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[Blog] KeyHoleTV: peeking on Japanese TV and radio programmes

Caught One Piece anime on FujiTV =)

KeyHoleTV is an interesting little program, available for Windows, Mac and Linux, which lets you watch Japanese TV programmes and listen to Japanese radio stations. The quality of sound and picture is far from being 'high', but I guess it's better than nothing at all.

More info:

[Blog] Firefox: remapping mouse buttons (updated 2009-11-19 01:31:52)

Recently I changed my Firefox usage pattern. Instead of opening FF fullscreen, I now tend to open FF alongside some other window/s, like xterm or gvim.

Naturally, some or even many websites don't quite fit into the little space that is given to them now and so the problem of scrolling the page sideways as well as vertically arises. I remembered a feature called 'Autoscroll' and enabled it. When 'Autosroll' is enabled you can press the middle mouse button (which nowadays is almost always a scrolling-wheel, not a button), drag the mouse and the page scrolls in the direction you drag the mouse.

But as I used autoscroll, little by little, I got frustrated with the 'middle-button'. Scrolling-wheel was not designed to be pressed too often, I would've preffered to use an ordinary button any day.

That's when I remembered that Firefox -- is an open-source browser. I decided to download it's sources and implement the ability to remap mouse buttons arbitrarily.

The first thing I did when I got FF's source was find . -iname '*mouse*'. I found a file with intriguing name, content/events/src/nsDOMMouseEvent.cpp, tried to modify it, but there was no effect.

Then I found widget/src/gtk2/nsWindow.cpp, which is one of the files that interfaces FF with GTK2 and which translates GTK2 events to FF's. At first I tried out to make a hardcoded remap, i.e. changed

...
    PRUint16 domButton;
    switch (aEvent->button) {
    case 1:
        domButton = nsMouseEvent::eLeftButton;
        break;
    case 2:
        domButton = nsMouseEvent::eMiddleButton;
        break;
    case 3:
        domButton = nsMouseEvent::eRightButton;
        break;
...

in the nsWindow::OnButtonPressEvent function to

...
    PRUint16 domButton;
    switch (aEvent->button) {
    case 1:
        domButton = nsMouseEvent::eLeftButton;
        break;
    case 2:
        domButton = nsMouseEvent::eRightButton;
        break;
    case 3:
        domButton = nsMouseEvent::eMiddleButton;
        break;
...

It worked, so next I added a new about:config variable, mozilla.widget.mouse-button-map:

And wrote a function, which when the Firefox starts up, parses this variable, if it's present, and maps the buttons accordingly.

The format of the variable... Hm, that'll be a bit hard to explain...
The position in the string, is the GDK button number of the mouse button you want to remap. The number on this position in the string, is also a GDK mouse button number and denotes to which button you want to remap the button! If there is an 'm' on the given position, then it means the previous button will invoke the context menu (Look through the nsWindow::OnButtonPressEvent function, the context menu button is kind of mapped separately). If you don't want to remap the button on this position, put any char there other than [0-9m].
For example, given a value "13m2", the buttons will be remapped in the following way:

left mouse button -- will be remapped to left mouse button =)
middle mouse button -- will be remapped to right mouse button and it will also invoke context menu when pressed
right mouse button -- will be remapped to left mouse button

The scrolling function of the mouse will stay as it was, because scrolling is processed separately.

And so, now I can autoscroll with the right mouse button =) And I'm also so looking forward to using this on my laptop *types make extract patch*...

Here's the patch: ff_mouse_button_remap.patch.

[Blog] Introduction (updated 2009-11-18 21:39:43)

In this blog I'll try to tell tall tales of my adventures in the IT world.

My main interest is programming. Favourite operating system: OpenBSD. Favourite language: C.

OpenBSD is installed on 3 of my four computers: my main PC (also has Vista), my laptop and my home server which hosts this page. The fourth computer runs MS-DOS and Windows 98 :D

[Software] cwm(1) (updated 2009-11-11 02:02:29)

I decided to start using OpenBSD's calmwm(1) at work, where I have a Linux box. So I checked out the latest source and naturally it didn't compile straight away. Here it is if you're a linuxoid and you want to try cwm out too and you don't want to waste a few hours playing with Makefile, searching for missing files and implementing several lacking library functions: http://s010.lv/files/cwm_linux_20091109.tar.gz

[RecycleBin] op.sh (updated 2009-11-11 01:42:32)

Here's a nice little shell script, it's an analog to GUI's double-click concept.

Example usage: op doc1.pdf pic1.jpg ...

http://s010.lv/files/op.sh

Will add a more thorough description later xD

[Misc] Namie's Nature (updated 2009-11-11 01:37:24)

I'm a big fan of a Japanese pop singer, Namie Amuro. Here's a little chillout fan video I put together. For the most part, footage is from the NEVER END PV. Beautiful song...

[test_page] asd

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[Hardware] 4x4 LED matrix

One day I came up with an idea of making a 4x4 LED matrix which would connect to LPT port. This is my first self-made, real device. Before that, I only assembeled various little thingies, like binary counters, on a breadboard, which weren't intended for usage but rather for one-time demonstration.

One thing that served as an additional impulse for making the device, was the fact that I finally found out how to work with the input/output ports on OpenBSD: to enable access to I/O ports, use i386_set_ioperm(2) or i386_iopl(2) system calls, to read/write the ports use the C wrappers for in and out machine instructions (#include ).

Components I used: standard logic integreted circuits, namely, two 74HC373 (a latch) and one 74HC04 (the NOT gate); sixteen 220 Ohm resistors and sixteen LEDs.

The principles behind it are as follows: since the LPT port has only 8 data lines, we cannot obviously operate on all the 16 LEDs at the same time. So we need to either switch between them very fast, or we need to find a way to preserve the information on the one half of the LEDs while we are working with the other half. I chose the second option, because it is easier to program, and because with the first method — the computer would need to run in an endless loop and that would consume CPU power and... Well, I just felt like the second method would be more appropriate.

Soldering time: around... 10 hours. Those small wires were a real nuisance :-D
Programming time: around 4 hours.

Planning how to arrange elements:

The plastic coating on wires melted ofcourse:

Consturction complete:

The back:

Schematics:

Here is a video of the device, demonsrating a scrolling "HELLO WORLD" string:

Source code of the program that does that: 4x4_led_matrix.tar.gz.

usage: ./ledmtrx [-t delay] [-s || -b || -d || -r || -D] data -t delay -- delay for scrolling or substituting display modes, see below -s -- default mode, scroll text; 'data' is the text to scroll -b -- display text by substituting chars; 'data' is the text to display -d -- display an individual char; gedatati is the char -r -- raw; 'data' is an unsigned short value to write to the matrix -D -- display a demo; 'data' is ignored

Making this device was really fun! I will use it for at least two other programming projects I have in mind ;-)

[RecycleBin] Window Closer

Type:	utility
OS:	Windows
Download:	source + exe
Screenshot:

When I work at the computer for a few hours, a hell lot of open windows accumulate. I got tired of closing them by hand, so I decided to write this utility to do that for me.

This program allows you to close all windows, captions of which match the string you enter. Two wildcards are supported: '*' — stands for zero or more characters; '?' — stands for one character. Minimizes to system tray.
It's writen in pure C + WinAPI, therefore it's very fast and needs very little memory.