Aplicaciones de las TIC en los Estudios Ingleses: Unit 3 final questions

What do you think about this unit? I found the information was really interesting, uncovering many topics I knew nothing about.

Did you already you know the tools presented? I knew the most extended tools, like general social media. However, I was unaware of such specific CoP tools.

Have you learnt anything new? Indeed, I’ve learnt about CoPs and many other tools also covering professional needs.

Do you consider now a key point to work in collaboration in order to study any topic?

Regarding UNED studies, I don’t consider it to be crucial since the teaching and learning methods proposed allows for individual activity. However, it’s quite beneficial since it allows for the contrast, correction and growth of ideas.

What do you think about UNED Community? Sincerely, I’ve always found it to be extremely helpful to clarify doubts or tiny aspects of information, leading to a better understanding of the topics covered in each subject.

Do you consider yourself as a part of a CoP after having taken part at UNED virtual courses as an active
member? Yes, although I’m far from belonging to the group of most active students.

Do you have any sense of community after these four years? Yes, of course, bit by bit :)

Debian: script to manipulate apt sources quickly from the command line

I’m one of those who just uses the command line to manage packages, and since I don’t use synaptic, it makes no sense to have the application ‘Software Preferences’ installed, which all in all pulls in a lot of packages.

But sometimes it’s tiresome to open an editor to enable or disable sources, or throw some sed command to change the line, which is anyway some typing. And it’s worse if you want to enable or disable several repositories at once.

So I created a bash script, aptsources (pretty unoriginal), to deal with repositories’ files under the directory ‘/etc/apt/sources.list.d/’. It doesn’t touch the file ‘/etc/apt/sources.list’ file at all, as it’s the file I edit the least. I have most Debian’s distributions entries uncommented (squeeze, sid, etc), with the use of apt-pinning.

The script allows to enable, disable, remove and add files under that directory. It also sets launchpad’s ppa repositories (Note and disclaimer: Ubuntu packages are not binary compatible!) with a syntax similar to add-apt-repository, allowing to set as an argument the Ubuntu version you think your Debian system is closer to. Thanks to Anant Shirvastava, as this function uses the code in his script. It also does backup, shows content, etc…

You can only specify one parameter a time, but some of them (--enable, --disable, --source) accept multiple arguments.

This is:

# aptsources --enable wine zeitgeist

would enable (uncomment) the ‘deb’ lines (not the ‘deb-src’ ones) in the files ‘wine.list’ and ‘zeitgeist.list’ at once.

One handy feature of the script is listing repos grouping them as enabled or disabled.

omar~$ aptsources -l
Enabled: cardapio docky multimedia synapse
Disabled: awn burg codeblocks getdeb hadret mpd-sound-menu notify-osd orta playdeb translate ufw-gtk vineyard wine zeitgeist

The script doesn’t run “exotic” commands, and it’s very easy to read. I stopped posting it here cause it got too big. You can download it from github. Click on the “Download” button and you will get a compressed archive with the latest version. You can install the script to ‘/usr/local/bin’ and bash-completion feature with aptsources.sh -i. I still enhance with small things so you better come back once or twice :)

Play with it and I hope it’s useful for more people than just me.

Enjoy!

First packages in AUR

I’ve uploaded some PKGBUILDs for the first time. I hope somebody will find them useful, and that I’ll be able to get at least one (vim-doc-es) into Debian’s archives.

Mailcheck is a great tool that allows to check for local or remote (IMAP or POP) mailboxes or maildirs. I use it to check my local maildirs for Mutt, and to issue a notice when there are any new mails.

vim-doc-es is just a package to allow an easy install to those you want the Spanish translation of Vim’s helpfiles.

vim-po and vim-po-fork are tools (particularly the later) that help me a big deal when it comes to translate PO files. The second is definitely the plugin I use the most.

I hope I can get more useful (at least to me) packages into AUR.

Using vim-addons and PO plugin

I really like vim-addons. It provides a very convenient and quick way to install, enable, disable, and more, addons for Vim. You can do it per-user if you run without privileges (a link is created under ~/.vim, or system-wide. To work, it needs some data fields in a yaml file for every plugin. The package vim-scripts in Debian provides such file, so I just used that one.

By default, vim-addons searches for plugins under /usr/share/vim/addons, whereas the plugins provided by vim-scripts are located under /usr/share/vim-scripts. This means you can add any plugin under /addons with the knowledge that it won’t interfere with other vim-scripts.

The reason I did this is because I don’t like the PO plugin file provided with vim-scripts. I rather like its fork, which also includes documentation. This is the entry I created for it in /usr/share/vim/registry/vim-scripts.yaml. You can also create a new yaml file and place it under the same directory. I didn’t have to specify the field basedir, as I placed the files under vim/addons.

addon: po-fork
description: "Enhanced PO addon"
disabledby: "let loaded_alternateFile = 1"
files:
- ftplugin/po.vim
- doc/po.txt
---

This done, use vim-addons list to see all addons with a yaml file, and vim-addons install addon to activate it. Use vim-addons help to get an idea of what you can do with this program.

Enjoy!