Tommy Winther

twenty-first century code monkey

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New mail notification for Evolution

23. maj 2006 /

Here you’ll find a small python script that will show a nice little notification when a new email is received by Evolution. It looks like this on my machine running Ubuntu Dapper.

New mail notification for Evolution

The script works by attaching itself to your systems dbus and listens for “new email” events from Evolution. When an event is received it compares the email folder to the _watch_folders array and decides whether to show the notification or not. The magic really lies in the two dbus lines near the bottom of the script. The rest is just to make the notification a little nicer. The magic part is actually the work of a former coworker of mine, so I can’t really take credit for that 🙂

The scripts of course requires python as well as libnotify to display the notification and the tango-icon-theme for the nice icon. The following commands should prepare your system to run this script. Just toss the script into gnome’s session manager and it’ll always run at startup.

apt-get install python2.4 python2.4-dbus libnotify-bin tango-icon-theme

The week of games

13. maj 2006 /

This years Electronic Entertainment Expo was this past week and naturally a shitload of new games and related information was announced. The most interesting in my opinion was the news on the Nintendo Wii and Sony’s PS3. The Wii is cool, the way you interact with the system feels new and very natural. The downside is that most Nintendo games have these cute characters in their game, it’s ok for some games, but for golf, tennis, etc. it looks goofy and it’s just plain wrong.

I don’t really know what to say about the PS3. I guess €599 says it all and Mr. Kutaragi stating that it’s “probably too cheap” just seems like a joke. I wonder what the pricetag will say when it hits Denmark. Ah, what do I care, I’ve always been a xbox fanboy anyway, and my Xbox 360 is keeping me entertained just fine 😉

Microsoft did, as I expected, have the best and most entertaining press conference, and most importantly presented a gameplay demo of Gears of War and announced Halo 3. What more can I ask of them 🙂
If you feel like watching the three console makers’ press conferences, Gamespot has some decent feeds. I don’t know about the low quality feeds, but the high quality feeds are nice, but I think they are only available to subscribers.

So with all this news in the gaming world I have been in a gaming mood all week. But with no time on my hands I didn’t get to play until the weekend, so I kinda wasted a bit too much time on it I guess. I finally finished Condemned, the last level was scary! And I’ve completed Call Of Duty 2 for the second time, this time on Veteran level, which mean I gained my first 1000 gamerscore on one game 😀
Right now seems like a good time ordering a new game. I just wish Gears of War was out now!

Custom iPod firmware

5. maj 2006 /

Today I stumbled upon the Rockbox replacement firmware for the latest iPod models. It has some really cool features, like crossfade support and support for a lot of different audio formats such as Ogg and FLAC. Unfortunately it does not support video playback and I couldn’t find any information if they expect to support it in the future. As expected it doesn’t support music purchased from the iTunes music store, because of the DRM.

I have a 5G iPod (aka. iPod Video) so the lack of video playback makes Rockbox that much less interesting. But if they add decent video playback in the future I’ll be sure to try it out.

Back when I had my 4G iPod I did try iPod Linux for a while. It dual boots between Linux and Apple’s stock firmware, so I could test it when I felt like it. However, back then iPod Linux didn’t have power management among other things, so it wasn’t really an option for daily use. I haven’t checked much up on the support and new features since then, but it has probably gotten more advanced over time.

You can find more information on the Ipod port of Rockbox at their wiki.

Really Simple Syndication

29. april 2006 /

I’m really into RSS feeds. They make my life easier since I don’t have to visit a bunch of websites to keep updated. I use the Sage extension for Firefox, so news is only a click away.

Unfortunately not all websites sport a RSS feed, so I have created a couple feeds myself by parsing their websites. Feel free to use them, they get refreshed once a day.

  • ScummVM – news from scummvm.org
  • DWN – Debian Weekly News from debian.org
  • Vim Tips – Random tips from the Tips section on vim.org

Finally broken into the 2K

28. april 2006 /

After a visit down memory lane aka Condemned, I haven’t played that since January or February, I finally passed the 2K mark with my gamerscore 🙂

I’m wondering what game to get next. I’m leaning towards the new Tomb Raider game. The demo was pretty cool once I learned how to control Lara. I also tried most of the other new demos on Xbox Live Marketplace, but none of them felt that exciting. I mean Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter is cool with awesome graphics and all, but I’m not sure if it’s my type of game and the other games just didn’t catch my attention.

Perhaps I should just wait until autumn for the second wave of nextgen games. Too Human and Gears Of War looks awesome so far and Frame City Killer looks quite interesting as well.

fglrx big desktop setup on a latitude d610

27. april 2006 /

Yes! I finally made it work – or at least constructed the right combination of search words for google to help me 🙂

At work I have a Dell Latitude D610 laptop, a docking station and a 20″ Dell flat panel. For the longest time I have tried to combine the two displays with both the x.org radeon driver and later on ATI’s proprietary fglrx driver.

The only success I’ve had with the x.org radeon driver is using the merged framebuffer together with a VGA cable, but that results in a not-so-nice image quality on the flat panel. I also had it working for two days with the DVI cable, but the next day the internal display in the laptop was dead, so I can’t recommend that option 😳

The proprietary fglrx driver that ships with Ubuntu Dapper (and most other linux distributions) is easy to configure, unfortunately it contains some bugs that triggered in my particular setup.
What I want is a resolution of 1400×1050 on the laptop and 1600×1200 on the flat panel. There’s a bug in the last few versions of the driver though, that makes it hard to do this, since it defaults the resolution of the second display to the resolution of the first display. This results in a resolution of 2800×1050 and garbage on the rest of the space on the second display.

Luckily, this page has a work-around for the problem. The solution is quite genius and uses one of the fglrx driver’s shortcomings to our advantage. When the driver is in big desktop mode it doesn’t support the Virtual parameter in the Display configuration – at least as you would expect. By specifiying a virtual size the driver will magically use the complete 1600×1200 resolution on the second display and I get what I want – full utilization of my displays.

The only problem with this solution is when the laptop is not docked and only have the internal display available. The driver is in single-head mode and accepts the Virtual configuration, creating a scrollable view port. This is easily fixed with the following command, though.

$ sudo xrandr -s 0

Have a peek at my xorg.conf for configuration details.

Logitech driver rant

23. april 2006 /

Recently I had the pleasant task of reinstalling Windows. Long story short, I needed the Media Center capabilities for my Xbox 360. I will probably talk about this some other time. Anyway, after numerous reboots – we are talking 10+ – to have a basic Windows MCE running with the latest security patches, Danish language pack, etc. I reached the point of installing all my additional hardware not installed by Windows. Most things are O.K. and requires a small driver download and a quick install, but the dreaded Logitech QuickCam Messenger driver is a joke. It’s 33 megs in size, granted the driver for my ATI graphics card is quite big as well, but it actually adds some useful functionality.

It’s not so much downloading the 33 megs that bothers me, with broadband it doesn’t take very long. No, it’s the options you get when installing this so-called “driver”. The required disk space is a whopping 70+ megs! What is this? Clearly must be a joke.
Anyway, when asked where I want to perform a typical or custom installation, I chose custom – it surely must be possible to not installed at least some of the junk (or utility applications if you will). And here is the fun part. I was able to deselect the driver, and that’s it. The required disk space was lowered to about 50 megs – but why would I install the damn thing without the driver, that’s why I downloaded this thing anyway.

I continue with what seems to be a “typical-custom” installation and when it finally completes, Windows needs to reboot once again. After the reboot I have a ton of new Logitech applications plus a Windows Explorer extension for something called My Logitech Pictures (or whatever) and all I wanted was a driver so I can use my webcam with messenger.

At this point I was kind of pissed off and went straight for Add/Remove programs. To my big surprise there was two installed Logitech application: Logitech Camera-driver and the other I can’t remember the name of, but it was quite clear that this second one contained all the junk, so I quickly uninstalled it (and had to reboot – suprise!)

Now all is fine and dandy. The webcam works and I don’t have all the Logitech applications I didn’t want in the first place. Why oh why couldn’t I just get the option when installing. I guess this teaches me not to buy Logitech products again – at least webcams, since I really like the keyboard I’m typing on right now and it’s also a Logitech product 🙂

Once again I have been confirmed in my choice of using Ubuntu Linux as my primary desktop is not a bad one!

Unpleasant phone call

23. april 2006 /

Yesterday evening I got one of those inevitable phone calls. The ones you just know are bad news even before you pick up the phone. I knew because my mother had tried to call me twice in quick succession, which almost never happens. The message was bad news indeed.

My aunt is dying.

She has been ill most of this year. Cancer in or near the brain. Although the doctors did try to fix her with surgery and various other treatments, yesterday they came to the conclusion they had tried all and couldn’t do more for her. She might live for a while, or maybe just a few days, they don’t know. Lucikly she has no physical pains.

She is only 66 years old.

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