I have been using F-Spot for some time, but decided to try digiKam (I am starting to feel, that albums are not that bad idea, after all, and I like autodetection of new/changed images). As it turned out, digiKam failed to import F-Spot tags (in spite of the fact I was working in Write metadata to file mode), so I had to do some scripting to copy the F-Spot tags to the digiKam database.

Below the crucial script and some extra comments.

I am somewhat unlucky. Being Python and Perl devotee, I just had to install PHP-based blog (all Python blogs seems to be pre-alpha, Perlish Movable Type is solid, but unclearly licensed and rumoured to be difficult to maintain). Now I wanted some reasonably looking issue-tracker, and it turned out that Trac is as far from multi-project handling, as it was two years ago, so I picked Redmine. Ruby on Rails application.

Yes, Redmine is what many people wanted Trac to be. Issues, wiki, timelines, roadmaps - but also file distribution, forums, categorization, and more. And very good, natural, support for multiple projects (including cross-project reports and moving issues between projects).

I had to write small custom issue importer. Maybe it will be of some use for somebody as a basis for another custom importer.... And yes, I wrote it in Python.

Second article of the FICS bot writing tutorial. After initial introduction now there is a time to write some code.

We will write very simple (even primitive) bot, aimed to perform a kind of a player registration - it will allow players to join something, and it will save not only their names, but also their current standard rating.

Perl will be used in this example, due to the presence of Net::Telnet library and good regexp support it is fairly suitable for the task.

Apart from using Mercurial for version-control I found a few cases, where it is fairly suitable as a ... backup tool.

I am maintaining some MoinMoin wiki. MoinMoin saves its data using the disk files. I won't delve into all details now, but my wiki instance is kept in a directory with subdirs for configuration data, runtime scripts, plugins and - finally - the wiki data - pages written by users, user preferences, and such.

My initial backup procedure was simple - just tar the directory, compress and copy to the remote machine. Slightly troublesome and ... giving only the last version for possible restore. Plus noticeable transfer every time new base backup is made.

Mercurial provided very nice alternative:

I love Perl. Having used a lot of programming languages, I find Perl to be the best tool whenever I need to parse yet-another-ugly-file, grab some data from the web page, convert a bunch of files between markups, quickly hack a HTML report based on database data, or script around some text based protocol - and more. I also tend to write Perl scripts instead of shell scripts, they are more powerful and less error-prone.

The Perl strengths lie mainly in very well integrated regular expression support (resulting in compact and easy to write text parsing code), support for dynamically created complicated data structures (a list of dictionaries containing field id and items, where items is a list of numbers... can be trivially created and operated) and CPAN - giantic library of useful libraries.

As I plan to refer to Perl in some future articles, I decided to save here a few valuable pointers:

• the best book to learn Perl from scratch: Learning Perl - concise, well written, and containing many useful examples

• awesome set of real-life examples and solutions: Perl Cookbook

Those two books should be sufficient for most people. Some possible extras:

As I wrote WatchBot, I am frequently asked How to write a FICS bot? This is the first of a few articles intended to give the detailed explanation.

It can be also of some interest for people wishing to write a FICS client interface (playing program), and maybe even for those wanting to write some program interacting with another telnet-based game server, be it ICC, WCL, or something else (as far as I know some go and backgammon servers also work similarly).

VirtualEnv is of incredible help for anybody using frequently changing new Python frameworks. Wanna test one project with Pylons 0.9.5 and another with Pylons 0.9.6? Need SQLAlchemy 0.4.3 while packaged 0.4.1 is required by some other app? Need to install some libraries without root access? No problem.

The only problem is somewhat unclear documentation. So here is my short recipe.

Nginx is my preferable webserver, known for its small memory footprint and great performance. Serendipity is a reasonably complete blog server which I picked over WordPress because it works with PostgreSQL database. I failed to find instructons how to run those two together, so here is my description. I use Ubuntu, so some details (like package naming and the way they are installed) are Debian/Ubuntu-like, but it should not be too difficult to follow on another distribution.

I love chess. But, having small kids, I do not have enough time to play it on the board. So I play it on the net.

There are plenty of chess sites and I tried quite a lot of them. So ... here are some recommendations.

This article is about places where one plays real-time games, be they blitz, rapid, or slow-time.

WatchBot can help you improve your chess. It can be used to:

• conduct PV Exercise;
• save notes for the teacher (or for own analysis);
• learn from better players.