Entries for archive: 2008-07

Found 8 entries.

Cil Hits a Nerve

I'm amazed at the reception Cil is getting so far. Further news now is ...

... Cil has been made a featured project on GitHub's Homepaage (though you have to be logged out to see it).

I spoke with Tom Preston-Werner a couple of weeks ago about projects which help drive Git adoption and thought he would be interested in Cil. He told me he'd feature it on the front page of GitHub so thanks very much Tom, that's awesome.

My Ohloh stats on Cil are also looking good and will soon show that the project has already had 6 contributors, some of whom have jumped completely out of left-field.

Thanks to everyone for helping out so far.

Labels: git, cil, planet-geek, planet-catalyst, github

Inserted: 2008-07-31 21:28 (1 year, 12 months ago)

Cil is now in Debian Testing

Cil has been through Debian Unstable and is now in Debian Testing.

If you didn't know, Cil is a command-line issue list which lends itself well to distributed bug tracking. It saves issues, comments and attachments locally and already there are some powerful features and ideas in it.

Cil v0.5.1 is now in testing and hopefully will be in the Lenny release. That particular version of Cil has all of the basic structure required to start using it and a number of great commands to help use it.

There is no v0.6 of Cil yet but there are a number of things planned. I added some initial abstractions about how Cil can integrate with various VCS systems and SamV has gone one step further and added some actual features which integrate even more to what I initial imagined. v0.6 will hope to tie up and pull together a number of loose ends around this whole area.

Further out, there are even more ideas on the horizon but I shall tell you about those closer to the time.

Some of you know I shall be off on my hols shortly so it may have to wait until after that but as I said, v0.5.1 is a nicely round and complete version to appear in Lenny. Have fun and happy hacking.

Labels: debian-lenny, cil, debian, planet-geek, planet-catalyst

Inserted: 2008-07-22 18:18 (2 years ago)

Problems with Google Reader

It's a web service. Which isn't bad in itself but that means there are many things missing or broken which I CAN'T CHANGE!

For example, let's take a look at one of my subscriptions. I was going through them today and filtering out those I didn't want to read anymore. Every now and again I stumbled upon something which just hadn't had any updates for a while.

Take DabbleDB for instance. I can't remember the last time I read a blog entry. Surely they're still around? I looked at their feed URL http://dabbledb.com/blog/?feed=rss2 ... which redirected me to http://blog.dabbledb.com/?feed=rss2 (and ignored the param). I then found their real feed right here http://feeds.feedburner.com/DabbleDB.

Yes, they're still around and very much alive and kicking. So why didn't Reader tell me what had been happening and that the feed didn't exist anymore?

I suspect there are a number of feeds I added over time where I haven't read anything from them in ages and all because they have moved the feed elsewhere.

What am I to do about it? Continuing on from my half-baked plan to use on-line services less and less, I am about a quarter way through writing a small RSS Reader I can deploy onto my site (I couldn't find something that already existed). It'll only be small since it'll only serve one person (you!).

Already I have an outline plan and some code but I have a nice feature set forming in my head. It'll give you a lot more information about the feeds you read. For example have you ever wondered:

  • when the feed you're reading last updated?
  • when was the last time you retrieved it?
  • how many posts have they done in the past month or even year?

And of course, this isn't on the desktop, it's on the web so you can read your feeds from anywhere. A nice 'Next' button in your toolbar would be handy, as would the ability to preview something instead of having to go there.

My plan is to be able to have your feeds public since that would be kinda cool, be able to click them and have it remember that you've read certain posts, and (thanks Donovan) I may even have something like a star so I can click interesting posts to share them.

Francois also told me about the Franklin Street Statement the other day. Whilst I might not actually pledge to it myself I do intend on releasing this software under the Affero GPL which will be awesome. Not because a big company will come and use it and therefore have to contribute back changes but so that anyone can use it and contribute back.

As I said, I'm just starting but hope to have something ready in a few days time.

As a final note, I'd like to say that I've been using Google Reader quite happily for ages and it has been really good. Now though I'm of the opinion that no matter how good, bad or indifferent a webservice is, it is always better when it is open.

Labels: google, planet-geek, planet-catalyst, rss-reader

Inserted: 2008-07-16 23:22 (2 years ago)

QR Code for http://kapiti.geek.nz/

The Google Chart API now supports QR codes.

QR Codes now available on the Google Chart API. Here's mine for http://kapiti.geek.nz/:

And the link I did it with.

I originally saw this because Brad Fitz has used it to put on his Facebook profile image which is interesting.

I guess if image search engines want to know where an image originally came from, they can scan for the QR Code

Taking this futher, I can think of one really good use already. You could put it on your Creative Commons licensed Flickr images and that way, the attribution part of publisher's side of the deal is already fulfilled. That can only be a good thing (as to whether they want a black and white pattern in the corner of their published images is a different story).

So I'm already defining a small protocol in my mind which might be quite nice.

There are 4 corners of an image so maybe something like this:

Any thoughts (apart from the fact it might look ugly)?

Labels: creative-commons, qr-code, planet-catalyst, google-chart, kapiti-geek-nz, flickr

Inserted: 2008-07-11 10:11 (2 years ago)

Cil News

There have been a number of good things things happening with Cil in the past week or so.

Just a few quick notes to start off with:

When writing Open Source Software, it usually feels good to be able to give something back but it also feels better when someone is helping you too. Francois deserves all the credit getting Cil into Debian and a lot of the credit for many other features already in Cil.

Now I just need to get my act together so I can contribute to email-reminder - I promise there will be patches before sunrise.

Labels: cil, planet-geek, planet-catalyst, dbts

Inserted: 2008-07-05 19:13 (2 years ago)

Cil v0.4.0 released

This release has a number of new things and functionality.

Here's the short version of the changes, though there are quite a few since Saturday's release:

  • now reads a ~/.cilrc config file, so set your UserName and UserEmail in there
  • you can now filter on --is-mine which takes your email from your ~/.cilrc
  • you can now use shortened hash names for issues/comments/attachments, so long as they are unambiguous
  • a new command called 'am' has been added so you can process email messages into either new issues or comments on existing issues (ToDo: processing of multiple messages in actual Mailboxes)
  • allows dependencies between issues so you can state which DependsOn or Precedes another

Documentation has been made a little nicer too.

There are still lots more ideas to get through but I'm sure it'll slow down at some point. As always, thanks to those who provide me with inspiration and ideas, you know who you are.

Have fun, let me know how it goes and happy hacking.

Update: fix to packaging, patched to v0.4.1, see the main cil page for tarball details.

Labels: cil, planet-catalyst

Inserted: 2008-07-02 23:47 (2 years ago)

Why I'm Passionate about Perl

I saw this meme on Grant's journal (huh, who keeps a journal these days, I knew he was old fashioned). Not sure where he got it from but I thought I'd do it anyway.

\b{The person who introduced me to Perl showed me that...}

Erm, nothing. I was the same as Grant. I introduced myself to Perl and I'm glad I did. At the time, I was living in Germany, had a crappy old laptop, no webbernets and lots of time. I had to do something and somehow, Perl won.

I first starting using Perl to...

...do my own photo gallery website. And yes, I wrote my own templating language. I love the fact that I did it and I think by doing so, my passage towards being a true Perl programmer was complete. TMTOWTDI! It's my party and I'll cry if I want to.

I kept using Perl because...

...after only a few days, I was connecting to The Gimp and writing Perl-Fu modules to generate the graphics, the thumbnails and all the buttons on the site (duly swapped with onMouseOver and onMouseOut). The fact that this language was reading in XML, writing out HTML, reading in jpgs, writing out lots of other images and all these other things made me think that this language was special. At the time, I just didn't know that it wasn't a language at all, and instead was an addictive kind of glue, dressed up and disguised as a language.

I can't stop thinking about Perl...

...because it just encompasses everything I believe in. It has power, expressiveness, individuality, schizophrenia and duct tape (lots of it). It's also free and it has a great community, which are both hugely important factors.

I'm still using Perl because...

...I haven't yet found anything better than it. I'm afraid it's that simple. Other scripting languages don't seem worthwhile enough (or different enough) to spend time on and it's only completely new paradigms like Erlang, which I would consider learning. Whilst a lot of Perl people are saying "Ruby until Perl 6", I'm saying "Perl until Perl 6".

I get other people to use Perl by...

N/A. I don't say to other people that they should do anything. Then again, there's no harm trying to convince someone to use something by showing them it's better. I mean, show them a thousand line Java file or a 10 line Perl program. Also show them ACME::EyeDrops and say "There, you do that". If they reply with "Why would I want to?", you've just won the "Which is more fun?" argument.

I also program in ... and ..., but I like Perl better since...

...as stated before, I've not found a better language, though in the past I have written stuff in C, C++, Ruby, Java, Ada 83 (Ravenscar Profile) and a few other bits and pieces. To be honest, waiting for stuff to compile just bores me to tears. It used to take me a thousand hours to get an Ada program to compile and once it compiled, there was no point running it since I knew it would work! Perl is a refreshing change :-)

Labels: perl, planet-geek, planet-catalyst

Inserted: 2008-07-02 21:33 (2 years ago)

SoCNoC 2 a Success

Despite my own failure at doing SoCNoC this year, a number of other people have and it is they I'd like to thank for making SoCNoC what it is.

Throughout the year, a few of us behind the scenes in KiwiWriters do lots of work to make sure we're ready for SoCNoC during June. Sometimes it feels like a lot of work but when it starts, it's all worthwhile.

And this year we have managed to break a number of records. Here's a quick run-down of some of the more memorable figures:

  • 143 participants (2.4x last year)
  • 32 winners (2x last year)
  • 2,635,755 cumulative words written (2.6x last year)
  • 58,000 page impressions (2x last year)
  • cost - free (same as last year)!

and lots and lots of fun in to the bargain too.

Well done to everyone who completed it. Special congrats. to our organisers who not only did all the work but managed to write a novel too: Kerryn, Travis, Cassie, Pam - and hello to Jane too!

Here's looking forward to a record breaking 3rd SoCNoC next year!

Labels: kiwiwriters, socnoc, planet-catalyst

Inserted: 2008-07-01 21:46 (2 years ago)