Inspirated

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: