The (old) Licquia Family Blog
This is the old blog site, powered by a simple blogging system called Blosxom. It's here to keep old links from breaking, and for whatever historic interest might remain.
Here's the current site.
This is the old blog site, powered by a simple blogging system called Blosxom. It's here to keep old links from breaking, and for whatever historic interest might remain.
Here's the current site.
For those who don't know, GNOME is a graphical user interface for Linux. To explain this simplistically, the user interface is the part that draws the little buttons, scroll bars, and check boxes, and ensures that when you click these things, something interesting happens.
Anyway, my employer provides a little Web-based sign-in board and requires that we all use it to let the company know what we're up to. I'm terrible at remembering to visit the Web page and click on the little form, so I wrote a little chunk of code that hooks into the GNOME user interface called an "applet". It sat on my desktop and gave me a cute little icon that told me what my status with the board was, and I could click on it and tell everyone I was going to the bathroom now, which I'm sure they were very excited to learn.
It worked great, but it was written for GNOME 1, and I'm now using GNOME 2, which means the applet hasn't been working for a while. This weekend I fixed it. Which is to say, I rewrote most of it from scratch, because GNOME 2 talks to its applets in a different way than GNOME 1 did.
Now that I'm on the other side of that problem, and my new applet sticks itself beautifully next to the time on my desktop and happily tells me that I'm "out", I have to say that I'm happier for the experience. As is usual for open-source technology, GNOME 2's applet technology is poorly documented, and the new GNOME hooks for the Python programming language (my language of choice) is even worse. But once you figure out how it works, you fall in love. That's where I am now. All the real problems I had were as a result of not understanding things; now, I feel like I can do anything with this.
All the same, I think I'm going to write a "Writing GNOME 2 Applets in Python" tutorial really soon and post it somewhere.
Apr 28, 2003 | Comments are no longer available