I was very bored today. Tired from working on Ratuus (don’t go there, site is under heavy construction :)) I needed something to help me take my mind off everything. And what better way to do it, than playing with Python, Pidgin and D-BUS. :D

To cut the long story short, I needed something that will update my Pidgin status message with the information about the current song I am listening. Till recently I was using Rhythmbox player and there is a perfect little Pidgin plugin called Current Track that worked with this player. Last week I discovered gmusicbrowser and fell in love immediately. It is fast, rich with functionalities but still simple to use. Exactly what I want from audio player. (Hm, I just noticed it is written in PERL. Now when Python is used for everything this comes as a big surprise.)

gmusicbrowser already has a plugin called NowPlaying. It will trigger some command whenever song is changed. I just needed to write this command that will inform Pidgin about the change. So, this seemed like a perfect exercise for slow Saturday. :)

Quick search on Pidgin and D-BUS showed extensive documentation about Pidgin API accessible through D-BUS. There is even a working example of how to change the status message! :)

But that was too simple, so I got another idea. Some time ago, I wrote a small daemon in C that will bind to a specific port and display random bofh-excuses fortune messages when someone would telnet to it. (Seems like I have a lot of spare time. I should really find some hobby!) Something similar to telnet bofh.jeffballard.us 666 (here for more information). So I was thinking about implementing the same for my Pidgin status. Random BOFH excuses in your status message! How cool geeky is that!

The result of all that is short (~60 lines of code) Python script that will set your Pidgin status message to:

a) you current song

pidgin_status.py -m The Real McKenzies - Outta Scotch

b) random line from a file

pidgin_status.py -f /usr/local/share/bofh-example

c) anything you give as the command line argument

pidgin_status.py Some very interesting and funny status message

Only difference between a) and c) is the type of the icon that will be shown. In example a) there will be a small musical note, while in example b) and c) nice arrow pointing to right side will be show.

In the middle of testing I noticed this strange message:

Being from Serbia myself, I find this extremely funny. Although, I didn’t know Serbian hackers are so notorious! :)

I hope someone will find it useful. In any case, I am accepting donations for some long and adventurous vacation. As you can see, I really need it! :D

pidgin_status.py
bofh-excuses