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Weather forecast in the Gnome panel, revisited
10:18pm, Friday 9 July 2010

About a year ago I threw together a hacky mess of Perl and gnome-swallow-applet to display the BBC's 3-day weather forecast in the Gnome panel. I recently rewrote it to use Perl's Gnome2::PanelApplet which seems to have had the relevant bug(s) fixed since I last tried.

There are still some rather rough edges: you'll still need to change the feed location from the coded-in one for Cambridge to something suitable for your location; and don't look at the code dealing with the use of a web proxy. Still, the embarrassing match-happy regexp error which meant that Sunday was always displayed as being sunny is gone...

It needs a bunch of Perl modules, including Gnome2::PanelApplet (from CPAN, or Debian packaged for i386 by me here). Drop this script in /usr/local/bin and this applet description file in /usr/lib/bonobo/servers and you should be able to do the usual right-click/add to panel.

Have fun. If you fix any FIXMEs please let me know.

Kwiki title bug
11:10am, Monday 21 September 2009

Note to self:

Kwiki has a bug in the tabnav theme where the page title doesn't get set properly. To fix, edit theme/tabnav/template/tt2/kwiki_screen.html and change page_id (line 9 or so) to be page_name.

Simples...

Spam of the day
9:17am, Tuesday 15 September 2009

Subject: INVITATION TO SUPPLY ONE MILLION BATH TOWELS

Do you know where your million towels are?

Weather forecast in the Gnome panel
11:04pm, Friday 31 July 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
8:30pm, 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.