Ikke's Blog

Stickynotes alpha

As per bug #150493:

This is "true" transparency using XComposite, not blending with the background or a screenshot.

It's fairly buggy, but that's caused by xcompmgr and Metacity's ignorance of Compositing (I think):

• When xcompmgr is running and you create a new note, it's not transparent although xprop says _NET_WM_WINDOW_OPACITY is set to a correct value. Restarting xcompmgr makes new notes transparent
• Text of notes can't be changed
• Notes can't be resized or moved

The "Delete" and "Sticky" buttons work fine though. Really strange.

Metacity really needs a built-in compositing manager, like XFWM's.

Crosswords

Only 67% :-( Guess I'm too young to know about those k* tools ;-) Some questions are a little Debian-specific too, but hey :-)

GtkSpell language

I'm sorry Gnome-NL guys, but I must confess I'm running my desktop using the "C" locale (ie. english). There's one major problem with this: when I'm using Gaim with spell checking enabled, I'm always "wrong" as 99% of all time I talk to IM buddies, it's in dutch (nl_BE, or something close to that at least ;-)).
A very annoying issue that could be solved by disabling spell checking (*sigh*), which I don't want (hey, one has to *fix* problems, not go around them).

So I made this little patch (very simple, low profile patch, I know). It's against gtkspell 2.0.11, and as gtkspell seems to be no longer maintained, this is the version you got on your system most propably too.

To set a language to use for (gtkspell based) spell checking, just set the GTKSPELL_LANG environment variable, like this:
echo "export GTKSPELL_LANG=nl >> ~/.profile"
Then log out and log in again so the variable is incorporated in your environment.

Enjoy!

less and HTML

I didn't know about this before:

(that's "less index.html" in the lower terminal)

Cool! The image isn't fake, just try it for yourself.

Gaim CVS and Bonjour using Avahi

So you want to play around with Gaim 2.0beta1 or CVS, you definately want the Bonjour/RendezVous protocol plugin to be able to IM with your buddies on your local LAN, but you haven't got Howl on your system as you believe Avahi is the way to go (good boy :-))?

Just apply this little patch. It's against current anoncvs from sf.net. You need to build avahi with avahi-compat-howl support.