I finally was able to run cammag (another my old project) in a qemu/freedos environment so i created some videos for my website.

I spent some time in playing with old stuff and took some videos of camelet and curvat, two projects i made about 15 years ago, running on qemu/freedos.
The videos are on youtube and are linked in the projects section of my website.

Metrix is near to be complete, i put the website on-line even if many pages are under construction (the documentation is far from beeing complete).
The live system is up and running and can be viewed (link) to understand what metrix is, currently it receive about 300 metrics (principally the computing farm and the computer science laboratory) but this number will increase quickly.
Currently the website is not IE friendly.

Finally with the help of Flavio, metrix (my project of a monitoring system) is not blocked anymore, today we made the first step of migration from mysql to postgres.
Also the work on the scheduling optimization is making step, the infrastructure is almost complete and is producing data.

Many time has passed since my last post, so it's time to start writing again.
I added to my website the poster section to put there some work presented this year to a conference.

I'm going to abandon ion3 as my WM and start using wmii, there are some reasons in doing this:

- It doesn't depend on external libraries and languages (the need for lua in ion3 is very annoying), so it is easy to compile it among different architectures.
- It is dynamic, each client may have one or more tags associated and "workspaces" are build on the fly by the WM.
- It is blessed from Plan9: Every interaction with the VM can be done using its namespace. As result it is really easy to configure everything, you don't need to learn lua and check for APIs, just need "echo" "cat" some other shell stuff and pipes.
For example i'm used to have many workspaces (tags in wmii) and i don't like to have them always listed on the bar. But i want only the current so just modify some creation in /lbar and it is done:


# Event CreateTag
# echo "$WMII_NORMCOLORS" "$@" | wmiir create "/lbar/$@"
# Event DestroyTag
# wmiir remove "/lbar/$@"
Event FocusTag
echo "$WMII_FOCUSCOLORS" "$@" | wmiir create "/lbar/$@"
# wmiir xwrite "/lbar/$@" "$WMII_FOCUSCOLORS" "$@"
Event UnfocusTag
# wmiir xwrite "/lbar/$@" "$WMII_NORMCOLORS" "$@"
wmiir remove "/lbar/$@"

...

wmiir ls /tag | sed -e 's|/||; /^sel$/d' |
while read tag; do
if [ "X$tag" = "X$seltag" ]; then
echo "$WMII_FOCUSCOLORS" "$tag" | wmiir create "/lbar/$tag"
# else
# echo "$WMII_NORMCOLORS" "$tag" | wmiir create "/lbar/$tag"
fi
done


Another example, i want Alt+X and Alt+Z to change to the next and to the previous view:

Key $MODKEY-z
LOCALVIEW=`wmiir read /tag/sel/ctl | head -n 1`
VIEWS=`wmiir ls /tag | sed -e "s/\///g" | sed -e "s/sel//g"`
OLDVIEW="none"
for i in $VIEWS $VIEWS
do
if [ $i == $LOCALVIEW ]
then
PREVVIEW=$OLDVIEW
fi
OLDVIEW=$i
done
wmiir xwrite /ctl "view $PREVVIEW" &
Key $MODKEY-x
LOCALVIEW=`wmiir read /tag/sel/ctl | head -n 1`
VIEWS=`wmiir ls /tag | sed -e "s/\///g" | sed -e "s/sel//g"`
OLDVIEW="none"
for i in $VIEWS $VIEWS
do
if [ $OLDVIEW == $LOCALVIEW ]
then
NEXTVIEW=$i
break
fi
OLDVIEW=$i
done
wmiir xwrite /ctl "view $NEXTVIEW" &


- Menu are managed by an external application (dmenu), i modified dmenu to include some libidentif code. Now i have a fully probabilistic WM that can handle incomplete commands correcting them (I will put patches and ebuilds in the download section of my website)
- Every aspect of the WM may be automatized so it is possible to create a start-client script like the following that put every client on its place:

#!/bin/sh -f
WAITCLIENT=5

# Spawn a firefox instance
firefox &
sleep $WAITCLIENT
echo -n "Firefox" | wmiir write /client/sel/label
echo -n "web" | wmiir write /client/sel/tags

# Connection to masqserv
xterm -title "onehost.serpe-net.it" -e "ssh onehost" &
sleep $WAITCLIENT
echo -n "onehost.serpe-net.it" | wmiir write /client/sel/label
echo -n "onehost" | wmiir write /client/sel/tags

# Connection to marketdb
xterm -title "anotherhost.serpe-net.it" -e "ssh root@anotherhost" &
sleep $WAITCLIENT
echo -n "anotherhost.serpe-net.it" | wmiir write /client/sel/label
echo -n "anotherhost+myfavoritehost+whateveryouwantastag" | wmiir write /client/sel/tags


There are some problems in the default xen 3.2 networking scripts (seen in network-bridge on gentoo). It is changed the way of building the bridges, in some way it is similar to the Xen 2.0 way of building them. This way the network connection will never be dropped and the system will be in theory more root-over-nfs friendly (we will check soon in our labs) but there are thing i don't like:

1) By default the bridge name is now the same as the NIC's one (i.e. eth0), this is confusing and may bring to errors.
2) Often i found a bridge called "tmpbridge" in my system, i have no idea (since i have no intention to debug the script) why. I think it is related someway to the number of bridges.
3) The script fails if IPv6 is enabled, i had to disable IPv6.

The documentation in how to put e xen dom0 with root filesystem over NFS is almost ready, you can find it on The "Wiki and Howtos" section (Direct link).
I also made other old projects on the projects section.

Also Metrix (another project) has now an abstract on the project section on my web site.

I put a brief description of the "Dynamical Domains" project in my website.