Writing Tetris in Clojure

Good evening to everyone. Today I want to guide you step-by-step through the process of writing a game of Tetris in Clojure. My goal was not to write the shortest version possible but the concisest one and the one that would use idiomatic Clojure techniques (like relying on the sequence processing functions and making a clear distinction between purely functional and side-effect code). The result I got is about 300 lines of code in size but it is very comprehensible and simple. If you are interested then fire up your editor_of_choice and let’s get our hands dirty.
The whole code is available here.

Raidcall on Wine: problem with dnsapi.dll

Recently I stuck with a problem that had no solution around the Internet. Raidcall, a voice chat program exclusively for Windows, refused to start under Wine referring to the absent (or wrong) library dnsapi.dll. I found out that there is such library in ./wine/drive_c/windows/system32/ folder. Replacing this file with original dnsapi.dll taken from Windows distribution didn’t help. So after that I opened winecfg, switched to Libraries, found dnsapi.dll (native) in the list and just removed it (Remove button is on the right). Then, after applying the changes, Raidcall finally started.

Hope this would help somebody.

Browsers on WM8505 Linux

Being a proud owner of WM8505 mini netbook I spent a lot of time tinkering with it. This little noname machines ship with preinstalled WinCE that is very close to useless, so as soon as I got the netbook I installed this Debian distribution on it. And since I don’t want my time to be utterly wasted I decided to start a series of post concering different aspects of using Linux on WM8505 netbooks. In this very entry I would talk about different browsers available for this installation, from the simplest to the most functional. So, let’s start.

Note: most of the information here should be also relevant for VT8500 netbooks.

Orglendar – calendar with org-mode schedule list for Awesome WM

This is still another widget to make awesome users’ life easier. This widget parses your Emacs org-mode files and shows you a pretty to-do list and a calendar. Here are listed its features:

• shows on-demand calendar with marked schedules and deadlines

• shows schedules and deadlines ordered by date

• supports multiple org-files

If you are interested visit this link for further information about installation and usage.

Quick launch bar for Awesome WM

After switching from Gnome\KDE many Awesome newcomers feel the lack of mouse-operated controls (like desktop icons or quick launch shortcuts). This widget tries to satisfy their needs providing an ability to put iconed shortcuts on the taskbar.

Widget uses *.desktop files for specifying the shortcuts, so you don’t have to edit your configuration file in order to add another shortcut. Also, you can just give the widget your Desktop folder as the folder for shortcuts, and they all will appear at the taskbar without any additional efforts.

For information about widget configuration and for the widget itself visit https://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Quick_launch_bar_widget

Coffee Time with Java – Part 1.5 – Sockets in Clojure

It is almost a year now since I wrote the first part of meant-to-be series of topics concerning Java. I understood that there is no need to write the same stuff over and over again while there is plenty of it on the Net. But this time I’ve got an idea to rewrite that primitive server-client demonstration into Clojure and see how it will look like.

Awesompd – half-widget/half-MPD-client for Awesome WM

Awesompd is not just an ordinar MPD widget. Its aim is to provide awesome users a robust, functional and extendable MPD client in the form of widget. Here are main features of awesompd:

• Provides an ability to control playback, switch songs, playlists, change volume and other options.

• Displays information through a scrolling widget and naughty notifications.

• Supports multiple servers and able to switch them on the fly.

• Supports UTF encodings.

For information where to download and how to setup it see http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Awesompd_widget .

The Modern Programming Craftsmanship

To make a start on the topic indirectly, I will state that one can view any kind of activity from different sides as different processes. Actually, there are different sides in any activity, but usually these sides are defined by people themselves. Chess, for example, were said to be an art by Wilhelm Steinitz, Emanuel Lasker considered them to be sport, Chigorin thought about chess as about science. But chess didn’t change because of these points of view, it’s the player who chooses the point for his own game of chess.
Today we see that the software engineering transformed from being a magic thing into the kind of craftsmanship. Programming is no more considered a fun delightful action but a slow tedious process of typing in tons of code, testing, debugging and repeating the cycle again. How did it happen? The whole IT sphere was from the beginning some kind of wizardry. A small amount of people made the large lifeless machines work and perform complex operations that were impossible to do for a human. But time has passed and wizards are now replaced with lots of commoners with minimal (usually insufficient) knowledge about the profession itself. This fact is much more mysterious and astounding to be left unquestioned.

Show the TO-DO list from your Freemind in conky

Introduction (if you look for instructions, skip this part)

I tried a lot of software (offline and online) to help me with my tasks. I tried using specialized software, I tried different built-in things (like Firefox\Thunderbird plugins), I tried Rememberthemilk and similar services on the Web, but the same problem remained – the information was too far from my eyes. It was either not noticeable, or stayed on my screen for not enough time, or I had to remember myself to view my to-do list.

Then conky came into my sight. I see it everyday, it stays on my desktop all the time, and I got an idea – why not show the to-do list in it? The idea isn’t new, one can say, but there is another problem – I’m too lazy to keep updated one more file for this list. But wait, I regularly work with Freemind, and it is fairly easy to create another branch directly for to-do management. Thus, I wrote this script that eased my life and may someday ease another one’s.

Go console

Sooner or later every user who got started using Linux with fancy Ubuntu windows has to get acquainted with big and scary Console. White letters on the black background, lots of typing and any sings of light in this long tunnel. But is it so bad? Console is an excellent solution which can help to deal with lots of problems way faster than moving the mouse around.