Saturday, December 17, 2011

Fun with Pidgin


Hi all,

Fun with pidgin....how ?.After reading this post you'll be able to play with your gmail chat status programitically.we'll be exploiting the xmpp protocol which Gtalk uses.

For Ubuntu(Linux) Users here's one of the way to do this. I am assuming you have installed pidgin on your system and it's working fine ( if you haven't.....downloading and install it...for any problem google it). After Installing Pidgin you need to install libpurple-bin.

For installing libpurple-bin from terminal -
$sudo apt-get install libpurple-bin.

or Ubuntu users can alternatively download the same using synaptic packet manager..

After this we just need a simple script to change your status message.i am sharing with you an script which i wrote...it will change you status and message every second. Isn't that cool ?....your name in your friend's chat list will change color from green to red and then red to yellow and then back to green in a cyclic way.
sleep_time=1
while test 1 = 1; do
msg1="Green"
msg2="Red"
msg3="Yellow"
if test "`purple-remote getstatus`" = "available"; then
purple-remote "setstatus?status=unavailable&message=${msg2}"
oldmsg="$msg"
elif test "`purple-remote getstatus`" = "unavailable"; then
purple-remote "setstatus?status=away&message=${msg3}"
oldmsg="$msg2"
else 
purple-remote "setstatus?status=available&message=${msg1}"
oldmsg="$msg3"
fi
sleep "${sleep_time}s"
done
save this file as status.sh now run this script in the terminal and just see the magic :D.
Sometimes this may be annoying for other's so you may increase the sleep_time.

Another Script for displaying time updated every second
sleep_time=1
while test 1 = 1; do
msg=`date`
if test "`purple-remote getstatus`" = "available"; then
purple-remote "setstatus?status=available&message=${msg}"
oldmsg="$msg"
fi
sleep "${sleep_time}s"
done
You can as do as many thing with as you can think bash script can do.........

Another way of doing that is using pyhton script using xmpppy library it will also not require libpurple-bin....but i haven't worked much on it so can't discuss that at this moment.

Edit : For exploring the python thing.....you can see this post by my friend Saurabh Singh .

Friday, December 16, 2011

Customizing Bootloader


Hi all,

I was looking for some cool stuff for Ubuntu...and then i found about burg....and believe me it's really good.BURG means brand-new unified grub loader.

If you are bored with your same boot-loader screen and are looking for some change then you should definitely try this..

for details about installation you can visit the link below

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/45164/how-to-customize-the-ubuntu-bootloader-screen/

Enjoy the new Bootloader !! :)