Sorry for the delay in sending you the donor codes. PayPal changed their protocols slightly, possibly in response to the Heartbleed bug. I expect they’ll start coming through during the day.

..but at this particular time, it’s not. I’m on vacation with the kids at the family summer home near Norrköping, Sweden. I expect to be back to LCDHost hacking in a week.

And six months later down the road, what has all my furious tapping at keyboards got me? I’ll get to that in a sec. First I want to tell you about my unhealthy desire to code things as good as I can – and even worse, re-invent other peoples wheels if I don’t think they’re round enough.

It always starts out reasonably enough. LCDHost needs some kind of repository to maintain metadata about itself, plugins, layouts, et cetera. Which in turns affects the software packaging. Which means I need to address security issues, both in the packaging and repositories. Ok, so far, not so bad. Except every wheel I look at has the wrong kind of spokes, or is too big, or not wide enough.

Then the insanity starts. You see, to have any sort of security, you have to design with it in mind from the start – and not many products are. Also if you want performance – design for it. As opposed to coding for it – that’s called optimization and is nowadays usually a waste of time. And above all else, stability and reliability.

I find plenty of solutions that are good enough. But my ego (he’s the giggling imp on my back, the one with red eyes rolling in random directions) won’t let me use them if I think I can do it substantially better. Which means I…

• Learn to use Python since awk doesn’t cut it and Perl is not my style.
• Hack up lbssh to let me launch my local editor to edit server-side docs (no more nano).
• Got fed up with Pythons argparse and write my own self-documenting CLI package.
• Write another chroot maintenance tool as I find existing ones lacking.
• Learn the details of a lot of boring stuff, like upstart and IPv6 and what the blërgh else.
• Evaluate existing PHP frameworks, contribute some bug fixes to them, and then start on my own. Of course.

I’m quite sure I left out more than half in that list, but it gives you the general idea. These tendencies of mine are good for software quality, but a supermassive black hole to time management. I hope to be recovering from obsessive recursive dependency coding soon.

Thank [this space intentionally left blank] for that.

So it’s been a while since I posted much – I’ve been caught up in a horrible rewrite of the monitoring plugin for a while, and have had a new version of the graphs plugin “under test” (i.e. running on my home PCs great) for… well, let’s just say longer than testing really needs. Maybe you’ve been wondering why I’ve not been saying much though? Well, this is the reason: my new daughter Madeleine.

Maddy is now almost 6 weeks old and doing very well.  I hope SR forgives me posting this here, but he did set the precedent a year ago…

What’s new in LCDHost alpha 24:

• Add LH_FLAG_NOSAVE_LINK when NOSAVE_DATA, READONLY and HIDDEN are set
• Updated Qt to 4.8.1
• Updated bundled libusb library
• Updated bundled hidapi library
• setLink() warns when old link syntax is used, sets NOSAVE for links
• Removed workaround for QTBUG-17890
• Removed workaround for QTBUG-6073
• LH_Mailcount: Corrected include path for LH_Text.h
• LH_Lg320x240: Thread joining reworked
• LH_LgLcdMan: Thread joining reworked
• LH_WebKit/WebKit_Server: Show message while waiting for worker thread to stop

If the autoupdater fails, you can get it from the LCDHost homepage

Another new plugin, LH_DriveStats, is now available. This plugin allows LCDHost to display several bits of data about your local drives, such as Free/Used/Total space and the number of reads/writes per second. It even sports a new pie chart object for the disk space. No pics for this one as I’m not artistic enough to make disk drives statistics look sexy.

Get it here

Yes, with A21 comes TeamSpeak 3 integration. Due to the impact of a certain baby (naming no names – he knows who he is… well ok, he doesn’t as his sense of self won’t have developed yet), SirReal and I weren’t able coordinate this release as well as we usually do so you’ll have to download it seperately and add it to your plugins folder by hand. There’s also an updated Eos that reacts to launching TS3 by hiding the 5-day weather and big clock and looking like this.

LH_TS3 features:

• Show your connection status
• Show the names of who is talking
• Show your speaker and microphone mute  states
• Show your connected username
• Show your connected channel
• A few other neat tricks…

Besides supporting Triscopic and hacking on the next version on LCDHost, I’m also now a dad for the third time. My two daughters now have a little brother:

I apologize for the forum downtime. I foolishly made a configuration change right before going on a military exercise for four days. Now excuse me while I go bash myself in the forehead with a wooden plank.