GPG signing party slips

September 25th, 2009

So there’s a GPG signing party here soon, so I decided to whip up a LaTeX file that creates a PDF with a bunch of slips of paper with the important information on it to hand out at the party. Instructions are included in the file.

Sigmodr Documentation: Day 1

August 7th, 2009

So I’ve read the last few FOSS Docs posts on technical writing recently. Conveniently I’ve also been hacking on the documentation for Sigmodr this week. It has been chugging along this week at a leisurely pace. I’d like to be able to write one chapter a day (at least, probably more on weekends and days I’m off). With how many data structures’ editors there are, it will take almost a three weeks at one a day, but some are small and don’t require as much time to be put into them.

Today I wrote up the documentation (along with screenshots) for the overall data structure for Sigmods.

Wiki and packaging

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.

Packaging work

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.

WordPress stuff

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).

Schedules

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.

Kobby packaged

June 20th, 2009

I got Kobby packaged tonight. There are a few things to clean up yet, but they’re minor. I should have it up for review on Sunday as I’m away tomorrow. Now just to sleep fast so that I’m not tired tomorrow.

Miscellany

June 20th, 2009

Well, I’ve been fairly active on identi.ca, getting the hang of it. I don’t like to just throw tags onto the message, so getting them to fit in is a fun little exercise.

I also started to learn the Colemak keyboard layout. It’s proving to be interesting and I like it better since the home row is more useful than QWERTY’s.

I’ve started to package Kobby for Fedora. Should be up for review by the end of the weekend (with dependencies libinfinity and libqinfinity). I’ll have it in my personal repo until Fedora proper has it.

I’m on identi.ca now

June 18th, 2009

I got an account on identi.ca and pinned Choqok to my desktop right beside Konversation. I’ll probably post stuff as I read books or stories, play games, hack on things, and other stuff that probably wouldn’t make up a blog post. I’m a green at the whole microblogging thing and stuff associated with it. I’m guessing that ‘!’ points to groups (of which I already joined Fedora’s and KDE’s), ‘@’ is towards a single person. Anything I’m missing? Oh, the important part. Wouldn’t want to forget that.

Netbooks? Ugh

June 15th, 2009

Despite what the title may have you think, I do want one. However, everything on the market right now is basically crap in one way or another to a point that I can’t convince myself that it’s a worthwhile investment. I love my T61, but it’s a bit bulky, gets hot in one corner, and the one battery is crap now (probably due to heat; 9-cell with 1-2 hours depending on the mood of my cat it seems).

* One thing that I’ve always hated was the touchpad. It’s too finicky and usually just gets in my way. However, I’d like to have one on whatever I get next since I use it for scrolling (everything else is disabled: tapping, movement, buttons, the works). I don’t think I’d be able to work with one (especially if the buttons were on the side) since I’ve gotten so used to the trackpoint. I thought at first that I would be doomed to live with a trackpad until I saw the Sony Vaio P. It has a trackpoint and all three mouse buttons. Unfortunately, it is overpriced and only comes with software I’d rather not give money to.

* I also would like at least 8 hours of battery life. I can get 4-5 hours from the good battery for the T61 and on powersave, so I don’t think this is too outrageous for a netbook.

* It has to come with Linux (or nothing). Even if I’m wiping it for Fedora, I’m not giving money to companies that don’t deserve the money.

* The Insert/Delete/Home/End/PgUp/PgDn keys must exist on their own. Having the latter 4 be modified arrow keypresses is not excusable for me since I use them so often (this kills the Asus machines). It’d be preferable to have them in the standard 2×3 arrangement, but it’s excusable if it means fitting on the machine (laptops don’t have an excuse).

* It has to be less than a kilogram. This is pretty common, but the larger ones tend to approach this limit.

* Sleep and hibernate should work. This is a no brainer, but it currently fails on the T61. It’s not really that much of a problem since boot time is low and the thing isn’t exactly agile either.

* Solid state drive. I have a desktop to tether it to, so 20G would be good, but I could probably work with a 12GB, 8G would be cutting it close. My current installs work on 10G and 15G / partition sizes (/home is the only one that’s separate) and are usually more than half free depending on the debuginfo and mock setup at the time, both of which won’t be happening on the netbook.

* Ethernet port on it. You’d think this would be a given, but the Vaio P is too slim for it and has some weird adapter that’s probably overpriced and defeats the purpose of the thing being so small.

* A webcam would be nice, but it’s not a showstopper.

* It would be nice to have 2G of RAM, but 1G should do it; currently I’m using on 650MB on the laptop and a little over a gig on the desktop with lots of extra stuff running.

Unfortunately, I think it may be a few years until I can find anything on the market that meets these requirements. Even laptops have trouble making them (except for the weight thing which I’d waive for them). Unless there’s one I’m not aware of. Thoughts?