Tarballs of Ion! — zakame’s blog

In a little while I’ll be packing my things: clothes (with a few formal attires), a couple of (C/data structures) books, some snacks (Nerds!) and spare change (no bills).  I’ve yet to see all of them fit in my backpack, so I’ll probably bring a couple of bags.  Tomorrow, I will be bound for Manila yet again, much earlier than usual, for the AsiaBusinessTour on Thursday.

And on the 16th, there will be the Bicol Open Source Forum in Legazpi City.  Joseph Davidton Cadag invited me to be a speaker; I’ve yet to accept, but I’m leaning to it, especially since this would be a great opportunity to speak more about FOSS to my fellow Bikolanos.  Also, its a nice time to meet up with Irvin Piraman who will be giving some Ubuntu CDs in the Forum too.

I just hope I can finish my (re)packaging of ecb which I ITA‘d since last August.  There is a package of the new upstream version already, but there seems to be a lack of Debian sponsors who can look into Emacs-related packages. *sigh*

W00T!  I am now the official maintainer for robotour!  My many thanks to Florian Ragwitz who uploaded my update to Sid. Many thanks to Shaun Jackman (the old maintainer) for allowing me to adopt his package Also, libmemcache has also been uploaded into Debian’s NEW queue by Sylvain Le Gall, and is now just waiting to be ACCEPTED (and hopefully it will be :D)

My efforts in learning C (yet again and grokking the Autobook has paid off, especially for gtklp, which has been listed in Steve Langasek’s FreetypeTransition as one of those packages that seem to use Freetype yet do not have an explicit Build-Depends on Freetype. My solution for gtklp was to transform the libgtklp convenience library (aka libtool’s noinst_LTLIBRARIES) into a regular static library, dropping some explicit LDFLAGS, and the result was that I dropped not just only Freetype from the binary’s Depends, but also PNG and zlib.  I just hope my sponsor for gktlp will notice this and upload soon

Pacquiao Gains Revenge with Electrifying 10th Stoppage of Morales

W00T!!! Let the beer flood!!! (and forget about LiveJournal flodding

I would have posted a pic here for everyone to see what I mean, but I fear would-be lawyers coming at my door and shouting “him, him, that’s the man!!!

Anyhow, salamat at congrats ulit, Manny, sa iyong pagkapanalo!

I’m now back home, but barely finished catching up with my mails. Much of my activities have been blogged elsewhere…

By the way I’m on Planet Ubuntu now. W00T! My hackergotchi is still missing though…

I’m back in Manila, again, to attend class. But this time around I’ll be staying longer here, maybe up until Thursday next week, since my dad will be coming here on Sunday so we can finally pack the last stuff we have back in our apartment at Makati.

That means, among other things, I can actually attend the PLUG induction tomorrow. That also means, however, that I won’t be able to continue my work on my adopted packages or on MOTUToMerge in the coming week :(. Then again, I think I can fill in the blank hours by working on translations for Rosetta or do (ocular) inspections of packages up for REVU.

Well, to keep focused here’s my TODO when I get back:

• Grok Overfiend’s WTFM, among other sources, and start to write manpages for robotour, dbacl, and gyach-improved
• Bring the {autotools,dchroots,pbuilders} stuff up to date
• Contact the ICL folks re: Edubuntu migration

My earlier effort to make a NEW GYach package has resulted to an upload to mentors. I’m not yet looking for sponsors, but can someone do some testing done with the gyach and gyach-media packages? In particular, can anyone see if webcam support is ok, and if sound works?

Thanks in advance!

Last October I filed an RFP for GyachE, a feature-rich Yahoo! Messenger client that supports, among other things, webcams. I requested so because Eric wanted to package this, and at the time I didn’t have any time to allot for packaging.

Now, Eric has asked me to take over the packaging. And indeed, this is a difficult package, since upstream (aka Ms. Erica Andrews) seems to have a rather snobbish attitude with regard to providing support for GyachE (well, it is not required anyway, remember about the non-warranty clause.) She can’t even provide a decent autotooling of the software, and what’s worse, is that the source itself seems to be a mixture of two different applications, one involving GTK2 and the other Python. Hell, I couldn’t even get the source to compile, and when I tried fixing the autotools, it was even more hell

I almost gave up on it, until I came across gyach-improved from Google. Mick Howe, thank you for being such a nice guy!

/me proceeds to renaming the ITP…

As I’ve blogged earlier, I uploaded the updated Debian packages for robotour and animal last night on mentors.debian.net, and am now looking for sponsors.

I also noticed that Clint has some packages for sale; I’ll take dbacl and bricolage And my fellow MOTU Stephan also has njam from Ubuntu up for adoption, and I’m taking it into Sid, not simply because I feel its my duty being a Ubuntu MOTU to give back to Debian, but because I am an existing Debian maintainer who wants to contribute more to Debian in that capacity.

Some of those newly-adopted packages would have to wait, however, until I get back. I’ll be leaving for Manila this Thursday to take my UPOU midterms, as well as to get some things from my old house in Makati. I might be seeing Jerome, Clair, JM, Sacha, and the other PLUG folks at their induction.

Among other things, some of my IE-using friends noticed some breakage with my blog layout (sigh). I’ll try to fix this later…

Update : Anibal Avelar seems to be the DD for njam already, but I couldn’t see the package in the package pool or in the static packages page, despite being said so in the developer QA page (even the QA page for njam itself doesn’t exist). \sh, it seems that the game is still afoot!

Update 2 : Ken Bloom comments that Anibal’s package is in the NEW queue.

Every now and then I set a day for myself to bring my big old desktop CPU to an internet cafe to update my Debian and Ubuntu installations, dchroots and pbuilders, because I only have a dialup connection at home (and of all things, from a softmodem.) It became such a habit that I decided to make the most of it, and use the time it takes for me to go and update to go around every internet cafe in town and see how people would react to my GNU OS Read the rest of this entry »

At the start of 2006, I’m adopting a couple of packages:

• Robotour — control mobile robots in this programmer’s game
• Animal — AN IMaging Library written in C

As for my libmemcache packaging, Sylvain Le Gall has offered to sponsor my package, and he’s got some comments too. YAY!!!