ronin

Jabber Notification

2009-03-21T19:24:00+00:00

A variation on the Gnome Notification theme with some jabber.

This time with some ruby:

#!/usr/bin/ruby
begin
  require 'rubygems'
  require 'xmpp4r/client'
rescue LoadError
  puts "Couldn't load xmpp4r, you probably need to install it.  Try gem install xmpp4r"
  exit
end

include Jabber
jid = JID::new('your_user@example.com')
password = 'xxx'
cl = Client::new(jid)
cl.connect
cl.auth(password)
to = "your_user@example.com"
subject = "Notification from `$USER`"
ARGV.each do | message |
   m = Message::new(to, message).set_type(:normal).set_id('1').set_subject(subject)
   cl.send m
end

Run it like:

emerge something_that_takes_ages; notify.rb "Emerge Done"

You’ll need ruby, ruby gems, and the xmpp4r gem.

Enjoy.

Prelude

2009-01-05T21:09:00+00:00

Prelude, a Metacity Theme which has minimal window decoration. Great for small screens such as the Dell Mini 9.

New Zealand, 1843

2008-05-15T09:23:00+01:00

Very cool(for me anyway) map of New Zealand from 1843. A couple of noticeable name differences are:

New Ulster, New Munster, and New Leinster are the North, South and Stewart Islands respectively.
Tasman Bay is known as Blind Bay(Tasman Bay of D’Urville).

This comes from the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection which has plenty of other cool maps to checkout.

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

2008-04-28T21:42:00+01:00

Clay Shirky: Gin, Television, and Social Software

“And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television.”

I found it hard to pull just a single quote of this piece out, it’s a quick read that just makes you start thinking. If the calculation of how much effort has gone into Wikipedia is even close, this is an amazing way to look at it.

My consumption to production ratio is so low it’s embarrassing.

Internet Asshattery

2008-04-26T11:43:00+01:00

Leonard Lin: Internet Asshattery, Armchair Scaling Experts Edition

iPlayer hacked again

2008-03-16T18:37:00+00:00

The hack for the iPlayer from last week was closed by the BBC, but only by more obsfucation. Therefore, there is a patch for last weeks script which fixes the problem.

Reading the comments there are a few people out there working on making this better, and it looks like there is a script to generate an RSS feed for the iplayer website.

New London Architecture

2008-03-16T17:36:00+00:00

Went and saw the Underground: Londons Hidden Architecture at New London Architecture this weekend.

They had a big model of central London which was pretty cool.

Command line Gnome Notification

2008-03-10T21:38:00+00:00

From the “it’s almost certainly been done better somewhere else” department, here is my script to fire off a Gnome Notification after a shell command finishes.

a python script:

#!/usr/bin/python
from pynotify import *
import sys

def notify(message=""):
    n = Notification("Command Line Completed", message)
    n.show()

init("cli notify")
if len(sys.argv) > 1:
    notify(sys.argv[1])
else:
    notify()

Then just add it to your path and you can append it onto some command:

echo monkey && mynotify.py "some message"

You then get a notification like so:

BBC iPlayer downloads for Linux

2008-03-09T08:59:00+00:00

BBC’s iPlayer is good, but this makes it better.

Found via

Thinking about scalable systems

2007-07-23T10:38:00+01:00

Joe Armstrong: Scalable fault-tolerant upgradable systems, part 1.

A system that is fault-tolerant can easily be made scalable and easily made so that we can do in-service upgrade.

Part 1, cool. Looking forward to the rest of this.