It has Transmission running with its great web interface activated. If I need to download some torrent file, I open its web interface and upload the .torrent file. Good, but… it could be easier.

If you download torrent files very often, the easiest way is to use the watch-dir feature from Transmission: every torrent that you put at some directory is automatically downloaded by Transmission. So, all I needed to do was copying the torrent files from my Macbook to my home server, using SFTP.

To configure your Transmission watch-dir, you must stop the Transmission service (I’m running the transmission-daemon version) and edit the settings.json file, inserting the following settings:

"watch-dir": "/home/mediaserver/transmission/watch",
"watch-dir-enabled": true

Remember: you must stop Transmission service, edit the file and start it again!

It works, but… It can be even easier, I thought. And I remembered of Automator, a good piece of software that comes with Snow Leopard, and that I knew but never used before.

The idea was: every time a new .torrent file is written at my laptop’s download directory, it should be copied to my home server.

So I opened Automator and created a new Folder Action:

At the top of the new workflow, I selected my Downloads folder:

 The next step in our flow is to create a script to copy our files via SSH to the computer that’s running Transmission. Use Utilities -> Run Shell Script to make it:

Now add the following content as the script’s source code. To make it work automatically, I allow my SSH server to receive connections using keys, not passwords. Don’t forget to change the scp’s destination to your computer’s host and directory:

for f in "$@"
do
	ext=`basename "$f" | awk -F "." '{ print $NF }'`
	if [ "$ext" == "torrent" ]; then
		scp "$f" root@myhostname.asdf.com:/home/transmission/watch
	fi
done

That’s it! Save your workflow and test it. Now, every time you click at a torrent file and download it, Transmission will download it automatically.

I tried to find a set of useful and free (as in “free beer” and/or as in “free speech”) tools to make my work easier. They are:

Classic Shell Setup

I don’t know why Microsoft removed the toolbar from Windows Explorer since Windows Vista, but this application tries to put it back there. It also allows you to get some customisation of Start Menu, and get a simple, fast and useful menu like the Windows 9x/ME/2000 times.

Notepad++

I like gedit and kate, and the native alternative for Windows is Notepad++: a good editor for plain text files, like source code.

Pidgin

With support for MSN/Live/whatever network, Google Talk, ICQ, etc. Pidgin is one of the best chat clients. I’d rather use it than the fancy MSN Live Messenger.

Winamp

Why use iTunes or the suffering Windows Media Player if you can use Winamp? It has a clean interface, a good way to organise library (although it’s a little bit iTunesy) and a simple playlist, everything in the same screen. I really love the good and old Winamp.

VLC

Winamp can play some videos, but I think VLC is a better tool for this job. Besides, it has a great support for a huge range  of video formats and features for users with any needs and all experience levels.

Nice, isn’t it? So, I downloaded the new beta for Linux, and it looks like the screenshot below. I had to set the tabs to be on top; Windows version brings this for default (at least the one that I installed using Wine).

Compare. The screenshot below is Firefox 3.6.4.

It’s a little far from the mockups of Firefox for Linux at Mozilla’s site. I hope I can see it soon.

I use StatPress to get statistics of the last readers of this blog. One of the informations I have access to are the operating systems that the last visitors were using. And how surprising it was to discover that I still have a visitor that was using Windows 95:

I really hope this person is using some extension to change his/her browser’s user agent header or just woke up from a sleep of 10 years or more.

So I googled a way to fix for this problem, and found the fix at Arch Linux forums. You’ll need to create a file called .fonts.conf in your home directory with this content:

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM 'fonts.dtd'>
<fontconfig>
   <match target="font" >
      <edit mode="assign" name="rgba" >
         <const>rgb</const>
      </edit>
   </match>
   <match target="font" >
      <edit mode="assign" name="hinting" >
         <bool>true</bool>
      </edit>
   </match>
   <match target="font" >
      <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle" >
         <const>hintslight</const>
      </edit>
   </match>
   <match target="font" >
      <edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
         <bool>true</bool>
      </edit>
   </match>
</fontconfig>

I closed Qt Creator and reopened it. The result was this:

But I read a little about Qt and, after talking with some friends about the pros and cons of GTK and Qt, I decided to do with Qt the same things that I’ve already done with GTK up to that point. So I would know what choice was better for me. Notice that I’m not saying that Qt is better for everybody and that GTK must die, but that Qt looked better for me and my personal project. After this disclaimer, and can tell my reasons:

• Look & feel. I’m a look&feel fanatic, and sometimes I move from GNOME to KDE only to check its new features. But I hate how GTK applications look in KDE. You can use gtk-qt-engine, but you’ll still notice the differences. You can set GTK to use the excellent QtCurve theme, that have identical versions to Qt and GTK, but you’ll get tied to a theme. But look what you have if you run a Qt application in GNOME (gedit is a GTK-based application and Picard is a Qt-based application):
  
  Thanks to QGtkStyle, Qt applications detect if you are in GNOME and your Qt application gets an almost perfect GTK look & feel. And yeah, it includes open and save dialogs.
• Documentation. Qt has a very, very rich and well-organised documentation, with tutorials, API references, and examples. gtkmm also have all these items, but they didn’t look very friendly to me. And the documentation of Qt 4.7, still in development, will be even better.
• A simple, but good IDE. A good programmer must not be dependent on IDEs, but they really help you. I tried to use Anjuta (unstable sometimes), MonoDevelop (very good for .NET platform, but not a good IDE for C/C++ development) and Netbeans as IDE when I was using gtkmm, and I was not satisfied with them. But Qt has its official IDE, Qt Creator:
  
  Qt Creator is clean, simple, and complete. It has quick access to documentation, breakpoints, project configuration, native support for CVS, Subversion and Git, good code completion, a good GUI designer (like the GTK’s Glade), among other features.
• Runs well on many platforms. Qt is smart enough to run well – and with native look & feel, I really like this – in Linux, Mac, Windows, and others.

But Qt still has some cons:

• Users should have it installed to run Qt applications, and this is not very usual in Linux environments based on GNOME, neither on Windows systems.
• Qt is free only if you’re using it in a free project. For commercial applications, you must obtain a commercial Qt licence. Update: this is not exactly a con. You still can use Qt under LGPL in commercial applications, but if you make any change to Qt you must publish them or purchase a commercial Qt licence (thanks, krok, for the comment).

If you’re beginning to learn to program for graphical environments or you’re looking for a good graphical library to use in your project, you really should give Qt a try, implement some examples and feel which option is better for you.

]]> http://www.esdrasbeleza.com/2010/05/13/why-i-chose-qt/feed/ 5 http://www.esdrasbeleza.com/2010/04/02/gnome-2-30/ http://www.esdrasbeleza.com/2010/04/02/gnome-2-30/#comments Fri, 02 Apr 2010 06:28:16 +0000 Esdras Beleza http://www.esdrasbeleza.com/?p=98 O GNOME 2.30 foi lançado nesse 1º de abril, e os pacotes rapidamente foram disponibilizados pro Arch Linux. Assim que atualizei o sistema, aproveitei pra conferir algumas das novidades. A maioria delas, na minha opinião, foram discretas.

Talvez a maior exceção seja o Nautilus, de interface renovada. Agora é possível dividir a visualização em duas, o que facilita muito a troca de arquivos entre dois locais diferentes. O Konqueror faz isso há alguns anos, e era uma funcionalidade que fazia falta no Nautilus.

Dois bugs que me enchiam o saco há algum tempo também parecem ter sido resolvidos. Ao usar dois monitores, alguns applets trocavam de lugar ao iniciar o GNOME e o papel de parede da área de trabalho era esticado entre os dois monitores. Agora o papel de parede é simplesmente replicado para os dois monitores.

Mais detalhes das mudanças na nova versão estão presentes no site do GNOME. Como todo mundo gosta de screenshots, aqui vai um da minha área de trabalho:

• Tema GTK: Equinox Radiance
• Tema do gerenciador de janelas (Metacity): karmic Lucy D.
• Ícones: nuoveXT 1.7
• Painel inferior: Docky
• Papel de parede: Stop that t-rain