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

I want to inform our users that thanks to the efforts of Philippe Makowski, we've got Firebird in openSUSE now. He took over the package we had in Build Service, rewrote spec file from scratch, fixed quite some errors and adjusted package in many ways. And as the result Firebird package was finally accepted yesterday (1st of September) into openSUSE Factory.

What is Firebird and why you should be interested? Firebird is open source RDBMS (relational database management system) and it is derived from Borland InterBase 6.0. It won SourceForge 4th Annual Community Choice Award in category Best Project for the Enterprise and was nominated in other categories as well. I can continue and mention features it has, but I think that the best approach will be to point you out to the following web page:

Get to know Firebird in 2 minutes

It is some time already since I encountered this game for the first time. I tried it because one guy on irc was speaking about how addictive it is. I didn't believed him, tried it and became addicted. I overcome this addiction over the time. I'm not addicted anymore, but as this game is freely available I want to warn our users about this dangerous game

So what is this game all about? Well, it is quite simple. You have to move boxes to get three or more same boxes in one line (either horizontal or vertical). When you achieve this, boxes will be destroyed. Your goal is to destroy boxes while they are on fields marked by green or yellow color. These fields will either vanish (green one) or get weaker (yellow one will turn into green one, chained boxes will get unchained). Level is finished when you destroy all marked fields (you can't destroy all boxes as you get new one for every destroyed box). And why it isn't so easy? Because you can move the box only if it will form the line.

Principe is really simple. And game has 50 levels. You can choose from several different themes and get some bonuses during play, but it still doesn't sound really addictive. And that's why it is so dangerous. So be aware and don't get addicted. This game is available for openSUSE in games repository and it's homepage is http://jag.xlabsoft.com/.

Well and since I'm not addicted anymore, I can try to play it a little bit more