Feedback on GNOME 3.0
After 5 months with GNOME 3.0, I'm really happy with the experience. At the end of work day,
my mind is no more exhausted of windows placement fighting and application finding.
GNOME 3.0 is really stable, except with the Open Source driver on my Radeon 5870 (4 crashes in 2 months).
I really like the behavior of dual-head where the secondary screen has only one virtual screen.
For me, there are just 3 annoying points:
- Ctrl + Del to remove a file in Nautilus, may be it's a Fedora settings but this change is just @!# I've already a Trash to undo my mistakes (http://www.khattam.info/howto-enable-delete-key-in-nautilus-3-fedora-15-2011-06-01.html)
- Alt key to shutdown, no I don't want to waste energy for days and my PC boots quickly.
- only vertical virtual screens, I found a bit painful to move down two screens when the screen is reachable with one move with a 2x2 layout but I understand this layout doesn't fit well with the GNOME 3 design.
To have a good experience with GNOME 3, I use:
- Windows key + type to launch everything
- Ctrl + Shift + Alt + arrows to move the application between the virtual screen
- Ctrl + click in the launcher when I really want a new instance (the default behavior is perfect)
- snap à la Windows 7 is great
- Alt + Tab then the arrow keys to select an app
Don't forget to read https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/CheatSheet or the Help (System key + 'Help').
It's not specific to GNOME 3 but you can change the volume when your mouse is over the applet (don't click, think hover) and a mouse scroll.
With GTK+, do you know you can reach the end of scrolled area with a left click on the arrow and a specific position by middle click?
I'm impressed by the new features of GNOME 3.2 and I'm waiting for Fedora 17 to enjoy it!
Incredible coincidence
The day I discovered that Firefox does not behave like Chrome/IE on Ajax redirects, Firefox 7.0 is out with the fix!
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=553888
PS: a simple request.is_ajax () after a redirect() in Django highlights the problem.
coreutils is a really active project
I'm impressed by the activity of the coreutils project (unix commands such as ls, df, etc). At first glance, you might think command line tools are written for good and only few changes are applied to ensure compatibility with the platforms. With several releases a year and new features for each, it's really an active project indeed.
You want to show the local time for 9AM next Friday on the west coast of the US, it's possible:
$ date --date='TZ="America/Los_Angeles" 09:00 next Fri'
The maintainers/contributors (Pádraig Brady, Jim Meyering and Eric Blake) are nice and quick to commit your patches.
So don't be intimidated it's not the glibc project!
PS: I'm waiting for the tag on translationproject.org to be able to push the latest French translation.
Tip for python-mode with Emacs
If you expect 'Ctrl + d' wil only remove the first part 'foo_' of 'foo_bar' with the great python-mode, you can make this change to python-mode.el:
- (modify-syntax-entry ?\_ "w" py-mode-syntax-table)
+ (modify-syntax-entry ?\_ "_" py-mode-syntax-table)
Thank you Ivan.
v3.0.1 to avoid ".0" problems
A dot zero isn't a dot zero without few problems, so I've released libmodbus v3.0.1 to fix problems with non-recent Linux kernels and other platforms.
libmodbus 3.0.1 (2011-07-18)
- Avoid useless serial_mode integer when TIOCSRS485 isn't supported
- Fix compilation failure on Windows (RS485 support) by Tobias Doerffel
- Properly check TIOCSRS485 define by Matthijs Kool
- Rename package to libmodbus5 to fix lintian warning
Magic libmodbus 3.0.0 is out
OK, the new stable release of libmodbus is finally out! Only 2 years after libmodbus v2.0.3 and 400 commits, I'm happy to release this new version which contains many changes to improve the API and enhance the Modbus protocol conformity. The major features of this release are:
- more coherent and extended API
- POSIX error return codes
- full documentation of the API
- IPv6 support
- new backend design
- support for Windows, MacOS X and FreeBSD
- rewriting of the message reading to avoid timeout
- native serial communication on Windows
Thanks to the many contributors
Tobias Doerffel, Florian octo Forster, Hannu Vuolasaho, Patsy Kaye, Ivo De Decker,
Allan Cornet, Manfred Gruber, Jason Oster, Petr Parýzek, Antti Manninen, Barry Grumbine,
Kirill Smelkov, Anibal Limón, David Olivari, Sisyph, aladdinwu, Jeff Laughlin, Yishin Li , Henrik Munktell, Paul Fertser, Norbert Koch and Stéphane Raimbault.
The development continues for the next v3.1 release with this roadmap.
Have fun!
libmodbus v2.9.4 is out!
This minor release contains many new features with IPv6 support, documentation (man and HTML), error recovery modes and small API changes. I'm intend to release the version 3.0 so I need feeback from this release even more if you use libmodbus on Windows or MacOS X (check nanosleep support for example).
It's easy to test the library, just compile and run the unit tests! Don't forget to notify your success or failure (by mail, wiki or bug report), see the Call for Testers page or the mailing list for details.
There are already Debian and Fedora packages but I need help to submit them to the distributions, so all experience in this field is appreciated.
libmodbus 2.9.4 (2011-06-05)
- IPv6 support Make the TCP implementation "protocol independent" by Florian Forster and Stéphane Raimbault.
- Fix compilation on Windows 7 (x64) with MinGW/MSYS and GCC 4.
Reported by Patsy Kaye. - Documentation of libmodbus functions with AsciiDoc (man and HTML) by Stéphane Raimbault
- Avoid an iteration in flush function
- New functions to send and receive raw requests (modbus_send_raw_request, modbus_receive_confirmation)
- Fix flush function of TCP backend on Windows
- API changes for server/slave:
* modbus_receive doesn't take socket/fd argument anymore
* new function modbus_set_socket to set socket/fd - API changes for timeout functions:
* modbus_get_timeout_begin -> modbus_get_response_timeout
* modbus_set_timeout_begin -> modbus_set_response_timeout
* modbus_get_timeout_end -> modbus_get_byte_timeout
* modbus_set_timeout_end -> modbus_set_byte_timeout - Fix longstanding limitation of server to wait forever
- New functions modbus_set/get_serial_mode by Manfred Gruber and Stéphane Raimbault for RS485 communications
- Improved recovery mode (see modbus_set_error_recovery documentation) for data link and protocol errors.
- Fix compilation issue with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. Reported by Allan Cornet.
Not compliant device can be time consuming!
Travis Atkinson of Com-Pac Filtration and me have worked together to find out why the HMI of Weintek Labs I-Series, with Ethernet, answered only to request sent by the modpoll program (proprietary software).
After many emails and the help of Wireshark, we have discovered modpoll uses the unit identifier as slave ID for TCP requests, according to the Modbus specs that's incorrect (cf page 23 of Modbus Messaging Implementation Guide v1.0b) but else the device drops the request! Two problems can sometimes lead to proper operation or Weintek company has designed this product on modpoll requests :-/
PS: The workaround was to set the slave ID with modbus_set_slave()
La DjangoCong 2011 est terminée
Grâce à Makina Corpus, j'ai pu assister à nouveau à la DjangoCong. C'est une occasion idéale pour retrouver l'équipe des Djangonautes de Makina au grand complet 
La nouvelle organisation du WE mettait l'accent sur la participation avec des mini-confs très courtes le matin (12 mn) et des ateliers à la barcamp, et encore une fois les organisateurs ont été irréprochables, bravo ! C'est un plaisir de retrouver des têtes connues et de rencontrer de nouveaux venus pleins de bonnes idées. Les entreprises étaient plus impliquées cette année (merci les sponsors) et l'écosystème autour de Django semble en bonne voie avec des produits tels Django SHOP et Django CMS,
Nous quittons Marseille avec quelques outils à utiliser au plus vite et de bonnes idées:
- Jenkins
- django_compressor
- django-extended-choices de twidi (utilisé par Libé)
- django-floppy-forms de brutasse
- https://convore.com/django-fr/djangocong-2011-slides/
DjangoCong est la conférence Django francophone à suivre !
Quelques photos http://www.flickr.com/photos/vineolia/sets/72157626398900439/
libmodbus for Arduino (almost!)
The libmodbus project is a real success on many platforms and to conquer the world, I've written a version dedicated to Arduino devices. My goals are:
- to talk with a standard Arduino UNO or Duemilanove via the integrated USB
serial line (8N1) - to have the lowest footprint (binary sketch size and SRAM)
- to be robust
OK, you're right, other projects exist already:
- Master/slave by jpmzometa and others is great but the reading in loop doesn't handle serial latency and the code contains too many arrays IMHO
- ModbusMaster is a master and I want a slave.
- Arduino-Modbus, the code is, eh, ugly!
- modbusmq by Mario Di Bacco is based on libmodbus but it aims Modbus TCP.
So I've extracted/adapted only the slave, RTU, reading/writing registers of libmodbus. To reduce the footprint even further, I've replaced the fast CRC code based on precomputed arrays (512 bytes) by a slow one (not so slow!). The result is clean library for Arduino able to handle exceptions if an error occurs.
The binary sketch size is 2,450 bytes and around 1,830 bytes of memory still free when running on 2K SRAM model.
The source code is available on github and have the project is referenced in the arduino.cc playground wiki.