using xosd for irc notifications and other goodness

so, here is the situation:

you have a machine behind a firewall and you have an ssh session to a server. and you want to send notifications to you machine. here is what i did, maybe useful for others, too

• you'll need the program called osd_cat, provided by osd
• you'll need to use ssh with the -X option
• if you run programs inside screen, you still won't know the the right DISPLAY number, so do a trick: add

  [ -n "$DISPLAY" ] && echo $DISPLAY > ~/.display

  to you ~/.bash_login

• now you're ready to use osd_cat:

  $ echo -e 'foo'|DISPLAY=cat ~/.display osd_cat --color=blue --age=4 --font=-*-helvetica-medium-r-*-*-*-320-*-*-*-*-*-* --offset=100 --align=right --indent=100

as an example, irssi has osd.pl to use osd_cat for highlight notifications :)