system idle? / getting XEvents

[linas linas org (Linas Vepstas)]

Hi,
Double question here:
1) is anyone working on any sort of thingy that will tell me if/how
long the keyboard/mouse has been idle?  I want to add a feature
to the gtt (gnome time tracker) that will turn it off after a period
of inactivity.

2) To do the above, I started porting Jamie Zawinski's xscreensaver
idle detection code to gdk, but got stumped. If the x server does not
have the xidle extension (seems xfree86 doesn't), then it listens
for XKeyboard/XPointer XEvents from *all* windows on the screen.  
Problem: there seems to be no polite way of getting gdk to give me the 
XEvent. (there is no analog of XtNextEvent).  I suppose I could just
XCheckIfEvent now that I think about it, but it could be hairy, and
I thought maybe one of the gdk developers could recommend a better way
...

--linas