Thanks to some early testing and feedback from the previous xdotool release, I've put together a new release that fixes a few minor problems.

Download: xdotool-2.20100601.2912.tar.gz

As usual, if you find problems or have feature requests, please file bugs or send an email to the list.

Changelist since previous announcement:

2.20100601.*:
  - Add --sync and --clearmodifiers support to mousemove_relative
  - Fix bug in mousemove_relative --polar (Reported by Paul S via mailing list)
  - Change polar coordinates to be 'north'-oriented (0 is up, 90 is right...)
    (Requested by Paul S via mailing list)
  - Changed xdotool search flags. '--title' now means '--name' to match the
    window name (shown in the window manager title bar for the window).
    Related: http://code.google.com/p/semicomplete/issues/detail?id=33
    --title still works, but you will get a warning about deprecation.
  - Walked through all commands and tried to make sure the manpage reflects
    reality and has more detail where needed.

2.20100525.*:
  - Skip certain tests when the requirements aren't met (ie; no such window manager, etc)
    Reported by Daniel Kahn Gillmor.

New xdotool for your enjoyment.

Download: http://semicomplete.googlecode.com/files/xdotool-2.20100524.2888.tar.gz

Major changes:

• xdotool getmouselocation now supports --shell for outputting something you can simply eval into your shell
• Added 'sync' support to several commands. The --sync flag, if supported, will wait until the requested operation has completed before exiting.
• Added --polar (polar coordinate) support to mousemove
• Fixed some keymap bugs

As usual, if you find problems or have feature requests, please file bugs or send an email to the list.

Changelist since previous announcement:

2.20100524.*:
  - Add --sync flag to many commands. This flag will make any supporting command
    block until the operation completes. For example, a 'windowmove --sync' will
    only exit once the window has moved. Commands supported:
    * windowactivate
    * windowfocus
    * windowmap
    * windowmove
    * windowunmap
  - Fix http://code.google.com/p/semicomplete/issues/detail?id=21
    Multiple keyboard layouts are now supported better. Added unit tests
    to ensure consistency in typing across releases.
  - Added polar coordinate support to mouse movement. 'mousemove' and
    'mousemove_relative' support this. Flag is --polar. 'x' becomes angle (degrees)
    and 'y' becomes distance. The default origin is screen center. If you specify
    a window (to mousemove) then the origin is the center of that window.
    Requested by Paul S on the xdotool-users mailing list.
  - internal: Reworked testing to be less flakey
    http://code.google.com/p/semicomplete/issues/detail?id=30
  - internal: split commands into one per C file
  - API changes that required a version bump.
    * xdo_keysequence and friends now take a delay.
  - New libxdo functions:
    * xdo_window_wait_for_map_state
    * xdo_window_wait_for_active
    * xdo_get_window_location
    * xdo_window_wait_for_focus


1.20100415.*:
  - Add support for searching classnames (not just class)
  - Support switched xkbmaps. We do this by checking if the keycode found for a keysym
    has that keysym as the first or second (normal or with shift-key) mapping, if not
    we pretend we didn't find it and request it be bound as if the keysym wasn't mapped
    to any key.

    This is a hack to avoid knowing what other modifiers are required to type
    keysyms mapped at indexes 2 or beyond (0 is normal, 1 is shift, 2 and beyond
    are unknown).
    Verified fixes this: http://code.google.com/p/semicomplete/issues/detail?id=13
    Should fix some of this: http://code.google.com/p/semicomplete/issues/detail?id=21
  - Add --shell flag to getmouselocation. This will output data you can safely
    eval in your shell.
  - Add platform detection for Darwin when building.
    Should fix: http://code.google.com/p/semicomplete/issues/detail?id=28

1.20100325.*:
  - Fix bug in search where --name wasn't working. Test written to cover this.
    http://code.google.com/p/semicomplete/issues/detail?id=25

1.20100318.*:
  - Bug fixes only this release
  - Rewrote tests to use ruby and will now test against Xvfb and Xephyr using:
    no window manager, openbox, and then gnome.
  - Fix build problems on Arch linux (or gentoo?)
    Fixes: http://code.google.com/p/semicomplete/issues/detail?id=20
  - Fix searching for only visible windows.
    Fixes: http://code.google.com/p/semicomplete/issues/detail?id=22
  - Fix xdotool search flags: --title, --name, --class
  - Add include for keysym.h to fix compile errors reported on the mailing
    list.

Thanks to some early testing and feedback from the previous xdotool release, I've put together a new release that fixes a few minor problems.

Download: xdotool-1.20100302.2708.tar.gz

As usual, if you find problems or have feature requests, please file bugs or send an email to the list.

Changelist since previous announcement:

1.20100302.*:
  - Some test fixes suggested by Daniel Kahn Gillmor
  - Don't use isatty(0) anymore as it isn't totally reliable in determining if
    we should try to read from stdin.

1.20100301.*:
  - Minor libxdo patch to avoid exporting unnecessary symbols (Daniel Kahn Gillmor)
  - Minor Makefile fix to only link libxdo (and not xdotool) against libX11 and
    libXtst (also Daniel Kahn Gillmor)
  - Some test cleanup patches by Daniel Kahn Gillmor
  - Fixed the 'type hello' test that would fail sometimes when run in Xephyr.
  - Fix a minor bug in xdo_window_setclass that incorrectly aborts when
    XGetClassHint fails.

Lots of changes since the last announced release. Grok should get some more activity now that I'm actually using it in a few places. If you find bugs or have feature requests, please file them on googlecode issue tracker (see below)

The largest changes are:

• we ship with Ruby and C API.
• lots of new testing code.
• we now use tokyocabinet internally instead of bdb.

Grok documentation:

http://code.google.com/p/semicomplete/wiki/Grok

Download:

http://semicomplete.googlecode.com/files/grok-20091103.tar.gz

File bugs/features:

http://code.google.com/p/semicomplete/issues/list

This release has all tests passing in these configurations:

• FreeBSD 7.1. tokyocabinet 1.4.30, pcre 8.00, libevent 1.4.12
• Ubuntu 9.04. tokyocabinet 1.4.35, pcre 7.8-2, libevent 1.3e-3
• CentOS 5.3. tokyocabinet 1.4.9-1, pcre 7.8-2, libevent 1.1a-3.2.1

Thanks to Pete Fritchman, grok also ships with an RPM spec so you can 'rpmbuild -tb grok-20091103.tar.gz' for simple build and deployment. The spec builds grok, grok-devel, and grok-ruby.

I'm using this version of grok myself with good success. It's also being used in the new logstash (log indexing tool) project for doing log parsing.

Full changelist since the last announced release:

20091103
 - New: ruby bindings are now really supported.
 - Change 'WORD' pattern to be word bounded (\b)
 - Move grok-patterns to patterns/base
 - update rpm spec to install patterns/base in /usr/share/grok

20091102
 - Add a bunch of tests, mostly in ruby, to exercise grok. This uncovered a
   few bugs which are fixed.
   All tests currently pass (both CUnit and Ruby Test::Unit) on:
   * FreeBSD 7.1. tokyocabinet 1.4.30, pcre 8.00, libevent 1.4.12
   * Ubuntu 9.04. tokyocabinet 1.4.35, pcre 7.8-2, libevent 1.3e-3
   * CentOS 5.3. tokyocabinet 1.4.9-1, pcre 7.8-2, libevent 1.1a-3.2.1
 - When making strings in ruby, we now make them tainted per ruby C docs.
 - "Too many replacements" error will now occur if you have cyclic patterns,
   such as defining 'FOO' to be '%{FOO}'. Max replacements is 500.

20091030
 - Make 'grok' main take a config for an argument.
 - Add grok rpm spec.
 - Updated Makefile to work on Linux and FreeBSD without modification.
 - Fixed bug introduced in 20091022 where capture_by_(name,subname) didn't
   work properly.
 - Add default values for match {} grok.conf blocks:
   shell: stdout
   reaction: "%{@LINE}"
 - Have grok exit nonzero if there were no reactions executed, akin to grep(1)
   not matching anything. 'reactions' are important here; matches with no
   reaction will not count as a reaction.

20091023
 - Fix libgrok accidentally sharing it's parser/lexer functions. Turns out,
   libgrok doesn't actually need to parse the grok.conf, so we don't build
   against it anymore for the library.

20091022:
 - Convert to using tokyocabinet instead of berkeley db.
   * Berkeley DB isn't easy to target across platforms (4.x versions vary
     wildly in bugs)
   * tokyo cabinet should be faster
   * tokyo cabinet is less code to write, and slightly more readable in the
     author's opinion.
   * we don't have to serialize with xdr anymore

20091019:
 - include pregenerated bison/flex output since gnu flex varies much from
 non-gnu flex, and many important platforms don't have gnu flex available
 easily from packages (freebsd, centos, etc) but come with the other flex.

 No functional changes.

For whatever reason, I decided to play with oniguruma tonight (a newish regular expression library). I'm considering an effort to port some of grok's functionality to C or C++ for speed reasons. Doing it in C++ would require me to re-learn C++.

The docs are pretty complete, but not very helpful with respect to examples. I wasn't able to find very many useful examples on google, but the API docs are quite good. What wasn't answered by the docs was answered by reading header files. Excellent.

The result of this adventure is this:

# regex: ^(?<test>.*?)( (?<word2>.*))?$
# input: "hello there"

% gcc -I/usr/local/include -L/usr/local/lib -lonig oniguruma_named_captures.c
% ./a.out "hello there"
word2 = there
test = hello
% ./a.out "foobarbazfizz"
word2 = 
test = foobarbazfizz

Download the code

I finally picked up some small parts (leds, breadboard, leads, multimeter) from Fry's to start work on my universal remote project. Yes, I know you can buy universal remotes. I want to learn more electronics, so why not use this as a starter project?

Since my Soekris box is now free of it's router duties, I can use it for this project. To do this, I'll need two pieces: an infrared receiver, and an infrared emitter. I bought an infrared emitter led today, and I just need to buy a receiver online (they're like $2).

Before getting there, I needed to learn how to drive the GPIO ports on the net4501.

It was pretty simple to do, nd after hooking up a few wires I had an LED that blinked after a few hours of reading and hacking. The code itself was trivial to write, I just had to learn how to talk to the GPIO ports.

After writing the blinking code, I decided the next step was clearly to add fading to the LED. This is commonly done with PWM (pulse-width modulation). Apple made this technique famous with its "breathing" LED lights on the monitors and laptops when the devices were in sleep mode.

At any rate, I have successfully written code that makes both the error led and the PIO5 (GPIO 0) pin "breathe".

Download glow.c

Long story short...

File: 'connect.over' contains

#include <netinet/in.h>

override(`connect', `
  {
    // code to inject before the connect() call is actually made
  }
')

Output is 'connect.so' which overrides libc's connect function.

% LD_PRELOAD=./connect.so nc google.com 80
stream connect: fd=3 host=64.233.187.99:80
% LD_PRELOAD=./connect.so nc -u 129.21.60.9 53 
dgram connect: fd=3 host=129.21.60.9:53
% LD_PRELOAD=./connect.so ssh scorn           
stream connect: fd=3 host=129.21.60.26:22
stream connect: fd=4 host=109.112.47.115:12148
scorn(~) %

The output by nc was due to my function above outputting this.

The strange ssh connection on fd=4 above is seemingly due to ssh calling connect() on a tty? fstat says:

jls      ssh         3221    4 /dev        122 crw--w----   ttypd rw

inode 122 on /dev is /dev/ttypd.

This release of keynav adds necessary support for configuration files and the benefits obtained from dynamic configuration.

View the project page and/or download keynav-20070629.tar.gz

Update: 20070627 had problems with $HOME so I released a new version (0629).

Yesterday, I talked about macros. I spent some time coding today and I now have a tool that will let you execute raw keyboard and mouse input into X using the XTEST extension.

The primary example I used was focusing firefox's URL bar without the mouse. The sequence was this: Switch to Desktop 2 (I press Alt+2), focus firefox's URL bar (using control+l) and clear it.

The result is a simple tool I'm tentatively calling 'xdo'. You can download the source here. Compile instructions are at the top of the file.

The top of xdo.c details the implemented commands, so let's cut to an example:

% echo 'key alt+2; sleep 1; key ctrl+l; key BackSpace' | ./xdo

It does exactly what you think. The 'sleep' command has values in milliseconds, and is only necessary to slow down so that events can propgate fast enough (window focus changes, etc).

Another reasonable example would be to say "firefox, open a new tab and load the URL in my clipboard":

# My clipboard contains a valid url, say, "http://www.google.com/"
(echo "key alt+2; sleep 1; key ctrl+l; key BackSpace;"
 echo "move 55 55; sleep 1; click 2; key Return") | ./xdo

Seems complex, but look at what's really happening: Go to desktop 2, focus urlbar, hit backspace (clearing it), move the mouse cursor to 55,55 (a point inside the urlbar for me), hit middle mouse button to paste.

Change "ctrl+l" to ctrl+k (unix firefox) to focus the "Search" box instead, and change the 'move' command to cursor over the search box to paste instead, and suddenly you can bind a simple keystroke to search for whatever is in your X clipboard. Useful.

One of the neater features is that you can 'type' text:

% echo 'type echo hello there; key Return' | ./xdo
echo hello there
% echo hello there
hello there

I've got my usb mouse working with the new moused. Most of the code in the module is ripped from usbhidctl(1). Now that I *actually* know how things work, I found that the read() wasn't actually one with side effects. Good.

You'll need the new moused framework for this module.

Basic instructions:

1. Download my moused framework (newpsm project on this site)
2. Recompile your kernel without "device ums"
3. Build moused, build the usbmouse module.
4. Run moused: ./moused -m usbmouse -d /dev/uhid0

If it doesn't work, let me know.

moused-usbmouse.tar.gz

Future plans:

• Rewrite ugly bits
• Port ums(4) hacks for broken mice
• Test with more mice
• Write uhid joypad support