Organizing Windows using the Keyboard with Compiz Grid

30 Jun 2011 Ubuntu 0 Comments

The Mac has a great utility called Divvy to easily map windows to loacation on the screen using the keyboard. Fiddling with the mouse to get multiple windows in the right location is a productivity killer and a pain in the neck (or shoulder, or elbow, or …)

Ubuntu (and of course any other Linux distro with compiz) has a similar feature built in as a plugin for compiz. Type Alt-F2 and enter ccsm + Return in the command prompt to launch the CompizConfig Settings manager. Select the Window Management from the left menu and enable the Grid plugin. Click on it so you can look at the key bindings in the Bindings tab.

If you are on a desktop or a big laptop with a separate numeric keyboard you are set. As you can see the locations for the windows are by default mapped in a logical fashion like the arrow keys on the numeric keypad.

However my laptop does not have a separate numeric keyboard and enabling it before typing the key code is a pain. Remapping them is easy by clicking on the button with the key code. A window appears with a Grab key code button. Click it and type the new keycode you want to assign it to. If there is a conflict, you will get a window explaingin the conflict and asking how to resolve it.

My first attempt was to remap the laptop numeric keys using the super keys. This conflicted with the unity launcher since the top row 7-8-9 map to the apps in the launcher.

To avoid conflicts I use now Control-Super with the keys around the j-key (which is the home key for the right hand)

Also autokey (a text macro expander) is mapped to Super-K

  • Control-Super-j : 100% (maximize)
  • Control-Super-h : 50% left
  • Control-Super-k : 50% right
  • Control-Super-u : 50% top
  • Control-Super-m : 50% bottom
  • Control-Super-y : 25% top-left
  • Control-Super-i : 25% top-right
  • Control-Super-n : 25% bottom-left
  • Control-Super-, : 25% bottom-right

If Control-Super-j is used to maximize a window, clicking on one of the other keys will first restore it to the original size and position and only map it to its place on the second click. I consider this a feature, but you are free to interprete it as a bug.

Result, this is now super practical way to divide my windows on my screen.

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Proxy Support for Grails

28 Jun 2011 Java Stuff 1 Comment

Not a big thing, actually for me it is.

I am always struggling with proxy settings. It requires a lot of different incantations to be done, every program deals with it differently, support for platform settings is flaky, …

Grails deals with this is a way which pleasantly surprised me :

grails add-proxy <name> –host=<hostname> –port=<portno>

e.g.

grails add-proxy client –host=proxy –port=3128

allows you to create a setting for a proxy and bind it to a name. It also supports username/password.

Switching to the setting involves only

grails set-proxy client

to enable the proxy setting, and

grails clear-proxy

when I get back in a transparent environment.

(for completeness there is a remove-proxy command which is useful to remove those passwords after the need has passed).

I particularly impressed  that this was done in a simple and straightforward without the need fo brain gymnastics trying to remember which arcane curse needs to be put at what location in which file.

Nice.

 

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Fix for Sonar choking on ‘result returns more than one elements’

23 Jun 2011 Uncategorized 2 Comments
Recently our sonar installation on our Hudson CI choked again, this time with an error I have not seen before. It was just before the release of an important milestone for the team, so not being unable to publish new version on the test server could not come on a worse time.
In the Console Log of a failing built we found the message.
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD FAILURE
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 5.791s
[INFO] Finished at: Thu Jun 23 09:20:05 CEST 2011
[INFO] Final Memory: 20M/429M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.codehaus.mojo:sonar-maven-plugin:2.0-beta-2:sonar (default-cli) on project pfus: Can not execute Sonar: PicoLifecycleException: method 'public void org.sonar.batch.ProjectTree.start() throws java.io.IOException', instance 'org.sonar.batch.ProjectTree@50a6023a, java.lang.RuntimeException: wrapper: result returns more than one elements -> [Help 1]

Ok, apparently something returns 2 results which should only have one result and it stands to reason that it is coming from the database. Pity there is no indication on which table would be affected.

Some googling retrieved this post which points to the snapshots table and more specifically to records with the field islast set to true.

A quick check in …/conf/sonar.properties revealed the database connection parameters.

Ok, this is a good time to check you have an up-to-date backup of your database. (Or make one if you’re not sure)

Using your SQL query tool of choice (I used the built in Data Sources tool in IntelliJ) connect to the database.

The snapshots table contains a project_id which confusingly does not really contains projects, but actually all kinds of assets, artefacts, files, however you ike to call it. Unfortunately there are many thousands. Even if I limited to only the ones with islast=1 there were close to 1000 records.

Narrowing further down with :



select project_id, cnt
  from (select project_id,
          count(*) as cnt
        from snapshots
        where islast=1
        group by project_id) as cntsnap
  where cnt > 1

Gave me the project_id I’ve been looking for, in my case 2089

Now a quick

select * from snapshots where project_id=2089

Gave the 2 offending rows. A quick glance showed that one of them was very suspicious : the parent_id was the same as his own project_id and there were lots of null columns.

I deleted the row based on the id. Retriggered hudson to rebuild the project, and the build succeeded and sonar seems to be happy again.

I hope there will be no other repercussions. For our purposes the sonar data is not really critical and we could also restart without any impact. If your sonar data is more critical a better choice would be to restore from backup before the build started failing.

 
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