my blog

Tuesday 27 February 2007

Gossip love in Rhythmbox

Two weeks ago, I wrote a Rhythmbox plugin to automatically change my Gossip status so that it displays the currently played song. I was amazed that it was possible to achieve this so easily, thanks to python and D-Bus. Here's the mandatory screenshot:

Gossip Status plugin for Rhythmbox

(Looks quite weird to see the tooltip and not the mouse cursor, doesn't it?)

There are of course small issues to fix: I don't know if it works with the latest python bindings for D-Bus, and quitting Rhythmbox/stopping the music leaves you with an empty status (that's a small Gossip bug).

You can install it with only a few steps: download the tarball and move the directory it contains to ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins/gossip. Enjoy!

Update: new tarball that should work for more people.

Summer of Code 2007

It's still winter, but it's already time to start thinking about Summer of Code: Google took the (good) decision to start things sooner. Meeting some of the students who participated to SoC in the past at events like FOSDEM makes you believe that SoC is a good thing, since it helped them getting more involved in our communities and they decided to stay and rock.

There'll be an IRC meeting to talk about GNOME in SoC 2007 tomorrow/today (yay for timezones, so let's be clear: Tuesday 27th) at 20:00 UTC, in #soc. That's in a few hours. We'll discuss what went well last year, what could be improved, what we want to achieve, etc. Everybody is welcome to attend this meeting, but this is not a meeting for students who want to participate in SoC: it's more targetted at potential mentors for this year's SoC. It'd be great to have some of the students who participated in previous SoC join the meeting to give some feedback. If you can't attend the meeting but have some comments you'd like to share, you can send me an email or leave a comment.

Also, after this meeting, we'll create the wiki page to gather ideas for SoC projects. We're waiting a bit to create the page because the meeting might learn us some things about how to manage the idea pool, but it shouldn't prevent you to start thinking about cool, sexy or revolutionary project ideas :-)

by Vincent