Unified Diff

I’m very picky about my desktop environment. I like windows, toolbars, icons, etc. to be arranged in a certain way. Typically, I turn off annoying prompts and nag screens in Windows, and unhide “scary” advanced options in OS X. One hard-to-fix pet peeve is when applications put an icon in the notification area (near the clock) AND leave a tab in the taskbar. This wastes valuable taskbar real estate.

I use Spark on my workstation to connect to the company’s internal IM server. The application works alright, but the contacts window always appears in the taskbar. So I started to think about ways I could programmatically solve my problem.

So I was trying to read a document on my computer at work today, while making notes on a piece of paper. But every five minutes the screensaver would activate, causing me to stop writing, type my password, and find my place in the document again. Needless to say it was quite annoying.

Well, it’s official… I’m a geek. A few weeks ago I started writing an extension for the PHP runtime that provides bindings to libfuse. Back up a few months— I wrote a PHP script to screen-scrape the Trac web interface and allow me to grab source code to a project I’m working on.

My solution worked but it was pretty ugly. So I wondered if it would be better to implement a FUSE file system to do the same task. Unfortunately PHP didn’t have bindings for libfuse at the time. After several failed attempts at using SWIG to automagically generate an extension, I came to the harsh realization that if I wanted FUSE bindings I’d have to do it myself. I mean… how hard could it be?

It actually wasn’t too bad. I read a bunch of non-existent documentation on the Zend API and went to work on a prototype. It took me about a week, but I now have a working PHP extension. I’ve also since implemented TracFS to replace my ugly script.

I love Amarok and wanted to install it on my MacBook. With Qt4 on the horizon, it will be possible to run Amarok natively in OS X without an X server. But I didn’t want to wait for Amarok2 to become stable, so I looked into compiling Amarok 1.4 and running it under X.

I tried following the On OS X guide with limited success. Apparently, ffmpeg won’t compile on Leopard and that caused the entire libxine compilation to fail. I tried various combinations of configure flags, but none seemed to help. I looked at the source to try and fix it, but unfortunately I’m not terribly familiar with x86 assembly.

For one of my pet projects, I needed to add a graphic to certain ListView rows. I considered owner-drawing the control, but that seemed messy. What I really wanted was a way to draw on top of whatever Windows painted. I couldn’t find a nifty .NET way to do this, so remembering a technique from the MFC days, I decided to custom draw the ListView. This would let me inject my own drawing code and let Windows handle the rest. Perfect!

I had originally implemented the ListView using a control style to eliminate the annoying flicker every time the list was repainted. Once I started custom drawing the control, I saw odd artifacts in the ListView’s client area when I scrolled or moved the mouse. If I turned off double buffering, it worked fine.