Category Archives: English

Pizza Party!

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Here’s a useful program!

Pizza Party lets you order pizzas from the command line. It has lots of benefits, including:

  • Batch usage (for ordering many pizzas).
  • Runs on most Unix-like operating systems.
  • Background operation (you can order a pizza from a cron script).
  • Lots of options to customize your pizza (--extra-cheese, --pepperoni, etc.). Check the manual page for details.
  • It’s free software!

The only drawback is that it currently only supports Domino’s pizza. We’ll have to port it to Telepizza or whatever.

Yum!

Backported patches to sarge and dapper

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Johh has backported the latest patches he created for the etch/edgy versions of Last.fm to version 1.0.7, so Debian sarge and Ubuntu dapper users can benefit for them. Changes include the ability to select the web browser from the configuration dialog, a new ALSA plugin and some other minor fixes.

Last.fm 1.1.3.0 for Debian etch and Ubuntu edgy has been updated too, including a fix for environments with several sound cards.

Full changelog and source code here. Binaries here.

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.

Last.fm 1.0.7 updated

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I have updated the last.fm packages for Debian sarge (1.0.7-0sarge2) and Ubuntu dapper (1.0.7-0dapper2). This update solves a bug that caused the program to segfault when double clicking on Friends.

Download them at http://people.igalia.com/berto.

Version 1.0.9.6 is not affected by this bug, so if you’re using Debian etch or Ubuntu edgy you don’t need to do anything.

Happy holidays.

A Christmas gift for you

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I’m pleased to announce the availability of new Debian and Ubuntu packages of the the latest version of the Last.fm client for x86 systems.

New versions have been released by the Last.fm team, being 1.0.9.6 the current one. However the only official download for GNU/Linux is still several months old and lacks the newest features and bug fixes.

I have been combining efforts with John Stamp and we have prepared packages for Debian and Ubuntu. We’ll try to keep them updated with every new release from Last.fm (you can subscribe to this blog’s feed for announcements if you want to).

Go here for downloads and more information.

These packages are unofficial and they haven’t been tested thoroughly, so comments and suggestions are welcome.

Merry Christmas for you all!

P.S.: I’m sure that some of you know where I took this post’s title from. Highly recommended, of course, and not just for these dates 😉

Last.fm client for Debian and Ubuntu

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I wrote about Last.fm some time ago in this blog, and mentioned some of the programs you can use to listen to this internet station.

However, the previous official player is deprecated and no longer supported (although it still works) as the Last.fm team has released a new client (in beta stage for GNU/Linux systems). This new client can be downloaded here, but there’s no Debian package, just a precompiled binary in a .tar.bz2 file. Moreover, this binary does not work in sarge, the current stable release of Debian.

As this new client is GPL too (congratulations!) I downloaded the source code and made a Debian package ready to run in sarge systems. You can get it from my webpage. I have been using it successfully for some time, but any comments regarding its packaging are welcome. Enjoy!

Updated 03-12-2006: I also built another package for Debian testing (etch). You can download it from the same page I mentioned above.

Updated 04-12-2006: Now a package for Ubuntu edgy is available too!