Blogging to Nowhere

Hello Everyone, welcome to Twenty-Ten (yes we finally get to sound like we live in the future!).

I’m very pleased to announce the release of my pet project Mu-Feeder, or at least a very early version of it. I actually released version 0.1.0 unofficially yesterday, but then found a bug which was tickled by Python 2.4, so fixed that and re-released as version 0.1.1.

If you want to try it out you can get it here, or you can download the code with:

$ bzr branch lp:mu-feeder/0.1

If you have a bug report, please post it on the Launchpad bug tracker, I’m also seeking feedback which you can send to me in a variety of ways (comment here, identi.ca or Launchpad answers page).

I hope someone finds this useful! Enjoy!

I haven’t written here in a while, principally because I’ve been doing exams and finishing various projects at Uni. I’m now doing a summer studentships project for my department for which I get paid (excellent!), so that’s keeping me busy. However, I’m not really here to talk about all that stuff…

The purpose of this entry is to announce my personal Free Software project. Mu-Feeder (pronounced ‘mew-feeder’) is a project to replace the proprietary web service Twitterfeed with a piece of Free Software. Basically the idea is to take entries from an RSS or Atom feed and post them to a microblog. I figured this could be quite easily done and it would let me get used to the tools, etc involved in publishing Free Software. Basically, it’s not meant to be a complicated project, just to fill a gap and give me some experience.

At the moment the software is designed to run as a Python script executed via Cron. When it gets called it should build a summary of the top items in the feed (along with shortened URL’s) and post them to the configured microblog. I already have identi.ca support as well as (untested) twitter and StatusNet support, principally bacause they all use the same API. I’m aiming to have support for a single feed in the 0.1 release with support form multiple feeds in a subsequent release.

All the details are up on the Launchpad page at https://launchpad.net/mu-feeder and you can get the code via bzr with:

$ bzr branch lp:mu-feeder

Bug reports are welcome at https://bugs.launchpad.net/mu-feeder.

That’s about it, I’ll update on progress here as I go. Bye for now!

PS. Ironically this blog entry will be posted to identi.ca with the very service that Mu-Feeder aims to replace!

Well, this is my second post in as many days. Truth be told I’ve actually  been giving the site a bita lovin’. I’ve had a general tidy up, added ‘more tags’ to some of the longer posts so that they don’t take up as much of the main listing page and I’ve added a new Copyright (CC) notice as well as sorted out some Google adds to try and pay for the hosting of the site (not sure how successful they’ll be though).

I’ve also been working generally on my ‘personal cloud’. I’ve put up a gallery where I can put my photos which is something I’ve wanted to do for a while. I’m using Gallery 3 (Beta 3) which is nice. I tried this a while ago with Gallery 2 and it was horibly complicated and overengineered so I gave up in the end.

The new interface is really nice, there’s come nice AJAXy stuff in there which makes it feel nice and polished – kind of like using Flickr or Facebook only with Freedom. As you may have gathered I’m not a huge Facebook fan, although I do have an account, this is mainly because of concerns over privacy and what control they have over your data (including any photos you upload). I’d rather just retain control and ownership of my data.

Anyway if you want to have a look at the gallery, click the gallery link at the top of the page (it currently uses javascript to redirect you – something which I will fix in future). I think that’s about all for now. I’m hopefully going to get back to posting some techy stuff soon, I still have a couple of things lined up I just haven’t had time to write them up yet.

Bye for now!

Wow, it’s been three months since I last posted. I know this blog has never exactly been frequent, but that’s bad even for me, however I do have a very good reason. Over the last few months I’ve been incredibly busy working on my 4th year University project.

For anyone that doesn’t know, I’m studying Computer Systems Engineering at the University of Auckland and I’m in my final year of undergraduate. At our university that means working on a year long project (worth 2 times the credit of a regular course) and presenting your progress at the end of it. My project was in the embedded systems arena and involved the development of a real-time embedded speech dialogue system – basically an embedded speech controlled application. I’ll try and post some more details in the future, I have some videos and stuff I want to put up, but I don’t want to focus on it too much because we didn’t really use that much Free Software.

Anyway, it’s pretty much over now – we just have one more component to hand in on Friday and then it’s done. I’ve really enjoyed the experience and learnt a lot. I’m thinking that I may go further into embedded systems – hopefully to do a Masters degree next year. I also want to do some hardware hacking/embedded systems stuff at home and have already been searching out how I can do it using Free Software, I’ve already found Free replacements for some of the components we used which I wish we’d used now! Maybe there will be a few posts on that in the future, but I already have a couple of other posts lined up, so expect to see a flurry of activity here!

That’s it for now though. See ya!

Hey,

Haven’t been posting in a while, mainly because I’ve been busy doing other things:

I’ve developed and successfully launched a new website for my Tramping Club, using Drupal – which I’ve now found is really awesome for community type sites like that btw.

I’ve switched to Crunchbang (Cruncheee) on my EeePC, which I really like. I intend to review it at some point, but I’m not sure when I’ll get round to it.

Also, this week has been the first week of uni, so I’m going to be busier from now on. I’ll still try and post as much as I can, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to write any long articles.

That’s about it. I should probably mention a bit of site news too:

I was just listending to Linux Outlaws 80 and they mentioned this whole drop IE6 thing, which I’m really in favour of! This site has now officially dropped IE6 thanks to the Shockingly Big IE6 Warning plugin for wordpress.

Also LO mentioned the email I sent them re Wikia search (yay!!!). Thanks Dan and Fab (if you ever read this!).