Hell Oh Entropy!

The past week has been quite hectic, with a lot of juggling between different things I have been wanting to do. So here's what I had on my mind:

• I have been looking to learn more about compilers. I goofed off in college and missed out on the same course that was taught twice. I always understood enough to fool my teachers into thinking I knew it all, but not enough to really know it all. Or some for that matter. So now I want to make up for it.
• I had not touched ayttm and libyahoo2 for quite a while. So I wanted to do something there
• Kushal had asked me if I could package libraw for Fedora because some random app needed it. He asked me because I knew autotools and I could autotoolize the project before I package it.
• Rahul pointed out this cool little command line audio player called gst123. I had been looking to write something like this for some time now but I just could not wrap my head around gstreamer. I tried it and immediately fell in love. I just had to package it for Fedora.
• Work at my day job. Lots and lots of work.
• Work at my day job. Lots and lots of work. Yes, it is worth mentioning twice

And so here's what I actually ended up doing over the week:

• I had bought 3 books to study compilers. They're just lying there since I haven't had enough time to actually start studying.
• Nothing on ayttm and libyahoo2. Not enough time
• Packaged libraw and submitted for a package review. There is no activity on that bug report yet, but there was some action before it. Libraw upstream does not like autotools, so I had to hand-write a configure script to detect stuff. I also looked up and tried out the app for which Kushal wanted me to package libraw. The app is Shotwell, a photo management program. And it is good; I'm starting to use it for my photographs now. I'm glad I decided to package libraw for it.

• I packaged gst123. The package has been approved and I have already submitted an update for F-13. I did this while on a bus from Pune to Mumbai :D

  gst123 is a really cool app, try it out. It might not play internet radio streams right out of the box (my use case), but you can easily pipe/grep/cut your way to getting it to work. Here's how I play the radio stream from Absolute Radio:

  gst123 `curl -s http://network.absoluteradio.co.uk/core/audio/ogg/live.pls?service=vcbb | grep File1 | cut -d '=' -f 2`

  See, it's so easy!

Oh yeah, work at my day job. Lots and lots of work.