Tarballs of Ion! — zakame’s blog

This weekend, a rather long one due to the observance of the National Heroes’ day, got me started into doing some little hacks for WeeChat, an IRC client that I have been using in place of Colloquy on the Macbook which I use at work. I have been using WeeChat originally because I’ve been using TOR to connect to the ‘Net, but later on I found out about WeeChat’s extensibility via script plugins that can be written in either Ruby, Lua, or Perl.

And, being the Perl monger that I am, and having lots of idle time (hey, this was a weekend I looked for some way to better integrate my WeeChat to my Mac setup. The first thing I came up with was a way to get the app to send event notifications via the Growl framework (which I got from Adium,) since the WeeChat I have here is a console-only app (there is an ongoing GTK/wxWidgets UI port, but not available yet in MacPorts, where I got WeeChat.) A quick look at the Growl developer documentation, however, got me looking into Mac::Growl, which provides a very simple Perl interface to Growl. And thus, I came up with growl-notify, which now keeps me up to date on what’s going on in IRC while I’m doing something else.

The other thing that I got to work on with was a simple way to do Twitter status updates while on IRC. Of course, I do have the excellent Twitterific for Mac installed, but again I was raring for some quick hack to do at the weekend, so I decided to do this one too. In IRC, one can pretty much indicate his/her status by using the /me command (which is really a shortcut for doing a CTCP ACTION message, but I digress.) This particular command seemed to be a fairly natural command to tie a Twitter updater with, so it only took a while for me to look up Net::Twitter, write a modifier for the /me command, and come up with weeter.

Now, the week’s back, and I look forward to my work and its pending tasks (currently something involving PostgreSQL, GlusterFS, and lots of Amazon EC2 nodes with a renewed zest for tackling problems. And when weekend comes again, its yet another time to recharge, and perhaps hack some more on better integrating the apps that I use in my workflow (and thus helping my productivity.)

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.

Clair: Yep, (I think) I do. I used to play Magic during grade school when it was hot off the press. Back then I remembered building the first strategy decks from scratch, along with my friend Ronel Romarate (I dunno if what the link’s taking to is the same guy, but I think he looks like it). We had some blasts with these cards: I reckon that Black Lotus was selling at P20 to a P100 at the time (even P2 if you’re lucky to find one in the streets).

The past three days have been really tiring. I’ve been hacking and painting as Paul Graham writes. I wouldn’t be holding an exhibit anytime soon, except if you want to visit my place. Because that’s exactly what I painted: my own house.

From light blue and off-white to very light green and pale orange.

Mosaics at St. Monica Catholic Church in Mobile Alabama - Very cool. They’re very beautiful, and even the flow of the fabrics on the Bible characters are pulsing with life and energy. Perhaps that’s just what we need for the reconstruction of our very own Parish of St. John the Baptist here in Daet.

I wonder if there’s anyone here in the locality who can do those kind of mosaics.