Michal Hrušecký

About a week ago I was at LinuxTag spreading a word about openSUSE. It was great event and I really liked it. And I was on of the four lucky guys that won Googles Nexus One. Hurray! And now what I want to write today about... I was migrating all my stuff from my Palm Centro to Nexus One. And one of the things I was using my Centro for was tracking how much petrol does my car consume. I was writing in plain text file and I was thinking about writing some script around that... But never had the time to actually do that. But now with Nexus One, my log is synchronized with Google Docs. So I don't have to take care of the synchronization part. So I sat down and wrote a simple script to compute my cars consumption and I want to share it with you. Originaly I wanted to use googlecl, which is available in openSUSE Contrib, but it had some problems with Google Apps, so I decided to use curl instead.

First of all how do I structure my log. I've got currently two types of things I'm tracking - petrol and maintenance. As we are talking about consumption, we are interested only in petrol ones These lines looks like this:

PET:97644:20100430:12.53l:394.4Kč

As you see, it's in semicolon separated values format First field means that it's petrol entry. Second one is kilometer counter. Third one is the date %Y%m%d and the fourth one is the number of liters. Fourth one is the price, but it's not really important. My document is named "Auto" but if you want to use the same script, you can name it however you want and just change the $TITLE variable in the script. You'll need to change email and password anyway And you might be also interested in changing $RECENT variable, which states how many entries are used in computation.

Script

For those who didn't know, last week there was an event called LinuxExpo in Prague. And we off course went there with the Czech part of openSUSE Boosters team to talk about openSUSE. Other colleagues also helped with running openSUSE booth. And some of our community members we standing around talking to people as well.

We had our HP TouchSmart machine with us (same one as we had on FOSDEM), but this time we had only one of them. But to make things more attractive for visitors, we took steering wheel with pedals with us and we had Torcs preinstalled. So people wasn't only touching our desktop and playing with camera, but also racing.

We also had a presentation with Pavol about how people can use openSUSE Build Service and SUSE Studio in schools to prepare LiveCD for student to make it easy for them to run their school software at home. I used it in similar context already (I'll write something about that later).

So overall, it was nice being there, meeting many people working to make Linux better and get some feedback from our users. And at the end here are few photos that appeared on our hard drive during LinuxExpo.

As for the photos, just few people you might know... There are some people from SUSE Office in Prague. But you can also see non-SUSE people there. You can see Tomáš Matějíček - author of the Slax and even one of the Gentoo developers Other photos can be found on root.cz photo gallery and on Liberix photo gallery.

This is going to be just a little note. Tomorrow starts two day conference LinuxAlt in Brno in Czech Republic. I'm planning to attend as a mere mortal (no presentation or such). So if you want to speak to me in person, you can probably catch me there somewhere. I'll be wearing some openSUSE t-shirt and I'll probably have some other openSUSE/Novell stuff with on me. I'm attaching one of my latest photos to this blog post.

And why you should be interested in meeting me? I'll be carrying around some DVDs with openSUSE 11.2 PromoDVDs for people (if they'll get ready in time). And if you'll catch me soon enough, I'll give you one. One of my colleagues, Pavol Rusnak, will be carrying some DVDs too, so you can try catching him too So tomorrow the game 'Catch your openSUSE Booster' will start and first winners will get DVD with openSUSE 11.2.

This is a first entry on my new blog. Maybe the first statement can be just "First post!!!", but I want to tell my potential readers why this blog was founded, what's its purpose and what you can hopefully find here in the future.

The original reason to create this blog was to have some place where I can post my ideas about my work. I'm currently working as a package maintainer in SuSE and sometimes I'm facing some things that I think people should know about. But who reads mailing lists nowadays? If I'll be good at blogging, I'll be googleable and therefore these idea may actually find some audience. Well, other thing is that my first goal is to get aggregated on Planet SuSE, once this site will be finished enough.

While I was thinking about this stuff, I realized that this may be a good opportunity to create some personal pages about myself too. Well, everyone wants a little bit of attention and I'll probably want to publish some personal stuff as well. Like photos from pubs and other social events. Maybe even my personal opinions about world around us. But that's probably distant future, so don't get scared

Main focus of this blog will be probably Linux and OpenSource in general. Most of it will be probably about my work - about OpenSUSE and it's tools, about MySQL I'm maintaining in OpenSUSE and maybe about some other packages. I'm also trying to participate in OpenSource software development whenever I have some free time, so you may expect some notes about that too.

So this is it - my first post here and I hope you will like my blog

...and I hope this isn't also the last post