Archive for July, 2009

Wiki and packaging

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

I did some more packaging work this week. Serna is a mess for a spec file right now and its dependencies aren’t looking all that much better. I’ve reviewed Mailody, Plastik colorscheme, and KMess in Fedora. The daisy plasmoid is under review now as well. Kobby has been pushed to the repositories too.

I also did some wiki work for the KDE SIG. Seeing as my motivation for coding is still low, I figured I’d do some more mundane stuff to help. I’ll get around to cleaning up the other pages in the coming week.

Luckily (and unluckily), the laptop started having performance issues and VNC was utterly unbearable, so now I’m on the desktop where I did all of the work anyways (plus being able to type ‘<’ again is nice), so now there’s one less layer between working and what I’m seeing (keyboard shortcuts are eaten locally if possible before VNC gets them, so the mouse was being used more…which is not really my thing). Now I’m using synergy between the two and it works well, though I’m finding that it’s hard to use both. About the most I can do is fire off a mock or rpmbuild on the laptop and then get back to IRC or whatever.

Posted in Fedora, KDE | No Comments »

Packaging work

Sunday, July 26th, 2009

So I’ve started work on packaging some new applications for Fedora. Today I took a look at a new application I found in the search for a decent DocBook editor. I found Serna by Syntext. It’s a Qt4-based application that was released under the GPLv3 earlier this month. The build system is a little lacking (uses tmake and expects that its build system builds and installs the dependencies from Python to Qt) which makes packaging a pain. In the mean time, I’ll work on the dependencies which are not in Fedora yet which includes tmake, a Qt tool, and a Java XML…thing. I have off tomorrow, so I should get at least some work done on the Qt tool and maybe some headway on tmake.

The company seems to be working to get out of the binds of being proprietary. Supporting system copies of dependencies is apparently one of the top priorities, but changing from “python is here” to “run python” isn’t all that easy (there’s $(THIRD_DIR) all over the place in the .t files and the patch would be…monstrous). The mailing list does not have an nntp access point (such as GMane) and I was unable to find any public archives, but that should come in time I imagine. I’ve joined the ML for developers in the meantime to try and help with the system dependency stuff.

I also put Bilbo Blogger (which I am using to write this post) up for review today (I’ll swap reviews). The post previewer is great as well as the support for editing older posts and their details.

Posted in Fedora | No Comments »

WordPress stuff

Sunday, July 26th, 2009

Dear lazyweb,
I tried fixing up tags and categories, but things seem to be a bit wonky (books tag and Books category seem to affect each other so that the case is the same on both) and causes me to have to put that off until another time. Anyone else having such issues with WordPress? IUf so, how did you fix them (if you were able to)?

In other news, I’ve updated some stuff around here. WordPress is now the latest version and the comment validation plugin has been modified be more confusing to bots that try to post here (but not to humans).

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Schedules

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

So I just read an essay by Paul Graham which helps to explain why I can’t get the gusto to work on code all that much. I’ve just felt out of steam most of the summer and have written just about nothing. So instead I’ve been reading a lot. Since I got back from college I’ve read a lot. Here’s a list (in no particular order) of those that I’ve finished:

  • Robot Visions by Isaac Asimov
  • Disclosure by Michael Crichton
  • Sphere by Michael Crichton
  • Frankenstein by Marry Shelley
  • The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
  • Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman
  • Mathematical Fallacies and Paradoxes by Bryan Bunch

and those that I am currently reading:

  • Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
  • American Gods by Neil Gaiman

It does feel good to be back reading again. I only got through 4 or 5 of the 60 I took to college last year. So now I’ll be taking less and reading more so instead of 6%, I hope to be closer to 80% of those I take up. I may write stuff about them in the future.

On the coding side, I’ve cleaned up some stuff in Sigen from fixing Sigmodr to behave better with minimum values of some variables showing descriptive text instead of having -1 be -1, it says “No limit” which is how the engine interprets it where applicable.

I’ve also started to work on the Kross fixes I’ve been wanting for a while in KDE’s playground. Not sure how long it will take with the current schedule I keep. I do have time to work on it today, so that’s where I’ll probably be until everyone else gets back.

Posted in Books, KDE, Kross | 1 Comment »