Things I ought to be blogging about
I just got back from OSCON. I gave an Ignite talk about my Kindle hacking, a "regular" 45 minute talk about SD, the p2p bug tracker that I work on and a half-day talk on RT. OSCON, as always, was amazing. I think I only made it to a half-dozen actual sessions - the hallway track kept me that busy.
About a dozen people yelled at me for not doing more to publicize some of the projects I'm involved with. Each and every one of these deserves a whole series of blog posts. Maybe by listing them here, I'll embarass myself into writing a bit more.
I've had a busy year. I didn't realize how busy until I wrote this post. Below are some of the projects I've been involved with / instigated. In almost every case, I've had fantastic collaborators who have helped make the tools a reality. But the projects are all my fault ;)
SD is a peer to peer bug tracker (think git for bugs) that can also sync to RT, Hiveminder, Google Code, GitHub, Trac. Read-only support for syncing with RedMine is available today, with full two-way sync coming soon. Sync plugins are only a few hundred lines of code once you have a CPAN module to talk to an app. For now, you can check out the talk I gave at OSCON.
K-9 is an opensource email client for Android. I founded the project when I forked the core android "Email" app to get some needed bugfixes onto user devices quickly. Since then, K-9 has added features and fixes at a pretty rapid pace. Best of all, other folks do a lot of the work :)
Shipwright is a build and distribution system for applications. It has special features designed to tame Perl's CPAN, but it works well for non-Perl apps too. It lets you build a versioned source archive of your application and all its dependencies. It comes with tools to help you distribute buildable source archives with an app and all its dependencies (down to libc if you swing that way) with a single installation tool. The resulting binary packages have a bit of magic to make them magically relocatable. Just recently, we also released support for multi-architecture binary distributions.
Changelogger is a tool we've been working on at Best Practical to ease the ordinarily tedious process of creating a human-readable changelog for your software package out of the version control system's commit log. It lets you open the change categorization and tidying process to a community of developers who can vote on rephrasings and categorization of changelog entries. The tool let Nicholas Clark slice through the 2500 changes included in Perl 5.10.1 in about 7 hours. Once we get a few more issues cleaned up, we'll be running a changelogger as a public service.
Kindle hacking. At this point, I have an ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope chroot with working X server, Keyboard and 5-pad. I need to fix an X server bug, then I'll build a downloadable installer and let the rest of the world start playing around.
I've done a bit of minor javascript hacking to make Twitter's web view more palatable to me: http://fsck.com/~jesse/spyhunter/ and http://fsck.com/~jesse/narrow-twitter.user.js.
At YAPC::US last month, I came up with a pair of 20 line scripts which let me read twitter in Mutt. I get keyboard bindings, proper threading, lightning fast searching AND I can keep it running in screen ;) It's actually just a replacement for /usr/bin/sendmail and some goo to turn tweets into maildir messages. My plan with this is to clean it up and add RSS feeds, Facebook and a few other activity streams. I may then try to package it up or set it up as a service. The code's all in my github account.
A half-dozen other things I tried out died on the vine: A postgres-based email archival tool, A ground-up rewrite of RT (don't worry, RT4 is alive and well, but that's another post), cleanup of MobiPerl and...well, I've blocked out my memories of the rest of them.