Patrick "Trick" van Staveren

In 2003, I was a young college student, bored one winter.  I had been using the Xfce window manager on my Slackware Linux machine, and I liked to use XMMS to rock out the tunes while doing my CS homework.  Or maybe while drinking some beer.  Anyway.  Xfce was younger then and didn’t have a lot of panel plugins, but panel plugins were all the rage those days.  I decided to try and write a panel plugin to remote control XMMS.  With the help of some kind developers from the Xfce project and good example plugin code, I was able to create the first version of the xfce-xmms-plugin.

I worked on the code for just a few months and it was released and downloaded by many. I left the code be and some others have picked it up since.  Thanks to Kemal Ilgar Eroğlu for picking up maintainership, and the others who have contributed patches over the years.  I moved onto using the GNOME desktop environment shortly thereafter so I didn’t end up needing the plugin anymore, but I have been known to use Xfce on occasion for a lighter desktop experience.

A visit to the plugin website shows that while a lot has been added, my fantastic original artwork, created in The GIMP, is still intact today.  I wonder if anyone is still using XMMS anymore? I’m sure there’s someone :)

November 11th, 2003: my first free software commit to the world.  It was CVS back then, then converted to Subversion and onto Git these days.  I was also using my university CS account which I think is disabled.  The history is also preserved in the Changelog file in the source download and even amazingly goes to show that I was going by the handle “pat” back then.