Smoking..
I’m within my sixth week of non-smoking, it gets better but still I do feel the urge to smoke sometimes, restrained only by the knowledge that I’ll become hooked again as soon as I lighten up another one.
The permanent cravings are gone, conversations with smokers tend to be strain my will but are easily survivable. Standing in the blue smoke still tempts.
But why? I don’t even like the taste. I’ve left behind the illusion that smoking calmes me down or teaches me how to breathe more slowly. My in-official title for smokers, suicidal misanthrope, remains to sound good. Temptation arises from time to time.
Slowly I understand those aggressive ex-smokers. Through a general smoking ban temptations would get rarer. Distrusting collectivism and state-imposed regulations my non-smoking gets a game against myself: do I need higher interventions to finally quit?
Computers provide users with various communication channels (as facebook, twitter, chat programs like ICQ, jabber, Skype). Each channel usually provides an own program for interacting with other users using that channel. To prevent users from being overwhelmed Ubuntu added the notifier-applet. It unifies all different communication notifications into one simple panel applet.
I am using Skype for most of my online communication, mostly because other people are using it and there are strange firewalls at work preventing most other protocols. Alas there’s no support for Skype out of the box and the skype linux crew is kinda slow (Skype 2.1, anyone?). Enters me who needed some diversion from master thesis writing..
indicator-applet with skype
May I introduce indicator-skype-client.py: it’s a small script, written in two or three hours (most of the time spent upon finding strange bugs in python-indicate). It currently provides a list of unread messages. When a username is clicked the corresponding skype window is opened or created. By clicking on the Skype label its main window is displayed. So far it works.. various updates will follow.
How to install?
Just start the python script while skype is already running. Skype will ask if you want to allow the script to access its data, just answer yes. The script will do the rest. It does not install itself into the user session, so you’ll have to start it if you want skype notifications.
TODOs
- There are various workarounds in the code (for example I needed an empty callback to get things displayed), work out those bugs
- currently there’s a hard refresh every 5 seconds (in addition to incoming message detection). This will have to go and be replaced with a more dynamic scheme.
- detect if an unread conversation was openend within Skype and do not display this conversation
- somehow automatically start the script when Skype or the indication-applet starts
So some things are missing, but the script is already workable. Have fun (and please provide patches if you fix problems (: ).
another month has passed..
Time flies by.. the last six week were more of the same: master thesis and other smallish stuff. The master thesis is getting along nicely albeit slow. At least I’ve got the first credentials for the practical part (Praktikum in German) now the two missing things are the Seminar and the Thesis itself. The later is currently around 95pages, its content slowly gets in shape. I still hope to finish somewhere around the middle of October.
I’ve just discovered an expired life insurance plan which will be reinvested into new stocks. Over the last year I had loses in the one-digit percent range, let’s see how the next year goes.
So far life’s good, I’m stocked up on concert tickets again. You can find me at the following shows:
| Date | Location | Band |
|---|---|---|
| 26.10. | Arena | Dredg |
| 4.11. | Porgy&Bess | Max Herre |
| 8.11. | Szene | Blumentopf |
| 10.11. | Arena | White Lies |
| 22.11. | Flex | Silversun Pickups |
| 29.11. | Gasometer | Alice In Chains |
Time to update the weblog again.. I’m still alive but covered with work lately.
I’ve been non-smoking since the Bruce Springsteen concert on July, 5th. So for it has worked out, my initial fears that I’ll loose some valued habits that I associated with cigarettes did not come true. Funny how I was never able to imagine myself in a coffee house or waiting without a cigarette.. and now I do not even know why. I’m still addicted to coffee (and the stays in aforementioned coffee houses to cure my need). What did it make different this time? I started to watch smokers during their daily life — my prejudgement that smoking makes all of us calmer was shattered afterwards. And what other reason to smoke did I ever state (sans the addiction part)?
What kept me occupied? My master thesis mostly. The attending professor did the first review of my thesis and the results were less than joyous. Seems like I’ll have to rewrite most of the thesis to make him happy. But his is one thing about hackers: when we fall down we get up and try to make most out of it. Otherwise no one would ever finish any development project. I’ll have to edit most of my thesis and develop a new storyline for its use cases but at least it seems that the software itself is finished (except the demonstration use cases).
The rest of my time went into SECOQC. A new release is around the porch and will improve various internals as well as provide a new user experience (sounds funny when this means mostly a new command line interface). So I’m doing a bit of user interface development lately: it’s rapid feedback loop is quite redeeming.
And of course I was not able to stay away from concerts. As NiN’s current tour is called “wave goodbye” I had to travel to Budapest for one (hopefully not last) concert. Did you know that you can get shriveled fingertips at a live concert? I didn’t. Thanks to Google Maps on the iPhone we were able to find the Szimpla again after the concert. Great place to hang out if you have some spare time in Budapest, but I never seem able to find the exit..
Hopefully I’ll be able to cover my master thesis with a real announcement soon.. to achieve this I’ve switched to “productive” mode: I’ve locked myself in with a stockpile of pizza and wine (-: code needs to be written.
Dear lazy web,
sometimes I get the urge to clean out cruft lying around my room, otherwise my mind keeps on thinking about stuff that still needs to be read or repaired.
Cloths get donated, eBay is good for larger stuff. But what about books? They tend to spread around me, some of them just collecting dust and without chance of ever being read again. I’ve used Amazon Marketplace for time to time but did run into some problems lately: their rates seem rise and now I’ve got some problems with them recognizing my banking account for pay-outs.. funny as it is the same account that I’m using for years to pay my book bills on the same site.
So, dear web, are there any alternatives? What I search for is a marketplace for used books, possibly nationally ordered so that I might cut on transportation costs.