Recent blog entries for kwd

I've been fairly busy lately. Actually having a little time to code outside of work now that I've laid off that blasted Playstation 2 game, Dark Cloud. I've signed up for an account on sourceforge in hopes that I'll actually have time and the motivation to do something. Whenever I do get around to posting some projects up there, I'll link to them from here. On that note, is there some way to link your advogato diary and ratings to sourceforge somehow? That would be cool.

My biggest projects right now are making encap packages of my most often used programs. See their official page for details. I also have a checkbook balancing type program I'm working on, because quite frankly, none of them do everything I want. Its going to be SQL based, because that seems like the easiest way to get it to do what I want. Initially, I'll do a web based version because I don't know any GUI toolkits, and just want something quick & easy. It being SQL, if I do the database right, I won't have to redo the database for the gui version.

Well, I finally stared on pkgtools. whickpkg is done and functional. The other scripts are coming along OK. What little I have done is available at this site. I'm currently calling this version 0.0.3. Version 0.1 will have all the features that I wanted when I first thought of this thing.

Woohoo! Finally started to update my web page a bit... Although right now it looks a lot worse than it did :-(

Programming
I've finally decided to did in an work on an open source project. Nothing terribly earth-shattering. I had done some thinking about it and currently Slackware is my favorite operating system, not just favorite Linux distribution. So I've decided to start trying to enhance it a little. First thing: the packaging tools. They leave something to be desired. A couple things I want to do:

• pkgcheck: a script that will generate md5 checksums of all files in a package. Then you can run it again with different parameters and it will give you a list of files in that package.
• whichpkg: another script. It will be something like you run "whichpkg foo" and it will tell you "file foo is in the following packages:"
• pkgbackup: using pkgcheck and whichpkg, will back up any files not in a package or that have been modified since the package has been installed.

Why am I doing all this? I want a way to back up all my stuff that isn't in a package so I won't lose anything when I wipe out everything on my box and install the new version of Slackware (whenever it comes out). Believe me, it needs it. Oh yeah, I'm planning on writing all this stuff perl, since I really want to learn perl.

I realized something yesterday at work. I'm hating it because I have very little experience working on a programming project with other people. It may be really helpful to get into an open source project. I'd like to do something fun, not too hard. Any ideas?

Not sure if I'm doing something wrong, but I seem to be having issues with Mozilla. Don't get me wrong, its a great browser, a great project, but its too darn slow to be usable as my main e-mail client. Anyway, every other e-mail client has something that bugs me except for Evolution. The problem with evolution is its only available for RPM-based systems, Debian, and Solaris. Tonight's project - get Evolution working in Slackware. I would just switch to RedHat or SuSE, but I keep getting frustrated with RPM dependency problems and just switching back anyway. Also on the agenda for Real Soon Now - get my Handspring Visor and the Gnome Palm Pilot conduits working together. Whenever I get it working, I'll post a howto to my web page.

I finally went ahead and created an account on this crazy site! I'm currently not really involved in any free/open source software project. Just kind of lurking on the FreeBSD and NetBSD developers lists, messing with Free, Net, and OpenBSD as well as Linux. Currently, most of my programming time is spend at my job at Jumpline.com. I want to get involved in some open source project. Initially, I wanted to get involved with developing the FreeBSD kernel, but after looking through some kernel source and some of the PR's, I decided it was most likely too much to chew on for a first project.