Eurion · RainCT's Blog » Planet Debian

Debian Games Team Meeting

Contributed Article — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:24:18 +0000

This announcement was provided by Martin Erik Werner. I’m reproducing it for Planet Ubuntu.

The Debian/Ubuntu Games Team is organizing another meeting. If you’re into developing and/or packaging of games, or just generally curious about games in Debian/Ubuntu, you should join!

It will be held next Saturday, the 26th of November, in the #debian-games channel on irc.debian.org (also know as irc.oftc.net) at 10:00 UTC. More information is available on the wiki page Games/Meetings/2011-11-26.

The agenda starts off with the usual round of introductions, so if you’re new to the Team, say hi! Then we’ll be going through the action items from the last meeting, including work on the Debian Games LiveCD, and what’s up with the /usr/games/ path anyways?

Next we’ll be moving onto how the Games Team is faring in terms of members: are new recruits finding it comfortable, should we advertise more?

Next up it’s the squeeky penguin: Wheezy is somewhere in the not-completely-distant future, how does that affect the Games Team, should we be scuffling to get specific tasks done?

Then onto the recurring question of Sponsoring, and how to improve it, should we be utilising DebExpo more? What about our favourite PET?

Lastly, PlayDeb is doing some really neat stuff, would it make sense for our team to push some changes to PlayDeb? Would it make sense for PlayDeb to push changes to Debian Games?

Hopes are for a good discussion, and a merry time, hope to see you all there!

One week with Debian Jaunty was a great experience, until around a month (or...
Debious – A dubious Debian packaging GUI Just some little (unfinished) concept mockup. Seeing that much of...
A list of some commercial GNU/Linux games I thought I’d be nice to make a little list...

Debious – A dubious Debian packaging GUI

RainCT — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 12:49:50 +0000

Just some little (unfinished) concept mockup. Seeing that much of it still ends up as a “text box with syntax highlighting” it’d probably make sense to implement it as a gedit plugin.

Balsamiq source XML

Debian Games Team Meeting This announcement was provided by Martin Erik Werner. I’m reproducing...
Packaging: Test-building your packages Short version: how to test-build Debian/Ubuntu packages in a chroot...
One week with Debian Jaunty was a great experience, until around a month (or...

Language Identification and it’s state in Free Software

RainCT — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 20:17:06 +0000

Working on a new feature for eSpeak GUI I started looking into language identification. Forcing users to manually choose the text’s language is a botheration, so trying to guess it by checking which system dictionary contains the most words from the text or some other method would surely be beneficial.

After a quick search I learned that it’s much easier than this: it’s possible to reliably determine the language based on statistic n-gram information. Ignoring the fact that now I officially hate Firefox, Chromium, OpenOffice.org and everyone else there for not implementing this and having me spend the day changing the spell-checker’s language, I was left with the choice on how to use this in eSpeak GUI.

The first option I found was TextCat, which is also the only library I’ve found to be packaged for Debian. However, ignoring the fact that upstream isn’t maintaining it any more (such a library shouldn’t need too much maintainance, after all), the package declares incorrect dependencies (bug filled a month ago, no response yet) and the API is also pretty crappy (it requires a physical file indicating the location of the statistic models).

Unrelated to that, I’ve also found that the Catalan text samples it includes are incorrect, so the same may be true for other languages. I guess it’d make sense to work on a new (and completely Unicode) language samples collection. I’ve thought of using something like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights since this way all languages can have the same text, but being more of a legal thing it may be biased by some words being too repetitive.

Looking for other alternatives to the TextCat library I’ve only found the following:

TextCat (same name, different code): PHP licensed, so incompatible with GPL projects.
Mguesser (part of mnogosearch-mysql): it’s a standalone executable and not a library.
SpamAssassin’s TextCat.pm: also a standalone executable, this time written in Perl. Apparently they were using a fork of TextCat (the original library, not the PHP licensed one) before that.

So it looks like I’ll have to start by getting a good collection of text samples I can use to generate the statistic data. Then I have several options on how to actually use it. As I see it, those are my possibilities:

Fixing libtextcat‘s packaging and just using that.
Taking it over as new upstream maintainer. Not my preferred option as I don’t really feel like maintaining a C library at this point.
Trying to convince the maintainer of the new TextCat (with last commit January this year and a more sane API) to re-license it in a GPL-compatible way, packaging that and seeing how that one works (haven’t tried it out yet).
Writing my own implementation in Python, maybe based upon this example or TextCat.pm.

Any other ideas, pointers to some library I may have missed or offers to collaborate are very welcome. Please also note that my intention in writing this post is not only to rant about there being no well-maintained ready-to-use library being available, but especially raising awareness on the topic of language identification. I’d love to see this feature all around the desktop, just like (and in combination with) spell-checking, which is already omnipresent.

11 comments
© Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2010. | Permalink | License | Post tags: language identification, Programari lliure, text categorization

Zeitgeist Data-Source Registry

RainCT — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 18:13:33 +0000

This post is about an upcoming feature in Zeitgeist 0.3.3 and is so far only available in checkouts from trunk or our PPA. It is expected to be released within the next weeks.

Some weeks ago I implemented a new feature in Zeitgeist and I figured I’d drop some lines about it. I’m talking about a data-source registry.

You may be wondering, «what the hell is that even, a data-source?». So Zeitgeist is a database, a global event log, but it doesn’t do any magic indexing or monitoring by itself; the information it logs needs to come from somewhere – be it applications sending it to Zeitgeist themselves, daemons, plugins for applications, etc. Any such entity is called a «data-source».

Having a register of all data-sources interacting with Zeitgeist provides some benefits, like for example:

Prototype of a data-source management user-interface

Having a list of them. Lists are nice :).
Being able to disable data-sources from a centralized place instead of requiring each to write its own preferences dialogue.
Being able to set up a blacklist rule considering which data-source the information comes from as a condition (not implemented yet).

More details

When they register, data-sources will need to provide the following information: an unique ID, a name (may be localized), a description (may be localized) and optionally a template specifying what sort of events it logs. Additionally, the last timestamp the data-source was seen by Zeitgeist, whether it is running right now and whether it is enabled will also be available.

It is important to note that registration is not compulsory; while it is highly encouraged for data-sources to use it, is it still possible to anonymously insert information into Zeitgeist (for example from a shell script). The event template is also only informational, and will not be enforced by Zeitgeist at this time.

Avoiding duplicates from GTK Recently Used

You may know that zeitgeist-datahub provides basic support for applications which have no direct Zeitgeist support but do use GTK’s RecentManager, which is not as detailed as we would like, but it is better than nothing. However, until now we had a problem: when applications had support for both, GTK’s Recently Used and Zeitgeist (be it native or as an extension), it was possible for duplicate events to be inserted or other sorts of conflicts between both data-sources. Now that we have the information from the registry available, we’ve been able to solve this modifying our Recently Used data-source to ignore any events concerning applications which already have another data-source logging the same types of events.

In case you don’t care at all about what I’m talking here and you just want to see fancy interfaces, go check this out.

Zeitgeist 0.3.3 is out! From the release announcement: On behalf of the Zeitgeist Project...
Zeitgeist is out! World, the first Zeitgeist release is out! From the release...
Introduction to Zeitgeist 0.2′s API So now that Zeitgeist 0.2.0 is out I’ve thought I’d...

Confession

RainCT — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 23:49:38 +0000

My dear Ubuntu,

I think the time has come that I make a confession. You may be wondering why I haven’t spent much time with you those last months, and you have the right to know. The case is, I have another one. She’s called Debian.

No, it’s not because of you. It’s also not because of your parents; while they aren’t perfect, they are great in many ways and I certainly don’t want to run away from then. Just wait and let me explain this. You surely remember that I spent a week with her some time ago? Well, now that I want to join Debian’s family, I decided that after all that wasn’t much time to get to know here, so I gave her another chance, and with this second experience I fell in love with her unstable character. Ubuntu, you are really extraordinary, and I’m still telling anyone who wants to listen about your wonders, but you just can’t appease my desire for trying out new things as well as Debian does.

Now, this doesn’t mean we won’t see each other anymore. I’ll still take you with me whenever I travel, and I’ll continue helping you with the household. In fact, all this wouldn’t signify a big change at all, if it wasn’t that at the same time I also decided to refocus most of my efforts on raising children, which is what really reduced the time I spent helping you.

So, while currently I’m not seeing you as much as before, I hope you all the best, and I’ll still try to help you advance, be it indirectly (1, 2) or, while probably to a lesser degree, continuing with direct contributions.

By the way, hello Planet Debian!

How to help with package screenshots

RainCT — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 20:25:06 +0000

By now most of you should have noticed that nifty feature that Add/Remove applications and Synaptic got a few months ago – being able to fetch a screenshot for every package, as can be seen in the image below.

What maybe isn’t that well-known is, where do those images actually come from? Easy: they are all at screenshots.debian.net and applications interested in showing them fetch them from there.

Now, I’m not telling you this because I think it’s soooo interesting, but because I’m seeing lots of packages without screenshots and… you can help create those! So, go look for some of your favourite application missing a screenshot, take a meaningful screenshot of it (in English, using PNG format, etc.) and head over to screenshots.debian.net to upload it :).

The new software centre (which can be tested in Karmic) of course also shows those screenshots, and in a much nicer way (they fade in automatically).

Confession My dear Ubuntu, I think the time has come that...