Builder's notes

As you can see, the migration to octopress started with the right foot. The blog is up and running, and I just have to try three times. That was an easy one. The first time I installed gentoo, took me about ten times to get it right.

I had some help, some guy named zanshin in #octopress at freenode, and the docs at Octopress.org. Now I’ve installed a new theme, added my tweets stream, and I’m on the way to migrate my content from the previous wordpress blog. I have found a tool named exitwp in some post of another guy in the same situation, and will test it soon.

You know what’s missing ? You probably have see all those sites where you make an account for yourself, and they ask you for an URL, like your site. Well, I’ve been putting the wordpress site there. My bad, that should be set on a central place, now I have to go changing that address everywhere. Maybe I should make a redirect page in the wordpress blog, although I have to say, I’ve never had too many readers.

Ohh, there’s other stuff missing, one that I probably miss a lot. wordpress.com have a spell checking utility, well, octopress hasn’t one. It’s up to my vim, and I’m pretty lazy. Since english isn’t my mother tongue. I’ll have to look out for error and typos.

It’s been a while since I blogged anything. Well, I actually did some ranting about starting this new blog. But that really doesn’t count. I should make a post saying what I’ve been up to. But I’m lazy. I’ve been:

• Learning some Qt (and I doesn’t like it, maybe I tell something about this later)
• Using SleekXMPP python library
• Learning ruby (Did I said this already ?)
• Learning Clutter, and here we stop.

While I was trying to pull some code using Clutter and Gtk+, before you ask, I was trying to put GtkWidget inside Clutter Actors to get some fancy animation, I got into some minor troubles, which I think those newbies like me out there should know.

First, if you read the blog of the might Emmanuele Bassi (Clutter’s author and main developer) you then came across this post Had a dream. I did, and I wanted to get those warning they talk about so my code would need to be modified pretty much anything when those API get deprecated. Well, I didn’t, I mean I used deprecated API and my compiler wasn’t throwing me warnings. Someone told me that I needed to use a decent set of compilers flags, and I tried, nah, still nothing. I went into IRC, I found help there and after a while, I was told to add this to my compiler options

1

-DCLUTTER_VERSION_MIN_REQUIRED=CLUTTER_VERSION_1_10

This finally solved the issue and I’m having pretty warnings every time I use an old method which should be destroyed in a couple of months.

Today I’ve been looking finally at how to deploy an Octopress based blog into Github. It’s been a while since I saw octopress, and I always liked the motto, it goes something like: blogging for hackers, and it sounds cool. I do have to say I don’t think of myself as a hacker, I’m more the guy who look to dig in the code of every piece of software I use, even when I know I don’t the time to.

Anyway, after a big while, and my request of my wordpress blog inclusion in Planet Gnome went stalled. I decided to go using Octopress, first I emailed the guys in Github since I have my doubts about using their system for ranting about stuff not related with ruby/rails and stuff. But they said they’re fine with that. I do have to say I’ve been learning some ruby these past days, there’s this RubyMonk site which is pretty cool, and I found out RubyKoans too which are pretty impressive too, although my lack of some supercharged environment is killing my advance there. Well after all that I think is pretty logic to try this move.

Here ends the drafting part

I’m the proud owner of a Gnome Foundation membership. That sounded awfull, anyway. It’s true , today the Gnome Fundation Comitee approved my application, and I set up my mail alias.

This is a great news to me, and I think it would be to anyone. There’s point you can’t miss though, this means more responsibilty doing a good job to make Gnome Project great.

Yesterday, while I was talking with the Gnome Contacts developer came up the issue of me having an account. I wasn’t familiar with the process, he point me to the page in question, and I filled the application for the account. The process took a day, this morning while I was solving another bug in Gnome Contact the mails reached my inbox telling me about the new account being setup in an hour or so. I finished the work in the patch. Went right to the instruction for using Git as the Gnome standards requires and pushed the patch by my own. Now I have a few commits already in git.gnome.org/gnome-contacts but this one is the first one I make myself.

Now I’m still waiting for the Gnome Foundation decision on my application to be a member yet, this is huge joy. I’m looking forward to contribue more to Gnome, it’s an amazing world with amazing people and great programmers, and I’m pretty happy to be prt of it.