Saturday, September 4, 2010

Another Serving of News Soup

Aside from the new Stack and Tile decorator that Clemens Zeidler just made public, there isn't much going on this weekend in the Haiku community. I figured I'd pass along some minor news from the last couple of weeks.

Next weekend I'll be heading off to the Greater Columbus Convention Center to help host a Haiku table at the Ohio Linux Fest, armed with Alpha 2 CDs, flyers, a demo machine, and a bunch of other stuff. I'm looking forward to the time. It was a busy, but fantastic time last year.

A couple of weeks ago a news post was made to HaikuZone about my book. As part of a collaboration effort with Jorge Mare (a.k.a Koki) and some notable Japanese developers in the Haiku community, Learning to Program With Haiku is going to have a special Japanese edition published. There is also some discussion of a Spanish translation, too, and Haiku contributor Kurain is in the process of translating my programming lessons into Chinese. I'm flattered to see some of these opportunities arise -- when I was writing the first few I never thought these would be as well-received as they have been.

As if it weren't already easy to install -- at least if you ask me, anyway -- Paladin is also on its way to becoming an optional package thanks to the effort of developer Scott McCreary (scottmc). The neat part is that -- at least at the moment -- it's possible to build the current 1.3 release or build straight from the sources in Paladin's Mercurial repository on Sourceforge. Pretty slick, if you ask me, and props to Scott for pioneering the effort!

Since the 1.3 release, I've been working on a self-extracting packaging system. It's similar in many ways to the packages used in Zeta 1.2 and 1.5, but creating them can be done using PSfx, a graphical program which closely follows the interface of the PackageBuilder tool which comes with the BeOS 5 Development Tools archive. These packages can also be created from the command line, and this ability is one of the main motivations behind the system. The system is still under development, but it's showing promise. I can't wait for it to be ready, if for no other reason than to make the next Paladin release go from sources to release package in one command, which would be really sweet.

School's back in now, and instead of primarily performing custodial duties like I've had the last couple of years, I'm back to doing what I love most: teaching music. I very much have a full load, so coding is pretty much limited to the weekends, but I'll be working on stuff like this packaging system as I'm able. Best wishes to all of you in whatever you do. :)

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