Unified Diff

It’s hard to describe just how much I HATE rebooting my computer. If I have to use a Windows computer for any extended period of time, then I always change update policies to disallow automatic reboots. In fact, I usually click the irritating “Remind me in ten minutes” button every ten minutes for three weeks before I finally allow Windows to restart (or until I stop the Automatic Updates service).

So you can imagine how annoyed I was to come into work twice this week to the blue Windows logon screen. Every time this happens it takes me twenty minutes to figure out what I was doing the day before, what I have to do today, and where I stopped with my work. And really what made this so much more painful was that it happened without any advanced warning.

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.

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.