Stardict in maemo extras

It's been about a month since I first downloaded Maemo 4.0(Chinook) SDK and tried to compile something like stardict. But there is much more difficult thing left to do - add .deb packages to maemo repository and create .install file.

Nokia did the right thing I think - usual user only needs to click on green button and choose place where to put an link in menu. The whole work is left invisible behind - to provide easy setup developer has to:

• create SSH RSA private/public keys
• create GPG keys
• upload public key on maemo garage
  
• write changelog info
• sign changelog files
• upload packages onto "extras" repository
• create installation file

Of course, Nokia has half-draft tutorial for this. So after the long process sleepy contributor finally gets this pretty arrow:
Note: still beta!

Back to 80s - console pacman game

Some time ago I had an interview for AI developer and the task was to write a Pacman game. I was not in mood to create a nice GUI or pretty 2D/sprites graphics, the main thing to do was to show ghosts running after the player. Used a standard non-blind path-finding algorithm for this. Here is the screenshot of the game(it's ugly, I know!):

Actually that's not the first game I've ever made. The first one was "Mine Sweeper" written in BASIC when I was 14. And I can assure you python is just awesome! May be anyone can remember GOTO and GOSUB/RETURN operators. Now having all these OOP, exceptions, libraries it's like damn nightmare. I definitely will prefer python to BASIC when teaching my children ;)

The source code(in python, of course) can be found following the link

Hi mom! Meet my bots!

Just imagine - not too distant future, you use robots' help everyday as if it's as common as cleaning teeth. They help you to keep order in your house, they send you reminders, they store all your friends' birthdays(so what?! I't my weak point). What if I tell you that you can use them more from today?

Google released its translating bot farm - special service to have an easy-access dictionary/translator in your gtalk Buddy list:

Russian to English:
Eugene Antimirov: Где находится ближайшая станция метро?
ru2en@bot.talk.google.com: Where is the nearest subway station?
Eugene Antimirov: Сколько это стоит?
ru2en@bot.talk.google.com: How much does it cost?

English to Russian:
Eugene Antimirov: Hi, anybody here speaks English?!
en2ru@bot.talk.google.com: Привет, кто-то здесь говорит на английском языке!?
Eugene Antimirov: What's the problem, buddy?
en2ru@bot.talk.google.com: В чем проблема, приятель?

It's awesome idea, I think. Of course IM/Jabber bots are not something new. IRC servers have had them for years. But new web2.0 and other services may breathe new life into this idea!

Even in my daily routine I use a few. Most frequently used one I wrote to keep an eye on my servers:

Eugene Antimirov: df -h
bot.....@gmail.com: Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 5.1G 3.3G 1.6G 68% /
udev 493M 76K 493M 1% /dev
/dev/sda4 135G 115G 13G 90% /home
Eugene Antimirov: sudo /etc/init.d/apache restart
bot.....@gmail.com: Restarting apache... Done

Just 20 lines of python + xmpp code and voila!

One of my friends uses bot who posts latest funny quotes from bash.org.ru to amuse chat visitors on his site.
So I think there will be more and more of them. Who knows...

Stardict port for IT OS2008

Finally did something useful for Open Source. It's 1:00AM now and I've just completed compiling everything I could find for my Nokia N800. Installing maemo chinook SDK was not without confusing things but I hope they will fix everything.

So the first application was of course Stardict. Just few fixes to code from trunk and it's ready:



Thanks to Gonzo for hosting. You can find 2 deb packages following this link. I'll commit my changes during next few days. In my To-Do list I have now Freeciv, my pacman game and mplayer's new GUI.