Monthly Archives: July 2011

Sys Admin Day

The last Friday of July is Sys Admin Appreciation Day, and I can’t let this day pass without giving a shoutout to the people running the Fedora Servers. The Buildbots, the Mirrors, the Mailing Lists, the Wikis and every other part of Infrastructure.

Thank you for making this possible, for the hours you spend at mid-night fixing something just so we won’t notice in the morning, and for making sure that everything runs as smoothly as possible.

It’s a shame we only get a single “Sys Admin Appreciation Day” and not a whole week or a month, because you guys are the unsung heroes. Thanks again.

Updated Tiled for Fedora

A few months ago (Back in December!) I decided to package Tiled for Fedora. Since then, it has seen a couple of releases but I’ve neglected the package for a while, until Bjorn reminded me today about it.

It’s been a while and a lot of things have changed. Including the location of the Tiled packages.

I’ve set up a Fedora Repository in my domain, you can view a very crappy placeholder index here.[http://repo.k3rnel.net]. The repo currently only has the Tiled-QT packages, but I’ll probably package the Java version and maybe other Android-related things up there.

One of the new things in the RPM is that it finally creates a menu item (Under Development in KDE or Programming in Gnome), so you can get started and map your game in no time.

Should you find any bugs, please report them to Tiled’s Github.

Happy Mapping!

Starting the Google Detox – RSSLounge

Everyone that knows me knows I’m a hardcore Google fan and enthusiast despite having been stung by them once, but with their recent launch of Google+ and all the news I keep hearing about how the faceless company keeps closing accounts without warning or a trial, I’ve decided to migrate away from Google, slowly.

The first service to go is Google Reader. For those of you that don’t know of it, it’s a very neat online RSS Reader that allows you to share and read RSS/Atom feeds from blogs and planets. Being online means I could access it from my phone and tablet (Which is something Liferea couldn’t do) and it got very convenient.

But now I’m switching over to RSSLounge. Of course, I set this up on my server by following their simple Instructions. I exported the OPML file from GReader and imported it into RSSLounge. A few moments later, and I was done.

RSSLounge lets you set feed priorities, which I think is super awesome, supports image rss feeds (And displays them beautifully), and only requires a server with PHP and MySQL and the source code available in GPLv3.

The User Interface is also beautiful, I can’t say right now if it’s better than GReader’s, but you can judge it yourself: They’ve got a demo set up.

I’m not going cold turkey on the Google Detox, but I’m slowly starting to migrate away from them, with Thunderbird replacing their WebUI already, and Duck Duck Go + Wolphram Alpha handling some searches but not all of them, and they get to keep my email just a little bit longer.

Like a mighty Jaffa once said. Shal’kek nem’rom. 

Update: I wrote this before reading this Slashdot Post on how getting your account suspended means kiss your calendars and emails good-bye. Looks like I started my Detox just in time.

Update 2: I’ve left Google+ already and removed all the +1 buttons from my site. SEO be damned.

KDE Dolphin’s Service Menus

While it is well known that I’m a huge Gnome (classic) fan, I recently dipped into KDE grounds, again.

Because Dropbox continues to ignore the Dolphin File Manager, I decided to give SparkleShare a try, and following Mairin‘s most excellent How-To, I set up sparkle.k3rnel.net for my public files. (As a note, you need to chmod +x the post-receive git hook, otherwise it won’t work.)

My favorite Dropbox usage was dropping a file onto the Public folder, and right clicking it on Nautilus to get a Public Link. Sparkleshare doesn’t have a way to do this, but since I mounted my Public Sparkle folder, I wanted needed a way to get the public link.

I ended up investigating on KDE’s Service Menus, and created this Service Menu for the purpose. You need to place it in your ~/.kde/share/kde4/services/ServiceMenus/ folder, modify ‘your.site.here’ and possibly killall dolphin if it doesn’t load at first.

Now, there are some serious flaws on my script (I’m new here, have some patience). For starters, the menu entry will show up in all folders, rather than just your Public Sparkleshare folder. The way I envisioned this is that it should detect if there’s a “.public” file in the folder, read its contents (something like http://your.site.here) and append that to the filename, otherwise, don’t show the entry.

The other flaw I have is that if you create public folders, and try to get a file from within a public folder, it’ll ignore the folder and end up with your.site.here/file.txt instead of your.site.here/folder/file.txt.

Finally, the other issue I have is that files with spaces need %20. It currently gives you the link with spaces, and it isn’t clickable in most cases.  If someone could help me with the script, I’d really appreciate the help.

I created one other script, this one’s much simpler. It’s an Android ADB Push Menu. If you’ve got adb set up, it pushes any file to your phone’s /sdcard. It’ll fail if you have 2 or more devices hooked up at once, but I haven’t had time to investigate on how to display submenus for each adb device.

Anyway, I’m liking KDE so far. I love how easy it is to create the Service Menus and I thought I’d share.

Hello, Beautiful

image

I finally got my G1 back. I sent it for repair about 6 months ago, due to a busted touchscreen.

Now, 60 bucks, 6 months and 100 emails and tweets later, I finally have it back, as broken as it was when I first sent it.

Update: Not only did he not fix my touchscreen, he wrecked the Antenna and now the phone can’t even make or receive calls. Great.

T-shirt Meme

hear that Paul started some new T-shirt meme…And I just couldn’t resist…


For the untrained eye, that’s my FUDCon Tempe Tshirt, I wore it at the FLISOL ’11 in Universidad Regiomontana.

Genuine People Personalities

He's a charming robotI’d lie if I said this post wasn’t inspired by the HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’m a big fan of Douglas Adams, and his idea of Genuine People Personalities really hit me.

What if terminals stopped being so boring and formal and instead got a bit more… people-like? You know, like Marvin the Android, or Eddie the Ship, or even those charming ship doors that are always “Glad to be of Service”.

Imagine firing up a terminal, and getting responses that are a bit more… human…

Or perhaps, something less formal, maybe you just want to sit back, relax and kick shell…

Of course, this sounds pretty far-fetched, but I’m sure that I’m not the only looney toon out there that would actually like the shells to be less robotic and more entertaining.

And doing this wouldn’t be that difficult. All we need is some sort of a locale package. Instead of using en-US (or en-UK), we could use something like en-TMNT or en-Formal, or even en-Fudd? (Peskwy woot powews)

And before you tell me that this has been tried before, and people hated it… Well…


You’re right. It’s a lost cause.

Perhaps this topic is best left as a thought, a ‘what if’, but terminals have been around for dozens of years and little has changed since then. Perhaps giving terminals some people personality could help us leap into J.A.R.V.I.S.-like Operative Systems?

And while we’re discussing terminals, a way to nuke the output of a failed build would be nice…
Share and Enjoy!
-Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

Update: Nicu suggested one more terminal.

Thoughts on ‘Social Networks’

If you already participate in one or more ‘Planets’ then I’m preaching to the choir here. 

I recently joined Google+ and have been on Twitter and Facebook (And even Foursquare, Identi.ca and Gowalla) for quite a while and while listening to Arthur C. Clark’s ‘The City and the Stars‘, and the word Diaspar (Which sounds like Diaspora) came up, I paused and started brainstorming about Social Networks.

Turns out that my favorite form of Social Networks has existed for quite a while, it just wasn’t advertised properly, I guess. I’m talking about Planets.

See, Google+ had the “bright” idea of separating everyone in Circles. Turns out Planets do that already, you ask to join a Planet (Like Fedora’s Planet), and follow the feed. Voila, you’re sharing (Be it from Tumblr, WordPress, Livejournal or Mediawiki) with people who have your same interests.

The API used by these Planets? Basic XML in the format of RSS or Atom. If you can write an XML parser, you’re already halfway there, and most recent blogging engines feature this neat “Trackback” / “Pingback” feature which lets you know if your blogpost was mentioned elsewhere.

The beauty of Planets is that your same blogpost can be published to the ‘Circles’ you want, (Assuming you gave each planet a feed per tag or category, and tag a post in the category or feed you want), and you can also control the ‘Signal-to-Noise’ radio on Planets (though this varies on your RSS Reader, by muting certain people’s blogposts).

The fact that they’re usually blogs is a big plus, because people won’t post inane things like “I’m at so-and-so restaurant” (though Twitter and Identi.ca do provide RSS feeds that could easily be added), but posts can also use powerful plugins that allow both picture and video galleries and not just  massive walls of text. This also lets you ‘own’ your data, which doesn’t happen if you upload your pictures to Facebook, Google+, Picasa or TinyPic (among others),

Another big plus to Planets and Blogs is that comments take place inside your blog, and although notifications will vary from blog to blog, unlike on Google+ or Facebook, where commenting on someone’s post can often mean a huge stream of notifications, or on Twitter where you @reply to someone and often wonder if s/he read it or was lost in the firehose.

I actually care about my data and the things I write, which is why I’m strongly considering scaling back from these “Social Networks” and joining several Planets, leaving my Facebook and Twitter accounts as empty microphone-like shells.

What I actually end up doing is everyone’s guess, but what is definitely clear is that the signal-to-noise ratio on Google+ is too damned much, Twitter’s is too damned low and Facebook sorta hit a middle ground (Thanks to the ‘Hide all posts from ${SpammyAppOrPerson}’ option that probably no one ever heard of)

I know that the idea of having the ‘unwashed masses’ each have their own blog is unlikely to ever happen, but hey, I’m one of those that thought Twitter wouldn’t ever get anywhere, and look where it’s at right now.

As a final note, one that no one cares about, I wrote this using WordPress’ new Zen Mode, and I have to admit, I really enjoyed using it.

Pronouns

In FOSS [Free and Open Source Software], it’s not “They”, it’s “I” or “We”.
-Bochecha

/dev/null

Just as an FYI. Linkedin just joined the list of addresses I automatically forward to /dev/null. The others are Microsoft/Xbox, Groupon, Twitter and Facebook and anything with the subject “(memberships reminder)”.

If I don’t add you to my linkedin is because I don’t really care about the network, it’s nothing personal.

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