Smoking..
I’m within my sixth week of non-smoking, it gets better but still I do feel the urge to smoke sometimes, restrained only by the knowledge that I’ll become hooked again as soon as I lighten up another one.
The permanent cravings are gone, conversations with smokers tend to be strain my will but are easily survivable. Standing in the blue smoke still tempts.
But why? I don’t even like the taste. I’ve left behind the illusion that smoking calmes me down or teaches me how to breathe more slowly. My in-official title for smokers, suicidal misanthrope, remains to sound good. Temptation arises from time to time.
Slowly I understand those aggressive ex-smokers. Through a general smoking ban temptations would get rarer. Distrusting collectivism and state-imposed regulations my non-smoking gets a game against myself: do I need higher interventions to finally quit?
Computers provide users with various communication channels (as facebook, twitter, chat programs like ICQ, jabber, Skype). Each channel usually provides an own program for interacting with other users using that channel. To prevent users from being overwhelmed Ubuntu added the notifier-applet. It unifies all different communication notifications into one simple panel applet.
I am using Skype for most of my online communication, mostly because other people are using it and there are strange firewalls at work preventing most other protocols. Alas there’s no support for Skype out of the box and the skype linux crew is kinda slow (Skype 2.1, anyone?). Enters me who needed some diversion from master thesis writing..
indicator-applet with skype
May I introduce indicator-skype-client.py: it’s a small script, written in two or three hours (most of the time spent upon finding strange bugs in python-indicate). It currently provides a list of unread messages. When a username is clicked the corresponding skype window is opened or created. By clicking on the Skype label its main window is displayed. So far it works.. various updates will follow.
How to install?
Just start the python script while skype is already running. Skype will ask if you want to allow the script to access its data, just answer yes. The script will do the rest. It does not install itself into the user session, so you’ll have to start it if you want skype notifications.
TODOs
- There are various workarounds in the code (for example I needed an empty callback to get things displayed), work out those bugs
- currently there’s a hard refresh every 5 seconds (in addition to incoming message detection). This will have to go and be replaced with a more dynamic scheme.
- detect if an unread conversation was openend within Skype and do not display this conversation
- somehow automatically start the script when Skype or the indication-applet starts
So some things are missing, but the script is already workable. Have fun (and please provide patches if you fix problems (: ).
blog is moving
Or rather evolving into a new system.
I just haven’t enough time at my hands to create regular blog posts. This might change after my master thesis will eventually be finished but letting a web page lying dormant ain’t best style.
As I was down with the flu the last days I wrote a small replacement system: it’s just around 150 lines of rails code that captures my twitter feed and allows me to write write longer posts/memos.
The idea is that tweets are aggregated through the day and presented as formatted RSS feed (so there should be no RSS spamming). Longer stuff (as the typical “how did I get x working under Linux” things that happen from time to time) will be integrated with the tweets (yeah, not done yet).
After all coding it was pretty straightforward and fun.. the only drawback is that the RSS feed URL will change, ie. your newsreader will loose my feed.
Dear lazy web,
sometimes I get the urge to clean out cruft lying around my room, otherwise my mind keeps on thinking about stuff that still needs to be read or repaired.
Cloths get donated, eBay is good for larger stuff. But what about books? They tend to spread around me, some of them just collecting dust and without chance of ever being read again. I’ve used Amazon Marketplace for time to time but did run into some problems lately: their rates seem rise and now I’ve got some problems with them recognizing my banking account for pay-outs.. funny as it is the same account that I’m using for years to pay my book bills on the same site.
So, dear web, are there any alternatives? What I search for is a marketplace for used books, possibly nationally ordered so that I might cut on transportation costs.