Present Perfect

I have yet to try Second Life myself (it's for work, honest - I need to see whether we can stream out of the box to it!), but the next version of the Linux client will use GStreamer.  The fact that I can't recall seeing any linden labs email addresses asking questions on the list is probably a testament to how far GStreamer has come over the years.  They don't even need to ask questions anymore!

In unrelated news, this afternoon a single one of our customers managed to peak over 1 GBit/sec on our platform.  Kaching.  Next stop, 5 Gbit/sec.

I have yet to try Second Life myself (it's for work, honest - I need to see whether we can stream out of the box to it!), but the next...

Europython is turning out to be quite interesting. It takes some effort to start talking to people given that I know relatively few here, but I'm learning lots of new stuff. But I'll save more for some other post.

Right now I want to focus on the more amusing combination of Linux and hotels. So here's the thing. The guys from Tuxdroid are here, selling their little Tux robots. For those who don't know, this is a small robot with text-to-speech that can flap its wings, make its eyes glow blue, and run around, as well as serve as speaker. I'm sure there's other stuff I'm missing. They're selling these babies for 79 euros, and the company is Belgian. They have a bunch of code available to program the thing (radio-controlled with a USB dongle), and it has a bunch of stuff in python. So far, so cool.

So here's the thing. I plug Tux into the power socket to charge him. When you start charging it, it says "Hello" and flaps its wings. In the hotel room, when I leave the room, I have to take the card out of that socket that controls whether there is power at all in the room (which is annoying in hotel rooms, because it means you can't leave your laptop charging while you are away.)

So, what happens when I come back to the room at night, get in, and put the card in the socket ?

A little bird flapping its wings and shouting "Hello" because it's getting fresh power juice. Too cute.

I'm wondering how I'm going to lug this thing around in my backpack for the next set of flights...

Europython is turning out to be quite interesting. It takes some effort to start talking to people given that I know relatively few here, but I'm learning lots of new...

God darn it.  Apparently automake 1.10 now warns me that constructs like this:

pychecker_indep_files = $(filter-out $(pychecker_010_files),$(pychecker_all_files))

use GNU make-specific features and are thus not portable.

So I started looking for "what is POSIX make anyway" and all I could find was this page which is irritatingly concise and doesn't leave me with a whole lot of options.

Anyone know what sort of text/list manipulation one can rely on when trying to stay portable ? Or is there simply no point in trying to support anything else than GNU make ?

God darn it.  Apparently automake 1.10 now warns me that constructs like this: pychecker_indep_files = $(filter-out $(pychecker_010_files),$(pychecker_all_files)) use GNU make-specific features and are thus not portable. So I started looking...

I wanted to clean up our work repositories a little, because I'm working on a platform deployment that is using something else than our venerable FC5 set of packages.

There's two things I wanted to do.  First, I wanted something that would clean out old rpm's from a directory - the ones that have been superseded by a newer version of a package.

Second, I wanted a script that could compare two directories (for two different base distros) and tell me which packages are of a different version between the two of them.  This tells me which packages I forgot to rebuild for either platform.

I've been googling for half an hour to find anything helpful, but it's hard to use google when you're not sure what you would call stuff like this.  In the end I caved in and wrote the first script in half an hour with the help of Paul Nasrat's excellent introductory slides (which I need to go through pretty much any time I write any rpm-related code).

Anyway, maybe you know of the existence of a script that does the second thing I want ? If not, odds are I'm going to write it in the next day as time permits.

I wanted to clean up our work repositories a little, because I'm working on a platform deployment that is using something else than our venerable FC5 set of packages. There's...

With a push and a shove, I excreted a new release of moap

An exciting release for me - with the help of some friends, bugs got fixed and features got added.

There is now a Bzr and a Git backend, bringing the number of supported VCS systems up to 5 - better than any copy I of prepare-ChangeLog.pl that I know of.

I also added a Bugzilla bug querying backend.  And Stefan is working on a SourceForge tracker backend.

One of the nicer things I've added recently is a way of being helpful to users when a dependency is missing.   For example, if you don't have Genshi installed, it will tell you that you're missing Genshi, and where you can find Genshi.  If moap knows about your distribution, it will even tell you how to install it if it knows.

If moap doesn't know about your distribution, or about how to get this dependency for your distribution, it will give you a link to file a ticket with the summary filled in for you already.  All you need to do is enter some information on how to detect your distro or install the dependency for your distro.  If this works out well, I can see myself adding this sort of thing to other projects.

Anyway, that brings me again one step closer to my talk at GUADEC, "Practical Project Maintenance".  The talk will also discuss moap, but the idea of the talk is mostly to draw on some of my experiences - as well as others' - in doing project maintenance work.

If you have any suggestions or ideas for this talk, or things you think I should cover, feel free to comment.

With a push and a shove, I excreted a new release of moap An exciting release for me - with the help of some friends, bugs got fixed and features...