@dchky: Except the information isn't there. I can understand that if I was asking something like "how do I make this script executable", or "how do I replace system icons" or god forbid, something that is reasonably well documented yet is buried among threads that aren't exactly easy to find with a search engine, like "how do I partition my SD card" - then you could go and say it's a silver spoon feeding thing.

But when I'm asking about a very specific DBus command, I shouldn't have to literally write out all the pages I visited, both at x.org (which has some general dbus documentation/tutorials) and in the developer documentation at maemo.org, for the reader to think 'gee, maybe this isn't blatantly obvious from what is out there'.

I didn't just go on here and ask something so *****ically obvious that it can be answered with "cd [filepath], and then try to run your script from there - oh, and you need to edit your .profile to permanently add your code to path". It's one thing to say explaining how to properly use something like cp or chmod is silver spoon feeding.

Did me quoting a snippet of python code (from the maemo.org wiki no less, but admittedly that's not necessarily too obvious) not indicate that I had looked around the place? Did the fact (if you saw me asking this in a few other threads) that I had been asking this for a few days now, with references to digging around the documentation, not indicate that maybe I was actually trying to find this on my own? Did I slip up somewhere on my grammar or capitalization or other basic articulation skills, so as to make myself look like the more typical ignorant-and-not-trying-to-fix-it individuals that come on these forums?

Honestly, by all means, if you can find where either that script has been posted, or non-fragmented, actually reasonably-easy-to-understand-without-prior-coding-knowledge documentation exists, then please, by all means - point it out to me. And then, please, do share what arcane combination of search terms you entered to find it.

Here's my issue, and why I feel the middle finger is deserved for the small subcategory of people who it's aimed at: No one even did that. Yes the code is only like 50 characters long, but hell, I would have been happy if someone had just said ">Link< Go read." In fact, I would have preferred that. Then maybe I wouldn't have had to spend like 8 hours of my day on slightly editing the same command and going from guess to guess on how exactly to combine the elements "com.nokia.mce" "/com/nokia/mce/request" and "get_device_orientation". And then by now I would have probably posted a nice portrait-mode capable config file to the Beautify Conky thread so that people could benefit from that that much earlier.

But no, apparently it's supposed to be obvious to the not-computer-programming-versed individual that unrelated-to-accelerometer documented dbus scripts can be almost exactly-identically translated to this one. Not to mention the fact that until I read through a mass of general DBus documentation, I didn't even think "com.nokia.mce /com/nokia/mce/request com.nokia.mce.request" made sense as a block of text in a command. I mean, yeah, I now know why that's the way it is - I can't pull up the technical explanation in words from memory, but I have a general understanding of. But was that explanation easy to find or repeatedly stated on this forum? No. Though at least it was easier to find for me than than the worst of this command.

Then there's a page - I'll even link you to it so you can see I actually dug around ( http://maemo.org/api_refs/5.0/5.0-fi...928a6ae2fc0c9e ) that simply says, with little explanation:

#define MCE_DEVICE_ORIENTATION_GET get_device_orientation
Query the device orientation information.

I get that it's a reference page - it shouldn't have explanations in it. And that's fine. But somewhere those explanations should exist. I spent like an hour (if not more if you count all the pauses to look through or search for more scripts/examples/documentation) trying variants of:

dbus-send [--system] [--print-reply] --dest=com.nokia.mce /com/nokia/mce/request com.nokia.mce.request [#define] [MCE_DEVICE_ORIENTATION_GET] [.][accel.][get_device_orientation]

The stuff in brackets being the stuff I took in/out (not blind try-every-possible combination, mind - there were educated guesses, and the [.] came in only once, when I did com.nokia.mce.request.accel.get_device_orientation ). And yeah it looks ridiculous now, especially the accel. thing because I eventually figured out that "accel." was the python variable (at least that's what I think it is) substituting pretty much the entire dbus addressing stuff before it. So sorry, but no where is it explained that #define MCE_DEVICE_ORIENTATION_GET get_device_orientation translates to stick .get_device_orientation at the end of com.nokia.mce.request. And I know for a fact that not a one of the pages (including all those code examples, most of which aren't even shell compatible, but are written in something else) that I looked through actually says that "com.nokia.mce.request.get_device_orientation is the proper dbus method_call or whatever it's called for fetching device orientation. Indeed, no where in the accelerometer documentation is anything stated about how to fetch device state - except for the aforementioned python code snippet (though that will be changed at the latest tomorrow, when I'm going to edit in the dbus command that I figured out today into the wiki, if no one else does it by then).

Did I figure it out eventually? Yeah. But it's not written anywhere that I could find, it's not easy to understand from what's available, and if anything, telling me the line of code in question would not be feeding me from a silver spoon. At the worst it would be doing a step of the cooking for me - though I would liken it to simply explaining how to make the meal in question, as opposed to expecting me to figure out how (from ingredients I have to scavenger hunt for, no less).

And note that I did not ask for help figuring out how to make grep filter a line that has either x or y or z. I figured that out on my own, after browsing on my own some similarly less than intuitive documentation on grep options. Same with certain things regarding awk that I wasn't clear on. I get that this forum gets a lot of annoying posts. I get that way too few people bother even trying to learn something on their own. But no matter how frustrating that gets, that doesn't mean that every question that is self-apparent to you is oh-so-well documented that everyone can be expected to figure it out. And it doesn't mean that you get to place people indiscriminately in the same category unless a person expressly takes the time to craft their post so as to show off all the research/work/searching they did.