rullzer

It has been long since my last post. Too long. I won’t fill you up on all the things I have done. Or maybe I will in other posts. But today I want to talk about openstreetmap.

As you might (or might not) know openstreetmap aims to provide a free (as in speech) map of the world. You can help by adding or editing the map. This is what I have been doing the last couple of months. Mostly fixing roads or adding new cycleways. Now of course cycling is good exercise. And it feels good to contribute to a free world map. However the real kick is seeing your changes of your work!

This can be seen on the main website. However that is only updated once a week. There are several other tile servers that serve a part of the map. These servers are generally updated more often. However when you use a tile server you are can’t change the rendering. So how great would it be to create your own rendering?

Check out my wiki entry. Of course it is a wiki so add all improvement you can think of.

After going trough my /usr/portage/distfiles/ I found a lot of tarballs that belong to versions of packages that are no longer in portage. Now these tarballs take up a lot of space. Doing a nice rm -rf * will ofcource take care of the problem but then all the tarballs that are still in portage will have to be downloaded again if once of the gentoo boxes in the network needs it (currently 4). Now it is not that I have a datalimit but it is a matter of principle.

So there must be an easier solution. I’ll try to look into it but python is writen in portage so maybe I can just include it and check for all packages and versions and remove the tarballs that have no corresponding ebuild. This script doesn’t have to run every day since it would take some time I guess but once a week or so just to keep the system clean.

Please let me know if anybody is interested in such an app or knows if it already exists…

It has been some time since my last post where I wrote I had the need for a Project in the vacation. And well I found one and altough the vacation is already over for a week I’m still (when I’m nog busy for school) working on it with Sander. For more info about why and the program see his blog.

But in shoort. We are working on a Qt4 frontend for mpd: QtMPC. So far it is already useable. Sander even kicked apache from his media PC since he didn’t use it anymore. We are far from supporting everything MPD supports but we are getting there. Soon (I hope) 0.3 will be released since we are making good progress but ofcourse the svn is available all the time

svn co http://qtmpc.lowblog.nl/svn qtmpc

Working on QtMPC made me realise that I had way to many music files. So maybe it is also time for me to get a media PC. However the budget is limit. But after talking to Sander yesterday I realised that an old pc would also work. However they make way to much noise. So right now I’m looking for some kind of old thin-client or something like that. Since crosscompiling can be done on the server or on my old laptop.

Now I could ofcourse get a cable and connect it to the server and the stereo but I’d rather not have alsa running on my server. Also if it is a pc with lets say 300 mhz. That would be more than enough to play music. It would consume much less power than my old laptop (wich is currently hooked up to the stereo). So that is again a big plus.

Ah well maybe when my next salary arrives.

So since it is vacation, Christmas is over and I have some time to fill. I have been thinking about some projects to do but could not really think of something doable in a few days. Since well I do not mind long term project I just want something where I have something working in a few days.

I had a nice idea that I borrowed from Tobias Koenig about bus-services. So I checked the transport company in Amsterdam. Wrote them a nice email if they have a way to communicate with the database. XML-RPC or something like that. Since I do understand they would not allow me directly on the database. An email came back that they do not have such a service and indeed could not allow me on directly on the database.

That is all understandable but the departure times are all available on the internet so I decided to give it one last try. A dump of the departure times from the database. But again they could not help me. Now I wonder why is that. I wrote a nice email that I just wanted to make a nice program. Why can’t they share that stuff with me? Or anyone else?

Now I could ofcourse parse the whole stuf by myself. But that would mean I had to write some ugly parser in their web of html. Which I do not like.

So that project won’t work for me. Then a friend of mine suggested a simple bittorrent client. That can run on a server and a nice client program to connect to it. So It can run while you are asleep or whatever. However after looking at a bittorrent file and the protocol I figured that would not be something I could have working in a few days.

So no project now. If you have any suggestions drop a comment please.

I had some contact with the SABnzbdplus maintianers today and it tuns out that the program is still called SABnzbd. So I switched the name of the ebuild and all reverences to SABnzbdplus are removed. This does mean users will have to chown their custom download dirs again. Sorry for that Chris.

Changes to the ebuild:

• All templates in the original package are now installed
• More info at the end of the ebuild
• Passes repoman, well not totally since it uses local use flags.
• Changelog enty

If you have the time please grab the ebuild here and give it a spin.

It is 40 minutes past midnight. However I did not want to keep this from you!

About a week back I saw that in my feed reader all the messages from the SABnzbd project were empty. Which means that there was no activity for a very long time. So after browsing trought the forums I found that SABnzbd was abbandond. It made me sad. But the good thing is that I saw that a new group of people has started a succesor for SABnzbd, SABnzbdplus.

SABnzbdplus: Binary Newsgrabber written in Python, server-oriented using a web-interface. The active successor of the abandoned SABnzbd project

Now what does this mean for the SABnzbd users? Well it comes down to that their usenet download tool is supported again and actively developed. So you can expet new features. Bug fixes etc. So all good news. (for current changes see the changelog).

Now the response I got to my SABnzbd-0.2.5 ebuild (see original blog post) was quite a lot. People thanking me and sending in suggestions. Unfortunatly the ebuild never made it into gentoo portage. But times have changed. Currently Cherrypy-2.2.1-r1 is in portage. So that means this ebuild does not need any other ebuilds.

Having said that I must admit that is not entirely true. It still need yenc if you want that. However we come to that. Since well that package is quite small and only a few python script being installed. It should be no problem getting that into portage. However I do not yet feel quite ready to sumbit my new ebuild to portage since it needs some testing and some features (like the included Nova themes) are not yet available after installing the ebuild. So it will need a lot of fine tuning. However that is proces that will take some time and I could really use your help. So please if you got some spare time emerge the ebuild, try it and let me know how it works out.

I now have only tested it on amd64 but since it are all python scripts it should work on any arch that has the required deps. As stated you will need the yenc ebuild. Other than it should all work fine.

Now if you were using my pervious ebuild be sure to unmerge that first. Else you will get file collison!

And finally here the ebuild can be found.

So I’m back at the university. Nice to see all the people again. So not that bad. Now we got a course Natural Language Processing and I was told it was best to do it in python. I never coded in python before so did not really know what to expect. I started coding and it was actually quite easy. It works nice and is surprisingly fast. However (and I know I am not the only one) why am I not allowed to use my friends { and }…. I like them. Now I know I have to indent etc. I already do that. But I like to use them just in case…

Ah well I think I can learn to live with it. But still… Would be nice if they gave me the choice to use it…

I just finished getting this baby to work. And i must say it works like it should work. Now the code is a lot better to read.
I suggest anybody that writes in Qt to check out this sexy thing. Now don’t forget to write your own ItemDelegate for it. It is a pain in the ass to get it working (at first) but once you’ve figured it out it just makes your life easier.

Now go forth and code.

I just finished adding the 11th revision of my personal recipe program cook. Still not ready for a release but I am getting closer. Thanks to my buddy Sander it now is no longer possible to add the items in the QListView/QTreeView. Updating a recipe no longer loses focus on a recipe (that was a real bitch). So for the upcoming week (besides school/work, which just has to be done) my main goal is to get the ingredients working. After that I will take a look at QWidgetMapper, which is supposed to make my life easier but at the moment I do not need it. So that is just bonus

O I also changed 2 QLineEdits to QComboBoxes which does make my life easier.

I was told that the link i posted provided an empty tarball. I will have a look at viewvc for that but i also decided i will keep a archive here: rullzer.com/cook. So if you want the latest release grab the latest tarball.

Since I am a KDE user i prefer to use a lot of KDE programs. However for editing code I always uses vi. That was until last week. When a buddy of mine, Sander, and me were coding. We both do not like huge IDE’s like Eclipse and KDevelop. They are just way to huge and take up all my ram (1.5GB at the moment so that is not really an argument). But is is an argument when I say i like lightweighted application, and well I do. So about Kate. It allows me to edit multiple files, auto-indentation and so on and so forth. Now I know vi has all that to. But right now I think Kate looks better.

If you not raised with vim-keybindings (yes i actually know someone that is) and you like lightweighted texteditors. Take a look at Kate.