This is the archive for May 2006. Recent posts can be found at the main blog page.

I feel my legs

Thursday, May 25, 2006 ★ 22:30 ★ Category Misc ★ Permanent url

For the first time in years I felt like running for a while. I don’t like running at all, but since the indoor volleyball season is over and some condition training is good for my health, I decided to just do it.

My route, click for full version

6.4 kilometres in 33 minutes, not bad at all!

Blink blink

Thursday, May 25, 2006 ★ 16:07 ★ Category Gnome ★ Permanent url

The HTML blink tag was never standardized (for a reason!) and its use has been discouraged by many people (although a fully featured web 2.1 implementation is available), but blinking pixels on my monitor still make me suffer everyday. Yes, I’m talking about blinking cursors. While not as annoying as blinking text or blinking notification icons (eg. instant messengers!), the last blinking pixels on my screen should die. Now!

First of all, my Gnome desktop: Desktop, Preferences, Keyboard. Uncheck the box. One down.
Yuck, gnome-terminal still blinks. It should just follow the Gnome settings. Luckily it can be turned off in the profile preferences.

Two down, one left: gvim still blinks, but adding set guicursor=a:blinkon0 to ~/.gvimrc seems to work.
Victory!

Command line and the clipboard

Tuesday, May 23, 2006 ★ 00:44 ★ Categories Gnome, Programming ★ Permanent url

A few days ago I stumbled upon a question in a newsgroup: how to put text on the Gnome clipboard from the command line?

In response, I wrote a small Python script (using PyGTK) that can be used as a pipe in your command line scripts. It puts all data from stdin on the clipboard. For this to work, you will need the correct $DISPLAY environment variable set (which will be the case most of the time, but it doesn’t work from cron for example).

CLI lovers, download copy-to-clipboard here and rejoice!

Update: Sure, there’s also tons of other solutions like xclip and of course the script could be more like a one-liner, but I like to demonstrate the ease of use Python and PyGTK offer.

Spinoza on ethics

Monday, May 15, 2006 ★ 00:16 ★ Category Misc ★ Permanent url

Excerpt from Ethica V, Propositio XLII

For those who don’t speak Latin: “Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.”

Junebug

Wednesday, May 3, 2006 ★ 10:32 ★ Category Films ★ Permanent url

Junebug is a film about this Great Thing called American Family Life. Johnny is an anti-social young man who seems disappointed about himself, his family; basically about everything. His naive and pretty dumb girlfriend Bernadette is pregnant, but Johnny can’t be bothered to give her the love and attention she needs. Both live with his parents, a caring, conservative couple too ignorant to look any further than their back yard.

Picture by Sony Classics (screenshot by me)

The other son is George, who looks a lot happier. He lives with a woman who runs an art gallery. At first sight he looks like a total different person compared to his family. But is he really?