What laziness can do
I hate repetitive tasks. If there is one thing I don’t want to do, is to do the same thing over and over. This applies to packaging to. It’s a repetitive task after all, so last night I thought of putting the commands I use in a shell script and run them every time I want to update one of my packages.
Then tonight I wanted to update another package, another repetitive task, so I added some stuff to the last night’s script and here we have this (update_pkg.sh and parse_spec.py). (update_pkg.sh depends on parse_spec.py and right now, they should be in the same dir).
So what does this little script do? Well, you give it the specfile name and it updates the package for you. Either you will have the tarball downloaded and put in ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES, or the script will update the source through svn or git, pack it and send it to SOURCES and update the package. Pretty simple, but saves a whole lot of time (and prevents excess boredom sometimes).
It also builds the package for F10-x86_64, F10-i386, F11-x86_64, F11-i386. You can easily add/remove other archs if you want.
Just don’t try –help for now, it’s badly broken (aka no such option and the help is far outdated, it’s for last night.)
so, that’s it for now. You can find Raptor and Konversation packages here
Until next time, have a good…week? Or day? 
looya! Now what?
Last things first, I’m thinking of writing a pseudocode parser that parses pseudocode to python code and executes it. It will be almost line-to-line translation between these two. The point of this is:
1) It’s fun
2) I’ll learn more about C++ libraries (especially boost)
3) It’s fun
4) It’s fun
5) Next time that I’m teaching concepts of programming to someone, I don’t need to teach them the syntax (of python) too.
6) It’s fun
So, here are 6 reasons why I’m doing this. So far, I have written down some ideas of what it will/should look like. Very similar to English, but not too close (e.g. “I kan haz bling bling” will not work for example).
On top of that, I’m thinking of making it extensible with the capability to add new keywords easily. Maybe a compiled-in plugin thingy will work fine.
Anyhow, I called it “looya” based on some random letters that came to my mind. However, a second thought made me realize that it’s awfully similar to lua. So, here it comes the first things:
1) What do you think a cool name would be?
2) Is it worth thinking about or should I abandon it before I even start it because it’s just so stupid?
Microsoft hit…badly
I’m generally not a fan of seeing companies engage in patent-y stuff, but this one was so cool I couldn’t help but post it here:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39638887,00.htm
Microsoft was hit by USD$388,000,000 (watching the zeros makes me feel better ). As soon as I read this, I remembered the case of M$ with TomTom.
pretty emacs
I recently switched to emacs from vim, and I’m enjoying it. I feel that the shortcuts are more sane when used with Dvorak layout. Anyway, emacs 22 doesn’t look so nice, so I looked about for emacs 23 and found this repo from Brad Walker:
install the repo (bmw-release) and install emacs:
$ yum install emacs
and of course, enjoy
EDIT: here is some color themes for emacs:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~maverick/GNUEmacsColorThemeTest/
I’m not dead either!
I, too, have been quite quiet sometime. It has been much due to the fact that school is killing me as of this very moment. But today I found some time to work on some packages and update them to the latest and the greatest. So, here are raptor-menu and konversation updated
raptor & konvi: http://amoradi.fedorapeople.org/rpms/
