Bloggy

So I’m finally back from my first patrol. The patrol itself went pretty well, we did a successful test launch and I learned a crap load about the engineering systems (but I still have oh so much to learn). There have been quite a few changes in things while I was gone as well.

Most importantly, my wife gave birth early to our son, Ian. He was born 08-Dec-2006, and was released from intensive care on the 20th. Since then, it’s been a whirlwind of feedings, appointments, and trying to sleep around his schedule. :-)

My wife delivered all by herself, and by the time she was to the hospital it was too late for medication so she also got to deliver without pain medication. She then had to take care of everything by herself and still drive an hour south to Jacksonville every day to take care of Ian.

In the spare time I did have I’ve been working on a new dial widget which may be useful for ksysguard in KDE 4.

The code behind the widget can be found at my dumping ground. It requires Qt 4.2, and is Linux-specific in how it reads sensors. So far it includes three, selectable on the command line.

• --cpu: Reads CPU temperature. This requires lm_sensors and even then may not work for you as the scaling factor is specific to my motherboard and libsensors really sucks.
• --net-rx: Displays receive bandwidth on the (hardcoded) eth0 network interface.
• --cpu-load: Display CPU load information (not including niced processes).

One problem is that it takes up too much CPU on my system to be useful as a indication of system status because of all the eye candy but other people report that they don’t have such a problem so maybe it’s just my system being out-of-date.

At this point I still need to update my KDE 4 install so I can port abakus and other of my goodies but now I have less time to do it in. :-/

Finally, congrats to the Indianapolis Colts for (finally) beating the New England Patriots in the playoffs.

Posted by mpyne under KDE & Personal & Pictures & Programming |