Inspirated

Conky is a small utility for X systems which displays various system statistics and graphs on your desktop. The tiny piece of software is highly configurable, exceptionally light-weight and well … Zooey Dischanel-ly sexy — that’s officially an adverb now, your disagreement doesn’t matter. In layman’s terminology, it’s the “green” stuff on far left:

(Click on the thumbnail for larger version.)

Be the screenshot as it may, here‘s how I pimped the stats. To use the same settings for your setup, replace your configuration file at ~/.conkyrc with the one at provided link and restart Conky. You’ll get the following:

• Processors usage bars and graphs for a multiple core CPU.
• Memory usage bars and graphs.
• Disk usage bars and graphs.
• Network traffic graphs. You may have to change the interface in configuration file from wlan0 to the one your system has.
• CPU temperatures. You need lm-sensors to make these work.
• Track currently playing in Audacious Media Player.

Just because rides aren’t pimp-able with a text file.

Tags: Conky, Desktop, Eye-candy, Open Source, Technology

A little while ago I had to code a few fixes for the fGallery WordPress plugin. The patch was released as version 2.4.1-1 and it wasn’t until yesterday that I noticed the “Previous” and “Next” links behaving erratically for my images. Fixing it required a little hair-pulling dance with SQL sub-queries. Anyhow-way, the end product does work as expected. Here’s the incremental diff with the bugfix which should be applied to the 2.4.1-1 release. If you don’t understand what was just said in the last line, you can use the already patched zip archive to have things automatically sorted out.

Tags: Bugfix, fGallery, Open Source, Patch, PHP, SQL, Technology, WordPress, XHTML

This time though, the 0.2 version bump is pseudo-official, as the experimental branch has finally been merged with the trunk. New features from the revision I just pushed include:

• An “Append” option which, who would’ve expected, appends user-defined text at the end of the countdown.
• An option to select whether the target time is specified in UTC. This was especially problematic as all my sandwiches started taking an extra five hours to heat up in the oven. Initially blaming Pidgin for having some psychic connection with the microwave, it later turned out that the countdown was aiming five hours ahead because, well, that’s the timezone I live in.

Keeping up with the tradition, here’s the obligatory screenshot:

Tags: AIM, Code, Countdown, GMT, IM, Jabber, Launchpad, MSN, Open Source, Pidgin, Pidgin Countdown, Plugin, Purple, Status, Technology, Time, UTC

I hereby welcome my ASUS Eee PC to the family:

(Click on the thumbnail for larger version.)

Going through statistics for the current year, found this little pleasant surprise:

Tags: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Rants, Statistics

The 0.2 version bump is kinda unofficial as my code branch hasn’t yet been merged into Pidgin Countdown‘s trunk. Nevertheless, here’s the changelog of what I’ve worked on so far:

• Reimplemented preferences with calendar and spin buttons for user-friendliness and validation.

  

• Fixed plugin unloading.
• Added “activation” of the saved countdown status message.

The plugin has become quite handy now. I do have another set of features planned which I will be implementing as soon as I get some more time for leisure coding. Still, as things stand right now, I am pretty content with being able to countdown my IM status to Roma fixtures, Fedora releases or even my sandwich’s heat-up time in the microwave with just a few clicks.

Tags: AIM, Code, Countdown, IM, Jabber, Launchpad, MSN, Open Source, Pidgin, Pidgin Countdown, Plugin, Purple, Status, Technology

No, hitting twenty is not a big deal at all. Also, since I have to deal with an academic fiasco of epic proportions these days, there wouldn’t have been any candles involved even if growing old was halfway as important as not growing up.

To compensate for the cake though, or lack thereof, I suddenly got this idea of having a countdown for midnight in my MSN status. Fortunately, Stephen English had just started working on a plugin called Pidgin Countdown for achieving such functionality. Less fortunately, the plugin only changed “saved statuses” in Pidgin and didn’t actually activate them for my IM accounts.

Now if this were a Windoze scenario, my only option would have been to pitch up a bug report to the developers and wait for a newer version to pop up (which most certainly would’ve taken considerably longer than six hours — my deadline). On the other hand — the beauty of open-source — all I had to do was to vim the plugin source, consult the Pidgin API documentation for status messages, add a new line and er.. witness the MSN protocol go all schizophrenic as my status message started flipping every second. Increasing the delay to about ten seconds was sufficient to make everything daisy. I actually plan to polish the nifty plugin a little more and have my changes merged in the source repository in near future. Till then:

Tags: Code, Countdown, Open Source, Pidgin, Pidgin Countdown, Plugin, Purple, Status, Technology