Entries from October 2006 ↓

First of all let me say I’m not a fan of wallpapers I’m more a “black background guy”.

But I have been hearing a friend complain about needing a program with this simple spec.

“take in a dir, randomly look for a wallpaper there and set it.”

I’m impress that gnome doesn’t has this so simple functionality same with fluxbox (although you can use feh, but I have yet to learn how). On the other hand KDE seems to have one that’s very nice it even has wallpapers on each desktop but it’s KDE.
Then they are lots of programs with a huge ammount of “functionality” like gradients and solid backgrounds and a bunch of stuff and yet they forgot something so simple as a random chooser.

Anyway I was about to fire up my editor and code something but i decided to google around and I found many:

all the relevant ones are in this thread, ironically they are all implementations of the same program in different languages.

The one that is a bit more complex is the C code which implements it’s own counter, the shell one, perl and python are just something that reads all files in dir and randomly gets one after that they all call gconftool-2 with the correct options to set the wallpaper; after that they all say set a cron job.

The one written in C goes hardcode loading a gconf instance and setting the property there ( /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename if someone is interested.) after that it created a mainloop and sleeps for X seconds, oh did I forget it needs to be compile and depends on 2 external libraries? good luck ubuntu users getting that build.
Anyway I could say which one I think it’s the best but as I said I don’t have any wallpapers to try them….

If only a friend of mine will lend me his huge list of wallpapers, which I’ll love to have but he refuses until I stop caling it “your huge pile of crap”
side note, check out this “true story” about openbox wallpapers why executable code is not a good idea

Come on click it it’s just one paragraph.

I have been around some wm mainly fluxbox, lately I have been working with a great small wm (tiny some will say) call dynamic window manager, by the way dwm is also some new crap from our best friends Desktop Window Manager.

I love them both dwm is great at not getting on your way and fluxbox is super fast but there is always this program that you love that doesn’t respects X and then you have trouble.for example try running rox inside fluxbox it will grafully take control of your desktop and then there is no way to get a menu, I know you can pass in params to stick it at north or south or nodesktop but then what’s the point of rox if it has no desktop? as another example take gaim or any other IM client and try to run it inside dwm it will threat it as a full screen app and I’m not up for tagging everyone as “float” and starting to patch the code is not a good idea.

the best part of all is that this is not dwm or fluxbox fault is the fault of whoever designed the program to just do what they want. not what X tells them too. But I’m just tired of having to choose between

• throwing out the program
• finding a workaround
• just complain about how bad it is.

Why gnome?

well to start I don’t like kde, never did and never will (note to self, if you ever run kde unpublish this post :D) other then the fact that it has way too much crap, it’s slow and reminds me windows and I don’t know why kde developers want to make everything and stick a k in front of it. it’s just flustrating.

On the other hand gnome is more flexible and less intrusive, i find that a couple of kde apps that I do like (amarok, kdiff3, etc) work without problems on gnome.

And of course xgl and beryl, since this is actually usefull eye candy (aka F12).

The biggest problem I see here is that the gnome that comes with gentoo is very ummm crappy? so I’ll sit down with the gnome beautifier guide as bonus points I’m going to migrate to gnome 2.16. (ones it gets out of hardmask )

Hello everyone this is just a test to check if my setup is correct

people said youtube was going to die or someone will buy it. I still think both can happen unless google works it out.

I believe one of this will happen

1. google will split their products into formal and informal online videos moving all the formal to googlevideo and leaving all the informal on youtube. by formal I mean either paid or tv or the big video blogs, maybe the directors from youtube. but they will stay as 2 diferent products.
2. The same as the above but to the point that ones you know it your hopping to one or the other page.
3. google will kill one of them and merge the ideas into the other. and here is big point for google if they kill youtube they will become microsoft if they kill googlevideo they will stay google (read: doing what noone will think to be a good idea and doing it, like buying youtube =o)

ohhh I almost forgot, congrats to youtube founders and employees!