Apologies for the last 30 hours of outage. The host for the virtual private server had an outage and had a hard shutoff. This seemed to cause a little havoc on services, but it all appears to be cleared up now.
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Category Archives: Projects
Hacking on KDE: part 1
In a personal brainstorm of how to better facilitate folks that want to have an ideal hacking environment, for X. The primitives of the idea need to be figured out, and often nothing happens because you can determine “If the person has enough desire, and know how, they’ll figure it out,” and most of the time this is a fine explanation.
When it comes to a project collection like KDE, compiling it and fiddling around can be supremely easy without the bounds of package dependencies, but still manageable packages. Although, there are now a lot a projects in the KDE Software Collection, and they are all modular. Even within the Slackware community, alienBob has already updated the build process for his KDE SC 4.7 packages to be modular. With the migration from SVN to git, it has clarified some aspects of the build, but it has now made a segregated landscape of projects. If someone wants to check out a new project, the latest development in it, it seems like a hidden process.
Being agnostic of which Linux distribution I am running, if, as a developer, I want to be able to easily manage working from the git repositories of the projects, installing them, and possibly even packaging the artifacts, this is a intricate process. But thankfully, it is a describable process, therefore we can automate it.
Last night I began working on a project, tentatively named ‘kappy’. With the K App, in mind, and it is written in Python, so having a py in there seems suitable.
The source code is currently living at http://hashbangbash.com/kappy.git, or browser viewable at http://hashbangbash.com/git/?p=kappy.git;a=summary
Initially it is just doing XML parsing of the projects available. Next plans are:
- making a caching ground for cloning/updating git repositories
- building the software
- having user definable configurations for flags and install paths
- making recipes, of a suite of software to build
- having a manager to package, for a respective distribution
Update: I’ve added a bug tracker for this project http://redmine.hashbangbash.com/projects/kappy
If you have feedback, feel free to send it in.
Take care,
vb
Good Times
This year has been a nice for socializing with nerds. Attending conferences is something that can get tiresome, if the content is something you do not find interesting or stimulating. Thankfully, I have no required conferences, so I can be choosy (schedules permitting). Naturally open source and languages would top the list of places to attend.
First off, was hanging out with the KDE folks in San Francisco, CA for CampKDE – April 4,5 2011. There were a number of good talks, and a great opportunity to shake the hands of names that I have seen around, as well as meeting many new folks. The kde-promo team has a YouTube channel, that they have published all the talks and interviews to. http://www.youtube.com/user/kdepromo
The talk I gave there is titled “Slackware: Quickly and Easily Manage Your KDE SC Hacking.” You can get the slides in [PDF] or [ODP], plus the videos posted on the kde-promo channel have the full talk (youtube.com/watch?v=Qs7vR3POHeo), as well as an interview afterwards by Wade Olson (youtube.com/watch?v=YIpUmPul1i4).
Next, was down to Spartanburg, SC for the SouthEast Linux Fest (SELF) – June 10-12, 2011.
This is the third year that I have attended SELF, and second time to speak, but what differentiated this year from any other speaking engagement (in the past, or distant future), was that it was a talk title “Slackware Demystified”, and none other than the founder of Slackware Linux, Patrick Volkerding was not only in attendance, but sitting on the front row! The slides from this presentation are available in [HTML] or [PDF]. Unfortunately, the videos have not been published yet. Hopefully they will actually get them published, unlike the previous two years…
Lastly … so far, was a local conference, that I did not speak at, only attended. JrubyConf – August 3-5, 2011. While I use MRI Ruby much more than JRuby, this conference was a great way to be around and hear from many brilliant folks (Like Wayne Seguin, Charles Nutter (headius), Nick Sieger, and Jim Weirich, to name a few), plus I felt that I needed to make up for missing out on RubyConf taking place in Baltimore, MD.
The KDE folks strongly encouraged making it to the DesktopSummit, which was hosted in Berling, Germany this year. While it was surely appetising to think of attending, it did not work out this time. It would have been nice to shake hands with some fellow contributors, like Eric Hameleers (alienBob). Better luck next year.
All good times, I look forward to next year, or event the rest of 2011.
Feel free to leave feedback on the talks.
Take care,
vb
More Red-Black Tree, but a little Ruby Benchmarking
After hearing a bit about the improvements in the Rubinius ruby interpreter, I decided to test a handful of the interpreters against the Red-Black tree insertion script I last posted about.
As a forward, this is completely out of idle curiosity, and with no deep intentions. The results had distinct winners and losers, and for more rich benchmark, this would need to include multiple iterations and some other aspects as well. All that to say, this is not an all encompassing benchmark.
The results are the length (in seconds) of time for the execution.
So using the rbtree.rb, that I last blogged about, using rvm, I have just run it through the following ruby interpreters:
- ruby 1.9.1p430 (2010-08-16 revision 28998) [x86_64-linux]
- rubinius 1.3.0dev (1.8.7 5bd938b5 xxxx-xx-xx JI) [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu]
- rubinius 1.2.0 (1.8.7 release 2010-12-21 JI) [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu]
- jruby 1.5.3 (ruby 1.8.7 patchlevel 249) (2010-09-28 7ca06d7) (Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM 1.6.0_23) [amd64-java]
- ruby 1.8.7 (2010-12-23 patchlevel 330) [x86_64-linux], MBARI 0×6770, Ruby Enterprise Edition 2011.01
- ruby 1.9.3dev (2011-02-14 trunk 30873) [x86_64-linux]
From an early look at it, the Rubinius interpreter is on to something good. For this example at least, their current release branch (1.2) is smoking, compared to anything else.
To look at the values, that make up the graph above, here is the spreadsheet
Take care,
vb