Building Rakudo Perl 6 For Arch Linux

One of my favorite features of my Linux distribution of choice, Arch Linux, is its package manager and the ecosystem built around it. I maintain my own repository of packages; some are custom builds of packages available in the standard repositories (like Vim), others are packages that don't exist in the standard repositories at all. One of the packages I maintain is for Rakudo Star, a Perl 6 distribution. I encountered some troubles creating a pacman package for the September release of Rakudo Star. I thought I would share my experiences so other package maintainers could learn from them.

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Posted on 2012-10-12

Making SSH_AUTH_SOCK Work Between Detaches in Tmux

I make heavy use of SSH agent forwarding in my workflow. However, sometimes you'll start a tmux session, do some work, and detach it. When you come back later, whether it's an hour, a day, or a month, your SSH_AUTH_SOCK within the session will no longer be valid, and you'll need to input your password every time you want to do something involving SSH. I came up with a simple solution a while back; if you drop this in your .bashrc, it should just work:

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Posted on 2012-07-27

Controlling MPD with Mac Media Keys

I use a Macbook Pro for my work at Booking, and I use music (or sometimes background noise) to avoid distractions while at work. However, I'm not a terribly big fan of iTunes; I much prefer the simplicity of MPD. My client of choice for MPD is Practical Music Search (pmus), which is curses-based and provides a nice shuffle feature. However, I want to avoid going back-and-forth between pmus and my work when I want to pause or skip tracks, so I managed to repurpose OS X's media keys to manipulate MPD and pmus. Here's how I did it.

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Posted on 2012-07-26

Another Look At Perl 6

About once a year, when the planets align and I have enough free time, I usually check up on the Perl 6 community and see how things are going, trying to rekindle some enthusiasm for the language. Every year, I move away from Perl6 once again, either because my free time has dried up, or the synopses are too long to read, or I get angry about how they renamed STDOUT to $*OUT.

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Posted on 2012-07-09

Automatically Adding Remotes For GitHub Forks

I do almost all of my open source work via GitHub. And why not? It's pretty much the standard these days. I love how you can just put something up on GitHub for the whole world to see, and you can follow (and even fix!) your favorite open source projects. Sometimes, if you maintain your own fork of a project, it can lag behind the project leader's, though. Which means after your fork stagnates, you have to clone a copy, and do something like this:

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Posted on 2012-06-25