There’s a number of improvements in 2.8.4′s development branch already over 2.8.3:

• Local sign-in and events management system.
• Port forwarding system.
• Migrating several systems over so they work with Django 1.2, and removing some older legacy code.
• All the local authentication hacks have been eliminated.
• Fixed XSS issue in captive landing page.

The code is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3, and is available from my GitHub repository.

At some point in the future this’ll be pulled into a 2.8.4 release, after some further janitorial work is done. It’s been sitting around for a little while, may as well get it out there now. Eventually this will be migrated to become a part of the LanConnect project, with optional integration with it’s databases.

I’ve written a QR Encoder patch for Quartz Composer based on libqrencode. You give it a string, and then it’ll encode it into an image.

There’s another patch in my github which provides a client to GPSdX. It’s a bit buggy still, and only works with GPSd running on localhost with the older encoding method. Unfortunately libgps is ridiculously annoying to work with, so I took the easy (incompatible) way out.

I’ve also patches for Openbravo POS. They make the “customer” price for an item be the buy price, allowing you to implement a simple discount for registered customers that isn’t based on a percentage. It also includes Australian currency images and some minor UI modification to waste less screen space.

I’m currently working on cleaning portal2 up for release. Which is fun. Most of the legacy authentication hooks have been removed, and it’s getting closer to running standalone in a nice way. As part of this I’m getting rid of lots of ugly and legacy code that was for Django 0.96.

UserProfile objects (returned by whoami and whois_ip) now also include the user’s forum numeric user ID. This means that your application can track when a user has changed their username.

Additionally, there’s now a new “python” output method for the HTTP GET API which gives the output of repr() on the result object. It’s not recommended that you use this with Python (instead use XMLRPC), but there may be instances where you find this useful.

This will allow in-browser applications to determine the identity of who you are logged in as before attempting to fall back to who owns the computer.

In other news, portal2 v2.8.3 now has a couple of other changes to it, such as support for clustering and a new graph on the usage page which is generated client side (and much faster than the server-side graph).

I’ve since updated the driver so that it treats the directional buttons on the big button controllers as the X and Y axes. This means that joydev.c will now detect the xbox360bb as a joystick driver, and so ordinary programs that use Linux’s joystick API can receive events from the controllers (and not just those that use evdev).

I also wrote a simple pygame version of Simon. This works whenever you have four joystick devices attached to your computer. You play by pressing any button on the controller. The colours match up to how the Big Button controllers are presented in xbox360bb. As soon as one person makes a mistake, the game ends. The loser is reported on the console.

Unfortunately, there’s no online “simulator” available, but that should be trivial for someone to write if they’re testing their program.

Because he didn’t implement it, and I got bored, I ended up writing “TrolledFS” as a FUSE filesystem module in Python.

The module requests two options, root, which is the directory that provides the structure of the filesystem (ie: it will appear to be a copy of this folder), and fakes, a folder containing replacement files. So if you requested example.avi, it would map it to the first file with the AVI extension in the fakes folder.

It is based on the Xmp.py (example) filesystem module from FUSE’s Python bindings, with all of the write calls filtered out. Instead, filesystem will say it is a read-only filesystem. If a file has no match in the fakes folder, the filesystem will say there was an I/O error.

Video demo (or you can watch it on YouTube):

You need to put this code inside your Gtk.Window.

public partial class MainWindow : Gtk.Window
{
	// viewport which we use to contain the label and handle the scrolling of the marquee.
	private Viewport vpMarquee = new Viewport();

	// marquee text should have some padding before and after the text, to avoid rendering errors, and
	// to allow the text to "flow in" when it is reset after reaching the end.
	private Label lblMarquee = new Label("                                                                                                 [lblMarquee] Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Donec metus quam, ullamcorper eu suscipit quis, rutrum sit amet massa.                                                                                                 ");//" Nunc dapibus accumsan metus, commodo placerat urna blandit non. Nullam turpis justo, dictum quis dignissim non, vehicula vel lorem. Fusce congue purus odio, lobortis pulvinar neque. Integer dui odio, venenatis sed tincidunt in, fringilla id urna. Maecenas faucibus massa eu orci tincidunt ac vulputate nibh aliquam. Aliquam ullamcorper erat nunc. Vestibulum hendrerit adipiscing neque quis interdum.");

	public MainWindow () : base(Gtk.WindowType.Toplevel)
	{
		// normally you'd be using Stetic, so you need to call it's build-constructor.
		Build ();

		// add the control to the window.  in this example, i'm adding it to a VBox control as the last element.
		vpMarquee.BorderWidth = 0;
		vpMarquee.Add (lblMarquee);
		this.vbox1.PackEnd (vpMarquee, false, false, 0);

		// update marquee every 33ms (~30fps)
		GLib.Timeout.Add (33, new GLib.TimeoutHandler (MarqueeUpdate));

		// add other code here for other things...
	}

	bool MarqueeUpdate ()
	{
		Application.Invoke (delegate {
			// calculate the total amount of space the marquee requires.  this only works because I've manually set the size of the window,
			// otherwise you need another way to get the width of the window instead of this.
			double n = vpMarquee.Hadjustment.Upper - this.WidthRequest;
			if (n < 1)
				// safety incase we don't have an actual width calculated width
				n = 1;

			//Console.WriteLine("{0} > {1} ?", vpMarquee.Hadjustment.Value, n);
			if (vpMarquee.Hadjustment.Value >= n) {
				// we've reached the end.  reset the marquee to the 0-position.
				vpMarquee.Hadjustment.Value = 0;
			} else {
				// scroll the marquee to the left by 3px
				vpMarquee.Hadjustment.Value += 3;
			}

			// tell gtk# we want it to take into account the updated value.
			vpMarquee.Hadjustment.ChangeValue ();
			vpMarquee.Hadjustment.Change ();

			// redraw the control and it's children (the label).
			vpMarquee.ShowAll ();
		});

		// tell Timeout we want to be called again.
		return true;
	}

	// ... add more stuff here for other functionality.
}

Changes:

• Mouse cursors now work correctly.
• You can now disable the “always shared” function of the VNC server and allow a client to take exclusive control with SDL_VNC_ALWAYS_SHARED="0".
• You can change the display number manually with SDL_VNC_DISPLAY.
• 8 bpp displays are now supported.
• pygame applications work at 16, 24 and 32 bpp display depths. 8 doesn’t work properly.
• This module now lies by default about the supported display depths reported by SDL_ListModes. It defaults to 16 bpp only, in order to make pygame work properly. You can change what it says this with SDL_VNC_DEPTH, or setting it to 0 to say all depths are supported. This doesn’t limit calls to SDL_SetVideoMode.
• You can tell the VNC server to ignore all client events by setting SDL_VNC_VIEW_ONLY="1".

There’s also a README.VNC included, which documents the functionality of the library and use of it’s environment variables.

Edit (2010-08-29): Just to clarify, this software is licensed under the same terms as SDL 1.2.14 itself, the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1, or at your option, any later version as published by the Free Software Foundation, Inc.

I’ve spent the last couple of days writing a new SDL video output module, which acts as a VNC server using libvncserver. Here are the patches against SDL 1.2.14. To use VNC support, you need to run ./configure with --enable-video-vnc, and once built and installed, run the SDL application with the environment variable SDL_VIDEODRIVER="vnc".

What works:

• 16, 24 and 32-bit true-colour displays.
• Mouse events.
• Keyboard events.

What’s left to do:

• Fix mouse cursors so they display correctly.
• 8-bit (paletted) displays.
• Handle surface locking properly.
• Reduce/eliminate tearing on frequent screen updates.
• Run the libvncserver event loop inside SDL’s event loop system.
• Implement a password on the VNC server and some sort of simple access control.
• Implement a view-only mode.
• Allow setting the display number manually.
• pygame applications.
• Fix screen resolution change colour issues.

What will never work:

• OpenGL surfaces.
• CDROMs, Joysticks and Sound over VNC.
• YUV video output.

I’ve had a lot of success with using the Origyn web browser (a WebKit/SDL-based web browser) and cgterm (a SDL C64/C128 telnet client) with this output method. Any SDL application that doesn’t use OpenGL surfaces should be able to run with this output module.

Some pictures: