Lots of times over the years I have used a application all the time I wish could be set to the system tray. I love when programs give you this option for things you always want quick access too, but dont want it cluttering up your task bar.

Alltray is a handy little application that will allow you to take any application and put it in the system tray area of your gnome panel. By default it is added to the menu under Accessories -> Alltray.

Starting the program will just pop up a little dialog area like below:

Clicking on any open application will move it to the system tray. You can see what I mean here with firefox.

I tend to use this for pan most of the time, but did not want to have to do this every time I started pan.

A min or two of poking in the command line switches of the alltray application let me create a startup session in gnome to start pan in the tray on boot up.

alltray –skip-taskbar pan

Replace the command pan with an application you chose and put it in your gnome startup session.

Well I ended up leaving where I was working to go work for a sister company to them. I am actually pretty happy I made the move and am now two weeks into the new job. Its close to what I was orig doing at the old job before I got shifted into do some other stuff because no one else was doing it. I really need to get back into the whole mind set of it though since I have been off of it for the last few months and doing other things.

The summer is in full swing, pool is open yard is in good shape and I have not felt over worked with having to keep it all in check. Several people expressed some concerns about me not being able to keep up with managing a house on my own, but it is actually not all that much work to look after. I actually enjoy it to a certain extent as it gives me something else to focus on for a hour or two at a time. Lots of stuff around that I would like to do, but plan to wait for now and maybe finish the basement next year sometime.

Had made plans to hang out today with one of the newer guys at my old work, but he didn’t end up calling at all.. Oh well what can you do..

Don’t really have many plan for tonight other than maybe a movie and playing some more rockband. Whiplash Assault is rated 1400 in the world on the PS3 charts for highest fans. We keep moving up but the higher we get the less we can move up in a night. Only a few songs now that we can not do on expert level in the default game. I have actually downloaded a pretty health amount of songs as it keeps the replay value high.

Just testing out a remote posting system from wordpress.

57%

Lots of changes have been coming up in my life it seems the past year or so. The newest of these is a change in jobs, I will be leaving my current employer of over 3 years to take a development/admin job for a sister company. I am looking forward to it, and the atmosphere should be a little better for me I think.

Other than that I have been keeping busy with work around the house. Spent all day yesterday cleaning up the yard and trimming trees. Its been a very yard work weekend as all the yard stuff has to be out on Monday morning. I took down the old umbrella style clothes post in the back yard. It was actually a pretty big job for one person since the large cement glob in the ground had to be dug up and moved out of the hole. Manged to get it out and everything looks good, but now I need to find away to get rid of said cement glob.

On the toy and gadget front I ended up getting a Electronic drum kit (For some reason every picture I can find right now has the double kick in it, which I don’t have. I still have issues with working the one kick for now). :)

Its been fun and a pretty good stress relief. Epibeta has been giving me some beats to work on every now and then. I will maybe see about adding the beats to posts as I am learning them.. Might actually be helpful to others.

I recently made the switch from Pidgin to Gajim and have been using a jabber server that supports transporting of msn, icq, and aim to talk to the people that refuse to support jabber.

I have been pretty happy with the switch to Gajim and in actual fact it is not much different on the surface than Pidgin. One thing I did notice was the iconsets for transport protocols do not work unless you turn on Preferences -> General -> Interface Customization -> Use Transports iconset.

After turning this on it reports the correct status of any users in the transport group, but uses a different icon image than all your jabber contacts. To correct this I copied the contents of “/usr/share/gajim/data/iconsets/jabberbulb/” (jabberbulb was the icon theme I was using for the jabber contacts) to “/usr/share/gajim/data/iconsets/transports/msn/” (for msn, do the same for aim, icq, etc). I didn’t know if this would work since MSN has a lot more status icons than the jabberbulb set, but it seems to be happy and everyone on my contact list now looks like a jabber user (best as I can get for now till everyone sees the light and switches).

Browsing around on Palm’s website, I noticed a update for the Palm TX Accessory Cradle. Being an up to date kinda guy when it comes to these things, I downloaded and installed it.

The update was suppose to fix some issue with the Palm TX locking up after inserting it into the Accessory Cradle.

Interestingly enough after the patch was installed my Palm would lock up everytime I put it on the Accessory Cradle… Removing the update from the Palm device, seems to have put me back to a working Palm and Cradle… I would suggest to anyone with a Palm TX and the Cradle.. Don’t install this if it isn’t already broken. :)