-)
Here’s the final version of this command:

Our server “Kopiec” is somewhat online (running CentOS off course) – we’re able to start/stop if thanks to a tool that’s called “remote insight”, and I’ve put 3 databases on there. MariaDB, InfiniDB and a clean MySQL instalation. We’re somewhat having problems with TokuDB, but that’s going to be our 4th database of interest. If you want to keep track of our test’s you can take a look at: http://mysqlintegra.project13.pl/.

The first step in getting things tested is filling those db’s with some data, and I mean a LOT of data. So we hacked up a more or less quick and dirty python script called dbfiller (source code avaiable on github) that would simulate a very simple table generation scheme (people working on shifts and checking in when they’re finished or start some activity). If you’re interested, our task is specyfied in the /doc/Opis.pdf file (sorry, only in polish). After a few days it’s up and running and we’re moving on to filling up those databases with some gigabytes of data.

Next we’re going to write some SQL Views/Procedures and then we’ll use Apache JMeter to run some performance benchmarks of some interesting data storage engines.

PS: If you’re wondering about my GWT-Crossword project – yeah, it’s still actual, and I’ll get right on it when done with some of the stuff here.
PPS: Yes, an Linux powered phone AT LAST in my hands! The HTC HERO is comming to me really soon – never again shall I use a ShitOS like WindowsMobile 6.5.

• TokuDB http://tokutek.com/
• InfiniDB http://www.infinidb.org
• percona http://www.percona.com/docs/wiki/Percona-XtraDB:start
• MariaDB http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/Maria (Maria, PBXT, FederatedX)
• IBMDB2I http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/se-db2.html
• …ane some more…?
  

A simple comprehension will be the first thing we’ll do for this project… Later on we’ll do some simulated “real life” tests using JMeter. It’s possible that we’ll write some app based on this database later on – but that’s somehow far off at the moment. That said, I’m really happy to be involved in an interesting and open (it’s all open source & free software after all) topic.

Tomorrow I’m going to the university to setup our very own (awesome ;-)) HP ProLiant DL380 server. It has 6 hard drives, thus it should be very interesting to run HEAVY database LOAD tests – can’t wait. We’ll install CentOS 5.4 and think about it’s future then…

LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 blender

This will launch blender and render it’s interface in software mode – runs perfectly, and no slowdowns could be detected by me so far :-)

Happy Hacking!