Just like last year, this fall we will have another Qt Developer Days. Europeans might want to visit Munich, Americans are better served with San Francisco.
Will I go there? Well, unless there is something wrong, yes I will. Note that a little information about the sessions is already available. I leave it as an exercise to the reader, which talks in the Innovate track I will hold :)
Since three brings the luck and it is the first Mersenne prime, I am glad to list three QWebView tricks for your pleasure:
Transparency, something you have also seen before:
If you have downloaded PostgreSQL 8.4.0 and are wondering where so many of the translations have gone: The translation team has decided not to ship translations anymore that are not translated at least about 80%. (See the commit message for the list of victims.) This is so that incidental users of stale translations are not presented with a confusing and distracting mix of translated and untranslated messages all the time. So right now we are only shipping a full or almost full set of translations into German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Portuguese, and Turkish.
To get the translations into other languages back into the release, go to http://babel.postgresql.org/ and start submitting updates. Updates may be included as early as release 8.4.1 in a few months.
I hope in particular that we might get the Chinese, Italian, and Russian translations back into shape.
By the way, if you want to start (or continue) translating, I suggest that you approximately follow this priority order: libpq, psql, pgscripts, pg_dump, initdb, postgres. This or a similar order will make the translations useful to the most users with the least amount of work.
The last few months have been challenging in term of amount of work to get done, in focusing on deliverables and in getting ready for the release of conStruct and structWSF sources codes, documentations, tutorials, web sites and demos.
I am now really happy to be able to finally announce the release of both software code sources along with a new development community website where users and developers can exchange ideas about these two news projects.
The biggest milestone of the last months is now behind us. However, this is just the beginning of everything!
I think that many things have been written about these two projects already. I don�t want to write any tutorial at this point. So the only thing I will do right now is to point you the more relevant documentation, web sites, blog posts and demos about each project. The next step will be to write about specific use cases, features, etc.
The community Web site is a place where developers and users of structWSF and conStruct can meet to talk about both projects, to report bugs and issues, to submit new enhancements, to find tips and tricks, etc.
I would suggest you to create a new user profile on the community Web site if you are interested in communicating with other members.
structWSF is a platform-independent Web services framework for accessing and exposing structured RDF data. Its central organizing perspective is that of the dataset. These datasets contain instance records, with the structural relationships amongst the data and their attributes and concepts defined via ontologies (schema with accompanying vocabularies).
The structWSF middleware framework is fully RESTful in design and is based on HTTP and Web protocols and open standards. The initial structWSF framework comes packaged with a baseline set of about a dozen Web services in CRUD, browse, search and export and import. All Web services are exposed via APIs and SPARQL endpoints. Each request to an individual Web service returns an HTTP status and optionally a document of resultsets. Each results document can be serialized in many ways, and may be expressed as either RDF or pure XML.
conStruct is a distro of the Drupal framework that aims to set a new standard in data integration and as a structured content system (SCS). With conStruct, you can let your data and its structure drive your applications. You can easily interoperate your diverse internal information with public content on the Web. And you can leverage a platform designed from the ground up for knowledge management and collaboration.
I'm going to DebConf, and will be giving what I think is the first talk I've ever done about debhelper there. Incidentially, debhelper in experimental has some nice new features.
I have no idea how I'm getting from the Madrid airport to Cáceres, and would rather spend time working on my talk than trying to book tickets internationally, so I hope buying train tickets at the station is not a foolish plan..
I'm proud to announce that OpenOffice.org Education Project will be represented at LSM / RMLL 2009 from the 7th to the 11th of July.
More precisely, Mathieu Lalanne, Pierre Pasteau, (to be confirmed) Nicolas Jeudy, and myself will welcome you, and try to answer your questions about everything.
Means answer all actions, including OOo4Kids Project we do to create a strong bridge between Educational world and the OpenOffice.org Project
Mathieu Lalanne(who will replace Remi Boulle, unavailable), will present the Education Project and EducOOo, the non profit association in the dedicated day of the french "pôle de compétences logiciels libres" of the SCEREN.
Link 1 : The OpenOffice.org Education Project
From my side, I'll participate to 3 presentations. The two first, will be with people from Ecole Centrale Nantes [4], aka ECN.
Also, thursday 9th July:
Link 2, presentation with Olivier Girardot, ECN student: Students contributions to OpenOffice.org
Link 3, presentation with Morgan Magnin, teaching at ECN : Challenges and recommandations
The last one, will be the 10th July, and will belong to the Development topic, and will be about OOo4Kids ( http://wiki.ooo4kids.org )
Link 4, about : present the the OOo4Kids project
See you !!
Hello, folks.
This is a quick post (written in the airport, while waiting my flight to Gran Canaria) just to tell you that GNOME Brazil one more time rocked at FISL – International Free Software Forum, which took place (again, as every year) in Porto Alegre, south of Brazil.
Thanks to GNOME Foundation, I was able to attend the event, and represent GNOME there, along with many Brazilian GNOMErs. We had a booth and a communitarian event, where I, Vinicius Depizzol, Gustavo (kov) Noronha and Julio talked about the past and the future of the GNOME Desktop, as well about how to contribute with the project.
Some pictures (click for larger size and for the description):
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Ah, also thanks to the GNOME Foundation I’m right now boarding to Gran Canaria, to GUADEC! This edition is special because it gets together GUADEC and Akademy (KDE) into a single conference. Looking forward to beat KDE guys in the Freefa soccer tournement!
We launched ActiveState Code today, and there was much rejoicing. Yaaaah!
ActiveState Code is a site for sharing code recipes. It is the replacement for the popular ASPN Cookbooks (especially the Python Cookbook, which was a collaboration with O’Reilly and Associates that resulted in two print cookbooks using recipes from the site). The new site adds things like tagging, the ability to add recipes in a number of other languages, and a fresher and hopefully more usable site.
Migration should be easy. All recipes from the Python, Tcl and PHP Cookbooks have been carried over. Redirects maintain all old aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbooks links. Recipe id and author ids have been maintained. The ASPN Cookbook categories have been translated into tags in the new system — full details here.
I welcome any feedback on the site.
The complete program for "Balisage: The Markup Conference 2009", including late-breaking news, has just been posted. See:
Balisage 2009 is the place to come to think about XML, and about markup. The Balisage program varies from the practical to the theoretical, with a little heresy mixed in:
JVIS USA LLC is an international supplier for automotive components and tooling with facilities in 6 countries and customers all over the world. Their website helps them introduce their products to auto makers.
When JVIS commissioned their website, they requested just a few static pages. It was built as a simple static HTML site (no CMS) and in English. Very soon after launching their new site JVIS decided to localize to Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian and Spanish. These are the languages spoken by their larger clients.
At that point Jason Marshall contacted us about translating JVIS' website. It was already built (as a collection of 23 HTML files), ready to be translated. Our translation service would have produced another 92 static HTML files which JVIS would have uploaded to their server. It was clear that JVIS was going to be adding new content on a regular basis and maintaining it all in several languages without using a content management system would have been a very unwelcome task.
The likely possibility of turning a client from being happy to frustrated, due to this manual content management, concerned us very much.
We suggested to Jason Marshall, the web designer who built JVIS website, to first migrate it all to a CMS and only then begin the translation process. The first choice was Drupal, given its powerful multilingual capabilities. Maintaining a multilingual Drupal site would be much simpler, not just for us, but mostly for the client. From the client's point of view, only English texts would need to be managed. Drupal would automatically handle everything else.
Cross-posted from hacks.mozilla.org
We’ve just launched Firefox 3.5, and we’re incredibly proud. Naturally, we have engaged in plentiful Mozilla advocacy — this site is, amongst other things, a vehicle for showcasing the latest browser’s new capabilities. We like to think about this release as an upgrade for the whole World Wide Web, because of the new developer-facing features that have just been introduced into the web platform. When talking about some of the next generation standards, the appearance of the number “5″ is almost uncanny — consider HTML5 and ECMAScript 5 (PDF). The recent (and very welcome) hype around HTML5 in the press is what motivates this article. Let’s take a step back, and consider some of Mozilla’s web advocacy in the context of events leading up to the release of Firefox 3.5.
Standardization of many of these features often came after much spirited discussion, and we’re pleased to see the prominent placement of HTML5 as a key strategic initiative by major web development companies. Indeed, exciting new web applications hold a great deal of promise, and really showcase what the future of the web platform holds in store for aspiring developers. Many herald the triumphant arrival of the browser as the computer, an old theme that gets bolstered with the arrival of attractive HTML5 platform features that are implemented across Safari, Chrome, Opera, and of course, Firefox (with IE8 getting an honorable mention for having both some HTML5 features and some ECMAScript, 5th Edition features).
Call it what you will — Web 5.0, Open Web 5th Generation (wince!), or, (R)evolution # 5, the future is now. But lest anyone forget, HTML5 is not a completed standard yet, as the W3C was quick to point out. The editor doesn’t anticipate completion till 2010. The path taken from the start of what is now called HTML5 to the present-day era of (very welcome) hype has been a long one, and Mozilla has been part of the journey from the very beginning.
For one thing, we were there to point out, in no uncertain terms, that the W3C had perhaps lost its way. Exactly 5 summers ago (again, with that magic number!), it became evident that the W3C was no longer able to serve as sole custodian of the standards governing the open web of browser-based applications, so Mozilla, along with Opera, started the WHATWG. Of course, back then, we didn’t call it HTML5, and while Firefox itself made a splash in 2004, the steps taken towards standardization were definitive but tentative. Soon, other browser vendors joined us, and by the time the reconciliation with W3C occurred two years later, the innovations introduced into the web platform via the movement initiated by Mozilla had gained substantial momentum.
The net result is a specification that is not yet complete called “HTML5″ which is implemented piecemeal by most modern browsers. The features we choose to implement as an industry are in response to developers, and our modus operandi is (for the most part) in the open. Mozilla funds the HTML5 Validator, producing the first real HTML5 parser, which now drives W3C’s markup validation for HTML5. That parser has made its way back into Firefox. It’s important to note that capabilities that are of greatest interest (many of which are showcased on this blog) are not only developed within the HTML5 specification, but also as part of the W3C Geolocation WG, the Web Apps WG, and the CSS WG.
The release of Firefox 3.5, along with updates to other modern browsers, seems to declare that HTML5 has arrived. But with the foresight that comes with having been around this for a while, we also know that we have a lot of work ahead of us. For one thing, we’ve got to finish HTML5, or at least publish a subset of it that we all agree is ready for implementation, soon. We’ve also got to ensure that accessibility serves as an important design principle in the emerging web platform, and resolve sticky differences here. Also, an open standard does not an open platform make, as debates about web fonts and audio/video codecs show. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, but for now, 5 years after the summer we started the ball rolling, we’re enjoying the hype around (R)evolution Number 5.
Today I gave a talk on building dynamic applications with OSGi at the Java-Forum-Stuttgart 2009. This was mostly the talk I gave (and prepared) together with Kai Tödter and Gerd Wütherich for previous conferences. Here are the slides:
I recently blogged about the GeoDNS setup we plan for security.debian.org. Even though all DSA team members agree that the GeoDNS setup for security.debian.org should come alive as soon as possible, we still fear to break an important service like security.d.o.
Yesterday I decided without further ado to float a trial balloon and converted DNS entries for the Debian Project homepage to our GeoDNS setup. While doing so, we found out that some part of our automatic deployment scripts still need to be adjusted to serve more than one subdomain of the project.
That setup is live for about eighteen hours now, and the project homepage now resolves it IPs via GeoDNS. For now, we are using senfl.d.o for Northern America, www.de.debian.org and www.debian.at for Europe and klecker.d.o for the rest of the world. From what I can see from GeoDNS logs, it seems to work fine, and the load stays reasonably low, so after a short test period we might add additional services like security.debian.org to GeoDNS.
The 6xx/7xx 3D driver is starting to do useful things again after moving over to the radeon-rewrite mesa code base. As of last night, it seems to be behaving properly on 14 of the 63 tests in progs/redbook, drawing incorrectly on 24, and either not drawing or crashing on the remaining 25. Cooper found that the following tests rendered correctly :
hello, plane, torus, list, aargb, smooth, tess, varray, tesswind, model, anti, bezcurve, picksquare, and cube.
The driver currently segfaults after running ~10 frames of glxgears - Richard is looking into that. Alex is hooking up the texture code to the new bufmgr code, and Cooper is going through the redbook tests and picking off problems as he finds them. Development and testing are primarily being done on discrete graphics cards; not sure of the current status on 760/780/790 IGP parts.
The r6xx-rewrite branch was synced up with mesa master recently, so merging it into master should be fairly straightforward. A bigger question is how and when we decide that the API to the drm is not likely to require further changes, ie when it makes sense to ask to merge the new drm ioctl support into the main kernel tree. The changes are relatively small and the chance of breaking any *other* support is extremely low, so maybe there's a chance of making 2.6.31 but we haven't had that discussion yet AFAIK.
If you want to try the latest code (with the caveat that it is *not* ready for general use), you want the r6xx-rewrite of mesa/mesa, and the r6xx-r7xx-3d branch of ~agd5f/drm. The drm code works with 2.6.28 and earlier, but has problems with 2.6.29 and higher.
Rational Team Concert 2.0 has been released. With a little work, you can get the client running on Eclipse 3.5 and the server running on Mac OS X.
The Jazz team does not officially support running the server on OS X, and a download that runs on OS X out-of-the-box is not available. With a couple of minor modifications, the Linux server download will run on OS X just fine.
<Connector port="9443"
connectionTimeout="20000"
maxHttpHeaderSize="8192"
maxThreads="150"
minSpareThreads="25"
maxSpareThreads="75"
enableLookups="false"
disableUploadTimeout="true"
acceptCount="100"
scheme="https"
secure="true"
clientAuth="false"
keystoreFile="ibm-team-ssl.keystore"
keystorePass="ibm-team"
sslProtocol="TLS"
algorithm="SunX509"
URIEncoding="UTF-8" />
If you want to make sure the server started correctly, you can tail -f tomcat/logs/catalina.out and watch the server startup. If you see any exceptions thrown, something went wrong. If all goes well, the last message you see in the log should be:
INFO: Server startup in xxxxx ms
To get started right away, launch Safari and point it to https://localhost:9443/jazz login with User: ADMIN and Password: ADMIN. You can use this admin account to create a personalized account. Don’t forget to give yourself a Developer license.
These instructions are not specific to Mac OS X – they should work for any OS.
The Jazz team does support a Mac OS X Client as an incubator project, but the client is based on Eclipse 3.4. You can download the client and get the jazz bundles to work in an Eclipse 3.5 environment. The Jazz client has dependencies on the following features:
With the exception of SDO, all of the features can be installed from the Galileo update site. To get SDO, add the EMF releases update site and install the SDO runtime from the EMF 2.4.2 release.
From the downloaded client, move all of the sub-folders in jazz/client/eclipse/jazz to your Eclipse 3.5 dropins folder. You could use P2 to install the contents of those sub-folders; however, you must manually check every bundle to be installed. I’d rather spend 10 seconds doing a drag-and-drop rather than 15 minutes checking checkboxes.
After you launch the client, you should be able to open the Team Artifacts view and create a connection to the repository at https://localhost:9443/jazz
See the Jazz web site for tutorials on getting started.
A lot of the major adoption successes for OpenID have been in the tech industry, though as of yesterday you can sign in to MySears.com and MyKmart.com using an OpenID. Beyond Interscope Records offering OpenID sign in on artist sites like Snoop Dogg's, Sears is really the first major retailer adopting OpenID. More on the OpenID blog and congrats to the team at JanRain that helped make this happen:
“We’re constantly looking for ways to stay innovative in our online initiatives by identifying and implementing technologies that help our users navigate our communities with ease,” says Rob Harles, Sears’ vice president of community. “Our adoption of the OpenID technology helps simplify our customers’ online experience and ultimately helps us meet our goal of ensuring our customers have the most efficient shopping experience possible.”
A feature I would really like on my computer is reasonable file content and meta data indexing, not such full text indexing for doing searched but field indexing for doing date/time boundaries, size indexing and other useful components that would make meta file io much faster.
But so far I’ve not been able to find a file system that has the reliability of modern ext systems with all the extra goodies that we really could do with to support our new breed of apps and data access that I’m so looking forward to.
So today’s blog post is a question for the community, what file systems have you tried? and how many of these features can you find?
This week IBM announced that Glendale Adventist Medical Center (GAMC), part of Adventist Health, a not-for-profit, faith-based health system operating in California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington and comprised of 18 hospitals with more than 2,800 beds, has improved the experience of its hospital patients by delivering email and Web access in patient rooms. Working with Novell and IBM partner NoMachines, GAMC is virtualizing 65 SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktops to give patients access to the Internet during their hospital stay. With access to tools such as e-mail, Twitter, Facebook or websites that offer information about a patients condition, patients are able to stay connected while they are in the hospital.
This virtualized desktop experience helps offer patients some comfort, while saving significant information technology (IT) maintenance and energy costs for the GAMC. One small way that technology is helping to improve the lives of its users.
Novell Account
==============
First of all, it is needed to Create an Useraccount from Novell. This Account is for the forums, buildservice, features and bugzilla. Just visit: https://secure-www.novell.com/selfreg/jsp/createOpenSuseAccount.jsp?target=http://www.opensuse.org and fill out the Form.
Login
=====
After them, go to en.opensuse.org and go to the right-top of the Site, and select “Login”. After you submitted your Username ans Password, you come to the Mainpage.
Userpage
========
Now you can see your Username in the right-top of the Site.
Now klick on your Username. Now you see the editpage of your Username. Here you can Place some needful Information like your Name, your Emailadress and if present the Instant Messenger Informations.
Picture Uploading
=================
If you would like to add an Picture from you, you can go to http://en.opensuse.org/Special:Upload. The select the File and upload it. Now search the right Path from the Picture. At last you can bind in your Picture into your Userpage.
Have a lot of Fun !!! 
Ok, we got a new council, I'm still there so thank you for renewing the trust on me =)
Looks like that less people found me or what I did that compelling to make me into the council, so surely I did something wrong. Solar got the first place so his cleanly cut ways are perceived better.
I started polling people about what they feel about Gentoo and what they'd like. The first thing I noticed is that people are sick of endless discussions on marginal stuff and even more sick of outside projects trying to push it's agenda on Gentoo using the shovel-in-throat way.
Second item is about trying to make the place nicer for everybody and better involve our large userbase. We used to be the nicest distribution regarding attitude towards newcomers and slow learner, now other distributions are better. We could re-learn from them.
That's what I perceived so far. As I said before I see the council just as the last resort to get something decided if we, developers, cannot find a large agreement. Solar likes more to be proactive in my opinion. You liked him so I guess we as council should try to push people express themselves and get new&interesting stuff done instead of discussing which is the new way to define a quantity next to infinity or why embedding information somewhere is right or wrong in theory.
That said, how wrong I am so far and how we could get Gentoo to improve even more?
Original post blogged on b2evolution.
Our Drupal installation has been upgraded to version 5.19 to address a security vulnerability. Let us know if you encounter any problems.
Everything is in the title: when you want to unzip an ODF or OOXML file, there is no bash completion for those documents types. I hacked the /etc/profile.d/complete.bash file of my Suse box to make it work.
Here is a first diff which can be improved to support other file extensions:
--- complete.bash 2008-06-09 14:21:12.000000000 +0200 +++ complete.bash 2009-07-02 19:04:41.000000000 +0200 @@ -162,8 +162,7 @@ esac ;; gunzip) e='!*.+(gz|tgz|z|Z)' ;; uncompress) e='!*.Z' ;; - unzip) e='!*.+(???)' - t="@(MS-DOS executable|Zip archive)*" ;; + unzip) e='!*.+(zip|ZIP|o[dt][tspgf]|O[DT][TSPGF]|doc[xm]|DOC[XM]|xlsx|XLSX|pptx|PPTX)';; gs|ghostview) e='!*.+(eps|EPS|ps|PS|pdf|PDF)' ;; gv|kghostview) e='!*.+(eps|EPS|ps|PS|ps.gz|pdf|PDF)' ;; acroread|[xk]pdf) e='!*.+(pdf|PDF)' ;;
I’m happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 alpha2 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project and include many upstream and Go-oo fixes. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE OOo build on the wiki page.
The packages are alpha versions and might include even serious bugs. Therefore they are not intended for data-critical usage. A good practice is to archive any important data before an use, …
We kindly ask any interested beta testers to try the package and report bugs.
Other information and plans:
The next build will be 3.1.1-beta1 and should be available 3-4 weeks from now. The final OOo-3.1.1 packages should be available at the beginning of September.
I have vacation the following two weeks and will not have access to the internet. I hope that the current alpha2 build is usable. If not, please report bugs and switch back to the stable build.
So, I decided to try and create an XText Grammar for the RelaxNG Compact Syntax. Mixed results so far, mainly having to do with my lack of knowledge on the XText grammar and it's mapping to EBNF.
Here is what I have so far:
grammar org.oasisopen.relaxng with org.eclipse.xtext.common.Terminals
generate relaxng "http://www.oasis-open.org/relaxng"
terminal Letter:
ID;
terminal CHAR:
'#x9' | '#xA' | '#xD' | ('#x20'..'#xD7FF') | ('#xE000'..'#xFFFD') | ('#x10000'..'#x10FFFF');
terminal NewLine:
'#xA' | '#xD' | ('#xA' '#xD');
terminal NameStartChar:
":" |
('A'..'Z') |
"_" |
('a'..'z') |
('#xC0'..'#xD6') |
('#xD8'..'#xF6') |
('#xF8'..'#x2FF') |
('#x370'..'#x37D') |
('#x37F'..'#x1FFF') |
('#x200C'..'#x200D') |
('#x2070'..'#x218F') |
('#x2C00'..'#x2FEF') |
('#x3001'..'#xD7FF') |
('#xF900'..'#xFDCF') |
('[#xFDF0'..'-#xFFFD') |
('#x10000'..'#xEFFFF');
terminal NameChar:
NameStartChar | "-" | "." | ('0'..'9') | '#xB7' | ('#x0300'..'#x036F') | ('#x203F'..'#x2040');
Model :
(elements += TopLevel);
TopLevel:
Decl* (Pattern | GrammarContent*);
Decl:
'namespace' (IdentifierOrKeyWord '=' NamespaceURILiteral) |
'default' 'namespace' (IdentifierOrKeyWord) '=' NamespaceURILiteral |
'datatypes' IdentifierOrKeyWord '=' Literal;
Pattern:
'element' NameClass '{' Pattern '}' |
'attribute' NameClass '{' Pattern '}' |
Pattern (',' Pattern)+ |
Pattern ('&' Pattern)+ |
Pattern ('|' Pattern)+ |
Pattern '?' |
Pattern '*' |
Pattern '+' |
'list' '{' Pattern '}' |
'mixed' '{' Pattern '}' |
Identifier |
'parent' Identifier |
'empty' |
'text' |
(DataTypeName) DataTypeValue |
DataTypeName ('{' Param* '}') (ExceptPattern) |
'notAllowed' |
'external' AnyURILiteral (Inherit) |
'grammar' '{' GrammarContent* '}' |
'(' Pattern ')';
Param:
IdentifierOrKeyWord '=' Literal;
ExceptPattern:
'-' Pattern;
GrammarContent:
Start | Define |
'div' '{' GrammarContent* '}' |
'include' AnyURILiteral (Inherit) ('{' IncludeContent* '}');
IncludeContent:
Define | Start |
'div' '{' GrammarContent* '}';
Start:
'start' AssignedMethod Pattern;
Define:
Identifier AssignedMethod Pattern;
AssignMethod:
'=' |
'|=' |
'&=';
NameClass:
Name |
NsName (ExceptClassName) |
AnyName (ExceptClassName) |
NameClass '|' NameClass |
'(' NameClass ')';
Name:
IdentiferOrKeyWord | CName;
ExceptNameClass:
'-' NameClass;
DataTypeName:
CName |
'string' |
'token';
DataTypeValue:
Literal;
AnyURILiteral:
Literal;
NamespaceURILiteral:
Literal | 'inherit';
Inherit:
'inherit' '=' IdentifierOrKeyWord;
IdentifierOrKeyWord:
Identifier | KeyWord;
Identifier:
(NCName .. KeyWord) |
QuotedIdentifier;
CName:
NCName ':' NCName;
NsName:
NCName ':*';
AnyName:
'*';
Literal:
LiteralSegment ('~' LiteralSegment)+;
LiteralSegment:
'"' (CHAR .. ('"' | NewLine))* '"' |
"'" (CHAR .. ("'" | Newline))* "'" |
'"""' (('"') ('"') (CHAR .. '"'))* '"""';
KeyWord:
"attribute"
| "default"
| "datatypes"
| "div"
| "element"
| "empty"
| "external"
| "grammar"
| "include"
| "inherit"
| "list"
| "mixed"
| "namespace"
| "notAllowed"
| "parent"
| "start"
| "string"
| "text"
| "token";
NCName:
NCNameStartChar NCNameChar*; /* An XML Name, minus the ":" */
NCNameChar:
NameChar - ':';
NCNameStartChar:
Letter | '_';
Name:
NameStartChar (NameChar)*;
Names:
Name ('#x20' Name)*;
Nmtoken:
(NameChar)+;
Nmtokens:
Nmtoken ('#x20' Nmtoken)*;
QuotedIdentifier:
'\' NCName;
How to grow communities is a hot topic these days. Francesco Lodolo recently blogged about how the Mozilla Italia community mainly consists of veterans who have been participants for several years, and how hard it is for them to find new contributors.
Illustration: Grow by Amy.Ng
Abdulkadir Topal from the German community also blogged about getting help for localization work on the European Mozilla Community Blog and reached an interesting conclusion about how to turn new and casual contributors into long-time community members: the key is to distribute ownership.
Kadir uses Thomas from the German localization team as a good example of this theory: Thomas is a relatively new community member (”only” two years worth of contributions so far!), yet he is one of the most active members on SUMO today. The key factor for why this happened, according to Kadir, is that Thomas was given full responsibility for the SUMO component within the German localization team.
As Kadir concludes, it’s “one thing to contribute little bits and pieces to a [project], but it’s a completely different thing to own it.”
I find this theory interesting. Maybe it is not a universal law that can be applied to everyone or every type of project/responsibility, but looking back at my initial involvement with Mozilla, ownership was definitely part of what motivated me — but not all of it, as I will explain below.
Kadir mentions in his blog post that it was something as trivial as a product logo that made me discover the Mozilla project in the first place. To me, the little Gecko logo — featured in an article about the planned Netscape 6 browser based on the previously open-sourced Netscape 4.x codebase — communicated “lean and mean,” and the article went on explaining how this new Gecko HTML rendering engine would be modern, compatible, portable, and small enough to be used even in future handsets (and guess what; about nine years later it turns out that they were right!).
Just a few days later, I learned that Netscape 6.x was just a branded and slightly outdated version of something called “Mozilla,” which apparently was the open source project behind the well known Netscape browser. I immediately switched to Mozilla instead, since it was more bleeding edge and therefore more fun for a geek like me.
That’s how it started for me. However, that wasn’t the reason why I sticked. Why did I turn from just interested in Mozilla to a deeply involved contributor? I will try to explain this and get back to Kadir’s theory, but I can say right now that there is a lot more than one reason why I’m still an active Mozilla community member.
It started around year 2000 with the realization that I could actually affect the project by submitting bug reports and providing feedback. Although open source as a concept wasn’t new to me, I had never actually gotten involved myself before. This, combined with the fact that I got to know other people with similar interests, made reading the newsgroup daily a pleasure.
However, I always felt that the original Mozilla suite represented something from the past, and that the way of the future was something lean and mean (yes, that Gecko logo that got originally got my attention!). The word “monolithic” was often used to describe the Mozilla suite, and even the word itself felt big, old and unmanageable to me. When the Phoenix project was announced on MozillaZine, I immediately turned my focus to that instead, and never looked back.
Because the project was still small and new, it was also a good opportunity to get more deeply involved because the signal to noise ratio was higher. Many people in the Mozilla community were still skeptical about Phoenix and preferred the tried and true Mozilla suite. This made the feedback I provided to the Phoenix project much more visible than it had been for the suite, making it a lot more rewarding for me to contribute.
As the project started to shape up with the release of Phoenix 0.3, I found myself heavily involved with things like filing bugs and RFEs, discussing feature implementations with developers, and, most often, answering questions from the growing number of users of Phoenix. As this consumed more and more of my time, I realized that there wasn’t a centralized place for people to get help with Phoenix. I viewed this as my opportunity to finally give something meaningful back to the project, and spent a couple of afternoons creating a small site called Phoenix Help. It was also a more meaningful way to develop my HTML/CSS coding skills compared to creating a website for, say, a Brood War clan (let’s call it UU).
Phoenix Help was very small and seemingly insignificant, but it was quickly noticed and appreciated by fellow community members in the MozillaZine forums. I especially remember getting my first personal e-mail from Asa Dotzler thanking me for doing what I did and encouraging me to continue the great work. This meant a lot for my motivation, because it was a confirmation that what I was doing was appreciated.
Before I knew it, people were linking to my site from all sorts of places (starting with Phoenix 0.5, even the release notes linked to it!), which made it even more important for me to ensure that the site looked good, was easy to use, and that the content was up to date. I was, in fact, responsible for the support site of Phoenix — I “owned” that part of the Phoenix project!
To wrap up, there were several things that motivated me to stay active in the Mozilla community:
When I look at this list, I realize that it’s impossible to point to one particular motivator for community members, and that everyone probably has their own unique list. More personally, I also note that my motivation model today is the exact same as it was when I got involved seven years ago.
Despite the fact that the list is based on my personal experience, I think that all of the motivators could be taken into consideration for anyone trying to build or grow a community. Depending on the project, some things might be more important than others, but they all affect your community:
Tree Climbing Cat by mokwai
There you have it — my first attempt to unwrap the mystery of building and growing communities. Is this helpful? Do you have similar experiences? I would love to hear what you think!
Audio: http://media.libsyn.com/media/jcm/linux_kernel_podcast_20090630.mp3
For Tuesday, June 30th 2009, I’m Jon Masters with a summary of today’s LKML traffic.
In today’s issue: fanotify, GPL, KVM, Modules, OOM, Real Time, Tasks, VFAT, VFS, and Virtual Terminals.
fanotify. Something we missed on Monday. Eric Paris posted a new version of fanotify, a notification mechanism originally designed to aid “anti-malware” vendors. The patch adds two key things, the ability to receive a read only fd pointing to modified filesystem objects (so they can be scanned for malware), and an access system in which processes may be blocked until an fanotify userspace listener has decided if whatever they were trying to do should be allowed (once they have been deemed “clean”). Eric reminds us that this is not an LSM, is not intended to provide system security, is not intended to prevent malware from running on Linux, but is merely intended to support on-access file scanning operations. Valdis Kletnieks followed up to say that he doesn’t care about virus scanners but that this could be useful for HSM applications.
GPL. Andrey Volkov posted an email about the ASUSTek Computer WMVN25E2+ WiMAX Subscriber Station, in which he alleges that this product is ingringing upon the GPL because it allegedy includes GPL software (he lists the versions) for which no source code is made available, and no offer of source is made under some kind of “intellectual property” defense. One hopes that that Andrey has tried other avenues of communication before emailing the LKML about it, since many companies can come around to doing the right thing with private prodding.
KVM. Gleb Natapov posted to let us know that KVM would like to provide the x2APIC interface to a guest without emulating interrupt remapping. KVM prefers this because x2APIC is better virtualizable and provides better performance than the MMIO xAPIC interface (Gleb cites examples of why this is the case). The patch changes x2APIC enabling so that it is enabled on KVM guests, even if interrupt remapping initialization failed.
Modules. Jan Beulich posted a patch reducing exported symbol CRC table size on 64-bit architectures. He does this by ensuring that these quantities are actually only stored as the 32-bit quantities they are (using assembly wrappers) rather than the 64 bits that are used when gcc is left to its own devices. By applying this patch, one saves 16k of kernel resident size, 2k module resident size, and a whopping 1M of vmlinux image size. On an unrelated note Jan also posted a patch replacing uses of num_physpages by totalram_pages since many memory sizing calculations should be influenced only by usable memory, not just the total number of physical pages (perhaps including lots of non-RAM).
OOM. Ongoing discussion of a patch intended for swapless systems that incorrectly also affected those with swap and caused a lot of OOM situations in 2.6.30 kernels onward (especially for David Howells, who found it) lead to the suggestion from Mel Gorman that OOM situations would also cause the kernel to print out the full active_anon LRU list – so that developers can figure out what pages are still on the active_anon list in that case, and – more importantly – which of those should not be there.
Real Time. Zoltan Bus posted a message saying that wake_up() sometimes isn’t waking up real-time priority tasks when called from an interrupt handler. This is interesting timing, because this author also heard just yesterday that (on the RT kernel) he should also never be calling wake_up from interrupt thread context. The correct places to use wake_up are probably worth documenting.
Tasks. Oleg Nesterov posted an RFC patch entitled “do not place sub-threads on task_struct->children list”. Currently, Linux systems add sub-threads to the ->real_parent->childen list, but this only really serves to slow down do_wait. With this patch, ->children contains only the main threads (group leaders). Roland McGrath thought this seemed mostly like the right idea.
VFAT. Ongoing discussion of Andrew Trigell’s latest patch. At the same time Hirofumo Ogawa followed up to ask whether it isn’t about time to change the default shortname=lower mount option for vfat filesystems. This is known to cause problems when copying files from one filesystem to another on Linux and affecting the originally intended case of the files, it also is inconsistent with respect to Windows behavior, whereas (as Jamie Lokier also agreed), shortname=mixed is a more sensible default.
VFS. In an evolution of previous discussion, Miklos Szeredi posted a new patch implementing a new O_NODE flag for open calls. Opening a file in such a way will not call the driver’s ->open() method and will not have any side effect other than referencing the dentry/vfsmount from the struct file pointer. This can be layered with other options to implement some useful features.
VTs. Lennart Poettering posted a patch implementing an extension to VT_WAITACTIVE such that is possible to wait until a specific VT becomes inactive. This will allow ConsoleKit to more easily keep track of which VT is the active one. Currently, ConsoleKit (which is used by distributions such as Fedora to assist with Fast User Switching of Graphical Desktops) creates 64 separate userspace threads, one for each theoretical VT, and calls VT_WAITACTIVE in them to look for changes. With this patch, ConsoleKit will instead be able to only monitor whatever it considers to be the current VT.
In today’s miscellaneous items: IDE and Network fixes from David Miller (including a migration to generic block layer request completetion on IDE for some legacy code, and some small fixes for the new ZigBee networking stack), Kmemleak fixes (Catalin Marinas – these are intended to reduce the “false positive” noise that Dave Jones and Ingo Molnar, and others, were seeing before), two “important” device-mapper fixes for 2.6.31-rc2 (Alasdair Kergon), a bunch of useful performance couter tools fixes from Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo (acme) adding filtering by comm, dso and symbol lists to perf (Paul Mackerras also posted a fix to enable counters only on next exec, allowing one to skip the launching process in profiling, and another allowing one to exclude any overhead caused by the presence of a hypervisor such as KVM). Ingo Molnar thinks Robin Getz’s CON_BOOT idea is “geninuely useful”. Finally, Amerigo Wang posted an update to kcore sizing calculation that should actually do the right thing this time around.
[new segment] In today’s blog postings: Dave Jones ponders aloud creating “rawhide”-like kernel builds for stable Fedora releases, to increase test coverage and (hopefully) make released kernels even better overall. If you’d like your blog included here, simply have it added to planet.kernel.org. If you do that, it’s assumed you don’t mind being featured in such things.
The latest kernel release is 2.6.31-rc1, which was released by Linus last week.
Andrew Morton posted an mm-of-the-moment for 2009-06-30-12-50. It contains the usual impossibly large number of patches to itemize here.
Stephen Rothwell posted a linux-next tree for June 30th. Since Monday, he adds a new tree entitled “sfi” (which was immediately dropped due to build problems), his fixes tree still contains that fbdev fix, and our old friend of the powerpc build configuration problem in an allyesconfig is back. There are a total of 132 sub-trees in the linux-next compose now.
That’s a summary of today’s Linux Kernel Mailing List traffic, for further information visit www.kernel.org. I’m Jon Masters.
As per tradition, the new Openismus T-Shirts are ready for GUADEC 2009 (GCDS). They are again unlike last year’s, and simple enough to wear among civilians. We were a little rushed this year but they turned out nice. Thanks to Kat for fixing things in Inkscape and getting them done.
We only printed a limited number, so seek out an Openismus developer over the first weekend to get yours.
Now that we’ve found a place to get these done in Berlin we’ll probably do a new design (2009 1/2) for the Maemo Summit in Amsterdam in October.
As per tradition, the new Openismus T-Shirts are ready for GUADEC 2009 (GCDS). They are again unlike last year’s, and simple enough to wear among civilians. We were a little rushed this year but they turned out nice. Thanks to Kat for fixing things in Inkscape and getting them done.
We only printed a limited number, so seek out an Openismus developer over the first weekend to get yours.
Now that we’ve found a place to get these done in Berlin we’ll probably do a new design (2009 1/2) for the Maemo Summit in Amsterdam in October.
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The WSJ just posted a well balanced review of TuneUp and Picard. Thanks for the nice write up, Geoff!
A few days after Eclipse Galileo, Netbeans released its latest offering, Netbeans 6.7. Here is a first look, as always from my entirely biased perspective.
