It's my job to fix stuff. Computer stuff. Sometimes at work someone will call me over to fix some stuff, and well, I can't.

"How come when I hit enter in Word, it goes down two spaces instead of one?" someone will ask.

It's an understandable sentiment. Your refrigerator breaks, you want the guy that comes to fix it to find out with the problem is, and remedy it. You don't want him to fiddle with it for ten minutes, hemming and hawwing about how it's probably some defect with the refrigerator that you can work around switching all the shit between your third and fourth shelves and then unplugging it and plugging it back in. Oh, and this isn't guarantied that it won't probably happen again the second I leave. Fuck no, that guy would be fired.

Let's just extend this analogy into the literal world of my job. I work on refrigerators that not only I can't open up the back to troubleshoot, I'm not even given the courtesy of being told how the mechanics of the refrigerator works. Could be freon compression and copper tubes. Could be fans blowing across coils that are constantly having cool river water pumped through them. Could be that new fangled Sonic Cooling method. Could be black magic, who knows? Not I, because I'm not allowed inside.

Using open source software must be the obvious solution to this tragedy, right? Of course, then I could see inside. Then I could try to troubleshoot the actual problem. Then I could dismantle everything and go through every spring and coil and bolt until I found the problem. Is this practical? Fuck no, because not only am I a refrigerator repair man, I'm also an auto mechanic, a carpet layer, a plumber, a roofer, and a few other technical jobs that require specific skills to actually get anything accomplished. Oh yeah, and don't forget that at the same time I'm building your house from scratch and expected to know every bit of minutiae about what I've done with it in case you want something changed mid-build.... and, of course, construction will never end. With that sort of depth and breadth of skill requirements, there's no way I could learn the ins and outs of your refrigerator and still stay competent in the other areas. Sure, give me a toolbox and the majority of my time with your refrigerator and I'll figure it out. Just hope you expect to walk to work because I'm not fixing your car while I do it.

So now you're probably thinking, "OK, he's just like a general computer tech." Wrong-o. Many of my duties are only loosely computer related. What my actual job is will blow your mind. I am a hired smart person. When someone asks me how to align a column in Excel to the right instead of the left, do you think I walk in with the process memorized? If someone downloads something in their webbrowser and somehow has lost the memory of where they saved it to thirty seconds ago, am I imbued with precognitive forces because I can find it? Am I some kind of egg headed boffin because I try to redownload the file and see where the "Save to" dialog was last pointed? Hell no.

To tell you the complete truth, I'm not even sure that all this is because I'm smart! I have the sneaking suspicion that it's because everyone else is so fucking dumb.

UPDATE (4/25/2005): I am no longer supporting this project. Not long after I started this project, KNetStats came along and pretty much did everything KNetworkLED did, but better. If you're wanting a system tray network activity monitor, check on KNetStats. Its author seems to have more time and energy (and KDE coding knowledge) to devote to his project than I have for mine, so I surrender. The KNetworkLED code is still under the GPL, so I'll keep this page up as a place you can grab the code if the mood strikes you.

KNetworkLED, a network activity monitor for the KDE SystemTray

Here's a little app I threw together basically cause I wanted it. Being a guy who just left the Windows world about two years ago, I came to rely on the little network activity LED display in the systemtray to let me know if something was just taking a long time to transmit, or if the connection was just hung.

Now, I know there's a lot of these little apps all over the place, but there wasn't one for kde's system tray that I could find. Even if there were other ones that you could get to work in the systemtray, I'm a big fan of KDE's consistent look and its integration, so I decided I might as well make something I could use and learn the KDE/QT framework while I was at it.

Now, for the disclaimer: This is BETA stuff here. It works for me, I can't garantee anything. I made it with KDevelop, while learning KDevelop, while learning the KDE and QT api's, while being a neophyte C++ programmer.

Click here to download KNetworkLED v0.5.1 source tarball with KDevelop project! (515k)

• Docks into KDE system tray.
• Has a configuration dialog from which you can select what network device to monitor (out of the ones you have available)and how often you want to poll that device for activity (100ms to 1000ms).
• Tooltip popup when mouseovering the systemtray icon that displays what device is being monitored and how many TX/RX packets have been transmitted/recieved.

Known bugs:

• It doesn't get the correct RT/TX values from /proc/net/dev because the columns for the numbers are different than the the title columns for a couple people people I've seen (don't know why their dev file is screwy). Its possible that it's the same for people with kernels other than 2.4.x or 2.6.x. If yours is different and you know what columns are what, the columns the program uses are simple defines that you can change before compiling.
• There's no install rule for the makefile.
• I'd like it to detach from the console or whatever its run from, this is probably easy, but like I said, I'm a neophyte at this stuff.
• I'm sure there's a few more...

Other Issues (if you know kde programming please help, most of these are caused by me not knowing much about it):

• I'm using xpm's to do the icons, the actual kde iconLoader thing confuses me. Help in this area would be greatly appreciated.
• I don't think I structured the app correctly, When closing any window, it tries to close the entire app and I'm canceling it in the code.
• I'm not sure if I'm doing the whole DCOP thing correctly (not that there's really anything to expose to it).

You can also grab the latest CVS version:
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@www.hardgeus.com:/usr/local/repository login
(you will be prompted for a password. Just hit enter.
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@www.hardgeus.com:/usr/local/repository checkout knetworkled

This is released under the LGPL. Oh yeah, it also contains some parsing code from the Tleds project because I wrote my own parsing, but it was a pile of crap. Please, feel free to submit patches, bug reports, suggestions, etc to glitch13 at glitch13.com or leave me feedback.

Some people inquired about changing the icons. To do this, you would need to create 4 icons for each state: no traffic (network0.xpm), send only (network1.xpm), receive only (network2.xpm), and send and receive (network3.xpm). Then save them as 22x22 xpm's and replace the ones in the src directory. Then a simple recompile should do the trick. If you'd like to have my originals (or should I say the ones I originally ripped off of the Crystal Theme) to gimp up, click here to download them.

ChangeLog

bkelly.
This document was last updated on 7/01/2004.

For those of you who do not know, wxWindows is a cross-platform programming interfacethat allows programs to be written for one GUI library, yet allow it to be compiled on a number of platforms. This, of course, takes all the work out of porting programs from one widget library (ie win32) to another incompatible library (ie GTK). Most of you are now thinking about how little you give a shit and are leaving this page.

Well, I took some C++ wx code foo wrote for pgDesigner and created a tiny "skeleton" app for wx so that I don't have to start from scratch building the first window and setting up the automake crap. It's just a simple window class that inherits from wxFrame, a couple of dropdown menus, a few of events, and an automake setup.

This page is just here so I can get to this file from the intarweb, as can anybody else that doesn't feel like doing the setup for a app in wx. The code is probably crap and not conforming to any sort of respected standard, but there's not much of it there so I'm sure nudging anything around to your liking would not be hard.

(ps: I haven't tried compiling this on windows, so I have no idea if it will)

Click here to download wxskel-0.1.tar.gz

Here's a shot of the amazingness that you'll be downloading (of course your title bar and control buttons will probably lookdifferent):



Breathtaking, isn't it?

bkelly.
This document was last updated on 10/17/2003.