Friday, June 10, 2011

Wishings for a Guitar App

I've been craving the touch of my guitar for a while now...only it's not so practical to carry it around with all the travels I've had to do lately. If I happen to find some time, I would like to build a little app on the wetab that basically does what google so cooly did on their front page the other day (some flash applet that treats your mouse movement as though you were strumming a guitar when you hover over the guitar strings).But I wouldn't know where to start. I haven't done much GUI programming at all. I've seen some really easy to code python apps, but then again I don't know if that would be fast enough to make it fun. Well, just a thought I doubt I'll find the time to actually do this. But if you've stumbled across something like this I would welcome a comment to direct me to it :)

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Rotating WeTab Screen on Natty Narwhal

So the rotation bit turned out to be simpler than I had thought and thanks to the following link: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/InputCoordinateTransformation I've gotten it working.

So as before I have two scripts: rot.sh and norm.sh

rot.sh looks like this:

xinput set-prop 9 --type=float "Coordinate Transformation Matrix" 0 -1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1
xrandr -o left

norm.sh looks like this:

xinput set-prop 9 --type=float "Coordinate Transformation Matrix" 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1
xrandr -o normal

If I were awake in Linear Algebra class I would probably have realized the solution a lot earlier. In any case the first line basically represents something like the following matrix which in essence rotates the coordinate system by 90 degrees to the left. The details slip me at present but I'm sure I'll dream of matrices tonight...

0 -1 1
1  0  0   
0  0  1

Alrighty, over and out!

Natty Narwhal Installed

This will be a shorter post. I updated my Ubuntu install to Natty Narwhal and a bunch of things sort of broke. One was the multi-touch, if I did a two finger scroll now, touch completely stops working. I later realized that it is actually the GINN daemon kicking in and taking over the clicks but not letting go of them so if you're scrolling, you can scroll up and down for ever but you can't get back your single clicks. To remedy this I went ahead and disabled GINN from the Startup Applications applet and re-enabled twofing. I've also updated to twofing 9a, see this link regarding this: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/T101MT

The other problem I'm working on right now is the rotation. It looks like the configuration I had described in my earlier posts doesn't apply anymore. You have to set a Transformation Matrix for the coordinate system. I haven't had enough time to sort it out yet but I will post the details as soon as I have that figured out. Other than those two things, my system seems fine, and I think it's running slightly faster actually :)