My applet DesktopManager (It got renamed from Desktop Switcher) has been accepted into Awn Extras. This is awesome, because it's my first time being on a working dev team (even if I'm only working on my own applet and not AWNLib(the other main focus of AWN Extras)).

Also, I started working on a new applet for AWN called simply "Tetris" (might be changed for copywrite reasons). It lets you play tetris in an AWN dialog, and can be quickly paused/hidden by unfocusing the dialog. It's written using cairo and pygtk (originally pygame but pygame didn't play well with pygtk). It will be fully customizable and everything.

I've made a pretty simple AWN applet that's similar to the desktop drapes (or at least I'm assuming it is, I've never actually used desktop drapes, just read about it). Basically, it changes your desktop to a random image from a specified folder at a set interval. If the folder has sub folders, you can select to use one of them on the fly instead of the main folder by right clicking on the applet and selecting the sub folder from a sub menu (this only works on folders that are one level deep right now). It also displays the current desktop background on the dock.

While coding this blog, I came in need of a way to send pingbacks to other blogs. I normally write all of my own code, but I just couldn't figure out where to get started with writing a simple pingback client, that I decided to try and find one on the internet and then modify it to my desires. All of the ones that I found required a large XML library, or where huge in and of themselves. That was of course until I found pingor, a simple pingback client written in PHP that required no extra libraries. This of course was a dream come true, until I realized that it wasn't automated, and that you had to go and manually go to the page and add pingbacks. This of course, just wouldn't do. So I began to modify it and added a few improvements, including changing it into a function, removing the need to scan a whole page for the links to pingback and instead takes a block of html as an argument, and also has an argument that lets you toggle whether or not you would like the pingback function to send pingbacks to other pages on your site.

While writing the backend to this blog, I came in need of a simple function for creating thumbnails in PHP. Because I like to use mostly code that I wrote myself in my projects (it gives me a sense of accomplishment), I went about creating a simple function called imagethumbnail that takes a GD image resource and returns another GD image resource that is the appropriate size.

This past weekend I've been playing around with David Morgan-Mar's Piet. Piet is a programming language like no other I've ever used. Instead of having your code be written out using words and symbols, as in python, c or java, your code is instead written as an image. This makes Piet programs an interesting work of modern art. Here are some of the programs that I've made over the past few days (which I will admit are not as artistic as I would have hoped).