Club Silencio

Uni

Exams finally over, and I don’t mean for this summer, I mean for good: I passed the Last one with the capital L. It was about time. Now I’d better resume the work on the thesis.

small hacks that make me happy

JHbuild is a wonderful tool which I use daily. Sometime ago it gained the really useful feature of displaying a nifty notification icon with the state of the build. This morning I realized that one of the things I often end up doing is to look at that notification icon, realize that an error has occurred and then hunt in which workspace and in which terminal the build stopped. A whole ten minutes later I had this simple patch which raises and focuses the right terminal when the notification icon is clicked.
The patch is for zenity (which JHbuild uses for the notification support) and I am not sure if the patch is suitable for inclusion, since maybe raising the terminal isn’t what other users of zenity want… for sure it’s going to stay in my local copy.

Well, I admit this is a bit of an excuse to show up my ugly face on p.g.o, but I’ll join my voice in celebrating the EU decision against software patents. I notice that the Italian press is reporting it as an “Open Source Victory”, so I guess we should enjoy the good press, even if my feeling is that the rejection has more to do with the problems that software patents would have posed for all the small/medium european IT business.