Paul's Journal

I seem not to have written here for two weeks, where did the time go? Well, study projects probably… I have been working on GOAT! a lot and other misc stuff.

Today, I’ve looked into the first implementations of the RPA and Debian coupling. Now RPA base is maturing and the development 0.3 branch had some Debian source/binary specific generating code in it by bitserf, I decided to try it and and maybe help.

It is going to look something like this (or then again, maybe not at all):

  % rpa source iowa
  % rpa-build -t debian -b ./iowa source
  % ls
  iowa/
  iowa-0.9.1/
  iowa_0.9.1-2.diff.gz
  iowa_0.9.1-2.dsc
  iowa_0.9.1.orig.tar.gz
  % cd iowa-0.9.1
  % dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot ...
  

A Debian specific install script is put in iowa-0.9.1/debian/rules which could inherit the installer and be modified at will by the maintainer. An example of generated debian/rules template doing the standard stuff:

  #!/usr/bin/env ruby

  require 'install'

  class Debianize_iowa < Install_iowa 
  end
  

If we get this working, both RPA (and thus users of other operating systems working with Ruby) and Debian will benefit from this. I intend to commit non-Debian specific changes back to RPA (also QA stuff) and create a tight coupling so that Debian packages are very up-to-date and easy to maintain (read: no work at all to maintain). I’m currently trying to find my way in the code. You will hear more of this…

Spoiler alert! (only when following the links).

Last night (rather late :) ) I finished reading the last book of the Homecoming Saga series, Earthborn, because the story kept occupying my mind and interfered with my concentration. Or, at least, my sleep rhythm. I even think I liked this more than the Ender series. Then again, except for the “Cardish” touch, it is so different, it may be called incomparable.

I couldn’t help but notice the interesting theories about human nature in all the books, and I still wonder… which parts of these theories are really fiction and which are researched rather thoroughly?

I’d have to ask him once.

I have been working on GOAT!—Goal-based Object-oriented Adaptive Teacher the whole week (besides lectures and stuff). This was again for the Intelligent Systems course. It is the reincarnation of our Ruby Tutor project which was dropped earlier as a possible idea.

  <ul oid="itemList">
    <li>@item.name</li>
  </ul>

I also would like to thank the author (Kirk Haines) for writing this piece of software and helping me out a lot of times. I think Iowa has a somewhat steep learning curve at first, but it gets better after a while I hope we can fix this by providing information regarding where the hard parts are, where more examples are needed, and so on.

The following text is in Esperanto for variation purposes. Try to follow it, if you can, or just ignore it alltogether.

Paroli

Lastan ĵaŭdon mi parolis Esperanto unuafoje kun Maarteno. Ĝi estis amuza kaj m ankaŭ lernis multaĵojn. Dum la parolo mi sensis iomete estas problemo, kiam vi ne(longe) scias vortojn, sed denove estas bona en Esperanto, ĉar oni povas konstrui vortojn alimaniere. Ankaŭ estas tre amuze pri bicikli tra Eindhoveno kaj babili en Esperanto, kiam neniu povas komprenis vin! Mi ŝatas ĝin sed ankaŭ estas iom bedaŭrinde, ĉu ne? Kiam vi povas lerni Esperanto (certe kiam vi povas legis tion iomete), vi povas sekvi la retkurson:

• Retkurson por Nederlandanoj
• Retkurson ĝeneralan

(vizitu ankaŭ UniLang, kiam vi interesiĝas por lingvojn)

Emmeno

Mi denove vizitis amikojn en Groningeno kaj Emmeno ĉi tie semajnofinon. Ĝi estis tre amuza kaj hejmeca. Mi neniam estis en Groningeno, sed estas bela. Groningeno ankaŭ similas Leeuwardeno iomete, sed tamen estas alia urbo! Mi revenos ĉi tie!

Monato

Mi recivis la internacian magazinon Monato hieraŭ. Mi pensas estas bonega magazino. Ĝi estas de Belgio (Antverpeno) kaj havas iujn interesajn artikulojn. Ĉie tie monaton estas artikulo pri libera programaro, estas interesa pri vidi la Esperantan opiono/vidpunkton de tion. Mi ne ankoraŭ scias, ĉu mi abonas ĝin…

Hmm… kiel oni povas fari i18n por Hobikso… ?

Fonts

Redone the fonts of my site again. Everything is now relative to a base font of 10pt. I know that 12pt is normal, but it just to large on every machine I see it on, so 10pt it is. I’ve tried to do all the spacing between all elements as well. So zooming should be no problem¹, if everything is too large or small for your taste. Note that the site also has become smaller and has an increased line height to maximize the readability. Microsoft actually has nice typography pages for this, which I’ve used to redo everything. But also Wikipedia was helpful again. Please, send me the screenshots of the index of my journal at 100% zoom and note the browser’s default font size. A pity for the RSS/Atom/OkayNews feed readers, they miss it all. :)

Hobix 3.0

After I installed hobix 2.0b last saturday, I missed the 0.2c and 0.2d released and upgraded to Hobix 0.2e yesterday. But today… Hobix 0.2f got released and now 0.3 which I use now. Good work _why!

¹ Works for me in the 60% – 300% range, good enough.

Jabber RFCs 3920—3922

Today, the IETF published the Jabber (actually XMPP) protocols as RFCs with the Proposed Standard status. See also the press release on jabber.org . I am happy to see this! Using Jabber for almost 4 years now, I’ve noticed it has grown through the years and Jabber contacts dominate my roster since the past months. In my opinion, Jabber suffers a bit from decentralisation. On the lists I see a lot of stuff happening but nobody that controls it at all. The XMPP system is capable of so much neat stuff, I hope this brings back the drive in FOSS developers to work on Jabber, and the industry as well.

YTex

 
 title: An YTex document 
 author: Paul van Tilburg

 sections: 
 - First section: >
     Bla bla, this is the first section.
 - Second section:
   - >
     Hmm, if there are more sections, heading stuff goes
     here.  I can do *bold* text and _emphasized_ text.

   - First subsection: >
     A subjection with a !figure.jpg(nice caption)! and a 
     table:

     | head1 | head2 |
     | key1  | 3.0   |
     | key2  | 15.0  |

The plan to program a Ruby Tutor as I earlier posted last week has been cancelled. It seems that the purpose of the project for the Intelligent Systems course wasn’t clear enough to us. Since I (we) have no time at all this trimester for such a large project and the major imperative to do implement is now gone, I don’t think it’ll ever happen. Sorry!

I’ve been using Instiki as my small & easy CMS. Although it works quite well, I don’t like the fact that journalling with it requires a lot of work (i.e. manually archiving, setting dates and titles, etc.). So I decided to look for/switch to something differing. Since I have been reading up with Why the Lucky Stiff’s for some time now, I knew Hobix already. So, I decided to check it out yesterday. It is really great… it gives you the powers of Ruby, Textile, YAML and a strong/flexible templating engine combined! I have been trying to make it integrate in my already created homepage and I must say, it worked out nicely. I still have got some tweaking and fiddling to do the next weeks with both the homepage and this journal, but I’m confident it’ll work out.

This is a first Hobix test! It worked, since you can obviously read this…