Seems to be working quite nicely. You set the options in gconf (it's a gnome app) for which tag you want to use and what interval for the slideshow you want, and then just run the program. It will use any changed config options each time it changes, so if you set it to one tag and then run it and change it, it will use the new tag the next time it changes.

The next stage is to write a config front end so you don't have to edit gconf, and then write an install program (at the moment you have to manually insert it as a new program to start up as part of a Gnome session). Problem is, it works fine for me, so the motivation to do that is not so high. Hopefully I'll get around to it soon.

Exaile is pretty much a drop in replacement for Amarok . I've always liked Amarok, particularly for the cover art, smart playlists and general music management, but I can't deny there's something unpleasant about running a native KDE app on Gnome. Exaile is written in Python, GTK-based, and has all the features and smoothness of Amarok - but for Gnome. Love it, love it, love it. Having tabbed playlists so you can have multiple open at the same time also seems like a big improvement on Amarok as well.

Instructions for install on Ubuntu here .

Edit [2007-02-21]: After some issues with Exaile not showing the album covers correctly and not being able to seek to a particular point in a Podcast, I'm currently trying out Listen instead. Will update in a few weeks based on how I get on...

1. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list
2. Run sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
3. Enjoy!
   

There were two small gotchas. Because I was upgrading glibc I had to stop PostgreSQL first. And I had to change the apache startup script to remove the startssl option (deprecated). Other than that, all good.

Amazing how painless that was.

Now I have python 2.4 it's time to decorate !

Finally got around to installing and configuring ViewCVS , which, despite the name, can quite happily view a Subversion repo - which is what I have.

Was a little less than intuitive, I have to say, but now that I understand it all, it's quite well laid out. One central config file, nice syntax highlighting, and the thing I do like particularly is that it can create on-the-fly gzips of any directory. Nice for people to be able to download the source straight from the repo browser. Oh, and in the end, I just installed it from the debian repositories instead of from source, as the most up to date version required Subversion 1.20 or greater. I'm always pleasantly surprised by how many packages are available as .debs. Makes management much easier. 

Here's how simple it is. Create your database query, and then throw it into PyRSS2Gen's RSSItem method. Then create an RSS2 feed. This code shows you how:

items = []
 
for row in databaseitems: 
  items.append(
    PyRSS2Gen.RSSItem(
      title = row['title'], link = row['link'],
      description = row['description'],
      guid = PyRSS2Gen.Guid(row['guid']), pubDate = row['pub_date']    )  )

PyRSS2Gen.RSS2(
        title         = "Feed Title",
        link          = "http://localhost/test URL",
        description   = "Feed Description",
        lastBuildDate = datetime.datetime.now(),
        items         = items).write_xml(open("test.xml", "w"))

You can then connect to this with your rss reader by publishing the xml to a web directory and pointing your RSS reader to the location of the XML file. Very nice. 

When I first discovered deskbar, I thought - great, now Linux has something that Mac already has, and that's a good thing because it means we're not so far behind.

But this time around, I've discovered it's not just a nice little applet that can match the functionality of the Mac applet, it's actually something that's very useful to me and I'm going to be using it as an integral part of my work schedule from now on. I love being able to send email to contacts from the deskbar, and initiate web, file content and/or file searches from the same place. Nice looking plugin architecture for it as well - been seeing some interesting add-ons on various blog postings recently including a built in calculator.

And it's written in python, which obviously tickles me in the right place. 

This has been helped (a lot) by my being able to use Django at work. I've really been able to dig into learning some of the features of this great framework, and it's convinced me (along with Plone's resource intensive-ness for a poor wee server like mine) that I needed to get with it.

So I did.