Dave Holland's home page

Weather forecast in the Gnome panel
12:04am, Saturday 1 August 2009

It's annoyed me for some time that the standard Gnome weather applet doesn't display forecasts for the UK (it's a long-standing bug). So I scratched the itch.

Given that I'd be hacking something together in Perl, the Gnome2::PanelApplet module seemed like a good place to start. It didn't take long to get something that mostly worked. But, er, either I'm doing something wrong or there are still some lurking bugs; my applet wouldn't add properly from the Gnome menu, only if I started it from the command line first.

So I resorted to gnome-swallow-applet which is a clever (but revolting) hack to "swallow" any X window into the panel, and wrote a script to parse the BBC's weather RSS feeds and display icons for the upcoming days. This is what it looks like. You can download the script; change the feed URL for your location, and enjoy. If you fix any of the bits labelled FIXME please send me a patch!

False-positive spam rejections
9:30pm, Monday 13 July 2009

To anyone I've erroneously rejected email from today - sorry.

It seems that Sanesecurity's Sanesecurity.Jurlbl.5624 virus definition is a little too wide-ranging; I've disabled it.

Vocabulary of a 16 month old
12:30pm, Friday 8 May 2009

Stuart's vocabulary is quite extensive now:

key	key
door	door or window
doch	dog, quadruped
RAAAA	the dog that lives at the pub opposite our house
ee-ee	Mousey
brumbrum	car, bus, tractor, vehicle
don	gone
din	drink
dindin	dinner, food
Mumum	Mum
Dadad	Dad
dinky	stinky (poo), sticky, wet
hoch	hot, dangerous, mustn't touch

The random album meme
11:04am, Wednesday 4 March 2009

I don't usually "do" memes but this is more fun than most.

1. Go to "wikipedia." Hit "random" or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random. The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2. Go to "Random quotations" or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3. The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3. Go to flickr and click on "explore the last seven days" or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days. Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

Or cut out the faff and click here!

Gnome and floatbg, feeling dirty
5:19pm, Thursday 26 February 2009

I don't know what the best way is to get floatbg to play nicely with Gnome. But I have a feeling that this:

sprintf(cmd,"gconftool --type string --set
  /desktop/gnome/background/primary_color \"#%04x%04x%04x\"",
  red, green, blue);
system(cmd);

which I uploaded yesterday can only be described as "suboptimal"...