My Weechat Setup
I have been using the devel version of Weechat since about march 2009 because of a exploit in 0.2.6 (Which has been fixed in the repo’s from 0.2.6.1).
Why would I carry on using the devel version even if the security issue has been patched?
Simple 0.3.0 isn’t in any released stable Ubuntu repository yet also I like to help out testing/debugging/bug reporting where I can.
Why Weechat over some other CLI client like Irssi?
It started off as a simple I preferred Weechat’s config layout and ease of use and sane default configurations. Also the support from the Weechat community is astounding. People like xt and Flashcode have ported the majority of irssi scripts just to help out people transitioning from Irssi to Weechat. On that note the new changes in weechat’s API make almost every thing customisable and scriptable. I do in fact still still make use of Irssi as a bouncer still until weechat’s relay plugin is stable enough. Hopefully this will be finished soon.
How scriptable is Weechat?
Weechat provides bindings for Python, Ruby(devel version even supports ruby 1.9 now), tcl, Perl, and of course C. Weechat has a very extensive API to plugin to almost every aspect of the Weechat functionality.
Is Weechat available in my language
Weechat supports Internationalization so even if it currently isn’t available feel free to translate it into your own language.
My Favourite scripts/features
First and foremost is weeget this is weechats script manager/updater. Once installed you are able to install/update any other script including its self by simply doing /weeget install $scritpname.
- iset – Allows a simple interface to edit/search for configurations
- weeget – see above.
- buffer_autoclose – basically closes inactive private buffers after a specific period, helps to keep things clean and neat.
- go – Allows for hot jumping to buffers
- screen_away – Script that sets your away status based on whether weechat’s screen is attached or not.
- shell – Allows simple commands to be executed from within weechat.
- urlgrab – Script that helps manage the annoyances of long urls that would normally be unclickable
- aspell – This is a plugin not a script! This highlights spelling mistakes on your input buffers so you can see quickly for those minor typo’s
Tips and Tricks
- Add the alias smart filter. Helps to hide useless info like joins and parts from inactive members of large channels ie #ubuntu-meeting
- Use weechat’s remote access.
- Read the FAQ it contains lots of useful information.
Hope this has been of some help to others.
Blackberry Development on Linux
Dear Blackberry.
Would you please stop packaging your RIM development platform (That is written in java and runs perfectly well on Linux) in .exe format that does funky checks and api calls that fails to run in wine. Thanksbye.
On serious note I see many forum posts “Can I install this on Linux” to which all reply “No sorry you can’t” Ye you can install it on Linux but you can copy the installed files over to Linux go figure.
I would go into more details but seriously all you need is a windows box to install the files and copy them over 
Also if you would like to install your applications using Linux. Take a look at barry-utils you will need at least 0.15 since bjavaloader was only included in this release. Debian has this version and there is a bug on launchpad requesting an update at least for lucid.
Loco Team Contact Change
As Efrain already pointed out I have officially taken over as South African Ubuntu loco team contact from Jonathan Carter(highvoltage) with the other being Morgan Collett.
Hopefully I will have some more great news about Ubuntu-za to blog about in the future.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Jonathan for all his hard work and effort he has put into this team and wish him all the best. The growth over the last year has been inspiring. I would also like to thank him for continuing to host our wiki.
Optimizing J2mepolish Build Proccess
J2mepolish as a build framework is great! I have been using parts of it since before it was in beta.
J2mepolish provides different licenses depending on how you use the product now while this can be looked on in a bad light but I quite like the fact that it is open-source as well as long as you your self release the code under the same license should you wish to release under a different license there are other payed options available.
The build framework is licensed under GPL no matter how you use it.
I have found that the build proccess can be pretty slow and time consuming I have also found that with out obsfication it by default includes ALL classes in the framework include the GUI/Utils. While you don’t make use of them you aren’t violating the license it does increase the application size. There are a few tweeks that one can make to their own personal setup to improve this.
Firstly tmpfs and mounting your /build and /dist directory into memory (For debugging only I wouldn’t mount a full build) You would have to replace the standard build clean target since the standard user shouldn’t have permissions to delete/create tmpfs
Standard:
<delete dir=\"dist\" />
Changed
<delete includeemptydirs=\"true\">
<fileset dir=\"dist\" includes=\"**/*\" defaultexcludes=\"false\"/>
</delete>
Secondly the since the build proccess includes all the J2mepolish source files by default you should be able to just set polish.client.source to a empty directory but it contains a reference Locale which also contains references to other files(Which are not 100% needed unless you actually use the Utilities provided by J2mepolish)
So a simple fix is create a folder structure with /path/to/directory/de/enough/polish/util/Local.java and place this Local.java in there.
In the build file or one of the config files set
polish.client.source=/path/to/directory
and you should be all set. I noticed huge build time improvements but I don’t currently make sure of the GUI/Utils.
Hope this helps make you more productive. If you have any other tweaks I would love to hear them.
Using Python to Format Json
I have been working quite a bit with Json. Json disregards whitespace by implementation this makes the standard format of Json being a single very long line of not so readable text.
Simple example.
{"query":"some text","results":[{"title":"some result","id":"213"}]}
I had some plan to write some simple python script to format it nicely. I have used the json module before, I wasn’t aware it had a format function as part ofjson.tool.
curl + Json + Python
curl http://domain.com/api.json 2> /dev/null | python -mjson.tool
I found that with our redirection the error output to /dev/null i was getting.
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
0 67 0 67 0 0 76 0 –:–:– –:–:– –:–:– 0
Formated Json
{
"query": "some text",
"results": [
{
"id": "213",
"title": "some result"
}
]
}