Rainmeter "SageTV" Skin

[jusjoken]

Originally Posted by stuckless

I was helping jusjoken briefly with some rainmeter integration... I found it oddly surprising that Rainmeter does not provide a way to parse/expose JSON data... given that JSON is widely used as a means to transfer data over the net... I only looked briefly at the apis.

If JSON processing was possible, it would seem almost trivial to expose just about any sage information using either sagex remote apis or the phoenix remote apis.

Actually it is not proving that difficult (given help from Stuckless and the phoenix apis and learning from the work Dargason has done in Rainmeter) and if all goes well and I find the time to keep playing with Rainmeter we may have some Gemstone Widget skins available that will provide very similar functionality/look as the existing Gemstone Widgets including a skin to display the results from any vfs (view) as defined in Gemstone/Phoenix or user customized in the vfs user files.

Hang tight... and I will share more when I get a little further along.

k

[darcilicious]

Originally Posted by jusjoken

Hang tight... and I will share more when I get a little further along.

k

Wow!

[darcilicious]

Originally Posted by wayner

I just looked at the docs again I see that you are supposed to unzip into the Rainmeter skins folder.

If that doesn't help, post again -- it shouldn't be too hard to get you sorted out.

But when I read some of the forums they say that (and this is from about 6 months ago) that the main sites with skins, such as Deviant Art, now only allow .rmskin files due to virus or malware issues. But pretty much all of the skins that I downloaded for stuff like weather and CPU temp were not valid .rmskin files and were just zip files. Maybe they were old.

I'm a little confused -- IIRC you either download a .zip file (in which case you use some kind of unzipping program to unzip the contents into the Rainmeter skins folder) or a .rmskin file which should be "unpacked" by Rainmeter itself.

It should really be that simple.

What version of JSMeter are you guys using? JSMeterV? As far as I can determine from http://jsmorley.deviantart.com/art/JSMeterV-260984160 that version is from Oct 2011. Is that the latest version?

Pretty sure I've got the latest version but I can't check until later. In any case, JSMeter is a theme and has no effect in what you're trying to do (install skins, in whatever format they're downloaded in). Any theme can be installed and any skins can be installed in any theme.

A more important aspect would be the version of Rainmeter you've got installed and if .rmskin filetypes are associated with Rainmeter.

[Dargason]

The reason the file was uploaded as a zip file and then renamed to rmskin is that the forum doesn't allow you to upload an rmskin file. Other sites may have similar restrictions.

But under the skin (ha ha) the 'installation' just unzips the files to your skins folder anyway.

Actually it is not proving that difficult (given help from Stuckless and the phoenix apis and learning from the work Dargason has done in Rainmeter) and if all goes well and I find the time to keep playing with Rainmeter we may have some Gemstone Widget skins available that will provide very similar functionality/look as the existing Gemstone Widgets including a skin to display the results from any vfs (view) as defined in Gemstone/Phoenix or user customized in the vfs user files.

That would be great! I've learned alot about sagex and json (or xml parsing, anyway) since I wrote that, and I bet you can do a lot of cool stuff with phoenix/fanart.

[KryptoNyte]

Regarding the non-rmskin zip files, I noticed that there is a section near the bottom of this document called "Installing Manually" that may help with misc older skin installations;

http://docs.rainmeter.net/manual/installing-skins

[wayner]

I think I just didn't follow the instructions on where to unzip.

Back to the Sage skin:

It would be great if the display would be customizable so that we could display any info that we wanted, assuming that it could be served up by the web pages, Sagex, or whatever the source was.

For example, I would like to see a list of all clients connected. I have many extenders but I find that the system really bogs down when about 4 or more are connected. If a Rainmeter Skin could show all connected clients that would be great as I would likely notice this more quickly than having to go to the Sage web page to check it out.

It would also be nice to be able to show JVM readings, etc.

Other suggestions - if you click the (!) indicator for system messages it would be great if that sent you to the system messages page in the Sage web UI.

[Dargason]

It would be great if the display would be customizable so that we could display any info that we wanted, assuming that it could be served up by the web pages, Sagex, or whatever the source was

IMO, Rainmeter is designed to make it easy for non-programmers to create and modify nifty gadgets for the desktop with a tremendous degree of visual customization. Unfortunately, it generally requires the user to edit the skin files themselves and it isn't really flexible enough to make a full-fledged application. Think if it like a very customizable skinning system for a predefined set of easy to use measurements (such as system memory, bandwidth usage, disk space, etc.) It can also request data from a website and very crudely parse the result using regular expressions.

For more complex skins like this one, you need to write lua scripts to parse the result and determine what to display, and you need meters (a visual element) to display the data. To make this process generic to all the different sources and types of data to display would be difficult and require an entire rewrite of the skin. I've actually considered re-writing it, but I don't have the time for it right now, and I expect Jusjoken will do a much better job than I anyway.

For example, I would like to see a list of all clients connected.

Getting the number of clients connected is probably pretty trivial, without any modifications to the lua scripts. Creating a list of connected clients may also be fairly straightforward, depending on how flexible I wrote the script -- I'd have to check.

It would also be nice to be able to show JVM readings, etc.

I couldn't figure out how to get the heap stuff via Sagex, and it's not on the webserver anywhere. It would be pretty trivial to parse the BMT home page for this, but it seems like overkill to run the BMT server for this if you're not already running it.

Stuckless:

If JSON processing was possible, it would seem almost trivial to expose just about any sage information using either sagex remote apis or the phoenix remote apis.

I think rainmeter supports Lua 5.1 standard libraries, which does not include JSON parsing, but there are JSON libraries for lua 5.1 with source code here: https://github.com/luaforge/json/tree/master/json4lua

Maybe you can use this?

[wayner]

Originally Posted by Dargason

I couldn't figure out how to get the heap stuff via Sagex, and it's not on the webserver anywhere. It would be pretty trivial to parse the BMT home page for this, but it seems like overkill to run the BMT server for this if you're not already running it.

Maybe tmiranda would know as he wrote the JVM monitor Plugin.

[darcilicious]

Originally Posted by wayner

if you click the (!) indicator for system messages it would be great if that sent you to the system messages page in the Sage web UI.

This would be the easiest of your list to implement, actually.

[Dargason]

Quote:
Originally Posted by wayner
if you click the (!) indicator for system messages it would be great if that sent you to the system messages page in the Sage web UI.

This would be the easiest of your list to implement, actually.

Actually, I think it already does this... but I didn't want to say anything until I confirmed it on my own system.

Maybe tmiranda would know as he wrote the JVM monitor Plugin.

Perhaps, though I think his plugin is written in Java, and I think I know how to do it from within Java.

Now that I think about it, one easy way to do this might be to write a groovy script that returns the values, and call the groovy script through the webserver. It would make skin 'installation' a little more complicated, but not terrible. Of course, I don't have any idea how to write groovy code or even if I could get the heap information from within Groovy.

[wayner]

I can help with the groovy code but when I tried to do this before there was an issue as the groovy script I initiated ran in its own JVM so I wasn't getting the info for the SageTV JVM, I was getting the info from the JVM I started to run the groovy script. In fact I think the code I ran was more generic Java code that returned this info.

[Dargason]

Originally Posted by wayner

I can help with the groovy code but when I tried to do this before there was an issue as the groovy script I initiated ran in its own JVM so I wasn't getting the info for the SageTV JVM, I was getting the info from the JVM I started to run the groovy script. In fact I think the code I ran was more generic Java code that returned this info.

Hmm, yes. If it is its own JVM instance, than it wouldn't work.

[jusjoken]

As info...if my experiement goes well the JVM heap widget should not be difficult to replicate. I am starting with the weather widgets and then will do vfs lists and the go from there.

As for lua in Rainmeter using lua libraries like the JSON one...not now...it does not support that. But it's not that complex to parse the results as you have seen.

k

[wayner]

When I click the SageTV header or the system message (!) it opens my browser but the URL is completely blank. is this the behavior that other see or is it particular to my PC? FYI my sys is running Win7x64 and the browser is IE.

[darcilicious]

Originally Posted by wayner

When I click the SageTV header or the system message (!) it opens my browser but the URL is completely blank. is this the behavior that other see or is it particular to my PC?

When I click the SageTV header, I get the web server Home page (http://user:pass@ipaddress:port/sage/Home) as set up in the config file. Did you update the config file to use the settings for your local web server?

[wayner]

I didn't change this, here is what I have in SageTV.ini:

HomePageUrl=#Server#/sage/Home
RecordingStatusUrl=#Server#/sage/Home?xml=currrecording
RecordingConflictsUrl=#Server#/sage/Conflicts
RecordingConflictsRSS=#Server#/sage/public/Rss/Conflicts
SystemMessagesUrl=#Server#/sage/SystemMessages

and in UserConfig.inc
Server=#Authentication#192.168.1.92:8080
Authentication=http://name:password@

And some of these variables are used to pull in some of the data in the skin which is appearing and works fine. Maybe it is a browser issue - are you using Win7? 64 or 32 bit? This PC is running Win7 HP 64 bit.

[darcilicious]

Originally Posted by wayner

Maybe it is a browser issue - are you using Win7? 64 or 32 bit? This PC is running Win7 HP 64 bit.

Win 7 / 64bit / HP Touchsmart -- never any issues here...

[wayner]

Strange - when I change default browser to Chrome it works fine. I changed back to IE and it doesn't work.

[darcilicious]

Ugh. IE. I just tested it with IE 9 and none of the links work (or all I get is a blank page). I blame IE (which I almost never use at home).

[wayner]

Good I am not crazy. That's why I requested this functionality as I didn't think it worked as it doesn't do anything if IE is running when you click the icon or header.