Monthly Archives: January 2007

Last.fm in your language: 1.1.3.0 is out!

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Just a couple of days after we published an update for Last.fm 1.0.9.6, a new version was released: Last.fm 1.1.3.0.

Besides some bugfixes, the UI has been translated into several languages, so you can run this program in english, italian, german, french, spanish, portuguese, polish, russian, japanese and korean.

Moreover, this time the Last.fm team has released a Debian package (for Debian etch), available from the Last.fm downloads page.

However you still might find our packages interesting because:

  • We’re including some enhancements not available in the official version.
  • We have packages for several distros: Debian sarge and etch, Ubuntu dapper and edgy.

As usual, you can get the source code and diff at John’s page for original source code, Debian diff and a description of our changes. The compiled packages are available here.

And as usual, feedback is appreciated. Enjoy!

Last.fm 1.0.9.6 updated

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John has been working in the Last.fm client code and prepared some nice patches, so here’s a new minor release for Debian etch (1.0.9.6-0etch3) and Ubuntu edgy (1.0.9.6-0edgy3).

Changes include:

  • Some leaks were fixed, so now the client wastes less memory 😉
  • A new ALSA plugin has been introduced.
  • Users can select the web browser from the options dialog.

Get the full changelog and source code at John’s page.

As usual, compiled packages are available from my webpage. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Enjoy!

My first programming book

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I don’t remember exactly what my first programming book was, as it was many years ago (when I was about 12) and I keep a number of programming books from that time, but it was probably this one:

Novas aventuras no seu ZX Spectrum

It was a Portuguese translation of “Creating Adventure Programs on the ZX Spectrum“, originally by Peter Shaw and James Mortleman.

It explained how to design and code text adventures, one of the earliest genres of computer games that was about to disappear completely in the early 90s but fortunately is still alive thanks to the Internet (although it’s not a commercial genre anymore, obviously). There’s a number of free software programs for Unix-based systems to play classic and new games from that genre. Maybe one day I’ll post something about them 😉

With this book I learned some interesting things about algorithms, text parsing and data structures. All the programs included in the book were written in Sinclair BASIC, the first language that every Spectrum owner learned as the computer included an interpreter.

However, it wouldn’t be fair to say that I learned programming thanks to any book, because without any doubt almost all of my early programming experiences began with MicroHobby, a Spanish magazine dedicated to Sinclair computers. Thanks to the work of some enthusiastic fans who scanned all the issues, MicroHobby is available online in the MicroHobby Forever site.