Diverse technical interests

My technical focus has shifted quite a lot over the years.

I was really into computers as a small child, but took my teenage years off it to play guitar, bike outside and meet girls. Then I started to get more heavily into computers (again) in 1998 when I went to University and had a broadband connection.

I started by copy-editing for the web and writing bucket loads of HTML. This led to ASP and then a bit of PHP. I then, around 2002, moved to open source software and got deeper and deeper into Linux/Unix system administration, as well as, of course, making websites and setting up CMSes and so on.

Over the years I had picked up the very basics in many different programming languages, but I decided in 2006 that if I was going to develop my programming (while working and studying part time), then I should concentrate on one language for the moment.

I wanted a language that I could use to make interactive websites, as well as use for system administration, but it also needed to be good for programming for the Linux desktop.

So in the Summer of 2006, I sat in a relative's garden with a beatup ancient laptop and some printed out Python documentation, and never looked back.

These days my favourite computing activity is programming, especially with the Python, as regular readers might have noticed. I am churning out Python at a good rate, some of it for paid work, some of it for my own private learning and a tiny bit ends up in my public Python script directory.

In the coming months the amount of programming will rise still further as I am likely to take on some new roles from May, more of that will be revealed later when/if that happens.

Let's all share our scripts together

So I was asked:

> zeth have you got a bzr repo of your python scripts? so people using your little apps could give something back?

An interesting idea. The whole idea of free software/open source is that people can modify the code and share the changes. It might be that no one ever uses it, if so I have lost nothing, it is worth a try.

I only wanted to include the ones I thought were both useful and were relatively self-contained. The focus is on more on developing useful scripts that can be used by others, rather than in old scripts that only fulfilled a need of mine only. So I had a bit of a clear out, and uploaded nine fairly self-contained Python modules to Launchpad. With the idea is that I publish new ones there in the months ahead.

Here is the site. I was going to call it "Zeth's scripts" but since the idea is that it will be a collaborative affair, i.e. you can get involved, it is called Eden.

It is a garden because it is small now but might develop and change over time. Some scripts will grow, some will die.

For example, in the last post here, I made a module which took updates from Twitter and put them in pop-up notifications in the GNOME-desktop. Say someone takes the program and changes it so that Facebook updates are published instead, or makes it so it makes pop-ups for KDE or the Mac instead of for GNOME.

That person could then push their version ('branch' in bzr terminology') back up to the site. They do not need permission from me or anyone else. Launchpad can contain as many branches as you like.

Even more importantly, other people can also submit their own scripts and we can discuss them and modify them. You don't even have to use Python (shock, horror).

Making your own branch

So to get your own branch of the programs.

bzr branch lp:eden

Now lets say you have edited one of the scripts, or you have put new scripts into the directory. You can then share them back to launchpad like this:

bzr push sftp://zeth0@bazaar.launchpad.net/~zeth0/eden/devel

Replace zeth0 both times with whatever your launchpad username is.

If you don't have a launchpad username click here and enter an email address.

As that bloke with the beard says, "Happy Hacking".

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