Advogato blog for skeezix

10 Aug 2001

Fri, 10 Aug 2001 14:12:07 GMT

I'm working on a couple of hacks right now. The first is a patch to Nautilus to allow file-deletion , moving of files to the trash, from the Music View. I found that with the various mp3's I download from napster or gnutella, I quite often end up with incompletes. With a Music View that allows you to delete files, you can easily hear if the song is complete or not and then optionally delete the file.

The other hack which I haven't started yet, but I want to soon, is an importer for gnome-cal calendar data into Evolution.

Unfortunately my extra time is limitted lately. Hopefully that will change soon.

7 Aug 2001

Tue, 7 Aug 2001 23:25:18 GMT

Well I've been working recently on a Perl irc bot, smeg. It's an interesting way to pass time. We're in the process of moving a lot of persistent data to a SQL backend. Eimi has been investigating PostgreSQL and MySQL. Smeg is getting pretty advanced. He speaks on topic, utilizing a rather large database of quotations (originally based on the fortune packages). He also gets information from the web and of course has some preprogrammed responses. He has a mood and and affiliation to individual users based on their karma. He keeps a hierarchy of objects and how they relate to each other which provides him with a basic understanding of the universe. He can tell your fortune, give you news headlines (/., LinuxToday, and lwn.net daily).

We'd really like to do more to separate the "engine" (such as it is) from the implementation. The ultimate goal is to make him seem more human-like, while providing some cool bot-like functions which can be hidden. To that end he will spontaneously do things such as mark himself away for various reasons (depending on his mood, which isn't arbitrary--it's based on how users treat him), speak spontaneously, etc. Admins of Smeg have remote control over him. He plays cards (52 games to be precise), keeps a calendar and watch which can affect things he does which are time or date specific and admin-definable. He will give definitions of words, perform web-queries, and serve a damn fine beer (if he likes you). I shit you not.

16 Apr 2001

Mon, 16 Apr 2001 03:36:26 GMT

I enjoyed reading summaries and write-ups from GUADEC this weekend. It seems that Magic indeed happened.

7 Apr 2001

Sat, 7 Apr 2001 18:37:08 GMT

Well Gnome 1.4 is finally out the door. Now we can begin looking ahead to what needs to be done for Gnome 1.4.1 and Gnome 2.0 development. I wish I could be at GUADEC right now, but alas, I was unable to attend, so I'm very anxious to hear from those who did attend. Magic always happens at GUADEC.