In the library completely out.

Yep. I’ve been at my school library all day. It sucks. My legs are sour, I can’t stand it. Oh well. 10 more minutes until freedom.

First it was a test, and now our entire class is in the library.

At the beginning I thought this was going to be fun. But no… The only time we stepped out of the library was to get lunch.

Anyways, I’m about to fall asleep and I can’t wait to get out.

Thank you Akismet, redoux.

Hey everyone, this is Deathgleaner speaking. Kudos to the people behind AKISMET for creating the world’s best spam-fighting tool. I use it on my blog and it does a great job of catching spam comments from advertisers and low-lifes, and it still lets good comments through. My blog would probably be a hate box if not for Akismet.

Akismet has netted about 150 spam comments. It’s scary that spam comments out-rival normal ones.

Thanks again,
Deathgleaner

The flu. It’s here

People have been dropping out of school at unprecedented rates recently. At the beginning, no one could notice that the flu was already spreading at a fast rate, but as time went on, holes and gaps appeared in the classrooms and the student body looked like Swiss cheese. Already I have met many people who have been diagnosed with the swine flu.

The CDC says that the number of flu cases at this time of year matches the number of flu cases that we usually have near the peak time of year.

Even though people are taking dire precautions such as washing your hands and staying home, the flu continues to spread, probably because one student gets sick while at school, even though they don’t know it. Their latent germs get over the staircase railings, and once these germs become active, anyone who has touched that railing is infected. The spread is exponential, and young people are at more of a risk because they have not been exposed to such strains before.

My advise: wash your hands as frequently as possible. I’m not even joking. And carry around a few plastic bags in case you have to touch anything that’s swine flu infested.

Fedora Activity Day – Fedora Talk (Day 1)

Day One of the Fedora Talk Activity day is over.

Here’s some very quick wrapping up:

  • Icecast streaming is now working pretty decently, however the current test server is in… Germany. (http://publictest16.fedoraproject.org:8000/test.ogg)
  • Improvements on documentation, generally on the web site.
  • Troubleshooting tests are underway.
  • More “ghetto HTML” and such funnies.
  • People thinking my bag o’ chips is popcorn.

Things will continue tomorrow at I don’t know what time. I didn’t hear that part.

The conference has taken place on talk.fedoraproject.org, extension 2001.

Packaging ScriptBot for Fedora, a continuing adventure

You mostly likely know that I’m  a proud contributor to the Fedora Project. I helped out a bit on blogs.fedoraproject.org and I generally also keep the wiki clean. However, I haven’t ever made a package.

So my first packaging adventure is packaging the IRC bot library that ScriptBot uses.

One word: pain.

There’s a few nuances with PircBot. It comes as a jar with source inside it as well as the compiled classes. I extracted the source, made it usable for RPM to build. I scrapped the binaries, and put it into a traditional tarball. So apparently that doesn’t work.

Next, I found RPM wasn’t making a buildroot correctly. So I had to make a hack around that.

Then, it came to the install path. There’s a page on the Fedora Project Wiki apparently. But I didn’t know that! It’s not linked from the frequently visited Packaging pages.

After getting it to build, it went through a scratch build on Koji, then I filed for review on Bugzilla.

That’s when I found the page for Fedora’s Java packaging guidelines. I apparently did need documentation (although all I can put is a link, the documentation isn’t really pullable from the website). So I ended marking the bug for my request as CLOSED DEFERRED.

Expect a part two post when I actually get Pircbot into the repos.  Also likely is a part three when ScriptBot itself gets in.

See the ScriptBot project page at scriptbot.theoks.net.

Spam, spam, spam

Spam is always a problem. It’s a problem for everyone. Blocking it is also a problem. You can lots of the time have false positives. Which gets annoying. Also when your anti-spam doesn’t block enough. Or when it gets in your way. Maybe it doesn’t even work with your specific software.

I have spam problems too. SpamAssassin is the most well known open source mail-based anti-spam solution. The developers behind SpamAssassin need your help. They need you to submit “ham” and “spam” mail in order to teach SpamAssassin to recognize new spammer techniques.

Check the project out at this wiki page.