Linux Sand Garden

To keep this short and simple, I hadn’t used my netbook for a couple of days and it turns out I had installed xbindkeys. Probably in a case to get a key working as a shortcut for something, but never getting beyond actually installing it and creating the default config as the program suggests by running xbindkeys –defaults > ~/.xbindkeysrc. This just happens to enable 3 default keybindings, one of which is Ctrl-F (!?) to open an xterm. It also grabs that shortcut, and it no longer does its usual task in the program you’re running.

It also ignores xkb keyboard layouts, so for me using dvorak that means my Ctrl-U shortcut just disappeared, no more delete line of text in terminal, yay!

Fortunately I worked out that my issue was with Ctrl-F and a google search for that and xterm keyboard shortcut lead me to a where some poor sob had also run into the issue, but had worked out that xbindkeys was the culprit.

I’ve filed a wishlist bug report on the Debian BTS, but I doubt they’ll see it as something worth fixing.

As I have mentioned in other posts the ISP plan I have features a higher cost per GB than their regular pay as you go plan, but gives 75 gigabytes free transfer during the offpeak times of 2am-8am. This generally end up working out really well cost wise for me, but most of the traffic measuring tools measure on a day by day basis. Given my delirious state at the time, my previous little vnstat python script was appalling, and doesn’t even work. So here is the new improved version.

'''
VNStat Onpeak/Offpeak calculator
Author: Nameeater
Url: http://www.codemonkies.net/linux
Use: Calculates the data usage during Onpeak, 8am-2am,
     and Offpeak, 2am-8am, using vnstat.
'''
 
#! /usr/bin/env python
 
import os
import time
 
 
totalrx=0
totaltx=0
onpeakrx=0
onpeaktx=0
offpeakrx=0
offpeaktx=0
current_hour=time.localtime()[3]
hour_data=[]
 
vnstat=os.popen('vnstat --dumpdb')
data=vnstat.read()
 
for lines in data.split('\n'):
    if "h;" in lines:
        hour_data.append(lines)
 
for i in hour_data:
    h=i.split(';')
    if int(h[1]) > current_hour:
        break
    if int(h[1]) not in range(2,8):
        #debug print h[1], h[3], h[4]
        onpeakrx+=int(h[3])
        onpeaktx+=int(h[4])
    elif int(h[1]) in range(2,8):
        offpeakrx+=int(h[3])
        offpeaktx+=int(h[4])
 
print time.ctime()
print "-"*6
print "Offpeak Rx: ",offpeakrx/1024, "MB."
print "Offpeak Tx: ",offpeaktx/1024, "MB."
print "-"*6
print "Onpeak Rx: ",onpeakrx/1024, "MB."
print "Onpeak Tx: ",onpeaktx/1024, "MB."
print "-"*6
print "Total Onpeak: ", (onpeakrx+onpeaktx)/1024, "MB."
print "-"*6