Last week on the first part of this post we went through the necessary steps in order to have a working setup to maintain your own PPA.

Now we are going over the actual steps in order to build the packages.

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So, after wasting quite some time meandering through the Internet in order to create a good workflow for having a PPA for the EFL that involves the least amount of manual work as possible, I thought that it might be a good idea to actually document this and help the poor souls who would like to do this for their own projects or for those who would like to help maintain the EFL one (if you are one of these persons, please get in touch).

First of all, something that should’ve been done on the previous post, is to provide an explanation of what exactly is a PPA. A Personal Package Archive is Ubuntu’s way of allowing users to provide their own packages in a easily maintainable and shareable fashion. Therefore, users of Ubuntu do not need to wait for packages to be updated or included upstream, they can provide it themselves. There are many tutorials about setting one up, but I decided to write my own both to document what I’ve done and also to make it easier for others to follow and also to provide helpful tips about ways to improve my own workflow.
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Now that E17 is about to be released, and lots of work are being done in fixing a few outstanding bugs and getting things ready, we have started working on an official PPA to provide Ubuntu users with a quicker and easier way of experimenting with it.

It is available for testing here and will be kept up to date with the latest stable releases of the EFL plus the Alphas and Betas of E17 until the release. This work was based on the previous work of Hannes Janetzek and many others. I’m finishing up some remaining bits and will start work on the unstable daily builds next week.

If you find any problems on these packages, feel free to contact me (or send an e-mail to the enlightenment-users mailing list). For more information on how to help out with the packaging efforts, I’m going to be posting more information here next week.

Hello gentlemen, I know the blog has been pretty much on hold for quite some time but I’m going to try to pick it up again. And in order to have a good start I’m going to announce something that was in fact released some time ago, but without any sort of proper public announcement.

GNU Shogi 1.4 has basically two major changes:

• Switched license to GPLv3;
• New maintainer, namely me.

Besides those, there were a few bug fixes and general cleanups. More is coming in this area, I’m trying to gather now the different patches that had been added by distributions and integrating them (GNU Shogi had been left without a proper maintainer for quite some time). As soon as I setup a proper official repository I’ll put more information here, as well as listing whats planned for the future. If you’ve any requests for GNU Shogi, please feel free to contact me as well so we can add it to the proper TODO list :)

While I don’t have the time to write some more thorough reviews, let me just get some of the current stuff I’ve read out of the way:

Eragon

I’ve just finished reading the first book of the series, got the next one already downloaded on Kindle. I really liked the book, and I’ve high expectations for the remaining ones in the series. My only complaint is that Paolini tries too much to look like a veteran writer, and this shows in his choice of words and the construction of his phrases. This is mostly related to immaturity I believe, and much like J.K. Rowling I expect him to improve his writing skills on the next books.

One Jump Ahead: Challenging Human Supremacy in Checkers

This is an amazing account of the development of the Chinook software, a Checkers playing engine that was developed by Jonathan Schaeffer and his team. I seriously recommend this one, specially to those interested in Artificial Intelligence for Games and the level of dedication required to achieve an almost-perfect engine. Though the book discusses several technical topics, they are always properly introduced so it should be pretty easy to follow. The same goes for Checkers, which I actually found out is not as easy as I had previously thought.

Bossypants

This is Tina Fey’s autobiography. Being a huge fan of her work, I thought this would be an amazing read, but she puts so much emphasis on sarcasm that I actually stopped halfway through this one.

I really honestly thought it would be much better given the fact I love Tina's writing on 30 Rock and others, but after going over some 15 or 16 chapters I just got fed up with the huge amount of sarcasm. It does provide a few funny moments, and it might even get better towards the end if you stick with it, but I didn't.

The Steve Jobs Way

Though it describes itself as focusing on the leadership skills of Steve Jobs, this book is actually a biography/mythology in disguise.

It does provide a nice account of the history of Apple, including detailing some of the detours from Jobs at NeXT and Pixar. But it markets itself as a view into the leadership ways of Steve Jobs, and though it does mention lots of tidbits related, most of the time it just ends up as some sort of shrine for him: "only Steve Jobs could have done this", "only Steve Jobs could have thought this", etc.

I haven't read it yet, but I bet Isaacson's official biography is probably a much better read than this, both for people interested in his life and for people interested in his leadership skills.

Founders at Work

This is a collection of interviews with Startup founders. They really go into the details of their beginnings and give plenty of advice for wannabes, while keeping a extremely light mood. This is one of those books which you can always go back to, rereading one or another interview (much like its companion Coders at Work).

Can’t recommend this one enough, hopefully more people in the “Startup scene” will read and learn something from it.