Qball's Weblog » gwsl

Gmpc 0.16.0 memory usage analyse

Qball — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:02:49 +0000

I have been playing a bit with massif, and a little gnuplot script. Below you see a small analyse of gmpc (on opensuse 0.11 x86_64) connected to my mpd (With 23.000 items in the playlist). First you see gmpc start, connect, fill the playlist and load the taglists. After that you see a huge rise this is a database search for aa then a, this matches 24151 songs, after that I clear the search window, releasing the memory. After that I do search for “Clapton” in the metadata browser, this is slow (gmpc reports it takes 1.5 seconds). I am wondering if I should make the search use a lazy loading model, to reduce the memory usage, or is a 10mb extra acceptable?

Gwsl

Qball — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 08:49:59 +0000

I’ve got some questions lately about gwsl (Gnome Wireless Pc Lock).

It seems the code got “lost” when moving stuff around on my website.

So here it is again:

http://download.sarine.nl/Programs/gwsl2/gwsl2.tar.gz

This is the most recent code I could find, including a new fix for libglade.

I have no interest in developing this anymore, it was fun playing with gob2 and libusb, but the hardware itself is just to crappy.

Qball

p.s. I will try to put it in git later.

gmpc memory usage 3

Qball — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 15:52:53 +0000

Another stat, this is pympd, it’s alot slower, so I didn’t take time to skip a few songs, this is just startup and showing the list..

in the beginning it’s pympd not-connected, I needed some time to set the right mpd host+password

This is with skipping a few songs:

Sitecom Wireless PC Lock – Continued 7

Qball — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 20:20:39 +0000

I’ve made another alpha/beta release.

Changes:

* handle destroying of notification tray

* Correctly ignore “unlock” even when the program is started and a valid transmitter is already in range.

* Fix makefile so it gives nice output about missing dependencies, also block make install (not yet supported).

* Fix error in enable/disable transmitter as valid.

Probably some other things too, I forgot about.

Download it here: http://download.qballcow.nl/programs/gwsl/gwsl-0.2.tar.gz

Wireless PC Lock – Continued 6

Qball — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 19:36:21 +0000

A slight warning I should probably make. Wireless PC Lock doesn’t increase security, it even opens another possibility to unlock your pc (a big one). So don’t think it increases security, I just wrote it out of curiosity nothing more.

Having this said, I’ll make a small update later and hope to make a beta release this weekend.

Qball

Sitecom Wireless PC Lock – Continued 5

Qball — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 21:16:30 +0000

I’ve made the following updates, and the program is now actually usefull:

Tell the user when the dongle get’s removed/added (libnotify)
Tell the user when a unknown transmitter is activated within range.
enable/disable transmitters permission to lock the screen.
Ignore transmitter that are just passing by. (It can detect the difference between a transmitter turned on, and a heartbeat of a transmitter)
A notification tray that works in gtk < 2.10
Preferences window.

Todo:

connect some options to the gui. (there is f.e. an not-working check box)
Handle destroying of tray icon
Handle no tray icon
Write a tiny api doc.
Release code.

Sitecom Wireless PC Lock – Continued 4

Qball — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 20:27:48 +0000

I wasn’t realy happy with the code as it was, so I rewrote it into G:Object’s. (using gob2).
There are now 2 “objects”. (sorry for the bad naming).

Wsl:Main

This connects to the reciever, and monitors it.
It wil give signals on connecting/disconnecting the reciever.
If a new transmitter is added it gives a signal and creates a new Wsl:Transmitter.

Wsl:Transmitter

Gives a signal when a transmitter gets in range
Gives a signal when a transmitter gets out of range.

I also found some data on in the internet providing me with sufficient information to detect transmitter id, and to detect the difference between a heartbeat and a “sign on”

Now it would be cool if I could use gnome-keyring to store what “transmitter” is valid.

Sitecom Wireless PC Lock – Continued 3

Qball — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 21:39:09 +0000

Just a small update, I’ve put gwsl in my svn server, so you can grab it with the following command:

svn co https://svn.qballcow.nl/gwsl/trunk/ gwsl/

(I am sorry that my svn is very slow atm, I don’t know what is the cause of it. Connection is fine, load is 0. Connection is made instantly, but actually getting takes ages. Anybody can give me a clue?).

I’ve made the following changes:

Unplug event correctly handled. The handler is closed, and the applet starts polling for the device again. (Replace this by hal? Does anybody has a good tutorial on how todo this?)
Plugin event handled. (see above)
Correctly handling state of dongle on new devices, so it won’t lock and directly unlock again.

Todo:

deamonize.
Preferences window
transmitter identification, and only lock/unlock an allowed transmitter.

Questions:

What is the best way to detect plugin of a device from a user space program? (Is polling ok?)
What exactly does the dongle return when a transmitter is in range? just an transmitter id. (need more then one transmitter to fix that out.)

Sitecom Wireless PC Lock – Continued 2

Qball — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 13:14:07 +0000

I’ve made the following changes:

If the dongle is unplugged, lock the screen.
left click on the icon, lock the screen.
Right mouse menu, with lock and quit
Configuration file where you can set timeout, The screensaver Lock/Unlock command. (and enable/disable it). And you can set a script to execute on lock and unlock.

It is still nothing more then a quick hack. It doesn’t have a configure script, so you need to make sure you have libusb-dev and gtk+-2.10-dev installed. ( I’ve hacked the makefile to check if gtk and libusb is availible, but not sure if that works).

You also need to make sure that the program is allowed to bind the usb device (see previous blog for udev rule).

You can get the tarball: here

If somebody can donate another wireless pc lock (f.e. from sitecom) I will continue to develop on this, making it cleaner, and try to implement transmitter detection.
It is kinda cool to walk away from your computer, seeing the screen lock, and the music paused. and when coming back see the screen unlock and having the music continue.

Wireless PC Lock – Continued

Qball — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 20:23:13 +0000

I’ve improved it a little bit further:

After some fiddling around, I can now detect leaving of dongle in 2-3 seconds. If you want it to react this fast is a second question.
Lock and unlock the screen. (using gnome-screensaver)

Todo list:

I have the cleanup the code a bit and add a configure system (its 120 lines of code now, with everything hardcoded) and I will try to get some first code available this weekend.
I am also looking (probably buy one monday) for more wireless pc locks, so I can start trying to figure out how I can differentiate between dongles. If somebody has a Wireless PC Lock from thinkgeek (or any other brand) lying around (unused) let me know.
A option to temporary disable it.
more I forgot.

A screenshot:

Not much more to see.

p.s. I used the following udev rule to allow me to run the program as the user qball: SUBSYSTEM==”usb_device”,SYSFS{idVendor}==”04b4″, SYSFS{idProduct}==”7417″, GROUP=”qball”,MODE=”0664″