Free Software :: Planet Free Software

ToC

  1. GNOME : Paul Cutler: Keep On Rockin’ Me Baby
  2. Ubuntu : You In Ubuntu: Ubuntu 10.10 Beta (Maverick Meerkat) Released
  3. Mozilla : Mozilla Labs: The About:Firefox Study
  4. GNOME : Lucas Rocha: Visiting English towns
  5. GStreamer : GStreamer: GStreamer Good Plugins 0.10.25, Ugly Plugins 0.10.16, Bad Plugins 0.10.20 stable releases
  6. Ubuntu : The Fridge: Ubuntu 10.10 Beta (Maverick Meerkat) Released
  7. Planet Haskell : Kevin Reid (kpreid): Pointfree diagonalization in Haskell
  8. Python : John Cook: Bug in SciPy’s erf function
  9. GNOME : Stormy Peters: Scary parenting moments: When should you see the doctor?
  10. Ubuntu : Shane Fagan: How to turn Ubuntu into a Gaming platform?
  11. Ubuntu : Ubuntu Release blog: Ubuntu 10.10 Beta (Maverick Meerkat) Released
  12. Sage : A quick-and-dirty cryptographic hash function
  13. FreeDesktop : Peter Hutterer: XTS census
  14. Maemo : Changes for add-ons in Fennec alpha
  15. Mozilla : Matt Brubeck: Changes for add-ons in Fennec alpha
  16. Mozilla : Mozilla Add-ons Blog: Mozilla Add-ons SDK 0.7 Example
  17. Mozilla : Alice Nodelman: Talos Documentation Updates
  18. CouchDB : RelaxBack for Thursday 9/2/2010
  19. Xfce : Searching the desktop with Pinot and Catfish
  20. Debian : Joerg Jaspert: Testing ChangeLog
  21. Ubuntu : Mackenzie Morgan: Finding more women to speak at Ohio LinuxFest: success!
  22. Python : Menno's Musings: IMAPClient 0.6.1 released
  23. Python : Matthew Rollings: Find words with the most anagrams efficiently using python
  24. Mozilla : Ben Hearsum: Purple is a fruit (…and also a colour on Tinderbox!)
  25. KDE : Thomas Thym (ungethym): KDE's 4.5 Release Party in St. Gallen (Switzerland)
  26. GNOME : Jaap A. Haitsma: GNOME Amazon Referral Fees August 2010
  27. LISP : Hans Hübner: Quicklisp - The upcoming solution to Common Lisp's "library problem"
  28. Mozilla : Shawn Wilsher: Startup Time in the Wild Take Three
  29. RepRap : A Smarter Approach to Infill
  30. Planet Haskell : Thomas M. DuBuisson: A Better Foundation for Random Values in Haskell
  31. KDE : Theo Chatzimichos (tampakrap): Gentoo KDE and Qt September Meetings
  32. Mozilla : Patrick Finch: Still thinking about the Open Web
  33. SuSE : Nelson Marques: Equinox GTK2 Engine – Updated, 1.30
  34. KernelPlanet : Valerie Aurora: We now resume our regularly scheduled hiking
  35. KDE : Tom Albers: Launch identity.kde.org
  36. SuSE : Jeffrey Stedfast: Microsoft Double Rainbow!
  37. GNOME : Yuvaraj Pandian: The End of GSoC 2010
  38. LISP : Zach Beane: International Lisp Conference 2010
  39. Mozilla : Mozilla IT: Mozilla Scheduled Downtime – 09/02/2010, 4pm PDT (2300 UTC)
  40. Python : Yaniv Aknin: Python’s Innards: Hello, ceval.c!
  41. Ubuntu : The Fridge: Code Hosting Maintenance Friday, September 3, 2010
  42. SuSE : OMG!SUSE! team: Google Video Chat for openSUSE
  43. GNOME : Luca Invernizzi: Lightspark 0.4.4.1 released
  44. Mozilla : Calendar: Lightning on the Shiny new Try Server
  45. Ubuntu : Launchpad News: Code hosting maintenance Friday, September 3
  46. OpenX : OpenX CTO to speak at AdMonsters “OPS” in NYC
  47. Mozilla : Boris Zbarsky: Peacekeeper benchmark weirdness
  48. Scheme : Joe Marshall: For your amusement...
  49. KDE : Andrea Scarpino (bash): KDEPIM 4.5 beta 3 released
  50. Ubuntu : Ubuntu Server blog: Server Team 20100831 meeting minutes
  51. OpenClipArt : Jon Phillips: An Introduction to StatusNet Video
  52. OpenOffice : Eric Bachard: OOoLight
  53. FreeDesktop : Tiago Vignatti: X Census (for 1.9)
  54. Elgg : Elgg 1.7.3 and 1.6.3 security releases
  55. Mozilla : David Eaves: Bugzilla – progress made and new thoughts
  56. OpenOffice : Gullfoss: Print file format changes on Linux
  57. Debian : Vincent Sanders: You shall go to the ball!
  58. Maemo : buscatcher: Never miss another tram
  59. KDE : Henri Bergius (bergie): My interview at dot KDE
  60. Maemo : My interview at dot KDE
  61. Mozilla : Mark Surman: Drumbeat: what’s next?
  62. KDE : Martin Gräßlin: Driver dilemma in KDE workspaces 4.5
  63. Ubuntu : Mackenzie Morgan: Sharing a shell and monitoring the other party
  64. Ubuntu : Matthew Helmke: The Manga Guide to Molecular Biology
  65. Ubuntu : Laura Czajkowski: The motivational drivers and barriers of volunteers in open source communities Part 2
  66. Ubuntu : Daniel Holbach: Holidays
  67. GNOME : Jordi Mas: gbrainy 1.51 for Linux and Windows
  68. Mozilla : Mozilla Labs: Bespin is now Mozilla Skywriter, moves to GitHub
  69. Ubuntu : Belinda Lopez: Ubuntu in Education
  70. Trolltech Labs : Fonts in Lighthouse
  71. StatusNet : An Introduction to StatusNet Video
  72. OpenOffice : IssueZilla: New issues: Thu Sep 2 13:43:01 UTC 2010
  73. Ubuntu : Stephan Hermann: Just in case you are a HP BL4* G6/7 user
  74. PHP : My interview at dot KDE - Henri Bergius
  75. RDF : Is Twitters plan to log all clicks a privacy loss?
  76. SuSE : openSUSE News: openSUSE Announce First 11.4 Development Milestone With Improved Package Management Performance, New XOrg, KDE and GNOME
  77. Ubuntu : Canonical Design Team: Why do you use Ubuntu?
  78. Smalltalk : Is it time to look for alternatives to Visual Smalltalk Enterprise?
  79. Trolltech Labs : Qt SDK packages for Qt 4.7.0 Release Candidate available
  80. Google opensource : Eclipse Day at the Googleplex 2010
  81. Smalltalk : S4A - Scratch for Arduino
  82. Debian : Evgeni Golov: Using plugins.svn.wordpress.org with Git
  83. Debian : Evgeni Golov: The joy and pain of WordPress
  84. SuSE : OMG!SUSE! team: Inkscape updates abound!
  85. Ubuntu : Dougie Richardson: Install web applications locally on Ubuntu
  86. OpenJDK : Dalibor Topić: Fedora gets a Java SIG
  87. Smalltalk : Scratch For Arduino (S4A)
  88. Maemo : Developing the MeeGo community
  89. Ubuntu : Paolo Sammicheli: LoCo Testing Team HowTo
  90. GNOME : Youness Alaoui: Update on PSJailbreak linux kernel (for N900 devices)
  91. GNOME : Nicolas Dufresne: Mail Notification in Meego
  92. GNOME : Nicolas Dufresne: GLib 2.26 will gain proxy support
  93. Debian : Wouter Verhelst: Frans Pop
  94. Free Software Magazine : The Bizarre Cathedral - 80
  95. OpenJDK : Dalibor Topić: JVM Language Summit 2010 Recordings On Oracle Media Network
  96. OpenClipArt : Nicu Buculei: My love story with Caroline
  97. XMLhack : Galaxy Tab
  98. SuSE : OMG!SUSE! team: Sprichst du open source? Check out the openSUSE Conference
  99. Ubuntu : Canonical Design Team: Happy Beta day everyone!
  100. Smalltalk : Smalltalk Daily 09/02/10: Loading Network Client Support
  101. Jabber : Process One: TextOne for iPhone, with photo sharing!
  102. OpenClipArt : Nicu Buculei: Sad/FUDCon
  103. KDE : Johan Thelin: Nordic Free Software Award
  104. Ubuntu : Christophe Sauthier: Handicap accessibility meeting for open communities webmasters
  105. Mozilla : Calendar: How are Lightning users doing in terms of Thunderbird usage
  106. SuSE : SUSE Studio: More secure SUSE Gallery
  107. GNOME : Pascal Terjan: The most unusable branch locator I have seen so far
  108. OpenClipArt : Fabricatorz: Fabricatorz: This week (August 29 – September 4)
  109. Smalltalk : September's Lulu discount code
  110. Smalltalk : FTP server back up
  111. Planet Haskell : Bryan O'Sullivan: Fast base64 encoding and decoding in Haskell
  112. Python : Duncan McGreggor: HCI at Canonical
  113. OpenClipArt : Nicu Buculei: Fedora 14 Supplemental Wallpapers
  114. SuSE : Fred Blaise: Tomcat: Too many open files… but why?
  115. Ubuntu : Duncan McGreggor: HCI at Canonical
  116. Ubuntu : The Fridge: Meet Jon Sackett
  117. Debian : MJ Ray: KohaCon10
  118. GNOME : Máirín Duffy: Sweet Caroline
  119. Debian : Russell Coker: Raw Satire Usually Fails on the Internet
  120. Debian : Christian Perrier: 100% for debconf in squeeze: 6 languages can make it
  121. Python : Python User Groups: pyCologne Python User Group Cologne - Meeting, September 08, 2010, 6.30pm
  122. OpenOffice : IssueZilla: New issues: Thu Sep 2 03:43:00 UTC 2010
  123. Mozilla : Armen Zambrano Gasparnian: Firefox in Armenian: ready to download! (development builds)
  124. Mozilla : Meeting Notes from the Mozilla community: Mobile Meeting Minutes: 2010-09-01
  125. Mozilla : Meeting Notes from the Mozilla community: Firefox/Gecko Delivery Meeting Minutes: 2010-09-01
  126. Ubuntu : Jordan Mantha: Fool me thrice ...
  127. Debian : Debian News: DebianDayPT 2010 in Aveiro, Portugal
  128. Ubuntu : Benjamin Humphrey: OMG! Ubuntu! gets a facelift
  129. Ubuntu : Ryan Kavanagh: Turnin-NG 1.1 released!
  130. OpenJDK : Cay Horstmann: Independence Day for Java?
  131. Mozilla : Alex Vincent: Sparking some interest...
  132. KernelPlanet : Harald Welte: Motorola announces "Ming" phone with Android
  133. Mozilla : Rock Your Firefox: BlogHer Survey Results
  134. LISP : Patrick Stein: Deadline approaching: in the Find the People, Lisp Programming Contest
  135. Ubuntu : The Fridge: New Ubuntu Lucid Proposed Kernel
  136. Planet Haskell : Jason Dagit: Trying out jsMath
  137. Mozilla : David Bolter: Firefox 4 beta - AT Vendor Alert
  138. Python : Matthew Rollings: 9 letter words with several anagrams
  139. Debian : Amaya Rodrigo: Dear Frans
  140. Ubuntu : Steve Stalcup: Social Spider Web
  141. Debian : Gunnar Wolf: Cycling, cycling everywhere!
  142. Ubuntu : Ubuntu Classroom: Packaging Training: The sponsoring tools in ubuntu-dev-tools
  143. Python : Mario Boikov: Python Koans - A Great Way to Learn Python!
  144. Debian : Russ Allbery: git-pbuilder 1.16
  145. Mozilla : Dave Townsend: Don’t miss an exciting opportunity to shape the future of Firefox 4!
  146. Scheme : Grant Rettke: Ready for Service
  147. Ubuntu : Aaron Toponce: Ramadan – Week Three
  148. Python : Evan Fosmark: SSL support in asynchat.async_chat
  149. Scheme : Grant Rettke: ocamlnet-3.0.0
  150. Scheme : Grant Rettke: Easy Ways to Fail a Ph.D.
  151. Ubuntu : Shane Fagan: .
  152. OpenClipArt : Greg Bulmash: Dumping the Cable Dinosaur
  153. Ubuntu : Ubuntu Podcast from the UK LoCo: S03E15 – Sharp Shooters
  154. KDE : Dennis Nienhüser (Earthwings): Turn Instructions
  155. GNOME : Stormy Peters: Should women stay on the technical track?
  156. XMLhack : Five XML Security Drafts Published
  157. Ubuntu : Rick Spencer: Quickly Widget Dating
  158. KDE : Guillermo Amaral (gamaral): KDEMU - OpenSuSE with Jos Poortvliet
  159. Ubuntu : Aron Xu: My way of choosing email programs
  160. SuSE : Matthew Ehle: openSUSE 11.3 Impressions
  161. Python : Vern Ceder: Python for Linux at OLF
  162. Mozilla : Timothy Nikkel: Bug 130078 Landed
  163. SuSE : Nelson Marques: The Plan: Portuguese speaking community census!
  164. Maemo : Improve your Nokia N900 camera experience with two beta apps
  165. Mozilla : Mark Surman: How the web was won: a talk
  166. Debian : Petter Reinholdtsen: My first perl GUI application - controlling a Spykee robot
  167. Ubuntu : Jani Monoses: Kiwi Linux 10.08 released with Chromium, Shotwell and more
  168. GNOME : Juan A. Suarez Romero: Grilo 0.1.6 released
  169. Ubuntu : Jani Monoses: Preparing for the next Kiwi Linux
  170. Ubuntu : Paul Tagliamonte: Global Jam, Columbus Postgame
  171. SuSE : Nelson Marques: openSUSE:Tools for Fedora 13
  172. Ubuntu : Stephan Hermann: News on the (DC)² Front
  173. Ubuntu : Steve Conklin: New Ubuntu Lucid proposed kernel
  174. Python : Imaginary Landscape: Our Django Server Setup: How and Why
  175. Ubuntu : Nathan Haines: OCLUG meeting this Saturday!
  176. SchoolTool : SchoolTool at Maker Faire RI
  177. KDE : Riccardo Iaconelli (ruphy): Akunambol 0.2 is out!
  178. Debian : Sylvain Le Gall: OCaml 3.12 with Debian Sid right now!
  179. StatusNet : StatusReport: StatusNet mobile Beta 3 is now available, OStatus 1.0 Draft 2 released!
  180. Python : Roberto Alsina: Goodreads+webcam+python+zbar == hackfun!
  181. PHP : Zend Framework is a BOSSie Award Winner - Zend Developer Zone
  182. Python : Brett Cannon: What will forever be exclusive to Python 3?
  183. GNOME : Paul Cutler: GNOME Journal Issue 21 is out!
  184. KDE : Stuart Jarvis: More Akademy Articles
  185. KDE : Aleix Pol (apol): KDevelop Git support
  186. PHP : Speaking at PHPNW 2010 - John Mertic
  187. Ubuntu : The Fridge: Announcing this week's Bug Day target - Empathy! - Thursday, 2 September 2010!
  188. XMLhack : what does law.gov mean to you?
  189. Miro : Will's blog: Dev call 9/1/2010 minutes
  190. PostgreSQL : Selena Deckelmann: Explaining MVCC in Postgres: system defined columns
  191. XMLhack : Norm Reconsiders DITA Specialization
  192. KDE : Volker Lanz (Torch): Release: KDE Partition Manager Live CD 1.0.3
  193. Python : Richard Tew: Roguelike MUD progress #2
  194. Planet Haskell : Holumbus: Hayoo! 2.1
  195. Python : Montreal Python User Group: Next Montréal
  196. Smalltalk : [Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants] Site Outage
  197. Ubuntu : Canonical Design Team: Ubuntu default wallpaper
  198. Mozilla : BlueGriffon: CSS 3 Backgrounds in BlueGriffon
  199. FreeDesktop : Bastien Nocera: New sharing UI update
  200. Mozilla : David Boswell: Featured Mozilla-based Applications for September

September 03, 2010

Planet GNOME

Paul Cutler: Keep On Rockin’ Me Baby

Well, I`ve been looking real hard
And I`m trying to find a job
But it just keeps getting
Tougher every day

But I got to do my part
Cause I know in my heart
I got to please my
Sweet baby, yeah

Steve Miller

I’ve been using Banshee for years now and I don’t know how I’d manage my (too) large music collection without it. The Banshee team released 1.7.5 on Tuesday. Banshee 1.7.5 has two new big features:

Trying to do my part, I’ve been working on all new documentation for Banshee written as topic based help using Mallard. The first release of user help was last month in Banshee 1.7.4 and with 1.7.5 I’d call it functionally complete.

banshee-help

(Click through to see a bigger version)

Now is when the fun starts!. My process is to write and write some more, and then come back and edit. I think I have most of the major help topics covered. Or do I? I need your help! Take a look through the docs. Have I missed any topics? Can you find mistakes I’ve made in how Banshee works? (I don’t pretend to be a Banshee expert or even use half of it’s features!) Typos? Grammar errors? (I wish I was a machine and could type perfectly, but sometimes I type like Aaron on a Thinkpad T410).

Lastly, I need to add content for common problems and advanced help, such as adding an is_audio file to some MP3 players to have Banshee recognize the player.

How can you help after doing one of the tasks above? File a bug! Drop me an email! Ping me in IRC in #banshee on GIMPNet! I want your feedback and ways I can make the help better, especially with the advanced topics and common problems that users may see.

And a big thank you to Aaron, Gabriel, Bertrand, Alex and all the developers who keep Banshee rockin’.

September 03, 2010 02:22 AM

Planet Ubuntu

You In Ubuntu: Ubuntu 10.10 Beta (Maverick Meerkat) Released

Ubuntu 10.10 Beta (Maverick Meerkat) Released. See what's new and what you have to look forward to in Ubuntu 10.10.10, Ubuntu 10.10 Beta gives you that view into what is come.

September 03, 2010 02:19 AM

Planet Mozilla

Mozilla Labs: The About:Firefox Study

The Latest Study

While previous Test Pilot studies (e.g. the Firefox Main Window, Menu Item Usage, and Tab Switch studies) have largely focused on user experience and usage data, the Test Pilot extension is flexible enough to capture a wide range of other data related to the Firefox browser. The ‘About:Firefox’ Study is a 1-day study implemented to record configuration and performance information for our product and engineering teams.

The study will take a snapshot of memory use statistics, plug-in information, graphics card configuration, and modified preferences (information that can be viewed in ‘about:support’ and ‘about:memory’). As always, we are careful to avoid collecting any sensitive or personally identifiable information. The ‘About:Firefox’ Study will only capture information on a pre-defined set of preferences; we’ve made sure to blacklist any preferences that might contain sensitive data, such as homepage settings.

By submitting this data, you will help our product and engineering teams prioritize development efforts and create a more efficient browser!

Test Champion: Christopher Jung, Data Analyst, Mozilla Metrics.
Test Duration: 1 day.
Test Version: Firefox 3.6.x and Firefox 4 Beta

Privacy

Security and privacy are priorities for Mozilla, especially when dealing with user data. Test Pilot privacy settings give users control over their data – these privacy settings include:

Get Involved!

September 03, 2010 01:33 AM

Planet GNOME

Lucas Rocha: Visiting English towns

Brighton

This year, Carol and I decided to plan for some quick visits to smaller cities around London. The reason is twofold. First, we wanted to explore a bit more the country where we live. Secondly, we wanted to “practice” how it was to travel with our little daughter before our vacation in Brazil. We’ve made 1-day trips to three towns: Windsor, Cambridge, and Brighton.

Windsor. We visited Windsor in the end of 2009 when my father and his wife came to London to spend Xmas and new year with us. We went there for an obvious reason: the famous Windsor castle, one of England’s most popular places for tourists. It was a quite cold day but we managed to enjoy the sightseeing anyway. Windsor, the town, is cute and very quiet.

Cambridge. This was the first time we made a trip with Julia. Cambridge is a university-oriented town full of students all around. We took the sightseeing bus and walked around quite a bit – a very tiring experience to carry Julia in a sling during the whole time. We went to some of the Cambridge’s classic locations such as King’s College Chapel and Fitzwilliam Museum. Got a pretty good impression of Cambridge, even though it seemed a bit too crowded with students.

Brighton. That was definitely our favourite town. Brighton is on the south coast of England. The pebble beach is a nice place to relax. Brightonians seem to be easy-going people. It’s amazing how the sea affects people’s behaviour and attitude. To be honest, Carol and I even considered moving there after the visit but it would be a bit impractical to work in London and live there.

What all those towns have in common? A very obvious thing: you see more English people. It may sound weird to say that but in London you don’t really experience English culture because the city is very cosmopolitan. Even though those towns are not so far from London, it was interesting to notice that they are more homogeneously English than London. I took some photos from all three towns.

Where are we going next? We have some obvious suspects in mind: Oxford, Bath, Stonehenge, Cotswolds, and others. We’re also planning a weekend trip to Edinburgh and surrounding locations. There’s so much to see that is hard to decide! But we have no hurry and summer is almost gone now. Maybe next year, let’s see.

September 03, 2010 01:26 AM

Planet GStreamer

GStreamer: GStreamer Good Plugins 0.10.25, Ugly Plugins 0.10.16, Bad Plugins 0.10.20 stable releases

The GStreamer team is excited to announce new releases of the gst-plugins-good, gst-plugins-ugly and gst-plugins-bad modules for the 0.10 GStreamer stable release series.

For more details, check out the release notes for gst-plugins-good, gst-plugins-ugly, and gst-plugins-bad, or download tarballs for gst-plugins-good, gst-plugins-ugly, gst-plugins-bad directly.

September 03, 2010 12:47 AM

Planet Ubuntu

The Fridge: Ubuntu 10.10 Beta (Maverick Meerkat) Released

The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 10.10 beta.

Codenamed “Maverick Meerkat”, 10.10 continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop Edition and Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition continue the trend of ever-faster boot speeds, with improved startup times and a smoother, streamlined boot experience.

Ubuntu 10.10 Server Edition provides even better integration of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, with its install time cloud setup.

Ubuntu 10.10 Server for UEC and EC2 brings the power and stability of the Ubuntu Server Edition to cloud computing, whether you’re using Amazon EC2 or your own Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.

The Ubuntu 10.10 family of Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, and Mythbuntu, also reach beta status today.

Ubuntu Desktop features
————————

The GNOME base platform has been updated to the current 2.31 versions. This includes the new dconf and gsettings API.

Evolution was updated to the 2.30.2 version, which operates much faster than the version in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

Shotwell has replaced F-Spot as the default photo manager.

Gwibber has been updated to support the recent change in Twitter’s authentication system, as well as changing the back end storage to improve performance.

The Sound Indicator has been enhanced to include music player controls.

The Ubuntu Software Center has an updated look and feel, including the new “Featured” and “What’s New” views for showcasing applications, and an improved package description view. You can now easily access your package installation history too.

New Design: The boot process is cleaner and faster. New themes, new icons, and new wallpaper bring a dramatically updated look and feel to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu One: Polished desktop integration with new sign up and sign in process. Tighter integration with Ubuntu SSO. Nautilus enhancements for managing folder sync preferences. Faster file sync speed. Share links to music within the Ubuntu One Music Store.

Please see http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/maverick/beta for details.

Ubuntu Server features
———————-

Cloud computing: The configurable initialization process for Ubuntu Server cloud images (cloud-init) has gained new features in Maverick Beta, including pluggable hooks, ebsmount, ext4 support, and new stanzas in the cloud-config format. Cloud image instances can now manage their own kernel and upgrade kernels with apt. This is done by using pv-grub, provided by Amazon.

Ubuntu Netbook features
———————————-

The new Unity interface is now the default in Ubuntu Netbook Edition. It includes the global menu bar. The date/time indicator now has a real calendar widget.

The standard photo management application has been switched to Shotwell.

Kubuntu features
————————

For Maverick, Kubuntu have merged the Desktop and Netbook images into one. Ubiquity, Kubuntu’s installer, will detect the screen size before the install and use either the Plasma Desktop workplace or the Plasma Netbook workplace as needed. Users will be able to switch between the two in System Settings.

Plasma Netbook now sports the Global Menu by default.

The standard web browser is now Rekonq, a KDE browser based on Qt Webkit.

Bluedevil has become the default bluetooth stack.

Pulseaudio is the default sound server.

KPackageKit updates bring a faster backend and an updated UI that provides a new Categories page, and new features such as a backup/restore tool for the list of installed packages.

Kubuntu’s installer (Ubiquity) now has updated look and layout.
Qapt-batch now replaces install-package as the update/batch-installer utility

KDE Platform, Workspaces, and Applications were updated to 4.5.0 (the recently released 4.5.1 update could not be integrated before beta release and will arrive shortly).

Qt was updated to the current 4.7 beta release.

See https://wiki.kubuntu.org/MaverickMeerkat/Beta/Kubuntu for more details.

Xubuntu features
————————

Xfce4 was updated to the current 4.6.2 release.

New default applications include: Parole (Xfce4 Media Player), replacing Totem Movie Player; Xfburn (Xfce4 CD/DVD burning tool), replacing Brasero; and xfce4-taskmanager (Xfce4 process manager), replacing Gnome-Task-Manager.

Edubuntu features
————————-

Edubuntu now includes Gnome Nanny, which provides parental controls in Edubuntu. There is new wallpaper included (periodic table breakout). In addition, an OEM Install mode is now available.

For those interested in learning more, there’s a new web site as well.
Check out http://www.edubuntu.org.

Ubuntu Studio features
———————————

In this release, Ubuntu Studio has better integration between Pulse Audio and JACK. JACK and Pulse Audio can now be used side-by-side if they are using different audio interfaces. If they are trying to use the same audio interface, JACK will take precedent. The network connections can now be configured with gnome-network-admin.

Mythbuntu features
—————————

In this release, Mythbuntu has updated to MythTV 0.23.1.

There is also a new backup and restore tool.

Other
——-

The full release notes can be found at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/maverick/beta

About Ubuntu
——————

Ubuntu is a full-featured Linux distribution for desktops, laptops, and servers, with a fast and easy installation and regular releases. A tightly-integrated selection of excellent applications is included, and an incredible variety of add-on software is just a few clicks away.

Professional technical support is available from Canonical Limited and hundreds of other companies around the world. For more information about support, visit http://www.ubuntu.com/support

To Get Ubuntu 10.10 Beta
————————————

To upgrade to Ubuntu 10.10 Beta from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS,
follow these instructions:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MaverickUpgrades

Or, download Ubuntu 10.10 Beta; The following link will direct you to a download location near you:

http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/download

Or, choose the mirror closest to you:

Africa:

Asia:

Europe:

North America:

Oceania/Australia:

South America:

Please download using Bittorrent if possible.

The final version of Ubuntu 10.10 is expected to be released in October 2010.

Feedback and Participation
—————————————

If you would like to help shape Ubuntu, take a look at the list of ways you can participate at

http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate/

Your comments, bug reports, patches and suggestions will help turn this Beta into the best release of Ubuntu ever. Please note that, where possible, we prefer that bugs be reported using the tools provided, rather than by visiting Launchpad directly. Instructions can be found at

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs

If you have a question, or if you think you may have found a bug but are not sure, first try asking on the #ubuntu IRC channel on freenode, on the Ubuntu Users mailing list, or on the Ubuntu forums:

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/

More Information
————————

You can find out more about Ubuntu and about this preview release on our website, IRC channel and wiki. If you are new to Ubuntu, please visit:

http://www.ubuntu.com/

To sign up for future Ubuntu announcements, please subscribe to Ubuntu’s very low volume announcement list at:

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-announce

[Discuss Ubuntu 10.10 Beta on the Forum]

Originally posted to theubuntu-announce mailing list by Robbie Williamson on Thu Sep 2 23:50:39 BST 2010.

September 03, 2010 12:35 AM

Planet Haskell

Kevin Reid (kpreid): Pointfree diagonalization in Haskell

James@Waterpoint (Xplat on Freenode) mentioned an interesting problem: write an elegant point-free expression to compute the diagonal of a list of lists (that is, from [[00, 01, 02, ...], [10, 11, 12, ...], ...] obtain [00, 11, ...]).

His version:

diag = (map head) . (foldr (flip ((flip (:)) . (map tail))) [])

My version, which needs a non-pointfree helper function (but one which others have invented before, and perhaps ought to be in the standard libraries), but has fewer flips:

import Control.Arrow ((***))
import Data.List (unfoldr)

uncons xs = case xs of (x:xs') -> Just (x,xs'); [] -> Nothing
diag = unfoldr (fmap (head *** (map tail)) . uncons)

uncons is sort of the opposite of unfoldr, in that unfoldr uncons = id.

Update: [info]darius's version, from the comments:

diag = flip (zipWith (!!)) [0..]

September 03, 2010 12:21 AM

Planet Python

John Cook: Bug in SciPy’s erf function

Last night I produced the plot below and was very surprised at the jagged spike. I knew the curve should be smooth and strictly increasing.

My first thought was that there must be a numerical accuracy problem in my code, but it turns out there’s a bug in SciPy version 0.8.0b1. I started to report it, but I saw there were similar bug reports and one such report was marked as closed, so presumably the fix will appear in the next release.

The problem is that SciPy’s erf function is inaccurate for arguments with imaginary part near 5.8. For example, Mathematica computes erf(1.0 + 5.7i) as -4.5717×1012 + 1.04767×1012 i. SciPy computes the same value as -4.4370×1012 + 1.3652×1012 i. The imaginary component is off by about 30%.

Here is the code that produced the plot.

from scipy.special import erf
from numpy import linspace, exp
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

def g(y):
    z = (1 + 1j*y) /  sqrt(2)
    temp = exp(z*z)*(1 - erf(z))
    u, v = temp.real, temp.imag
    return -v / u

x = linspace(0, 10, 101)
plt.plot(x, g(x))

September 03, 2010 12:19 AM

Planet GNOME

Stormy Peters: Scary parenting moments: When should you see the doctor?

Photo by Rußen http://www.flickr.com/photos/rubenperez/452108745/

My son had RSV when he was 4 months old and the doctors warned us that he was at increased risk of asthma and other respiratory problems. Fortunately, he didn’t develop asthma, but he did develop a mom who’s terrified of breathing problems.

Since then, I’ve had trouble figuring out when we should go to the doctor.

See, the day he was diagnosed with RSV, our day care provider told us she thought he was pretty sick and should go to the doctor. Of course it was Friday at 5:00 and we had dinner plans. And the two previous times she’d thought he should see a doctor, he’d been fine. But we took him. And on the way over, I commented to Frank that this was it. Third strike and she was out. If he wasn’t sick, I wasn’t listening to her advice again. I now take her advice very seriously. When we got to urgent care they immediately attached a device to him to test his blood oxygen levels. One look at the readings, some xrays to eliminate pneumonia and they told us to go immediately across the street to the hospital. There would be a room waiting for us. (Instead we had to go and sit in an office and show proof of insurance, but that’s a different story.)

Since that day, I’ve called the doctor’s office numerous times and held the phone up to my son so they could hear what he sounded like. Several times they have sent us in to the doctor or urgent care. One memorable morning his breathing was so loud it actually woke Frank and I up – and we were in a different room. When I called the doctor at home and held the phone up to my son’s mouth, he told me to go the emergency room immediately. We decided that I should go alone so we didn’t have to wake up our older son. While going 75 mph down the interstate, the terrible breathing noise stopped. My heart stopped too as I put on my hazard lights, pulled over to the edge of the freeway and leaned over the backseat to see if he was still breathing. He was. The terrible noise had started again by the time we got to the hospital and the hospital staff was so sure he had swallowed something, they took xrays. Nope, just a throat infection that was closing his throat up.

But I also took him to the doctor for a number of common colds that didn’t really merit a doctor’s visit – except to calm my nerves. So I no longer trust my judgement.

This morning he sounded terrible. And Frank told me he should go to the doctor. (And usually Frank thinks I’m too quick to go to the doctor.) And when I called the doctor’s office and described what he sounded like, they didn’t think I should wait until 2:45 to see his regular doctor. They told me to come right in. So I was scared. And imagined all the worse.

Luckily, he only has croup and the medicine they gave him to reduce swelling in his throat kicked in within a few hours.

But I continue to be regularly terrified because I simply don’t trust myself to know if it’s serious or not. I mean I would have brought him home with RSV and he might have died that night.

At the doctor’s office today, I anxiously waited the reading of the oximeter (it was a nice 98) and decided I should have bought one of those a long time ago. Turns out you can get one for less than $100 on Amazon. (For the record, I spent 4 days in the hospital staring at an oximeter reading, willing it to stay above 80.) So maybe with an oximeter of my own I’ll know when it’s really serious … but probably not. I’ll probably keep calling the doctor’s office.

(For the record, you are supposed to take kids into the doctor – urgently – if they have stridor breathing sounds, wheezing, stomach breathing, blue lips or gums, … or any number of other terrifying symptoms.)

Related posts:

  1. When do you need a new doctor?
  2. Caleb has RSV
  3. Ultrasounds & 5 year olds: “Is this going to be scary?”

September 03, 2010 12:12 AM

Planet Ubuntu

Shane Fagan: How to turn Ubuntu into a Gaming platform?

I was thinking about this issue a lot. Games have a hard time on Linux with multiple sound architectures, different package management systems and not many ways to deploy their app easily. So the answers to these are use pulse audio, make a few different packages for different distros (which is expensive) or just deploy it on Ubuntu (which would piss off other distros) and deploying it at the moment is hosting it on your own website as a download.

In maverick we are getting a marketplace in the software center to sort out the deploying part and i presume thats going to have a centralized payment system so thats good for the game developers. My idea is that we can take this further. My idea is make something like like battle.net or steam (kinda).

Ok for those who don’t know steam is the payment management and distribution system for games and battle.net is just a payment management system for blizzard’s games.

So we have an SSO and now a marketplace, distribution and centralized payment system for maverick. Why not expose some info to games developers? The info that is needed depends on the game but if its something like WoW you would need the account info and if they paid for the game to log you in.

The idea is kind of a win win situation, the user wins because there is no login and its a simple system to handle everything for them and the developer wins because he doesn’t have to code a complex login system and he gets the payments handled too.

Thoughts?

September 03, 2010 12:03 AM

September 02, 2010

Planet Ubuntu

Ubuntu Release blog: Ubuntu 10.10 Beta (Maverick Meerkat) Released

Releases are big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big they are. I mean, you may think it’s a long haul to release a single package or application, but that’s just peanuts to a distribution release. Because of this, we must work our way up to it, incrementally…bit by bit…milestone by milestone. So with that, we formally announce Ubuntu 10.10 Beta in all it’s glory. Please download and give it a whirl, and if you find a problem, by all means file a bug…but Don’t Panic.

For more information on the release, please see the announcement.

September 02, 2010 11:42 PM

Planet Sage

A quick-and-dirty cryptographic hash function

Cryptographic hash functions sit at the core of many secure applications. They are vital to digital signatures for example: rather than signing a message, the hash of the message is signed. A cryptographic hash may be considered as a sort of digital fingerprint: it identifies a message in the same way that a fingerprint identifies [...]

September 02, 2010 11:20 PM

planet.freedesktop.org

Peter Hutterer: XTS census

Tiago's X 1.9 Census includes the commits to the X Test Suite for the 1.9 window. IMO, this isn't particularly expressive since XTS follows its own cycle and the server merge windows have no meaning to it.

The short history of XTS is:
The X Test Suite was written back in the day of yonder (possibly more than two yonks ago) and it is designed to perform a number of protocol tests to verify whether the server has changed behaviour. This includes simple things like creating a window and making sure the MapNotify is sent through to more complex interactions with modifiers and grabs.

XTS was still in CVS until 2009 when I wanted to figure out how much I really broke with MPX. So I imported it into git and started autotooling it. XTS is a bit of a beast and at some point I gave up and asked Dan Nicholson for help; his autotooling skills exceed mine by some unmeasurable amount. A few months later and some 80-something commits later Dan came back with a fully autotooled XTS. So building XTS went from requiring a wiki page to git clone, autogen.sh, make.

From then on, we continued working on making it more sane and easier to run, along with misc code cleanups (DECNET support? Really?) and one of my favourite issues: that after 4 hours of runtime one realised that every test had failed because DISPLAY wasn't set. Anyway, I digress.
We found a couple of issues in the X server as well, with 1.7.7, 1.8.1 and 1.9.0 being the first three releases that pass the test suite without crashing.

XTS is still a bit from being really useful, at the moment many of the test results are write-only (though a few test errors have fed back into the server or even libxcb). Anyway, here are the raw numbers from gitdm (that 1 employer is Unknown because I couldn't be bothered setting up a gitdm.config file).

Note: 1024 of my changesets are a semi-automatic rename of files and that skews the statistic.


Processed 1275 csets from 5 developers
1 employers found
A total of 33380 lines added, 30758 removed (delta 2622)

Developers with the most changesets
Peter Hutterer 1061 (83.2%)
Dan Nicholson 192 (15.1%)
Aaron Plattner 12 (0.9%)
Jon TURNEY 4 (0.3%)
Tinderbox user 4 (0.3%)

Developers with the most changed lines
Dan Nicholson 20545 (50.0%)
Peter Hutterer 10296 (25.0%)
Aaron Plattner 3854 (9.4%)
Tinderbox user 655 (1.6%)
Jon TURNEY 30 (0.1%)

Developers with the most lines removed
Aaron Plattner 2000 (6.5%)

Developers with the most signoffs (total 5)
Dan Nicholson 3 (60.0%)
Peter Hutterer 2 (40.0%)

Developers with the most reviews (total 10)
Dan Nicholson 7 (70.0%)
Peter Hutterer 3 (30.0%)

Developers with the most test credits (total 1)
Pat Kane 1 (100.0%)

Developers who gave the most tested-by credits (total 1)
Dan Nicholson 1 (100.0%)


The point of this blog post? Give credit to Dan for his magnificent work on XTS because he's been carrying the load for quite a while. And of course, many thanks to Aaron, Jon and Pat for their contributions.

September 02, 2010 11:15 PM

Planet Maemo

Changes for add-ons in Fennec alpha

Firefox for Mobile Firefox for Mobile Changes for add-ons in Fennec alpha - http://limpet.net/mbrubec... 4 hours ago from Matt Brubeck - Comment - Like
1 Add to favourites0 Bury

September 02, 2010 11:11 PM

Planet Mozilla

Matt Brubeck: Changes for add-ons in Fennec alpha

Last week we released a new alpha version of Firefox for Android and Maemo (a.k.a. Fennec). This release brings some major changes and new features for add-on authors. Our Fennec add-on documentation now has the details you need to start updating your Fennec add-ons or creating new ones.

What's new for add-ons?

One very big change in this release is Electrolysis, the project to move content and chrome into separate processes. Any add-on code that interacts with web content through the DOM must now be in a separate script that runs in the content process. For details, see the Electrolysis guide for add-on authors.

Fennec 2.0a1 also features new APIs for extending the context menu and site menu. See the User Interface Guide for links to documentation and example code.

The upcoming beta releases will include even more changes. Add-ons that use Fennec's panning and zooming features will probably need significant changes for the new graphics code in Fennec 2.0b1. We will also include APIs for for add-ons to customize sharing and other new features. If you are working on an add-on that is affected by these changes, please let us know.

Get started

To start updating or creating your Fennec add-on, download our Fennec alpha for Android and Nokia N900 or download the emulator for Mac/Windows/Linux. When you're ready, update your addons.mozilla.org listing and set the maxVersion to 2.0a1. Or you can start getting ready for beta by setting your maxVersion to 2.0b1pre and keeping up-to-date with our pre-beta nightly builds.

September 02, 2010 11:11 PM

Mozilla Add-ons Blog: Mozilla Add-ons SDK 0.7 Example

The release of the Mozilla Add-ons SDK 0.7 brings with it many useful APIs developers can leverage to create an even wider variety of Firefox add-ons without touching a single line of code from the underlying Mozilla platform. Notable APIs from 0.7 include Clipboard, Notifications, and the topic of this post, the Panel API.

The addition of Panel in the SDK provides for numerous UI and display implementations that were not nearly as easy to accomplish in earlier versions of the SDK. You can now easily display detailed, interactive content in response to a user interacting with your add-on’s widget, toolbar, or other browser UI.

Here is an example of what a creating a simple Panel API instance looks like:

var panels = require("panel");
var data = require("self").data;

var myPanel = panels.add(panels.Panel({
    contentURL: data.url("somepage.html")
}));

In the example extension MailPing, panels are used to show the user detailed information about their unread email messages. You can download MailPing from addons.mozilla.org or grab a zippy of the entire package, add-on, source files and all.

September 02, 2010 11:01 PM

Alice Nodelman: Talos Documentation Updates

I recently put some time into updating the talos documentation. There are now sections describing how numbers are calculated, the history of the tp test along with updates to descriptions of tests, description of talos hardware, where to file bugs and so on.

Any comments and suggestions on what needs addition or further clarification would be great.  I’m mostly going by the questions that are directed at me the most frequently.

September 02, 2010 10:43 PM

Planet CouchDB

RelaxBack for Thursday 9/2/2010

Upcoming Events

Couchio is having an “open Friday” tomorrow. Anyone from the community is invited to drop by the office and if you show up before noon we’ll take you out to lunch.

CouchHack next Monday the 6th and Tuesday the 7th. CouchCamp starts Webnesday the 8th - Friday the 10th.

Recent Happenings

Cloudant releases BigCouch (Dynamo style distributed CouchDB) and Klaus Trainer documents how to get it up and running on Ubuntu.

Let’s just say that again, Cloudant releases FUCKIN BIGCOUCH BAYBEE! This is a huge deal and a big step forward for the couch community.

GeoCouch gets rebased to CouchDB 1.0.1.

New _replicator database gets merged in to CouchDB trunk.

The free online version O’Reilly’s CouchDB The Definitive Guide gets a redesign.

Chris Strom has had some great posts about his node.js/fab/couchdb game.

Mikeal started work on a rewrite of Futon using sammy.js.

Jobs Postings

Couchio is hiring a ton of positions.

Cloudant is hiring an Erlang developer.

September 02, 2010 10:41 PM

Xfce News

Searching the desktop with Pinot and Catfish

I was looking around for desktop search frameworks today, specifically something with a gtk frontend and that required the fewest resources to run.

I discovered Pinot, a dbus-based file index/monitor/search tool. It even comes with a minimal gtk+ interface. I found few reviews on Pinot, and even fewer recent reviews comparing it to other search frameworks like Strigi, Tracker, and Beagle. I also discovered Catfish, a lightweight frontend to several different search services. There's not much out there on integrating Catfish and Pinot, so I forged ahead and wrote my own code, then did some trial-and-error experiments.

All ebuilds are available on my overnight overlay. Instructions for adding the overlay are on the wiki.

Writing the ebuilds

The only ebuild I found for Pinot is sadly out-of-date, and is completely incorrect. Also, it depends on libtextcat, and I never found an ebuild for that.

So, I wrote my own ebuilds for the latest versions of Pinot and libtextcat.

Not content with Pinot's minimal gtk+ interface, I decided to try Catfish, a PyGtk frontend for several different search engines, including Pinot. Catfish is made by the same developer of Midori, a well-respected lightweight WebKit browser. While Catfish's development has been stalled for two years, I figured it was worth a shot, since its user interface is friendlier than Pinot's.

Catfish, like Pinot and libtextcat, is not in Portage, but there is an open bug for its inclusion. However, the ebuild for the latest version needed updating, as it didn't include Strigi or Pinot. So I rewrote it and added descriptive metadata.xml entries for Catfish's and Pinot's USE flags.

There's still a bit of work left on the Catfish ebuild, since there's a QA warning about not leaving precompiled Python object files in /usr/share/catfish. However, the application itself works perfectly. Just need to clean up the install process so that the bytecode doesn't clutter up the filesystem.

Pinot

On first run, Pinot will take a long time to index your files. I pointed it at my user's /home/ directory, which contains 51,000+ files, totaling 9.3GB on a Reiser3 filesystem with tail enabled. That operation took probably half an hour, and that's on a fast SSD! All of Pinot's indexes and databases take up 455MB, bringing my total /home/ usage to about 9.7GB. Pinot typically used about 50% of my CPU while doing so, sometimes dropping down to the 20s and 40s.

However, since Pinot is on a fast SSD, and it's running off a 2.3Ghz dual-core Athlon backed by 4GB RAM, I didn't notice any performance hit while indexing. I'm not running any special kernels or schedulers (like BFS) either; just vanilla-source-2.6.35.4. There was no noticeable lag or slowdown, despite viewing two Thunar windows, working with four terminals, and browsing nine Firefox tabs. My system was only laggy when compiling Pinot and its dependencies.

Once my /home/ was indexed, I searched around. Queries were pretty much instantaneous. There's no easy way to measure the speed of each query, since it's much too fast to time with a stopwatch. That's probably mostly because of the SSD -- as it is, without a desktop indexer/search app, most similar queries take less than a second. Once the initial filesystem index is complete, Pinot drops back to just monitoring directories if you've told it to do so, relying on the inotify feature in the kernel. That drops CPU and memory usage to zero, as near as I can tell. Nice!

Pinot's greatest advantage on my system, at least, is not its speed, but its usefulness for easily finding deeply buried files and folders.

Interestingly, even though Pinot by default is not supposed to index Git, CVS, or SVN repositories, it seems to ignore that setting. Searching for "catfish" turns up a document named catfish tricks and all the ebuilds and git logs that have "catfish" in the title. Apparently Pinot's regex filter isn't very reliable. I probably need to add in another asterisk to disable searching or indexing of any files within a git directory.

Catfish

Catfish mostly works as expected, though it defaults to using "find" rather than "pinot" as its search engine. I haven't yet found a way to set it to use Pinot as the default search provider. Catfish is quick to load, and its layout is fairly intuitive. Sometimes, however, it will just stop working with Pinot, and even though Pinot has indexed my entire home directory, Catfish won't return any search results, though I can get those results by using Pinot's interface. The rest of the time it works great.

Besides offering a friendlier UI for searches, Catfish's real strengths are its useful options, both for presentation and for tying in with my desktop's filemanager. With a couple of commandline switches, Catfish can display thumbnails of various filetypes, use larger icons in search results, use various wrappers for opening and working with files, or even use powerful regex search methods. No, it won't have the awesome preview capabilities of Gloobus, but you also don't have to install all of Gnome to get similar features.

Right out of the box, Catfish will allow you to open files and folders obtained from your search results just by clicking them. I don't know if that works for all filemanagers, but it works with Thunar, which is all I ask.

I like to use Catfish in combination with another powerful feature of Thunar: custom actions. Since Thunar lacks a built-in search bar (aside from a rudimentary go-to alphabetical list when you press a key), how do you integrate a search utility? One way is by adding search functions to the right-click menu.

  1. Open a Thunar window, and go to Edit -> Configure custom actions.
  2. Click the plus icon: +. Give the action a helpful title, description, and icon. "Search" is pretty standard among icon sets, so there should always be one available even when you change themes.
  3. Add the action command: catfish --path=%F
  4. Now go to the Appearance Conditions tab. I left the file pattern as * and checked all boxes, so that no matter where I browse or click, I can launch a Catfish search.
  5. Save the new action and exit Thunar. The next Thunar window you launch will let you right-click anywhere in the browser to open a Catfish search.

You can add any commandline switch you like to the catfish command; just run catfish --help to see the available options.

Thunar's custom action feature is pretty nifty; there are all kinds of things you can put in the context menu. It comes with an example to open a terminal in the current directory. You can create actions to launch applications with a root prompt, convert one image type into another, play media, print or email documents, and more. If you can script it, you can write a trigger for it and stick it in the context menu. Just read the custom actions documentation for many more examples of what you can do with Thunar. Neat!

Looking forward

So, will I keep using Pinot and Catfish? Possibly. While I am leery of any process like Pinot that writes so often to my SSD, and I'm not at all happy with its database size compared to my actual directory size, I do like that it's fast, and responsive. It doesn't seem to have the huge memory leaks or lag that Strigi/Nepomuk do in KDE. In fairness, KDE is trying to get us to believe in the power of the "semantic desktop," while Pinot and Catfish just want to create an easy frontend for finding stuff, without worrying about associating them with various files or activities.

As long as the database doesn't get too much larger, or the indexing/monitoring services use too many resources, I'll keep it around. I've got five+ years of accumulated files in various folders, with more constantly being loaded to and from offline backups. Pinot and Catfish can help with my hard drive spring cleaning, and help me locate stuff that I've just plain forgotten about. The older you get, the less you remember, right?

What I'd really like is a search bar built-in to Thunar, maybe in the upper right corner, backed by Pinot. That'd place everything I need right up front, without having to drill down through right-click menus.

* * *

Speaking of Thunar:

Do you use Thunar? Do you use Dropbox? Xfce developer Mike Massonnet posted a message to the xfce-dev list this morning with a link to a new project: Thunar Dropbox. It integrates the Dropbox service right into your favorite lightweight filemanager. No longer do you have to run Nautilus just to use Dropbox easily. Now you can use it within Thunar.

Original post from Planet Gentoo.

September 02, 2010 10:41 PM

Planet Debian

Joerg Jaspert: Testing ChangeLog

I just merged a nice work from another ftpteam member, Luca Falavigna. He wrote dak make-changelog, which is intended for generating the changelogs for stable point releases.

I took the chance and asked if he can extend it a bit, which he did, so today I could merge that work. Besides that we are able to generate ChangeLogs between all suites we have, we now generate a ChangeLog on every time we import a new set for testing, listing only the changes done in that run, by listing the changelog entries from the package, or in case of removed packages just listing their name with the removed version.

We keep 4 rotations of that ChangeLog, you can find it (with the next mirror push) on all Debian mirrors in the dists/testing/ directory. This should be especially interesting for those people following testing on their systems, to easily see what got changed. :)

September 02, 2010 10:26 PM

Planet Ubuntu

Mackenzie Morgan: Finding more women to speak at Ohio LinuxFest: success!

Cross-posted on Geek Feminism. Co-authored by Moose J. Finklestein, OLF's speaker committee chair.

Some conference organisers will say "we didn't get any submissions from women" to explain the lack of women on their stages. As of two years ago, the Ohio LinuxFest was in that category. With a little outreach effort, and embracing diversity as a core value, the Ohio LinuxFest has successfully recruited more women to share their experience at OLF.

How'd we do? While last year only five of the speakers at Ohio LinuxFest were women, out of a total of 31, this year 14 of the 38 speakers are women. That's a third of the conference speaking slots! One of the two keynoters is a woman. There were 107 talk proposals for the 27 general speaking slots. Before anyone tries to suggest that we simply took them all, it should be noted that a full 48% of the proposals for talks categorised as not assuming high levels of prior knowledge (making them suitable for the most attendees) were from women.

We believe that much of this success is attributed to community outreach. This year, we contacted Ubuntu Women, Debian Women, LinuxChix, DevChix, and the FSF's Women's Caucus mailing list about the call for presentations, and did it have an effect!

Recognising the various concerns women speakers can face, we tried to specifically address potential issues in the email sent to women-focused mailing lists. Some of these known issues include lack of confidence in new speakers, not being clear what the intended audience is, or the "imposter syndrome," where someone doesn't recognize that they are qualified to speak on a topic. The woman to woman dialog made the difference.

We wanted to make sure people weren't refraining from submitting because they lack confidence in their technical abilities (an excuse we'd heard before), so we explained the attendees' demographics, hoping to get more proposals that would fill the gap we had for user-aimed talks. Ohio LinuxFest has everything from home desktop users who started using Ubuntu a week ago (or even that day!) to seasoned system administrators who love Slackware, Gentoo, or NetBSD. Nevertheless, beginner proposals have tended toward introduction to development topics, not leaving enough for people who want to be users, not developers. We also made sure to mention that it's a great crowd who is very welcoming of first-time speakers.

Women are involved with more than just speaking at the Ohio LinuxFest. Beth Lynn Eicher has been actively involved as a director for 6 years now, and the current staff, all volunteers, is about 35% female.

The Ohio LinuxFest takes pains to create a weekend conference friendly to all people, not just women. The diversity statement includes gender, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, and even operating system -- folks who don't use Linux are just as welcome as those who love it. There are regularly talks about or including BSDs, interoperability in heterogeneous environments, and cross platform free software.

Additionally, all speakers are instructed to keep the content of their presentations clean. The Ohio LinuxFest bills itself as a family friendly conference and aims to keep it that way. As an effort to make a positive effect with the community at large, the Ohio LinuxFest will host the second annual Diveristy in Open Source Workshop on September 12, 2010.

Looking at the growing trend of more female influence on the OhioLinuxFest we'd like to see it be the leader for more women to attend and become more involved with other free software interests.

For those interested in pretty graphs, I've been graphing women speaker proportions at various LinuxFests on the GeekFeminism Wiki.

From http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com

September 02, 2010 10:12 PM

Planet Python

Menno's Musings: IMAPClient 0.6.1 released

I've just released IMAPClient 0.6.1.

The only functional change in the release is that it now automatically patches imaplib's IMAP4_SSL class to fix Python Issue 5949. This is a bug that's been fixed in later Python 2.6 versions and 2.7 but still exists in Python versions that are in common use. Without fix this you may experience hangs when using SSL.

The patch is only applied if the running Python version is known to be one of the affected versions. It is applied when IMAPClient is imported.

The only other change in this release is that I've now marked IMAPClient as "production ready" on PyPI and have updated the README to match. This was prompted by a request to clarify the current status of the project and seeing that all current functionality is solid and, I don't plan to change the existing APIs in backwards-incompatible ways, I've decided to indicate the project as suitable for production use.

As always, IMAPClient can be installed from PyPI (pip install imapclient) or downloaded from the IMAPClient site. Feedback, bug reports and patches are most welcome.

September 02, 2010 09:56 PM

Matthew Rollings: Find words with the most anagrams efficiently using python

Following my previous post about 9 letter anagrams I am posting the final code I have created taking into account suggestions/snippets from Michael, Toby and Martin. Added two variables to make it nice and easy to modify what to look for.

Code

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from time import time
from collections import defaultdict  

ag_len = 10 # Anagram word length
ag_min = 2  # Min # of anagrams
dictionary_path = '/usr/share/dict/british-english'
tic = time()

wd = defaultdict(set)
for l in open (dictionary_path, 'r'):
	l=l.strip()
	if ag_len==len(l):
		wd["".join(sorted(l))].add (l)

for ws, wl in wd.iteritems():
	if len ( wl ) >= ag_min:
		print " ".join ( wl )

toc = time()
print toc-tic,'s'

Explanation
The dictionary file is filtered by length into a dictionary. The key for the dictionary is the letter of the word sorted in order, IE:

"".join(sorted('arranging')) = 'aagginnrr'

With the value as the unsorted word. Because words that are an anagram of each other will be identical when sorted this means that using the add method with a dictionary will cause any anagram to share the same key. Eg:

When the dictionary gets to megatons it will create a new key in the dicitonary like so:
{'aegmnost': set(['megatons'])}

Then to magnetos
{'aegmnost': set(['magnetos', 'megatons'])}

Then to montages:
{'aegmnost': set(['magnetos', 'megatons', 'montages'])}

Then we loop over all the items in the dictionary we created and see if the length of the values is greater than the minimum value we are looking for.

All done, a very elegant and simple method to find words with several anagrams for a given word length.

Results

I was going to post the interesting 10 letter anagrams I found however I couldn’t find any with more than 2 anagrams with the dictionary I was using.

There is a 11 letter tripple anagram:

anthologies anthologise theologians

and some 8 letter with 4 or more anagrams:

painters pertains pantries repaints
resident nerdiest inserted trendies
salesmen lameness nameless maleness
strainer restrain terrains retrains trainers
altering triangle relating integral alerting
rangiest ingrates angriest gantries
parroted predator teardrop prorated
iterates teariest treatise treaties
trounces counters recounts construe

September 02, 2010 09:39 PM

Planet Mozilla

Ben Hearsum: Purple is a fruit (…and also a colour on Tinderbox!)

Today I successful landed the first part of bug 505512, which lays the ground work for catching all sorts of build problems and turning them purple, instead of red. As part of this initial work we’ll now be catching most problems when cloning Mercurial repositories, turning the builds purple, and automatically retrying them.

In the next week or two I’m going to add similar behaviour for at least the following:

If there’s other things people can think of that should be flagged as infra problems, or that should cause builds to be retried, please add them to this Etherpad: http://etherpad.mozilla.com:9000/build-infra-errors. Bonus points if you write the regular expression that catches it :-).

Currently, the purpleness is only visible on plain Tinderbox, but once bug 592340 is resolved, TBPL will support it as well.

September 02, 2010 09:34 PM

Planet KDE

Thomas Thym (ungethym): KDE's 4.5 Release Party in St. Gallen (Switzerland)

One of the many KDE Release Parties [1] took place in St. Gallen (Switzerland). On Tuesday, 17. August we celebrated together with the Linux User Group [2]. The LUG is not very big but at that evening an amazing number of interested people turned up to see the new release of KDE's workspace and applications. My notebook was defect at that time so we used the KDE 4 live cd [3] on a system of one of the participants (thank you, Petra).

The atmosphere was very friendly and we had really good conversations with gnome fanbodys. So I could have a look at gnome shell.

All in all it was a great evening and I learned a lot.

1. There are many open minded and interested people out there. Just invite them and show them a solution to their problem.
2. Doing the main presentation with a live cd is not the best idea
a) it's slow,
b) there is no content  and
c) it was not rocking stable.
3. At least "a view" were impressed and I could give away some live CDs.
4. The accessibility has room for improvement.
5. The important thing for (new) users is: Easy to use (incl. out-of-the-box abilities), stability and their favorite apps (or equivalent). (So nothing new here, but we still a few miles to go.)
6. Improve use-cases information.

[1] http://sg.linuxtreff.ch
[2] http://community.kde.org/Promo/ReleaseParties/4.5
[3] http://home.kde.org/~kdelive/

September 02, 2010 09:32 PM

Planet GNOME

Jaap A. Haitsma: GNOME Amazon Referral Fees August 2010

gnome-amazon August has been a record month :-) for the affiliate fees that the GNOME Foundation received!!!! In total approximately $500 has been received from the different stores.

The change compared to last month ($231 in total) is for large part due to the fact that Banshee now has the option to buy MP3 files from Amazon. Through MP3 purchases of Banshee users $175 of affiliate fees were generated. Since the Amazon store is only present in a development version of Banshee I expect we’ll see much higher revenues when 1.8.0 gets released and gets packaged for the major distributions. Hopefully the distributions will not change the affiliate tag to their own.

Hopefully somebody will also add the Amazon MP3 store this into Rhythmbox.

Detailed overview of the August affiliate fees:

Amazon.com $272.00
Amazon.ca $0.00
Amazon.de €133.38
Amazon.fr €12.18
Amazon.co.uk £20.96
Amazon.jp ¥732

Keep on spreading the plugins to friends and family

Below and in the GNOME Amazon Store you find the links to install the GNOME Amazon Search Plugin of your favorite Amazon store. NOTE the links below might not work if you read this post in an RSS reader, because it needs a javascript command to install the search plugin. Just install the search plugin by going to this post directly.

Firefox

SearchPlugin

Epiphany

For epiphany use the following smart bookmarks.

September 02, 2010 09:12 PM

Planet Lisp

Hans Hübner: Quicklisp - The upcoming solution to Common Lisp's "library problem"

We're all tired of hearing that Common Lisp is all nice, but it has a library problem. True, many of the open source libraries written in Common Lisp are half-baked, incomplete, unmaintained and tasteless. But this is true with libraries in all languages (think libwww-perl), so that can't be the real problem. The real problem, as I see it, is that until now, there was no universally good way of installing a library and all of its dependencies.

The existing, widely deployed solutions (asdf-install and clbuild) require external tools to work, depend on the availability of diverse servers in the internet, and do not have something like a central maintainer who ensures that things are always in basically working order. Also, these solutions are rather unportable, as they depend on external tools and a Unixish environment which is not available everywhere.

My personal solution to this problem, until now, was to have a Subversion repository that contains all the libraries that any of my projects need. Some of these came from release tarballs, some from other revision control repositories, and maintenance was manual. Whenever I started a new project, I brought some of those libraries up to date, coped with any (new) dependencies, lost backwards compatibility with my older projects etc. This kind of sucked, but it had the beauty that both development and deployment ended up being relatively easy. All that was required was a svn checkout from my repository, and I was all set on a new machine.

Recently, Zach Beane was fed up enough to do something about this: He created Quicklisp, a self-contained, centrally managed, cloud hosted Lisp library system which aims to run everywhere and provide users with a one-stop solution for the "library problem". Quicklisp is in an early alpha stage, but having tried it, I must say that I am pleased and impressed. Finally, Common Lisp can also become a glue language like Python and Perl.

I tried Quicklisp today because Twitter has notified me that basic http authentication for applications will no longer be supported. Instead, one is now supposed to use OAuth to authenticate requests sent to Twitter. This required my reaction.

About two years ago, I have written a small gateway program that forwards new postings to Planet Lisp to Twitter. At the time, I was rather frustrated with Common Lisp and thus took the gateway as an opportunity to try Clojure. Today, I looked at the source of the gateway again to find out what it would take to make it use OAuth instead of basic http authentication. As the gateway was the only program I have written in Clojure so far, and I was not really that eager to extend it to OAuth. I tried for a few minutes, but found that my old program did not run with the current Clojure version right away, so I would have to basically start setting up a Clojure development environment from scratch in order to be able to use an existing, open source OAuth library.

Instead, I thought I'd give Quicklisp a spin. After all, parsing some XML and sending HTTP requests are no big deal in Common Lisp either, and an OAuth library is available, too. With Quicklisp, all it should take was write some glue code to connect DRAKMA, CXML, cl-ppcre and cl-oauth. Installing the bunch should be a matter of loading quicklisp.lisp, then typing (ql:quickload `("drakma" "cxml" "cl-ppcre" "cl-oauth")) and watching the show scroll by.

And hey, it worked right away. I even embedded a web server in the gateway application so that it can be monitored by the system status monitors provided by my hosting provider. All in all, rewriting the thing in Common Lisp and deploying it took no longer than two hours, and the source is not significantly longer than the Clojure version either. Furthermore, the new gateway properly deals with non-ASCII characters. Embarrassingly, the Clojure gateway was buggy in that respect and never properly twittered the titles of my own blog posts. Thanks, Zach!

September 02, 2010 09:01 PM

Planet Mozilla

Shawn Wilsher: Startup Time in the Wild Take Three

Over a week ago, I collected the data I said I was going to look at last time. I finally had a chance to look at the data (startup times with and without add-ons for two profiles on the latest version of 3.6), and my hypothesis was not verified. That means it is back to the drawing board for me. The graphs are not at all interesting, so I am not going to post them. At this point, I think the goal is officially at risk. With the profiles we got, I am not even seeing slow startups with cold startup. It is hard to diagnose a problem you cannot reproduce, sadly.

Next Step

Next week I am going to sync up with limi and get some contact information from the people that sent these profiles to us. We are going to have to do some remote debugging to see why they see such slow startup times.

News on the Past

Paul is feverishly working on a solution to make session restore not kill us on startup. He even has some test builds which you can download and test, but these are experimental. You should make a copy of your profile as a backup when using this test build in case things go boom.

September 02, 2010 08:23 PM

RepRap: Blog

A Smarter Approach to Infill

As is often the case, I had my Mendel running a week or two ago, and I was sat mesmerised for far too long watching it work. Fortunately, whilst this was happening I had an idea I thought was worth sharing.

Our Mendel happened to be printing a particularly complex part, I think it was one of the extruder driven gear. I made the casual observation that on the lower fine layers, it does a pretty good job. But once you get into the middle layers, it needs to do quite a lot more in air movements compared to the fine layers, as the extruder cannot get to where it needs to be smoothly because of the low density of the infill. The issue with this is that with present extruder designs, and even with reversing, we still get some ooze that makes a bit of a mess. Annoyingly, the reversing and inair movements start at the outline of parts, and the ooze typically spills over a tiny amount, making the part surface a little blobby. It also makes sense that this problem is particularly true for intricate areas of the part, such as the gear teeth.

Thus, It would be very beneficial to vary the increase the infill density within the intricate regions of parts. Not only would this help with ooze, but intricate areas would automatically strengthened with more material. I also suspect that if this was implemented we could also reduce the infill percentage in simpler areas to speed up build time.

Fortunately, we already a gauge of part complexity, and that is the length of each individual road within the infill(L) and the distance between infill roads(D) could be made proportional to this length.


September 02, 2010 09:19 PM

Planet Haskell

Thomas M. DuBuisson: A Better Foundation for Random Values in Haskell

RandomGen – The Old Solution

Mathematicians talk about random bits and many programmers talk about streams of random bytes (ex: /dev/urandom, block cipher counter RNGs), so its a bit odd that Haskell adopted the RandomGen class, which only generates random Ints. Several aspects of RandomGen that are non-ideal include:

Building Something Better

For these reasons I have been convinced that building the new crypto-api package on RandomGen would be a mistake. I’ve thus expanded the scope of crypto-api to include a decent RandomGenerator class. The proposal below is slightly more complex than the old RandomGen, but I consider it more honest (doesn’t hide error conditions / necessitate exceptions).

class RandomGenerator g where
        -- |Instantiate a new random bit generator
        newGen :: B.ByteString -> Either GenError g

        -- |Length of input entropy necessary to instantiate or reseed a generator
        genSeedLen :: Tagged g Int

        -- |Obtain random data using a generator
        genBytes        :: g -> Int -> Either GenError (B.ByteString, g)

        -- |'genBytesAI g i entropy' generates 'i' random bytes and use the
        -- additional input 'entropy' in the generation of the requested data.
        genBytesAI      :: g -> Int -> B.ByteString -> Either GenError (B.ByteString, g)
        genBytesAI g len entropy =
                ... default implementation ...

        -- |reseed a random number generator
        reseed          :: g -> B.ByteString -> Either GenError g

Compared to the old RandomGen class we have:

  1. Random data comes in Bytestrings. RandomGen only gave Ints (what is that? 29 bits? 32 bits? 64? argh!), and depended on another class (Random) to build other values. We can still have a ‘Random’ class built for RandomGenerator – should we have that in this module?
  2. Constructing and reseeding generators is now part of the class.
  3. Splitting the PRNG is now a separate class (not shown)
  4. Generators can accept additional input (genBytesAI). Most generators probably won’t use this, so there is a reasonable default implementation (fmap (xor additionalInput) genBytes).
  5. The possibility to fail – this is not new! Even in the old RandomGen class the underlying PRNGs can fail (the PRNG has hit its period and needs a reseed to avoid repeating the sequence), but RandomGen gave no failure mechanism. I feel justified in forcing all PRNGs to use the same set of error messages because many errors are common to all generators (ex: ReseedRequred) and the action necessary to fix such errors is generalized too.

    In Closing

    The full Data.Crypto.Random module is online and I welcome comments, complaints and patches. This is the class I intend to force users of the Crypto API block cipher modes and Asymmetric Cipher instances to use, so it’s important to get right!


September 02, 2010 08:03 PM

Planet KDE

Theo Chatzimichos (tampakrap): Gentoo KDE and Qt September Meetings

Part of today’s KDE Team meeting:

KDE 4.5 status and plans to put it in Portage

We agreed that KDE 4.5.1 is suffering of some important bugs, and after a long discussion we decided to put it in portage, but it will never make it to stable branch. We are mentioning the upstream bugs, as we think that users should be aware of them before updating:

Also, keep in mind that KDE SC 4.5 lacks the KDEPIM suite, so users should use KDEPIM 4.4.5 instead, which is also stable in portage tree.

In case of an update it should be smooth.

The whole summary and log can be found at the KDE project space.

The Qt Team also had a meeting one our later, summary and logs at the Qt project space

=-=-=-=-=
Powered by Blogilo

September 02, 2010 08:03 PM

Planet Mozilla

Patrick Finch: Still thinking about the Open Web

Earlier this week, Dria wrote about some ideas for articulating the Open Web.  It’s important because

  1. it’s important, and
  2. we (meaning the Mozilla project) need to articulate what sets us apart from other browser producers.

Let’s first assume one hurdle: the difference between the Internet and the Web.  I wonder how many people outside the industry understand that?   (I even wonder how many people in the tech sector do not.)  But let’s put that problem aside, and assume for a moment that net neutrality is a given, and not in grave danger.

We want rather to be able to articulate the importance of technology choices such as a preference for webm and Ogg Theora over the H.264 codec.  Mozilla (and, let’s remember, others) make these choices for a very clear set of reasons.  At least, they are clear to us.

While I like the commentator Tiago Sá’s comment about Firefox being fundamentally participatory, and that a small number of users who have internalised the proposition of the open web is preferable to a large number of users who haven’t, for me, whether or not an individual Firefox user cares is moot.  I think part of Firefox’s success and impact in the market was that you didn’t have to care about what it stood for to love it.  But of course, the more people who do understand, the better.

But what concerns me more is that within the industry, in my perception, the level of understanding of Mozilla could be better.   We need to be loud and unambiguous about why an Open Web matters.  We have to articulate why the ability for anyone to pick up a set of tools and go and build on the web without being beholden to anybody else is important,  what that means for both the capabilities of the tools the have, but even more importantly, the terms (yes, the licensing) by which they can do that.  And then, we need to articulate what the societal impact is – and there are in fact several: economic, social, cultural and so forth.  And that, in the parlance of our times, is a non-trivial task.

It’s already genuinely difficult to remember life before the Web.  I say Web, and not Internet, because Web is how almost all of us first experienced the incredible power of the Internet to connect people and ideas in ways we had not envisaged before.  Sure, I used email first, and yes, it was amazing, but it did not open up the world, it merely made it more efficient.

The Web’s virtue isn’t contingent upon the specific technologies that make it, another set of technologies with the same properties and freedoms would do the job, but if we didn’t have the Web, we’d have to invent it.

Dria sets out of set of possible and useful analogies for explaining the web as a public resource.  Some of them are very good, some might suffer slightly from some culture-specificity (e.g. volunteering in a public library), and she starts to address the point of the web as a public good.  One analogy I especially like is considering the public road network.  The road network is something that is almost entirely subject to public provision and regulation (let’s not shy away from it), and the cars that drive on it – although subject to stringent regulation – are privately provided and serve primarily private objectives.    Now, imagine for a moment a road network which was run on a commercial basis, where the main interests represented were the car manufacturers.  Unless you’re an Ayn Rand acolyte (and maybe even then) it’s a much bleaker picture.

But let’s also try another tack – I am not in all cases a fan of argument by analogy (to refute argument by analogy with an analogy, one often ends up comparing apples and pairs), so I first want to think a little harder about what’s important – what this public good is, how it manifests itself, and how it exists at all.

Software is both machine and information.  It’s a tool composed of intricately expressed ideas.  In this way it is quite similar to mathematics, language or a theoretical science.  Private ownership, or perhaps better expressed, any form of public exclusion, is clearly negative outcome for the world, to say absurd in many cases (although the distinction between applied science and invention is a blurry one).

So, as I say, I’m still thinking, and maybe you are too.  But my definition of the Open Web would comprise two parts:

  1. what is important about the web: not the intrinsic qualities of the technology, but the incidental ones, i.e. the behaviour it facilitates
  2. what are the specific qualities of the technology that engender this (both capabilities and licensing, in combination with the previously-assumed net neutrality)

With these, I think our analogies will butter a few more parsnips.


September 02, 2010 07:58 PM

Planet openSUSE

Nelson Marques: Equinox GTK2 Engine – Updated, 1.30

I have updated the following packages to version 1.30:

Updated to 1.30.1 and added i686 arch. Finally sorted mock problem out after some struggle!

September 02, 2010 07:53 PM

Kernel Planet

Valerie Aurora: We now resume our regularly scheduled hiking

About four years ago, I started feeling like crap. Things went downhill from there. I tried going to doctors, not going to doctors, medications, taking no medications, exercising to exhaustion, not exercising at all, eating vegan, eating mostly meat, not eating at all, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum. I think the only thing I didn’t try was acupuncture, but it was next on my to-do list.

Through all this my friends were awesome to me, if worried. So I want to let my friends know that, as of a month ago, I’m back to health, physically and mentally – so much so that I’m going on an 18 mile hike in the Grand Canyon next week. One of the hardest part of the last few years was giving up any sort of serious hiking and it’s thrilling to be back on the trail.

If you’re a friend and curious about the details, you can email me. But if you are as tired of talking about my health as I am, you won’t. :) I do have a word of advice for my fellow workaholics: If you’re completely stressed out, and it just seems to get worse, go read up on adrenal exhaustion.

Thanks again to my friends for being so understanding and kind while I figured this out. I’m really looking forward to doing something other than lying on my couch in a daze all day long.


September 02, 2010 07:24 PM

Planet KDE

Tom Albers: Launch identity.kde.org

Yesterday evening we did the final import into identity.kde.org and decided it was stable enough for general usage. With this blog we announce the general availability of this site and I will give a small introduction.

We imported all existing developers into the system, and all developers from the past too. Your username is identical to your subversion username. Your don’t have a password yet, but by using the obvious option on the welcome screen you can reset it and get access.

After the login you will be greeted with your profile. You can fill in all your details as you like. During the import we have set your Name and email address and the ssh public keys you use for svn access currently.

Important to know is what will become available to whom. We will not show all the profile data to everyone. We will use the grouping feature of the identity.kde.org-system. Basically we now the following groups: users, developers, former-developers, ev-members and sysadmins. users will never see anything. developers will probably see the usernames, names and email info of other developers, and ev-members will see what developers see, but also some more contact info about fellow ev-members. Or if someone decides otherwise, that’s fine too, we’re just executers trying to work with sane defaults for that matter.

This system will replace the famous accounts file in the future. We will of course provide something downloadable in the future for that. And hopefully it will replace the database we once used for ev-members, but this last bit is not sure yet, as the system is still being evaluated for this purpose.

This screen allowes your change your ssh-keys. This part is the primary use case for this system at this moment in time. While importing we have imported your keys already, and from now on you can manage your own ssh keys. You no longer need the system team to control which keys you will have access to svn. You can delete keys, and upload new additional keys, whatever you like, as often as you like and whenever it suits you.

Currently we are working on getting the scripts working which deal with all the key changes, so currently you can test this as much as you like without it having consequences. Just make sure that when you are ready with testing, you have the right set of keys uploaded. Starting from this weekend the scripts will be activated and the keys on identity.kde.org will be leading.

The future of the system is that we will soon open identity.kde.org for new users. After registration they will belong to the group ‘Users’. On this level, your username and password for identity.kde.org will also provide you immediate access to the new reviewboard and redmine system we will soon launch.

As a user you can request an upgrade to de developer status. This is done with a similar form as which we have used for the last couple of years. After the sysadmin has processed the request, the user is upgraded to developer, and from that moment on the user has push access to the repositories.

Both git.kde.org and svn.kde.org will allow commits / pushes from developers, both systems verify against the keys that are available in identity.kde.org. There is no difference between developers for git and developers for svn. If you can commit to svn you can also push to git.kde.org.

In the future we can use the data from identity.kde.org for a gazillion new purposes. Not only will your username and password from identity.kde.org give you access to a few new sites, but also you can think of more fun things. For example we can use it to power planetkde, instead of the config file, you can manage your rss feed from identity.kde.org. Or @kde.org email address holders can change the forward address behind the kde.org address. Or we can manage registrations for akademy this way. We’ve explcitely choosen identity.kde.org (which is powered by GOsa), because of the ability to create such features in a limited amount of time.

I’ve talked way to much for an introduction. You can now jump to the identity.kde.org-site, read the interview with Ben Cooksley, the sysadmin that deserves most of the credits for the setup of this system. You can also follow our progress in the launch of the git.kde.org infrastructure in our schedule. As usual you can file bugs for identity.kde.org at our bug tracker.

Share on Facebook

Feel free to Flattr this post at www.omat.nl, if you like it.

flattr this!

September 02, 2010 07:22 PM

Planet openSUSE

Jeffrey Stedfast: Microsoft Double Rainbow!

Microsoft has just created a new commercial for its Windows Live Photo Gallery software that plays on the "Double Rainbow!" stoner guy. I have to give them props for trying to be hip and cool, but I'm too busy laughing my butt off right now. You've got to see this:


What I want to know is what kind of camera is that guy using? Never seen anything like it. A friend suggested it was this antique digital camera, but I'm not convinced. If you have any idea what that camera is, let me know in the comments - it is gonna bug me for days until I know what that was!

September 02, 2010 07:10 PM

Planet GNOME

Yuvaraj Pandian: The End of GSoC 2010

Google Summer of Code ended a while back. Me (and most on #gsoc) agreed on one thing - WHERE DID THOSE 3 MONTHS GO? Amazing time it was - thanks to _ke (Who is frolicking somewhere in Thailand right now), fargiolas and the rest of the GNOME guys (#clutter, #gstreamer and #gtk+ yay!) for making it awesome. #hackers-india was a great venting place too :)

Cheese's master needs quite a bit of work before it can be included in GNOME 3.0 - and I plan on doing most of that. It's fun - demoing it at college is a huge hit. Looks like eventually, my original goal for Cheese might be met ;)

Right now, I'm decompressing, and basically not doing anything at all - except getting a bike, and sorting out some personal issues. Should be back coding (and blogging) soon. Have a huge post on GSoC experience coming up.

September 02, 2010 06:57 PM

Planet Lisp

Zach Beane: International Lisp Conference 2010

I just registered for the International Lisp Conference 2010. It's October 19th-21st in Reno, Nevada, USA. I'll be wearing my Quicklisp shirt or my Save Lisp And Die shirt at least some of the time. If you see me, say hi! Hope to see you there!

September 02, 2010 06:26 PM

Planet Mozilla

Mozilla IT: Mozilla Scheduled Downtime – 09/02/2010, 4pm PDT (2300 UTC)

We will have a scheduled maintenance window tonight from 4:00pm to 11:00pm PDT. The following changes will take place:

Please let me know if you have any reason why we should not proceed with this planned maintenance. As always, we aim to keep downtime to as little as possible, but unexpected complications can arise causing longer downtime periods than expected. All systems should be operational by the end of the maintenance window.

Feel free to comment directly if you see issues past the planned downtime.

September 02, 2010 06:23 PM

Planet Python

Yaniv Aknin: Python’s Innards: Hello, ceval.c!

The “Python’s Innards” series owes its existence, at least in part, to hearing one of the Python-Fu masters in my previous workplace say something about a switch statement so large that it was needed to break it up just so some compilers won’t choke on it. I remember thinking then: “Choke the compiler with a switch? Hrmf, let me see that code.” Turns out that this switch can be found in ./Python/ceval.c: PyEval_EvalFrameEx and it switches over the current opcode, invoking its implementation. If I had to summarize all of CPython into one line, I’d probably choose that switch (actually I’d refuse, but humour me by assuming I was at gunpoint or something). This choice is rather subjective, as arguably there are more complex/interesting bits in Python’s object system (explored here and there) or parser/compiler related code. But I can’t help seeing that line, and its surrounding function and file, as the ‘do-work’ heart of CPython.

The reason I didn’t start the series from this heart is that I thought it would be too hard (mostly for the author…). Thanks to what we (well, at least I) learned in the previous posts, I think we can now understand it quite well. I’ll try to link backwards as necessary throughout the article, but if you haven’t followed the series so far, you’d probably do much better if you went back and read some of the previous articles before tackling this one. Also, for brevity’s sake in this post, I won’t qualify the file ./Python/ceval.c and the function PyEval_EvalFrameEx in it. Finally, remember that usually in the series when I quote code, I may note that I edited it, and in that case I often prefer clarity and brevity over accuracy; this is true for this post as well, only much more so, excerpts here might bear only slight resemblance to the real code.

So, where were we… Ah, yes, monstrous switch statement. Well, as I said, this switch can be found in the rather lengthy file ceval.c, in the rather lengthy function PyEval_EvalFrameEx, which takes more than half the file’s lines (it’s roughly 2,250 lines, the file is about 4,400). PyEval_EvalFrameEx implements CPython’s evaluation loop, which is to say that it’s a function that takes a frame object and iterates over each of the opcodes in its associated code object, evaluating (interpreting, executing) each opcode within the context of the given frame (this context is chiefly the associated namespaces and interpreter/thread states). There’s more to ceval.c than PyEval_EvalFrameEx, and we may discuss some of the other bits later in this post (or perhaps a follow-up post), but PyEval_EvalFrameEx is obviously the most important part of it.

Having described the evaluation loop in the previous paragraph, let’s see what it looks like in C (edited):

PyEval_EvalFrameEx(PyFrameObject *f, int throwflag)
{
    /* variable declaration and initialization stuff */
    for (;;) {
        /* do periodic housekeeping once in a few opcodes */
        opcode = NEXTOP();
        if (HAS_ARG(opcode)) oparg = NEXTARG();
        switch (opcode) {
            case NOP:
                goto fast_next_opcode;
            /* lots of more complex opcode implementations */
            default:
                /* become rather unhappy */
        }
        /* handle exceptions or runtime errors, if any */
    }
    /* we are finished, pop the frame stack */
    tstate->frame = f->f_back;
    return retval;
}

As you can see, iteration over opcodes is infinite (forever: fetch next opcode, do stuff), breaking out of the loop must be done explicitly. CPython (reasonably) assumes that evaluated bytecode is correct in the sense that it terminates itself by raising an exception, returning a value, etc. Indeed, if you were to synthesize a code object without a RETURN_VALUE at its end and execute it (exercise to reader: how?1), you’re likely to execute rubbish, reach the default handler (raises a SystemError) or maybe even segfault the interpreter (I didn’t check this thoroughly, but it looks plausible).

The evaluation loop may look fairly simple so far, but I kept back an important piece: I snipped about 1,450 lines of opcode implementations from within that big switch, all of them presumably more complex than a NOP. In order for you to be able to get a feel for what more serious opcode implementations look like, here’s the (edited) implementation of three more opcodes, illustrating a few more principles:

            case BINARY_SUBTRACT:
                w = *--stack_pointer; /* value stack POP */
                v = stack_pointer[-1];
                x = PyNumber_Subtract(v, w);
                stack_pointer[-1] = x; /* value stack SET_TOP */
                if (x != NULL) continue;
                break;
            case LOAD_CONST:
                x = PyTuple_GetItem(f->f_code->co_consts, oparg);
                *stack_pointer++ = x; /* value stack PUSH */
                goto fast_next_opcode;
            case SETUP_LOOP:
            case SETUP_EXCEPT:
            case SETUP_FINALLY:
                PyFrame_BlockSetup(f, opcode, INSTR_OFFSET() + oparg,
                           STACK_LEVEL());
                continue;

We see several things. First, we see a typical value manipulation opcode, BINARY_SUBTRACT. This opcode (and many others) works with values on the value stack as well as with a few temporary variables, using CPython’s C-API abstract object layer (in our case, a function from the number-like object abstraction) to replace the two top values on the value stack with the single value resulting from subtraction. As you can see, a small set of temporary variables, such as v, w and x are used (and reused, and reused…) as the registers of the CPython VM. The variable stack_pointer represents the current bottom of the stack (the next free pointer in the stack). This variable is initialized at the beginning of the function like so: stack_pointer = f->f_stacktop;. In essence, together with the room reserved in the frame object for that purpose, the value stack is this pointer. To make things simpler and more readable, the real (unedited by me) code of ceval.c defines several value stack manipulation/observation macros, like PUSH, TOP or EMPTY. They do what you imagine from their names.

Next, we see a very simple opcode that loads values from somewhere into the valuestack. I chose to quote LOAD_CONST because it’s very brief and simple, although it’s not really a namespace related opcode. “Real” namespace opcodes load values into the value stack from a namespace and store values from the value stack into a namespace; LOAD_CONST loads constants, but doesn’t fetch them from a namespace and has no STORE_CONST counterpart (we explored all this at length in the article about namespaces). The final opcode I chose to show is actually the single implementation of several different control-flow related opcodes (SETUP_LOOP, SETUP_EXCEPT and SETUP_FINALLY), which offload all details of their implementation to the block stack manipulation function PyFrame_BlockSetup; we discussed the block stack in our discussion of interpreter stacks.

Something we can observe looking at these implementations is that different opcodes exit the switch statement differently. Some simply break, and let the code after the switch resume. Some use continue to start the for loop from the beginning. Some goto various labels in the function. Each exit has different semantic meaning. If you break out of the switch (the ‘normal’ route), various checks will be made to see if some special behaviour should be performed – maybe a code block has ended, maybe an exception was raised, maybe we’re ready to return a value. Continuing the loop or going to a label lets certain opcodes take various shortcuts; no use checking for an exception after a NOP or a LOAD_CONST, for instance.

That’s pretty much it. I can’t really say we’re done (not at all), but this is pretty much the gist of PyEval_EvalFrameEx. Simple, eh? Well, yeah, simple, but I lied a bit with the editing to make it simpler. For example, if you look at the code itself, you will see that none of the case expressions for the big switch are really there. The code for the NOP opcode is actually (remember this series is about Python 3.x unless noted otherwise, so this snippet is from Python 3.1.2):

        TARGET(NOP)
            FAST_DISPATCH();

TARGET? FAST_DISPATCH? What are these? Let me explain. Things may become clearer if we’d look for a moment at the implementation of the NOP opcode in ceval.c of Python 2.x. Over there the code for NOP looks more like the samples I’ve shown you so far, and it actually seems to me that the code of ceval.c gets simpler and simpler as we look backwards at older revisions of it. The reason is that although I think PyEval_EvalFrameEx was originally written as a really exceptionally straightforward piece of code, over the years some necessary complexity crept into it as various optimizations and improvements were implemented (I’ll collectively call them ‘additions’ from now on, for lack of a better term).

To further complicate matters, many of these additions are compiled conditionally with preprocessor directives, so several things are implemented in more than one way in the same source file. In the larger code samples I quoted above, I liberally expanded some preprocessor directives using their least complex expansion. However, depending on compilation flags, these and other preprocessor directives might expand to something else, possibly more a complicated something. I can understand trading simplicity to optimize a tight loop which is used very often, and the evaluation loop is probably one of the more used loops in CPython (and probably as tight as its contributors could make it). So while this is all very warranted, it doesn’t help the readability of the code.

Anyway, I’d like to enumerate these additions here explicitly (some in more depth than others); this should aid future discussion of ceval.c, as well as prevent me from feeling like I’m hiding too many important things with my free spirited editing of quoted code. Fortunately, most if not all these additions are very well commented -actually, some of the explanations below will be just summaries or even taken verbatim from these comments, as I believe that they’re accurate (eek!). So, as you read PyEval_EvalFrameEx (and indeed ceval.c in general), you’re likely to run into any of these:

“Threaded Code” (Computed-GOTOs)

Let’s start with the addition that gave us TARGET, FAST_DISPATCH and a few other macros. The evaluation loop uses a “switch” statement, which decent compilers optimize as a single indirect branch instruction with a lookup table of addresses. Alas, since we’re switching over rapidly changing opcodes (it’s uncommon to have the same opcode repeat), this would have an adverse effect on the success rate of CPU branch prediction. Fortunately gcc supports the use of C-goto labels as values, which you can generally pass around and place in an array (restrictions apply!). Using an array of adresses in memory obtained from labels, as you can see in ./Python/opcode_targets.h, we create an explicit jump table and place an explicit indirect jump instruction at the end of each opcode. This improves the success rate of CPU prediction and can yield as much as 20% boost in performance.

Thus, for example, the NOP opcode is implemented in the code like so:

        TARGET(NOP)
            FAST_DISPATCH();

In the simpler scenario, this would expand to a plain case statement and a goto, like so:

        case NOP:
            goto fast_next_opcode;

But when threaded code is in use, that snippet would expand to (I highlighted the lines where we actually move on to the next opcode, using the dispatch table of label-values):

        TARGET_NOP:
            opcode = NOP;
            if (HAS_ARG(NOP))
                oparg = NEXTARG();
        case NOP:
            {
                if (!_Py_TracingPossible) {
                    f->f_lasti = INSTR_OFFSET();
                    goto *opcode_targets[*next_instr++];
                }
                goto fast_next_opcode;
            }

Same behaviour, somewhat more complicated implementation, up to 20% faster Python. Nifty.

Opcode Prediction

Some opcodes tend to come in pairs. For example, COMPARE_OP is often followed by JUMP_IF_FALSE or JUMP_IF_TRUE, themselves often followed by a POP_TOP. What’s more, there are situations where you can determine that a particular next-opcode can be run immediately after the execution of the current opcode, without going through the ‘outer’ (and expensive) parts of the evaluation loop. PREDICT (and a few others) are a set of macros that explicitly peek at the next opcode and jump to it if possible, shortcutting most of the loop in this fashion (i.e., if (*next_instr == op) goto PRED_##op). Note that there is no relation to real hardware here, these are simply hardcoded conditional jumps, not an exploitation of some mechanism in the underlying CPU (in particular, it has nothing to do with “Threaded Code” described above).

Low Level Tracing

An addition primarily geared towards those developing CPython (or suffering from a horrible, horrible bug). Low Level Tracing is controlled by the LLTRACE preprocessor name, which is enabled by default on debug builds of CPython (see --with-pydebug). As explained in ./Misc/SpecialBuilds.txt: when this feature is compiled-in, PyEval_EvalFrameEx checks the frame’s global namespace for the variable __lltrace__. If such a variable is found, mounds of information about what the interpreter is doing are sprayed to stdout, such as every opcode and opcode argument and values pushed onto and popped off the value stack. Not useful very often, but very useful when needed.

This is the what the low level trace output looks like (slightly edited):

>>> def f():
...     global a
...     return a - 5
...
>>> dis(f)
  3           0 LOAD_GLOBAL              0 (a)
              3 LOAD_CONST               1 (5)
              6 BINARY_SUBTRACT
              7 RETURN_VALUE
>>> exec(f.__code__, {'__lltrace__': 'foo', 'a': 10})
0: 116, 0
push 10
3: 100, 1
push 5
6: 24
pop 5
7: 83
pop 5
# trace of the end of exec() removed
>>>

As you can guess, you’re seeing a real-time disassembly of what’s going through the VM as well as stack operations. For example, the first line says: line 0, do opcode 116 (LOAD_GLOBAL) with the operand 0 (expands to the global variable a), and so on, and so forth. This is a bit like (well, little more than) adding a bunch of printf calls to the heart of VM.

Advanced Profiling

Under this heading I’d like to briefly discuss several profiling related additions. The first relies on the fact that some processors (notably Pentium descendants and at least some PowerPCs) have built-in wall time measurement capabilities which are cheap and precise (correct me if I’m wrong). As an aid in the development of a high-performance CPython implementation, Python 2.4′s ceval.c was instrumented with the ability to collect per-opcode profiling statistics using these counters. This instrumentation is controlled by the somewhat misnamed --with-tsc configuration flag (TSC is an Intel Pentium specific name, and this feature is more general than that). Calling sys.settscdump(True) on an instrumented interpreter will cause the function ./Python/ceval.c: dump_tsc to print these statistics every time the evaluation loop loops.

The second advanced profiling feature is Dynamic Execution Profiling. This is only available if Python was built with the DYNAMIC_EXECUTION_PROFILE preprocessor name. As ./Tools/scripts/analyze_dxp.py says, [this] will tell you which opcodes have been executed most frequently in the current process, and, if Python was also built with -DDXPAIRS, will tell you which instruction _pairs_ were executed most frequently, which may help in choosing new instructions. One last thing to add here is that enabling Dynamic Execution Profiling implicitly disables the “Threaded Code” addition.

The third and last addition in this category is function call profiling, controlled by the preprocessor name CALL_PROFILE. Quoting ./Misc/SpecialBuilds.txt again: When this name is defined, the ceval mainloop and helper functions count the number of function calls made. It keeps detailed statistics about what kind of object was called and whether the call hit any of the special fast paths in the code.

Extra Safety Valves

Two preprocessor names, USE_STACKCHECK and CHECKEXC include extra assertions. Testing an interpreter with these enabled may catch a subtle bug or regression, but they are usually disabled as they’re too expensive.

These are the additions I found, grepping ceval.c for #ifdef. I think we’ll call it a day here, although we’re by no means finished. For example, I’d like to devote a separate post to exceptions, which is where we can discuss the tail of the evaluation loop (everything after the big switch and before the end of the big for), which we merely skimmed today. I’d also like to devote a whole post to locking and synchronization (including the GIL), which we touched upon before but never covered properly. Last but really not least, there’s about 2,000 other lines in ceval.c which we didn’t cover today; none of them are as important as PyEval_EvalFrameEx, but we need to talk at least about some of them.

All these things taken into account, I think we can say that today we finally conquered the evaluation loop. This isn’t the end of the series, far from it, but I do see it as a milestone. “Hooray”, I believe the saying goes. I hope you’re enjoying the show, thanks for the supportive comments (they keep me going), and I’ll see you in the next post.


I would like to thank Nick Coghlan for reviewing this article; any mistakes that slipped through are my own.

1Lazy or timid readers may choose to defer to Nick Coghlan’s example of one way he did it; I urge you not to look there and solve it on your own, it’s rather easy.


Tagged: bytecode, code objects, evaluation, evaluation loop, frame object, internals, python

September 02, 2010 06:19 PM

Planet Ubuntu

The Fridge: Code Hosting Maintenance Friday, September 3, 2010


Launchpad code hosting will be offline Friday between 8.00 and 9.30 UTC for unexpected hardware maintenance. This means you won’t be able to browse, push to, pull from or otherwise access code hosted on Launchpad.

Going offline: 8.00 UTC 3rd September 2010

Expected back: 9.30 UTC 3rd September 2010

[Discuss Code Hosting Maintenance Friday, September 3, 2010 on the Forums]

Originally posted here by Gary Poster on September 2nd, 2010.

September 02, 2010 06:17 PM

Planet openSUSE

OMG!SUSE! team: Google Video Chat for openSUSE

Thanks to a tip from our friend @decriptor, it looks like the Google Video Chat browser plugin is now available for openSUSE!.

If you visit the download page you can download an RPM for a 32-bit or a 64-bit openSUSE installation. The plugin should allow you to use video or voice chat to talk to all your GMail contacts straight from your web browser. Since I don't use GMail, I can't verify how well the plugin works, but I have successfully held a video chat with a friend using it via my n900.

Pretty spiffy!


September 02, 2010 06:08 PM

Planet GNOME

Luca Invernizzi: Lightspark 0.4.4.1 released

Hi,

version 0.4.4.1 of the lightspark player has been just released. It’s mainly a bug fix release, the most relevant news are:

Moreover, from this release large downloads are cached to disk to reduce memory pressure.

As you may have noticed lightspark is now on Flattr and the last few posts about lightspark included the “Flattr this” button. Moreover, the Flattr-foss project (that suggest free software to be supported using flattr) has recommended Lightspark for september. Thanks a lot to the Flattr-foss team for their interest and support! Many people flattered lightspark the last month and that is really appreciated. I’m not of course talking about the (little) money, what is awesome is the large support received from the community and even the smallest donation is greatly motivating. Thanks to everyone


Flattr this

September 02, 2010 05:54 PM

Planet Mozilla

Calendar: Lightning on the Shiny new Try Server

After reading about Thunderbird getting a new Try Server, I thought it would be nice if the same would be possible for Lightning. After just a few failed builds, I successfully built Lightning using the Try Server and had a lightning.xpi uploaded to the right target directory.

If you want to try this on your own, you need a hg account and this patch file. Note also that you should be using mercurial queues. This not only makes managing multiple patches easier, it also makes using the Try Server a piece of cake.

  1. Set up your ~/.hgrc. This is not strictly needed, but makes life easier. Add the following lines:
    [alias]
    push-to-try = push -f ssh://hg.mozilla.org/try-comm-central
    This will allow you to simply start a try build by calling hg push-to-try
  2. Get the calendar tryserver patch and import it into your mercurial queue.
    hg qimport -n tryserver-calendar.diff https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=471566
  3. Apply (with hg qpush) any amount of patches that you'd like to test.
  4. Call hg push-to-try (yes, with all those patches applied to your tree!)

Thats all! If you want to watch your progress, see the Thunderbird Try Tinderbox. You will get email when your builds have completed, together with a link to the ready built lightning.xpi. Thunderbird files will not be uploaded.

For more information on the Tryserver, especially on how to exclude certain platforms or provide extra mozconfig options, please read the Thunderbird TryServer Guide or the Firefox TryServer Guide.

September 02, 2010 05:51 PM

Planet Ubuntu

Launchpad News: Code hosting maintenance Friday, September 3

Launchpad code hosting will be offline Friday between 8.00 and 9.30 UTC for unexpected hardware maintenance. This means you won’t be able to browse, push to, pull from or otherwise access code hosted on Launchpad.

Going offline: 8.00 UTC 3rd September 2010

Expected back: 9.30 UTC 3rd September 2010

September 02, 2010 05:33 PM

OpenX Blog

OpenX CTO to speak at AdMonsters “OPS” in NYC

John Linden, OpenX’s Chief Technology Officer will speak at the upcoming AdMonsters OPS conference in NYC on Sept. 30th.

His talk, Ad Serving Transformed: ‘Revenue Serving’ Lays New Foundation for Growth, is a wake-up call for publishers.

He’ll review the biggest challenges facing publishers today, and why the old approach to managing advertising doesn’t work in today’s dynamic market. He’ll explain how the industry needs a smarter approach to managing advertising that replaces static ad serving with ‘revenue serving,’ enabling publishers to automatically maximize their direct and indirect revenue on one platform.

He’ll show how a next generation ad server must redefine how to classify, package, and sell ad inventory so publishers can launch new ad products in an increasingly competitive marketplace—while giving them better control over targeting data, more accurate forecasting, and instant access to global demand.

He will also explain why the industry needs a global ad exchange to help publishers improve yield from their international inventory.

September 02, 2010 05:29 PM

Planet Mozilla

Boris Zbarsky: Peacekeeper benchmark weirdness

The Peacekeeper benchmark runs its tests by doing the operation 10,000 times, then dividing one million by the time spent to determine a runs/second number. Unfortunately, the accuracy of this approach is terrible: the operations they're timing don't take that long to do, so they're measuring times in the 0-20ms range for those 10,000 iterations. Given the millisecond accuracy of JS timers, that introduces a lot of noise; furthermore some browsers don't actually update their Date.now() expeditiously; those would look better than they really are in this benchmark.

It looks like the futuremark folks had some code to try to run for 2s instead of 10,000 iterations (only in IE, although the comment says in non-IE), but they messed up the scoping so that the code is a no-op.

On a separate note, for their Array.splice benchmark even 10,000 iterations is nonsense. The benchmark starts with an array of 100,000 elements and removes 20 elements for each call. After 5000 calls, the calls become no-ops, and the benchmark then times those no-ops.

If anyone knows how to contact futuremark about this benchmark, I'd really appreciate it. I have yet to find useful contact info for that.

September 02, 2010 05:27 PM

Planet Scheme

Joe Marshall: For your amusement...

Some computer Tom Swifties:

September 02, 2010 05:16 PM

Planet KDE

Andrea Scarpino (bash): KDEPIM 4.5 beta 3 released

A new beta of kdepim 4.5 has been released and packaged.

To try it you have to enable the [kde-unstable] repository on Arch Linux (both arches available).

Is the most usable beta (obviously); With the beta 2 only POP was working, but I can use a disconnected IMAP account with this release. I’ve just upgraded, migration worked (WOW!) and I’ve successful sent a mail.

No more to say at the moment.

PS. backup your data before the upgrade!

September 02, 2010 05:08 PM

Planet Ubuntu

Ubuntu Server blog: Server Team 20100831 meeting minutes

Here are the meeting minutes. They can also be found
here
with full irc logs.


September 02, 2010 05:06 PM

Planet Open Clip Art Library

Jon Phillips: An Introduction to StatusNet Video

Thanks to @rejon pals @mray and @hypermodern for putting together the new html5-based “Introduction to StatusNet Video.”

intro to statusnet

Please head over to StatusNet’s main page to see the video.

September 02, 2010 05:01 PM

Planet go-oo

Eric Bachard: OOoLight

EducOOo Logo

EducOOo presents OOoLight

OOo4Kids is made for children ( 7-12 ), but after some times, it appears that older people want a light office suite too :-)

So we had the Fun idea to start from OOo4Kids 1.0, and to propose a new light office suite based on OOo4Kids.

Naturally, its name is OOoLight.

Currently, we test with Norwegian Bokmål ( Windows only ), but if the software is appreciated, maybe we'll provide other locales.

 
=> Download OOoLight  ( Norwegian Bokmål, for Windows, only, who can be installed in parallel with OOo and OOo4Kids)

For further information, about the Norwegian version, have a look there


As usual, the Design is made by Ben Bois

Last but not least, if some feature is enough interesting, there is no problem for a backport in OpenOffice.org (OOoLight is provided under LGPL v3 License, fully compatible with OOo )


Some screenshots for the poor other :


OOoLight docked on Mac OS X



The splashscreen :


OOoLight, the splashscreen



The new Start Center :


OOoLight, the new Start Center



---------------------------------------------------------------------


Education Project on the wiki
EducOO.org blog (french)
OOo4Kids

Many thanks to Ben Bois , author of the EducOOo Logo

September 02, 2010 05:00 PM

planet.freedesktop.org

Tiago Vignatti: X Census (for 1.9)

Topic’s name is a funny (and friendly) devotion to GNOME Census. So let’s take a look at some numbers from the time Xorg 1.9 was in development – raw data is here.

Would be unfair to measure only the work that happened e.g. in X server or in the drivers being developed and come up with the statistics about “who developed X”. X and X development community are quite extensive and don’t concern only “graphics” related, i.e., pixel information that appears on your display screen. This is a very common mistake.


X does input device event processing, device keys mapping (e.g. keyboard), pixel rasterization, output and input devices hotplug and configuration, devices and user session pairing, (different) 2D/3D graphics implementation, frame-buffer content management, X application and session security, application memory resources testing, analysis and debugging and etc. So it’s far from just pixel showing up on screen.

X is a generic graphical system. I prefer to see X as an implementation that doesn’t handle (or should not) system-level resources like memory or frame-buffer content. Other people see a bit differently. Given so, I divided all X development in the following groups, that you’ll see below as bold. Statistics were generated from the time people were working on 1.9 Xorg (02 Apr to 20 Aug):

The proto set of repositories represents the X11 core protocol description together with its extensions. The implementation of X11 and extensions to be used by clients are inside lib and xcb. lib also contains some few libraries to be used within xserver. xserver contains the server implementation of X. So here are the numbers for X implementation (xserver, proto, lib and xcb repositories):

Processed 874 csets from 74 developers
59 employers found
A total of 291730 lines added, 155222 removed (delta 136508)

Developers with the most changesets
Alan Coopersmith 134 (15.3%)
Jamey Sharp 106 (12.1%)
Gaetan Nadon 84 (9.6%)
Keith Packard 66 (7.6%)
Tiago Vignatti 55 (6.3%)
Peter Hutterer 54 (6.2%)
Mikhail Gusarov 41 (4.7%)
Jeremy Huddleston 38 (4.3%)
Matt Dew 21 (2.4%)
Fernando Carrijo 19 (2.2%)

Developers with the most changed lines
Matt Dew 172273 (53.2%)
Alan Coopersmith 75739 (23.4%)
Gaetan Nadon 13199 (4.1%)
Mikhail Gusarov 8979 (2.8%)
Keith Packard 6438 (2.0%)
Jeremy Huddleston 5750 (1.8%)
Jamey Sharp 5535 (1.7%)
Tiago Vignatti 5227 (1.6%)
Marko Myllynen 5154 (1.6%)
Yaakov Selkowitz 3614 (1.1%)

Developers with the most lines removed
Marko Myllynen 4729 (3.0%)
Tiago Vignatti 3922 (2.5%)
Mikhail Gusarov 3670 (2.4%)
Yaakov Selkowitz 3523 (2.3%)
Josh Triplett 3141 (2.0%)
Adam Jackson 2521 (1.6%)
Jamey Sharp 2036 (1.3%)
Daniel Stone 312 (0.2%)
Fernando Carrijo 221 (0.1%)
Pierre-Loup A. Griffais 91 (0.1%)

Developers with the most signoffs (total 1007)
Keith Packard 184 (18.3%)
Alan Coopersmith 155 (15.4%)
Gaetan Nadon 105 (10.4%)
Jamey Sharp 103 (10.2%)
Peter Hutterer 88 (8.7%)
Tiago Vignatti 56 (5.6%)
Mikhail Gusarov 42 (4.2%)
Jeremy Huddleston 39 (3.9%)
Fernando Carrijo 19 (1.9%)
Adam Jackson 18 (1.8%)

Developers with the most reviews (total 530)
Keith Packard 74 (14.0%)
Peter Hutterer 63 (11.9%)
Jamey Sharp 62 (11.7%)
Alan Coopersmith 46 (8.7%)
Adam Jackson 44 (8.3%)
Julien Cristau 34 (6.4%)
Dan Nicholson 30 (5.7%)
Daniel Stone 23 (4.3%)
Alex Deucher 21 (4.0%)
Tiago Vignatti 18 (3.4%)

Developers with the most test credits (total 42)
Gaetan Nadon 11 (26.2%)
Tiago Vignatti 8 (19.0%)
Jeremy Huddleston 2 (4.8%)
Colin Harrison 2 (4.8%)
Richard Barnette 2 (4.8%)
Eric Anholt 2 (4.8%)
Keith Packard 1 (2.4%)
Peter Hutterer 1 (2.4%)
Dan Nicholson 1 (2.4%)
Dave Airlie 1 (2.4%)

Developers who gave the most tested-by credits (total 42)
Jamey Sharp 11 (26.2%)
Alan Coopersmith 9 (21.4%)
Keith Packard 8 (19.0%)
Tiago Vignatti 2 (4.8%)
Yaakov Selkowitz 2 (4.8%)
Kristian Høgsberg 2 (4.8%)
Jon TURNEY 2 (4.8%)
Peter Hutterer 1 (2.4%)
Mikhail Gusarov 1 (2.4%)
Pierre-Loup A. Griffais 1 (2.4%)

Developers with the most report credits (total 13)
Richard Barnette 2 (15.4%)
Jamey Sharp 1 (7.7%)
Dave Airlie 1 (7.7%)
Robert Hooker 1 (7.7%)
Fabio Pedretti 1 (7.7%)
Julien Cristau 1 (7.7%)
Matt Turner 1 (7.7%)
Kalle Olavi Niemitalo 1 (7.7%)
Chris Ball 1 (7.7%)
邓逸昕 1 (7.7%)

Developers who gave the most report credits (total 13)
Julien Cristau 3 (23.1%)
Tiago Vignatti 2 (15.4%)
Peter Hutterer 2 (15.4%)
Jamey Sharp 1 (7.7%)
Dave Airlie 1 (7.7%)
Alan Coopersmith 1 (7.7%)
Chris Wilson 1 (7.7%)
Michel Dänzer 1 (7.7%)
Pauli Nieminen 1 (7.7%)

Top changeset contributors by employer
Oracle 135 (15.4%)
jamey@minilop.net 106 (12.1%)
Intel 89 (10.2%)
Red Hat 87 (10.0%)
memsize@videotron.ca 84 (9.6%)
Nokia 75 (8.6%)
dottedmag@dottedmag.net 41 (4.7%)
Apple 38 (4.3%)
matt@osource.org 21 (2.4%)
fcarrijo@yahoo.com.br 19 (2.2%)

Top lines changed by employer
matt@osource.org 172273 (53.2%)
Oracle 77967 (24.1%)
memsize@videotron.ca 15840 (4.9%)
Red Hat 9684 (3.0%)
dottedmag@dottedmag.net 9029 (2.8%)
Intel 7898 (2.4%)
Apple 6162 (1.9%)
jamey@minilop.net 5986 (1.8%)
Nokia 5548 (1.7%)
yselkowitz@users.sourceforge.net 3652 (1.1%)

Employers with the most signoffs (total 1007)
Intel 207 (20.6%)
Oracle 155 (15.4%)
Red Hat 119 (11.8%)
memsize@videotron.ca 105 (10.4%)
jamey@minilop.net 103 (10.2%)
Nokia 78 (7.7%)
dottedmag@dottedmag.net 42 (4.2%)
Apple 39 (3.9%)
fcarrijo@yahoo.com.br 19 (1.9%)
yselkowitz@users.sourceforge.net 17 (1.7%)

X drivers, although decreasing in functionality with the time, they still touching kernel and system-level tasks. And that’s why I prefer see those separated from the rest of X implementation. The numbers of development of X input drivers and input event processing tools (xf86-input-*, xkbcomp, xkeyboard-config repositories):

Processed 285 csets from 28 developers
24 employers found
A total of 20679 lines added, 17716 removed (delta 2963)

Developers with the most changesets
Gaetan Nadon 115 (40.4%)
Peter Hutterer 62 (21.8%)
Sergey V. Udaltsov 45 (15.8%)
Chris Bagwell 7 (2.5%)
Daniel Stone 7 (2.5%)
Stephan Hilb 5 (1.8%)
Simon Thum 4 (1.4%)
Adam Jackson 3 (1.1%)
Julien Cristau 3 (1.1%)
Oliver McFadden 3 (1.1%)

Developers with the most changed lines
Sergey V. Udaltsov 17613 (74.3%)
Gaetan Nadon 3096 (13.1%)
Peter Hutterer 1024 (4.3%)
Stephan Hilb 479 (2.0%)
Daniel Knittl-Frank 272 (1.1%)
Simon Thum 189 (0.8%)
Daniel Stone 152 (0.6%)
Chris Bagwell 81 (0.3%)
Michel Dänzer 66 (0.3%)
Patrick Curran 46 (0.2%)

Developers with the most lines removed
Gaetan Nadon 2244 (12.7%)
Peter Hutterer 206 (1.2%)
Fernando Carrijo 10 (0.1%)
Alan Coopersmith 7 (0.0%)
Julien Cristau 2 (0.0%)
Paulo Ricardo Zanoni 1 (0.0%)

Developers with the most signoffs (total 238)
Gaetan Nadon 115 (48.3%)
Peter Hutterer 79 (33.2%)
Daniel Stone 9 (3.8%)
Chris Bagwell 7 (2.9%)
Alan Coopersmith 6 (2.5%)
Fernando Carrijo 3 (1.3%)
Oliver McFadden 3 (1.3%)
Bartosz Brachaczek 2 (0.8%)
Adam Jackson 2 (0.8%)
Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 2 (0.8%)

Developers with the most reviews (total 52)
Rémi Cardona 14 (26.9%)
Fernando Carrijo 9 (17.3%)
Jamey Sharp 9 (17.3%)
Peter Hutterer 8 (15.4%)
Alan Coopersmith 4 (7.7%)
Dan Nicholson 3 (5.8%)
Gaetan Nadon 1 (1.9%)
Simon Thum 1 (1.9%)
Julien Cristau 1 (1.9%)
Magnus Kessler 1 (1.9%)

Developers with the most test credits (total 5)
Peter Hutterer 2 (40.0%)
Bartek Iwaniec 2 (40.0%)
Magnus Kessler 1 (20.0%)

Developers who gave the most tested-by credits (total 5)
Bartosz Brachaczek 2 (40.0%)
Peter Hutterer 1 (20.0%)
Chris Bagwell 1 (20.0%)
Patrick Curran 1 (20.0%)

Developers with the most report credits (total 3)
Peter Hutterer 1 (33.3%)
Julien Cristau 1 (33.3%)
Gabor Z. Papp 1 (33.3%)

Developers who gave the most report credits (total 3)
Gaetan Nadon 2 (66.7%)
Gabor Z. Papp 1 (33.3%)

Top changeset contributors by employer
memsize@videotron.ca 115 (40.4%)
Red Hat 65 (22.8%)
svu@gnome.org 45 (15.8%)
daniel@fooishbar.org 7 (2.5%)
chris@cnpbagwell.com 7 (2.5%)
Oracle 5 (1.8%)
stephan@ecshi.net 5 (1.8%)
simon.thum@gmx.de 4 (1.4%)
VMWare 4 (1.4%)
Nokia 3 (1.1%)

Top lines changed by employer
svu@gnome.org 17683 (74.6%)
memsize@videotron.ca 3304 (13.9%)
Red Hat 1273 (5.4%)
stephan@ecshi.net 479 (2.0%)
knittl89+git@googlemail.com 272 (1.1%)
simon.thum@gmx.de 189 (0.8%)
daniel@fooishbar.org 181 (0.8%)
chris@cnpbagwell.com 81 (0.3%)
VMWare 67 (0.3%)
pjcurran@wisc.edu 46 (0.2%)

Employers with the most signoffs (total 238)
memsize@videotron.ca 115 (48.3%)
Red Hat 81 (34.0%)
daniel@fooishbar.org 9 (3.8%)
chris@cnpbagwell.com 7 (2.9%)
Oracle 6 (2.5%)
Nokia 3 (1.3%)
fcarrijo@yahoo.com.br 3 (1.3%)
simon.thum@gmx.de 2 (0.8%)
avarab@gmail.com 2 (0.8%)
b.brachaczek@gmail.com 2 (0.8%)

for userspace video drivers (libdrm, mesa and all xf86-video-*):

Processed 5608 csets from 107 developers
84 employers found
A total of 528511 lines added, 1345893 removed (delta -817382)

Developers with the most changesets
Brian Paul 599 (10.7%)
Eric Anholt 597 (10.6%)
Gaetan Nadon 431 (7.7%)
Vinson Lee 426 (7.6%)
Marek Olšák 415 (7.4%)
José Fonseca 357 (6.4%)
Kenneth Graunke 326 (5.8%)
Ian Romanick 321 (5.7%)
Carl Worth 233 (4.2%)
Chris Wilson 208 (3.7%)

Developers with the most changed lines
Eric Anholt 957175 (56.3%)
Jeremy Huddleston 146459 (8.6%)
Kenneth Graunke 58744 (3.5%)
Jakob Bornecrantz 46941 (2.8%)
xgi0007 37147 (2.2%)
Brian Paul 36067 (2.1%)
Carl Worth 25201 (1.5%)
Jerome Glisse 22808 (1.3%)
Kristian Høgsberg 20469 (1.2%)
José Fonseca 18998 (1.1%)

Developers with the most lines removed
Eric Anholt 930476 (69.1%)
Jakob Bornecrantz 37952 (2.8%)
Kristian Høgsberg 6935 (0.5%)
Keith Whitwell 3829 (0.3%)
Gaetan Nadon 3113 (0.2%)
Daniel Vetter 956 (0.1%)
Chia-I Wu 451 (0.0%)
George Sapountzis 269 (0.0%)
Owain Ainsworth 58 (0.0%)
Joakim Sindholt 26 (0.0%)

Developers with the most signoffs (total 926)
Gaetan Nadon 363 (39.2%)
Chris Wilson 186 (20.1%)
Jerome Glisse 50 (5.4%)
Dave Airlie 42 (4.5%)
Daniel Vetter 37 (4.0%)
Brian Paul 27 (2.9%)
Alex Deucher 22 (2.4%)
Jeremy Huddleston 18 (1.9%)
Adam Jackson 16 (1.7%)
José Fonseca 14 (1.5%)

Developers with the most reviews (total 24)
Alan Coopersmith 6 (25.0%)
Rémi Cardona 4 (16.7%)
Ian Romanick 2 (8.3%)
Eric Anholt 2 (8.3%)
Corbin Simpson 2 (8.3%)
George Sapountzis 2 (8.3%)
Gaetan Nadon 1 (4.2%)
Chris Wilson 1 (4.2%)
Adam Jackson 1 (4.2%)
José Fonseca 1 (4.2%)

Developers with the most test credits (total 11)
Nick Bowler 2 (18.2%)
Calvin Walton 2 (18.2%)
Aaron Plattner 1 (9.1%)
Marek Olšák 1 (9.1%)
Tom Fogal 1 (9.1%)
Brian Rogers 1 (9.1%)
Arkadiusz Miśkiewicz 1 (9.1%)
Krzysztof Halasa 1 (9.1%)
Sven Arvidsson 1 (9.1%)

Developers who gave the most tested-by credits (total 11)
Daniel Vetter 5 (45.5%)
Chris Wilson 2 (18.2%)
Dan Nicholson 1 (9.1%)
Marcin Slusarz 1 (9.1%)
Francisco Jerez 1 (9.1%)
Tom Stellard 1 (9.1%)

Developers with the most report credits (total 17)
Aaron Plattner 1 (5.9%)
Brian Rogers 1 (5.9%)
Arkadiusz Miśkiewicz 1 (5.9%)
Julien Cristau 1 (5.9%)
Kenneth Graunke 1 (5.9%)
Thomas Bächler 1 (5.9%)
Niels Ole Salscheider 1 (5.9%)
Roy Spliet 1 (5.9%)
Gianluca Anzolin 1 (5.9%)
Sergey Samokhin 1 (5.9%)

Developers who gave the most report credits (total 17)
Chris Wilson 11 (64.7%)
Marek Olšák 2 (11.8%)
Julien Cristau 1 (5.9%)
Ian Romanick 1 (5.9%)
Gaetan Nadon 1 (5.9%)
Maarten Maathuis 1 (5.9%)

Top changeset contributors by employer
VMWare 1870 (33.3%)
Intel 1552 (27.7%)
memsize@videotron.ca 431 (7.7%)
maraeo@gmail.com 415 (7.4%)
kenneth@whitecape.org 326 (5.8%)
LunarG 195 (3.5%)
Red Hat 183 (3.3%)
luca@luca-barbieri.com 127 (2.3%)
mostawesomedude@gmail.com 72 (1.3%)
AMD 64 (1.1%)

Top lines changed by employer
Intel 1057613 (62.3%)
Apple 238512 (14.0%)
VMWare 173210 (10.2%)
kenneth@whitecape.org 67387 (4.0%)
Red Hat 47856 (2.8%)
xgi0007@linux.site 37148 (2.2%)
LunarG 29790 (1.8%)
maraeo@gmail.com 15014 (0.9%)
memsize@videotron.ca 9531 (0.6%)
luca@luca-barbieri.com 6345 (0.4%)

Employers with the most signoffs (total 926)
memsize@videotron.ca 363 (39.2%)
Intel 210 (22.7%)
Red Hat 110 (11.9%)
VMWare 58 (6.3%)
daniel.vetter@ffwll.ch 36 (3.9%)
AMD 22 (2.4%)
Apple 18 (1.9%)
Oracle 12 (1.3%)
maraeo@gmail.com 11 (1.2%)
NVidia 11 (1.2%)

Pixman library (pixman) is a special one because can be used inside X and for other components on the system like cairo. It’s used for pixel manipulation, e.g. fast path to get advantages of CPU features:

Processed 78 csets from 8 developers
8 employers found
A total of 3088 lines added, 1270 removed (delta 1818)

Developers with the most changesets
Søren Sandmann Pedersen 54 (69.2%)
Siarhei Siamashka 9 (11.5%)
M Joonas Pihlaja 6 (7.7%)
Jeff Muizelaar 3 (3.8%)
Andrea Canciani 2 (2.6%)
Brad Smith 1 (1.3%)
Marek Vasut 1 (1.3%)
Siddharth Agarwal 1 (1.3%)

Developers with the most changed lines
Søren Sandmann Pedersen 2207 (64.7%)
Siarhei Siamashka 462 (13.6%)
M Joonas Pihlaja 185 (5.4%)
Andrea Canciani 119 (3.5%)
Marek Vasut 69 (2.0%)
Brad Smith 24 (0.7%)
Jeff Muizelaar 20 (0.6%)
Siddharth Agarwal 2 (0.1%)

Developers with the most lines removed

Developers with the most signoffs (total 5)
Egor Starkov 1 (20.0%)
Rami Ylimaki 1 (20.0%)
Jeff Muizelaar 1 (20.0%)
Marek Vasut 1 (20.0%)
Siarhei Siamashka 1 (20.0%)

Developers with the most reviews (total 0)

Developers with the most test credits (total 0)

Developers who gave the most tested-by credits (total 0)

Developers with the most report credits (total 0)

Developers who gave the most report credits (total 0)

Top changeset contributors by employer
Red Hat 54 (69.2%)
Nokia 9 (11.5%)
jpihlaja@cc.helsinki.fi 6 (7.7%)
jmuizelaar@mozilla.com 3 (3.8%)
ranma42@gmail.com 2 (2.6%)
brad@comstyle.com 1 (1.3%)
sid.bugzilla@gmail.com 1 (1.3%)
marek.vasut@gmail.com 1 (1.3%)

Top lines changed by employer
Red Hat 2320 (68.1%)
Nokia 666 (19.5%)
jpihlaja@cc.helsinki.fi 185 (5.4%)
ranma42@gmail.com 123 (3.6%)
marek.vasut@gmail.com 69 (2.0%)
brad@comstyle.com 24 (0.7%)
jmuizelaar@mozilla.com 20 (0.6%)
sid.bugzilla@gmail.com 2 (0.1%)

Employers with the most signoffs (total 5)
Nokia 3 (60.0%)
marek.vasut@gmail.com 1 (20.0%)
jmuizelaar@mozilla.com 1 (20.0%)

A very important work for X11 comformance testing is XTS, that was broken for while and now is working again:

Processed 41 csets from 4 developers
4 employers found
A total of 2244 lines added, 4078 removed (delta -1834)

Developers with the most changesets
Peter Hutterer 17 (41.5%)
Aaron Plattner 12 (29.3%)
Dan Nicholson 9 (22.0%)
Jon TURNEY 2 (4.9%)

Developers with the most changed lines
Aaron Plattner 3854 (74.1%)
Peter Hutterer 245 (4.7%)
Dan Nicholson 141 (2.7%)
Jon TURNEY 5 (0.1%)

Developers with the most lines removed
Aaron Plattner 2000 (49.0%)
Dan Nicholson 1 (0.0%)

Developers with the most signoffs (total 42)
Peter Hutterer 19 (45.2%)
Aaron Plattner 12 (28.6%)
Dan Nicholson 9 (21.4%)
Jon TURNEY 2 (4.8%)

Developers with the most reviews (total 10)
Dan Nicholson 7 (70.0%)
Peter Hutterer 3 (30.0%)

Developers with the most test credits (total 0)

Developers who gave the most tested-by credits (total 0)

Developers with the most report credits (total 0)

Developers who gave the most report credits (total 0)

Top changeset contributors by employer
Red Hat 17 (41.5%)
NVidia 12 (29.3%)
dbn.lists@gmail.com 9 (22.0%)
jon.turney@dronecode.org.uk 2 (4.9%)

Top lines changed by employer
NVidia 4726 (90.9%)
Red Hat 245 (4.7%)
dbn.lists@gmail.com 225 (4.3%)
jon.turney@dronecode.org.uk 5 (0.1%)

Employers with the most signoffs (total 42)
Red Hat 19 (45.2%)
NVidia 12 (28.6%)
dbn.lists@gmail.com 9 (21.4%)
jon.turney@dronecode.org.uk 2 (4.8%)

X documentation (doc repository):

Processed 22 csets from 6 developers
6 employers found
A total of 315 lines added, 45930 removed (delta -45615)

Developers with the most changesets
Alan Coopersmith 12 (54.5%)
Gaetan Nadon 3 (13.6%)
Thomas Hellstrom 2 (9.1%)
Julien Cristau 2 (9.1%)
Yaakov Selkowitz 2 (9.1%)
Dirk Wallenstein 1 (4.5%)

Developers with the most changed lines
Alan Coopersmith 45843 (99.3%)
Julien Cristau 52 (0.1%)
Gaetan Nadon 36 (0.1%)
Yaakov Selkowitz 23 (0.0%)
Thomas Hellstrom 4 (0.0%)
Dirk Wallenstein 2 (0.0%)

Developers with the most lines removed
Alan Coopersmith 45627 (99.3%)
Gaetan Nadon 18 (0.0%)

Developers with the most signoffs (total 23)
Alan Coopersmith 13 (56.5%)
Gaetan Nadon 3 (13.0%)
Thomas Hellstrom 2 (8.7%)
Julien Cristau 2 (8.7%)
Yaakov Selkowitz 2 (8.7%)
Dirk Wallenstein 1 (4.3%)

Developers with the most reviews (total 4)
Alan Coopersmith 2 (50.0%)
Gaetan Nadon 1 (25.0%)
Dan Nicholson 1 (25.0%)

Developers with the most test credits (total 0)

Developers who gave the most tested-by credits (total 0)

Developers with the most report credits (total 0)

Developers who gave the most report credits (total 0)

Top changeset contributors by employer
Oracle 12 (54.5%)
memsize@videotron.ca 3 (13.6%)
yselkowitz@users.sourceforge.net 2 (9.1%)
jcristau@debian.org 2 (9.1%)
VMWare 2 (9.1%)
halsmit@t-online.de 1 (4.5%)

Top lines changed by employer
Oracle 46053 (99.7%)
jcristau@debian.org 52 (0.1%)
memsize@videotron.ca 36 (0.1%)
yselkowitz@users.sourceforge.net 23 (0.0%)
VMWare 4 (0.0%)
halsmit@t-online.de 2 (0.0%)

Employers with the most signoffs (total 23)
Oracle 13 (56.5%)
memsize@videotron.ca 3 (13.0%)
jcristau@debian.org 2 (8.7%)
yselkowitz@users.sourceforge.net 2 (8.7%)
VMWare 2 (8.7%)
halsmit@t-online.de 1 (4.3%)

Nothing or close to nothing was done in the old font scheme (font repo), bitmap and cursor data. Also, from the total of 85 X traditional applications (apps), only 180 changesets were made and mostly concerning autoconf clean up.

Of course lines of code and changeset are far from being a good metric to see actually how the development happened. But still, it does represents something. For sure, there’s also a lot of other inaccurate information that I’m missing from this all. For instance, companies like Collabora does X development but sometimes get the merits for Nokia. Is that fair? I don’t know. And I don’t want to discuss this either :)

PS: Canonical, where are you here? Hint hint hint.

September 02, 2010 04:41 PM

Elgg News: All blog posts

Elgg 1.7.3 and 1.6.3 security releases

Georg-Christian Pranschke from Sense Post discovered a vulnerability in Elgg that could potentially allow SQL injection attacks using crafted URLs or POSTs. Versions 1.7.3 and 1.6.3 correct this and are highly recommended for all Elgg users.  Download 1.7.3 or 1.6.3 and upgrade now.

1.7.3 also includes additional bugfixes for problems found in 1.7.2:

To maintain the security of your network and its users, all Elgg installations should be upgraded immediately.  Again, thank you very much to Georg-Christian who followed our security policy and worked with us to get a solution out quickly.

September 02, 2010 04:37 PM

Planet Mozilla

David Eaves: Bugzilla – progress made and new thoughts

A few weeks ago I published a post entitled Some Thoughts on Improving Bugzilla. The post got a fair bit a traction and received a large number of supportive comments. But what was best, about the post, about open source, about Mozilla, is that it drew me into a serious of conversations with people who wanted to make some of it reality.

Specifically, I'd like to thank Guy Pyrzak over at Bugzilla and Clint Talbert at Mozilla both of whom spent hours entertaining and conversing about these ideas with me, problem solving them and, if we are really honest, basically doing all the heavy lifting to transform them from ideas on this blog into real changes.

So in this post I have two things to share. First is an update on progress from the ideas in the last post (which will be this post) as well as some new thoughts about how Mozilla instance of Bugzilla could be further improved (which will be my next post).

So here we go...

Update!

1. Simplifying Menus

First up I made some suggestions around simplifying the bugzilla landing page. These were pretty cosmetic, but they make the landing page a little less intimidating to a new user and, frankly, nicer for everyone. We are presently drafting up the small changes to the code that would require this change and getting ready to submit it as a proposal. Status - Yellow.

2. Gather more information about our users (and, while I'm at it, some more simplifying)

Second, I outlined some ideas for streamlining the process of joining bugzilla and on the data we collect about users.

On the first part, which is about the steamlined pages (designed to help ensure that true bug submitters end up in bugzilla and not those seeking support) here too we will be submitting some new proposed pages shortly. Status - Yellow

On the second part I suggested that we ask users if they English is their second language and that we mark new bugzilla accounts with a "new" symbol. Guy is coding up an extension to Bugzilla that will both of these. Once done, I'll suggest to Mozilla that they include this extension in their instance. Status - Green.

3. Make Life Easier for Users and the Triage Guys

I thought we could make life more efficient for triage and users if we added a status where bugs could be declared "RESOLVED-SUPPORT." There's been some reception to this idea. However, the second part of this idea is that once a bug is tagged as such a script automatically should scan the support database, find articles with a strong word correlation to the bug description and email the bug submitter links to those pages. Once again, Guy has stepped forward to develop such an extension which hopefully will be working in the not to distant future. Status - Green.

4. Make Bugzilla Celebrate, enhance our brand and build community

But probably the most exciting part is the final suggestion. That we send (at least non-developers) much nicer emails celebrating that the bug they submitted has been patched. It turns out (hardly surprising) that I wasn't the first person to think that Bugzilla should be able to send HTML emails. Indeed, that feature request was first made back in 2001 and, when I blogged about this the other week, had not be updated since 2006. Once again, Guy has proven to be unbelievably helpful. It turns out that due to some changes to bugzilla many of the blocks to patching this had disappeared and so he has been working on the code. Status - Green.

Lots here for many people to be proud of. Hopefully some of these ideas will go live in the not too distant future. That said, still many hurdles to clear and if you are a decision maker on any of these and would like to talk about these ideas, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Email & Share: Print PDF email Twitter del.icio.us Digg StumbleUpon Slashdot Reddit Facebook Netvibes Technorati Suggest to Techmeme via Twitter Identi.ca

September 02, 2010 04:24 PM

Planet go-oo

Gullfoss: Print file format changes on Linux

The CUPS print system that is used on Linux and other Unix operating systems is switching its file format from PostScript to PDF. As part of this OpenOffice.org should switch its print output file format to PDF, too. This was implemented in OOo for issue 94173.

The corresponding CWS pdfprint is going "Ready for QA" today and since this affects an area where we should have broad testing with a variety of systems and printers, I put an install set of the CWS at:

ftp://qa-upload.services.openoffice.org/pdfprint/linux-x86/OOo_DEV300m86_Linux_x86_install-arc_en-US.tar.gz

Please feel free to check this install set and see if it gives you printing related trouble. Ideally this change should be transparent for the user, that is you print your documents just as you did before. The only visible change is that "Print to file" would now produce PDF instead of PostScript; also you can switch the behavior back to the old one in either the (not well known) spadmin utility or per print job: in the Print dialog open "Properties..." , go to the "Device" TabPage and change the "Printer Language type" to either PDF or the desired PostScript Level.

Disclaimer: of course you should remember that this is a Child Workspace build, that is a development version. It will have the same issues that the correspoding Master Workspace (DEV300 m86) has and should not be used in a production environment.

For those that would like to test this on Solaris: here is a Solaris (x86) install set:

ftp://qa-upload.services.openoffice.org/pdfprint/solaris-x86/OOo_DEV300m86_Solaris_x86_install-arc_en-US.tar.gz

On Solaris however CUPS is rather optional, so you would not get a PDF print output there necessarily.

September 02, 2010 04:23 PM

Planet Debian

Vincent Sanders: You shall go to the ball!

Contrary to my last post I was able to attend the Debian UK BBQ at the weekend. My wonderful wife ditched me at Portsmouth station with permission to go play with my friends ;-)
Perhaps a bit more explanation is warranted about that last statement! We travelled back from France last Saturday. We were on the 12:15 (CET) ferry so had to be awake and on the road for the five hour France drive at "oh my gosh its early" time. The crossing to Portsmouth was slow as it was very choppy and we were leaving the Port at 15:30 at which point Melodie was good enough to let me go play with my friends while she drove home.
I did have the "fun" of doing the Portsmouth->London->Cambridge trip on UK public transport but it went pretty smoothly. Walking from Cambridge station to the BBQ location was a bit dumb, next time I am taking a cab!
The BBQ was excellent fun and big thanks for Steve for holding it again. Its always fun to meet the usual suspects. We also got to set a new occupancy record at Steves house Saturday night and discovered that certain members of Debian UK snore rather loudly (I think at one point we could measure it on the Richter scale).
Back home now of course. Work is the same as when I left so no change there and the Boys first day back at school seems to have gone smoothly too.

September 02, 2010 04:18 PM

Planet Maemo

buscatcher: Never miss another tram

Opening public data is a hot topic in Finland at the moment. As a small experiment with the data that is available I wrote buscatcher, a simple N900 app that displays Helsinki trams (and some buses) moving on a map in real time. This makes it easy to determine when your next tram is coming to the stop, or where it is stuck.

buscatcher.jpg

So far I'm keeping this application away from Extras until HSL gets scalability issues solved with their dataset. In the meanwhile you can grab and run the application from the GitHub repo.

4 Add to favourites0 Bury

September 02, 2010 04:17 PM

Planet KDE

Henri Bergius (bergie): My interview at dot KDE

Jos Poortvliet did an interview with me for dot KDE in this summer's aKademy and it has been online for a while now. In it we discuss things like Midgard as a storage engine for desktop applications, and Maemo's open QA process for Downloads applications. Some excepts:

At maemo.org we have an appstore for FOSS applications on the Maemo platform. This appstore is enabled by default on all Nokia N900s so we wanted to have some quality control. We had to create our own appstore approval process, compatible with the FOSS philosophy. Now any developer can submit an app, and anyone can test and vote. The whole process is completely transparent, auditable and visible. And it also provides a feedback channel from testers and users to the developers!

...

Midgard is a data storage service. Whether you write desktop or web applications, instead of coming up with your own file format, you just use Midgard. You can work more easily and object-based. Users have many different devices these days, so Midgard has strong replication features to synchronize between different systems. Midgard is built on top of GObject; we provide bindings to a bunch of different languages so developers can choose the tools they like - PHP, Python, Javascript. Currently (as in now, while we're talking) Qt bindings are being developed here at Akademy.

Read the whole interview.

September 02, 2010 03:55 PM

Planet Maemo

My interview at dot KDE

Jos Poortvliet did an interview with me for dot KDE in this summer's aKademy and it has been online for a while now. In it we discuss things like Midgard as a storage engine for desktop applications, and Maemo's open QA process for Downloads applications. Some excepts:

At maemo.org we have an appstore for FOSS applications on the Maemo platform. This appstore is enabled by default on all Nokia N900s so we wanted to have some quality control. We had to create our own appstore approval process, compatible with the FOSS philosophy. Now any developer can submit an app, and anyone can test and vote. The whole process is completely transparent, auditable and visible. And it also provides a feedback channel from testers and users to the developers!

...

Midgard is a data storage service. Whether you write desktop or web applications, instead of coming up with your own file format, you just use Midgard. You can work more easily and object-based. Users have many different devices these days, so Midgard has strong replication features to synchronize between different systems. Midgard is built on top of GObject; we provide bindings to a bunch of different languages so developers can choose the tools they like - PHP, Python, Javascript. Currently (as in now, while we're talking) Qt bindings are being developed here at Akademy.

Read the whole interview.

2 Add to favourites0 Bury

September 02, 2010 03:55 PM

Planet Mozilla

Mark Surman: Drumbeat: what’s next?

We’re eight months into Drumbeat. We’ve built a bit of a brand. People are interested. They want to get involved. More importantly: new people have shown up. Educators. Filmmakers. Artists. Not Mozilla natives. These new people are doing interesting things. And their peers are noticing.

It’s is a good start. We have some momentum. There is potential. Which begs the question: now what?

One thing is clear: we need to turn interest into action and impact. With 2011 on the horizon, I’m asking: how do we best do this? What does Drumbeat do next?

I want to know what you think about this. As comment fodder, here are three + one things I think we should focus on as Drumbeat moves into 2011:

0. Narrow our focus. Pick grokkable, magnetic topics.

Drumbeat started with a very broad call to action: ‘help keep the open web open‘. This didn’t work as well as we’d hoped. Some people responded. Most just stared back blankly.

Recently (and somewhat by accident), we’ve shifted focus to more specific mashups of Mozilla’s mission and other people’s big ideas. Re-invent cinema using the open web. Use the culture of the web to transform education and learning. And so on.

These mash ups have been much more magnetic. People already excited about the big ideas in question have looked up and said: ah, the web people are interested. Cool. How can I join in?

No matter what else we decide to do, one of our next steps should be to consistently use these ‘somebody’s big idea + open web tech and culture’ combos to focus what we’re doing. On the flip side, we should (dramatically) turn down the volume of the generic ‘help the open web’ angle.

1. Follow through on what we’ve started. Amp up participation and impact.

During the last eight months, we’ve dug our teeth into some awesome and substantial projects — Web Made Movies, Mozilla / P2PU School of Web Craft, Universal Subtitles. And it’s possible we’ll start work on a couple more by year end.

Each of these projects has big dreams. They also have clear goals for the coming year. A web developer education program that is 10,000 learners strong. A bustling open video studio pumping out productions with leading directors from around the world. Grassroots subtitling taking hold on well known, globally important video sites. These are amongst the 2011 goals Drumbeat projects shared in Whistler.

One answer to ‘what’s next for Drumbeat?’ is ‘follow through and help these projects reach these goals’.

There are three primary ways we can do this. Help with the technology side of these projects (e.g. P2PU leveraging Labs’ open social tools). Build fundraising capacity by actually designing and running campaigns with the projects (we’re doing major campaigns this fall and into next year). And, bring more people and profile to the table (e.g. volunteer recruitment in mainstream Mozilla newsletters and more promotion on Mozilla sites).

Helping in these ways will drive participation and impact in the projects we’ve already started. This, for me, is the baseline of what Drumbeat should do next. If that’s all we did in 2011, would it be enough? Personally, I don’t think so.

2. Get get good at open innovation. Find and grow more promising ideas.

We’ve always seen Drumbeat as a way to get many good ideas on the table, and then to back the best. A decent number of people have responded to this aspect of what we’re doing — there are now over 220 projects on drumbeat.org.

We’ve highlighted and helped a handful of these projects in small ways. Promoting them in our newsletter. Setting up peer coaching on our community calls. But, overall, we haven’t yet figured out a good and sustainable way to help these projects evolve, expand and succeed.

What we need is a simple, systematic way to find and grow promising ideas. One approach: combine the Mozilla labs open innovation process with the ‘magnetic topic mashups’ described above. Pick a topic. Run an innovation challenge. Back the best ideas that come out of the challenge.

For example, we might run a challenge around the question: how can the culture and technology drive innovation in the world of journalism? The challenge process would get many ideas on the table, spark collaborations. We’d offer fellowships or grants to the ‘winners’ of the challenge.

If Jetpack for Learning was any indication, this approach is more likely to yield results than the general Drumbeat  ‘propose a project that helps the web’ call to action we’ve been using so far. One of our priorities for 2011 should be to put this open innovation model centre stage, pick some awesome topics and see what we learn.

3. Spark people’s imagination. Make it easy for them to connect. Focus on (big) visibility.

While our existing projects are awesome and important, Drumbeat (and Mozilla as a whole) needs another side to it — a side that is lightweight, easy to engage and, well, sexy.

Why? Because part of our goal with Drumbeat is to spark people’s imaginations — to get millions of people excited about how the open web can liberate, empower and delight them.

If you look at this from a ‘what’s next?’ perspective, this is partly a matter of linking what we’re doing already to things people care about. Making Web Made Movies with well loved producers and artists. Connecting Universal Subtitles to widely known content brands. Showcasing robots, lasers and other shiny open tech toys at Drumbeat events. The good news: we’re working on all these things.

However, ‘sparking imaginations’ need not — and probably cannot — be completely tied up in the idea of Drumbeat projects and events. We should embrace anything we can dream up that delights and engages, and the connects people to Mozilla outside of their day to day experience of using our products.

Google showed how you can do this with it’s recent HTML5 Arcade Fire video. It was a lightweight, fun, internet-scale way to demo what HTML5 video can be. And people loved it.

We hope to do something similar with our upcoming Firefox 4 parks campaign with the World Wildlife Fund — using sexy demos to make the link between the forests of the amazon and the web ecosystem that Firefox helps sustain. We’ve got other ideas up our sleeves as well (including some involving cats!)

But, the fact of the matter is, Mozilla isn’t naturally good at this. We’re more often than not too earnest about the web. We need to develop or lighter sexier side. Especially if we want millions of people across the web to join and support our cause. In terms of Drumbeat next steps, this is a major area we need to work on.

These are early thoughts that need much shaping and refinement. I’m interested to know: Which sound right? Which sound exciting? Which sound unachievable? You’ve been watching Drumbeat unfold. Where do you think it should go next?

I’ve posted an etherpad version of this content for people to hack on. And you can also make comments below. I’ll feed whatever people post into a Mozilla board discussion mid-September. And, if there is alot of interesting changes, I’ll repost the full etherpad version here.

PS. I know this post is too long. Sorry about that. I really want to see how people react to the whole set of ideas here — so my attempts at chopping it into a bunch of smaller posts didn’t work.


Filed under: drumbeat, mozilla, open, poetry

September 02, 2010 03:54 PM

Planet KDE

Martin Gräßlin: Driver dilemma in KDE workspaces 4.5

KDE is currently blamed for errors in external components: the graphic drivers. I am lately reading quite some crap (e.g. on it news today) that we KWin devs knew about problems in the drivers and shipped 4.5 nevertheless with changes enabled which trigger the driver bugs. That is of course not true.

First let’s have a look on the checks KWin performs in desktop effects:

The most important fact in this list is, that KWin does not enable any functionality the driver does not claim support for it! Furthermore we have several runtime checks to ensure that our users have a smooth experience even if the drivers are claiming support for extensions they do not support. Many of these checks have been added in the 4.4 and 4.5 release cycle.

Now that I have explained all our checks we did to ensure a smooth user experience, I want to explain how it could happen that there are regressions in 4.5. In 4.5 we introduced two new features which require OpenGL Shaders: the blur effect and the lanczos filter. Both are not hard requirements. Blur effect can easily be turned off by disabling the effect and the lanczos filter is controlled by the general effect level settings which is also used for Plasma and Oxygen animations. Both new features check for the required extensions and get only activated iff the driver claims support for it. So everything should be fine, shouldn’t it?

Apparently not when it comes to the free graphics drivers (please note and remember: we do not see such problems with the proprietary NVIDIA driver!). We used to use indirect rendering for Intel drivers. In that case the driver still claims support for all the extensions which cannot work with indirect rendering, that is for example framebuffer object and shaders (NVIDIA does not support such extensions if direct rendering is not enabled). If we ask the driver if it is supported it says: "yes sure, everything is fine", till you try to use it. This caused serious problems with the blur effect. The effect checks at startup what is supported, sees that everything is supported and tells Plasma that blur is available. Plasma uses therefore the blur optimized theme and then blur just does not work. We do not see the problem on initial startup or creation of the resources, such as compiling the shader, we see it only during the painting pass. This results in completely transparent and impossible to read windows.

Of course this is unacceptable. Disabling the blur effect by default would not have been an option as users would have enabled it and have run into this driver issue. So we had to check it. I added a test to try to get a framebuffer object during initialization. If it fails KWin does not enable the blur effect. Fixed the issue for all Intel users. But this caused other problems, so for some drivers when using a "strange" resolution (e.g. multi screen) compositing cannot be enabled at all. We still do not know what is happening there and cannot debug due to missing hardware. This check had been removed in 4.5.1 again as it was causing problems.

We could drop the check because we had found a better solution: the free drivers also support direct rendering and so we activated it. Of course only when our test application running outside of KWin verifies that direct rendering works. So everything is fine: blur works and no more problems.

Well not if we have the graphics stack in X11. We saw some new problems appearing out of nowhere. The Intel driver seems to be able to support shaders for hardware that is not programmable, that means: software emulation. That’s a rather stupid idea. You use shaders because you want to have the power of the GPU, not the slow general purpose CPU. A GPU (even a bad one) is magnitudes faster in image processing tasks than a CPU and is highly parallel. We also saw issues like windows being rendered upside-down (this issue had already been fixed in mesa git master before we were aware of this problem). This issue hit for example all users of radeon driver in OpenSUSE 11.3. A very nice problem seems to exist for Intel drivers. Given the bug reports we can only conclude that the driver is not able to handle more than one GL context at the same time or started shortly after each other.

When I see these problems I think: "it looks like we are the first one to actually use the drivers". And then I start to think about it and realize: yes we are. Compiz does not yet use GLSL (Compiz’s Blur effect is written in GPU assembler. KWin blur also has an assembler part which is a fallback in case the driver does not claim support for GLSL), so we are probably the first ones to use these driver capabilities in a real world application. Now why are we using something that new? Because it is quite old: this is OpenGL 2 we are speaking about, a standard specified in 2004! Btw. Microsoft made use of blur by default when they introduced Vista, that was in 2006. So we are talking about functionality specified since six years and used by default by our competition for four years. Oh and please note: the same hardware runs fine in Vista or Windows 7 – at least that’s what we can see from the bug reports.

As those new problems appeared I worked on another solution. Just in case that you didn’t know: I don’t have such hardware, I could not reproduce any of these issues. It’s also important to know that we need special combinations of hardware, driver version, mesa version, X server version, kernel version and distribution to have either failed or working setups. So there are easily thousands of possible combinations. Testing everything is just impossible. We introduced a blacklist to workaround the most prominent issues concerning blur and lanczos filter. Lanczos is more important as it cannot be disabled as easy as blur. The blacklist is implemented in a way so that it can easily be extended. I tried to cloud source the problem of finding all broken drivers. This did not work out for 4.5 and for 4.5.1 I just did not find the time to write a new kconfig update script. I hope to get an update ready for 4.5.2.

So far I discussed about the problems we saw and new about before 4.5.0. Given that we introduced several additional checks to ensure a good and smooth setup and all the work we put into ensuring a smooth user experience, I am rather disappointed being blamed for what we did. In my opinion we did everything that is possible. The only other option would have been to withdraw blur completely (as explained: disabling by default would not have solved the problem). This would be rather bad given that we have a large user base which wants blur and have a working driver!

An issue we were not aware of before the release (bug was opened during beta phase, but not confirmed before the release) are freezes when changing any KWin related settings. In fact it is not a freeze. You can still use Alt+Shift+F12 to disable compositing and enable it again and everything works fine. We still do not know what caused the problem, but it seems to be related to enabling direct rendering by default. Unfortunately I am unable to reproduce this problem on the only Intel based hardware I have access to. The only solution so far is to disable direct rendering in general again, but this would be a regression for all users where it is working fine (see above: it cannot be reproduced on each Intel hardware).

So we are in a situation where each of the possible ways to go, is wrong. And it is all caused by the drivers claiming support for functionality they do not support. If they would not do that, we would not have those problems. It is a rather disappointing situation. I can only repeat what is listed in the release note: use the latest drivers.

I hope this brings some light on the problems and shows that we did everything that is possible to work around the driver bugs. The issues have to be fixed in the drivers!

=-=-=-=-=
Powered by Blogilo

September 02, 2010 03:49 PM

Planet Ubuntu

Mackenzie Morgan: Sharing a shell and monitoring the other party

Recently, I had a reason to allow someone else to use a shell on a machine for which I'm the admin, but I wanted a way to track what they're doing. You might think the history command is just fine for this, but it's possible to clear the history, and I wouldn't want that. Screen to the rescue!

I ssh'd into the machine and created a new user for my visitor. Then I switched to that user. Once logged in, I ran screen -L, which logs the shell (both input and output) to ~user/screelog.0). Then I called up the user, gave them the IP address, username, and password. They logged in, and I told them to run screen -ls to see a list of open screen sessions. The output looks like this:

There is a screen on:
 2119.pts-0.marlyn (09/01/2010 06:32:03 PM) (Attached)
1 Socket in /var/run/screen/S-maco.

The next step was for them to type screen -x 2119.pts-0.marlyn Once they did this, we could each see what the other saw in our SSH session, and it was all logged. Great! I could keep track of what they were doing as they were doing it and review the logs later for a double check.

It's not a VCS though. If you know what directory they'll be operating in, you might want to run bzr init ; bzr add ; bzr commit -m "starting point" first, so you can later run bzr diff | less to see what files changed and keep a record of what changed, since while it might all seem perfectly logical while it's happening, recalling the exact changes won't be easy. The point of watching can be to catch them in the act if they try to do something that violates your security policy or to be given a demonstration.

EDIT: After a question in comments about how you keep them from opening another non-screen'd connection, my friend Peter suggested adding screen -xR to the user's ~/.bash_profile, so it forcibly connects to the screen session. Thanks, Peter!

From http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com

September 02, 2010 03:45 PM

Matthew Helmke: The Manga Guide to Molecular Biology

It has been a while since I have reviewed a manga book. This is one of several atypical educational books that use graphic art to help teach difficult concepts or illustrate the action. This is another wonderful entry in the “Manga Guide to…” series that I have been reviewing.

The Manga Guide to Molecular Biology follows the actions of a two students who failed their molecular biology class and have to take a special summer course. The story line is enjoyable and eases the reader’s entry into the topic rather than being a distraction.

The book covers all the main questions and topics you would expect: what is a cell, what are the common parts of a cell, how do cells combine to make various organisms, what are proteins and how do they function within a cell, what is DNA and what are genes and how do they work to express the information coded in them? My favorite part was chapter 5 which focuses on potential applications for everything discussed earlier and theorizes what the future may hold in the field.

I work in a software project that is helping biologists do research, including helping process the vast amounts of data that comes from genetic sequencing. As a result, I have become familiar with most of the content this book presents. I believe the book is accurate and it is clear. The story created to assist with that presentation is enjoyable as well. I have a seven year old daughter that is reading the book with great interest. Some of the science is above her grade level, but her attention remains fixed on the art and the story and she is absorbing some of it as she reads.

Overall, I would say the book is a success and recommend it without reservation.

Disclosure: I was given my copy of this book by the publisher as a review copy.

Share and Enjoy: StumbleUpon Facebook Twitter Google Bookmarks email

September 02, 2010 03:40 PM

Laura Czajkowski: The motivational drivers and barriers of volunteers in open source communities Part 2

I blogged a while back about Barry doing his Masters Thesis on The motivational drivers and barriers of volunteers in open source communities which looked at the Ubuntu Community, he handed it in yesterday and I know some folks were curious about results so I asked him to write a small piece for the blog:

Barry Smyth:
In early 2010 I sat in on a seminar on Open Source Software and the community in Ireland, organised as part of my masters course in DIT Kevin St. One of the speakers was Laura Czajkowski. It was during her
talk that I saw the commitment she had to the community and it begins a process of thought about what drives individuals to offer their time and effort to Open Source Communities.

The course that I was studying was Computing but specialising in Knowledge Management (KM). Knowledge Management is the realisation that knowledge is an organisations greatest asset. We constantly hear
the term Knowledge and Smart economy being touted by the Irish government at the moment. They like so many large organisations realise that it is what we know and don’t realise we already know can
be our greatest resource.

Within companies it is commonplace for individuals to hoard knowledge, we do this for various reasons.

KM is about accessing the knowledge within people, teams, departments, organisations, then storing that knowledge in an understandable or codified fashion, and finally making that knowledge available and
easily accessible to others. Some prime examples of where KM can work effectively is in the Pharmaceutical industry, where the process of getting new drugs to market can be as long as 12 years. Most of the large pharmaceutical companies have implemented large KM projects. One in particular cut the time for filling applications to the European and American drug boards in half. The KM systems they installed held the knowledge of previous employees and former workers of the American Federal drug  Administration (FDA). Due to their expertise as to what information was required in an application, these applications could be filled out much faster. As you can imagine the saving of several years in getting a drug to market is worth a considerable amount of money to drug companies. This is can be the power of KM.

However what many organisations find when they implement KM initiatives, regardless of the money, time and expertise that they throw at it, is people seem unwilling to share their Knowledge. There are drivers that motivate and barriers that prevent people from sharing their knowledge.

Within Open Source communities, we have a group of people who come together to freely share knowledge. This makes it an ideal place to investigate positive motivations. If KM initiatives could replicate
the motivations within Open Source Communities then their initiatives could prove far more successful.

Back to my story, I began to realise that the Ubuntu community could offer me a perfect environment to investigate motivations to knowledge sharing. In May I contacted Laura and told her about my Idea. Within days we
were sitting down together in a lab in DIT and Laura was showing me around the Ubuntu community. Over the course of the next 3 months with Laura and several other members of Ubuntu’s community I had fashioned
a suitable experiment. The experiment would utilise the existing social networking pages (Launchpad) within the community and over a period of Two weeks would email an advertisement of one of those profiles to the mailing list of the Irish team. I would then survey the Irish team to ascertain the usefulness of the experiment. The idea of the experiment was to measure the levels of trust needed for knowledge sharing, and whether tools like Launchpad could assist in people getting curious about others in the community. This is the starting point of building relationships and trust. The experiment received great support from the community and I had a fantastic response to the survey. The experiment idea was even taken on board as a continuous feature by the UK and North Carolina teams. The results of the experiment did indeed indicate that, firstly trust
is important to knowledge sharing and secondly tools like launhpad if used in a proactive manner can initiate contact between members of the group.

Overall my experience dealing with Laura and the rest of the Ubuntu community was extremely pleasant. I could not of asked for any more help or enthusiasm. It was a privilege to get an insight into a remarkable community.

This is an extract of some of the projects findings:

Thanks to Barry for the update, if anyone wants to drop him a line here is his email address.

September 02, 2010 03:27 PM

Daniel Holbach: Holidays

Visa, finally got it

Visa, finally got it

Tuesday next week is my last working day and I’ll be gone for three weeks, without laptop. If you have anything really urgent, talk to any members of my team, Michael or Ara, they know how to get in touch with me.

I’m very much looking forward to this one and happy to meet Mehdi of the LoCo team there! :-)

I’ll be back on 29th September.

September 02, 2010 02:50 PM

Planet GNOME

Jordi Mas: gbrainy 1.51 for Linux and Windows

Here we have gbrainy 1.51, a minor bug fixing release. gbrainy is a game that challenges your logic, verbal, calculation and memory abilities.

What is new in version 1.51 from the NEWS file:

* 5 bug fixes
* Updated and new translations

The new translations include Vietnamese, Korean and Traditional Chinese translation (Hong Kong and Taiwan).

gbrainy 1.51 is available for download in source code from:

* http://gent.softcatala.org/jmas/gbrainy/gbrainy-1.51.tar.gz
    (md5sum 09762be168973e6157263ebbc0256a26)

Additionally, gbrainy is available for all major Linux distributions.

Updated Windows version

I have also updated gbrainy for Windows installer to 1.51. I did not this for more than 10 months, I think that I had to do it since the Windows version is downloaded by an average of 100 people per day. I have used Monodevelop 2.4 to build the Windows version and it worked very well making really easy now to build gbrainy cross platform.

September 02, 2010 02:49 PM

Planet Mozilla

Mozilla Labs: Bespin is now Mozilla Skywriter, moves to GitHub

Today, we’re announcing that the Mozilla Labs project codenamed “Bespin” is now called Mozilla Skywriter. It remains a Labs experiment to see how great coding in the browser can be by making a powerful, customizable HTML5 text editor. We’re also announcing a move to GitHub.

We’ve had many compliments and complaints about the “Bespin” codename ever since we first introduced the project. You can’t please everyone, especially when it comes to naming. The Bespin codename, derived from the awesome “cloud city” in The Empire Strikes Back, was a fun name to use for an editor that enables “coding in the cloud”.

Since the initial release in February 2009, the Bespin has come a long way. The project has changed focus and expanded its reach. The “Bespin Embedded” releases have been showing up more and more including several entries in the recent “Node Knockout” competition: Nodify, Inflatable Churn, and Wrath. Other recent development environments on the web have also chosen to use Bespin, including ShiftEdit, jGate and Mozilla’s own Add-On Builder (aka FlightDeck).

As we approach a 1.0 release, it was clear that it was time to shed Bespin’s code name and give it a real, lasting project name. We’re happy to announce that that name is Mozilla Skywriter. I think that Mozilla Skywriter fits the “coding in the cloud” theme very well indeed.

Skywriter is becoming an end-to-end JavaScript-based system. Camilo Aguilar, a new contributor to the project, has been working on porting “dryice”, our build tool, to node.js. Once that’s done, we’ll be creating a XULRunner-based desktop version of Skywriter and a new customizable server version based on node.js. It’s actually pretty amazing how many different uses for our editor we’ll be able to target with a single codebase.

Many people who have worked on Skywriter have expressed a desire to fork it on GitHub. There have been unofficial mirrors and plenty of people installing Mercurial just to use Bespin. In order to make things easier for our community, we’re moving the official repository for Skywriter over to GitHub: http://github.com/mozilla/skywriter.

A note about the repositories: that shiny new repository holds the “all JavaScript” version of Skywriter. As I write this, that repository needs a lot of work (in other words, it’s broken!). All of the “bespin” names have changed to “skywriter” and the build tooling is still in the process of being rebuilt. The existing bespinclient repository remains available for people wanting to work with something that works today. That repository is effectively a branch of the code prior to the start of the JavaScript work. For the most part, we should be able to migrate changes made to that repository over to the new Skywriter repository pretty easily. We’re just changing the tooling to JavaScript, we’re not really changing Bespin’s core plugins at all.

One final note about the Bespin to Skywriter transition: the Bespin name appears in many places and it will take some time to fully migrate over. The Mozilla Skywriter home page will always have up to date links to project resources and is the best place to look if you’re having trouble finding something.

You can follow the Skywriter project (MozSkywriter) on Twitter and ask us questions in #skywriter on irc.mozilla.org.

Finally, a big thanks to Julian Viereck who is off to university in Zürich. Julian has been a huge help to the Skywriter project since the beginning and we wish him good luck in the coming years!

Kevin Dangoor on behalf of the Mozilla Skywriter team

September 02, 2010 02:46 PM

Planet Ubuntu

Belinda Lopez: Ubuntu in Education

Wow – I’ve already been amazed at learning about some of the great things happening with Ubuntu in Education.  At every level, Ubuntu in schools and learning just makes sense.  Yesterday I was pointed to this great map showing school deployments in Finland:  http://bit.ly/amFiOO .   Greece is right behind them and lots of schools in the US are reporting success using Ubuntu as well.  The work is being done by both volunteers and Solution Providers.

The Andalusia deployment of over 200,000 systems is well documented and Amtron deploying 28,000 in Assam in northern India and Oxford Archaeology and Johns Hopikins and Oakland University and the list continues to grow.  Next week I’m visiting a local school in my backyard of Houston, TX that has migrated to Ubuntu using Moodle and other open source SIS (Student Information Systems).  The project lead is also the volunteer coordinator of the Moodle Core Contrib team.   I had to travel out of town to meet him and learn about this great project.  I’m really glad I did!

Next up, the Edubuntu team is still being driven by the unstoppable Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) and everyone is welcome to stop into #edubuntu and join the weekly meetings on Tuesdays to add your voice.

Who am I?  I’m Dinda!   I came into the world of open source and Ubuntu some five years ago b/c of my interests in Education and all things learning.  You might have seen me around various projects but now I’ve taken on the temporary role of looking at everything related to “Ubuntu in Education” and creating some materials to help anyone who wants to use Ubuntu for learning.  Are you a student?  parent?  educator?  Sys Admin or IT staff at a school/University?  Voter?  Decision maker or Service/Solution Provider?  What do you need to make Ubuntu a success in your school?  Email me or add your comments here.


September 02, 2010 02:42 PM

Qt Labs Blogs

Fonts in Lighthouse

The font system in Lighthouse was more or less a straight copy from QWS. From time to time I use the browser example test Lighthouse, but I was pretty annoyed that Lighthouse didn’t pick up the fonts on my system, but used the fonts that was shipped with Qt. Also one thing that has been [...]

September 02, 2010 02:17 PM

StatusNet

An Introduction to StatusNet Video

Today we put a nice Introduction to StatusNet video on the main page of StatusNet. We are always striving to better explain why StatusNet is great for you, your projects and your business, from indy to enterprise. We had the help of StatusHero Robert Martinez (known as @mray) whom created the video and Pete Ippel (@hypermodern) whom made the voiceover. And, because we believe in web standards and working working towards them as with OStatus, we are putting this video out using the html5 video tag. We hope in the future that more browsers will support open web video. If you can't play the video please try downloading the source files, or if you believe the video should play in your browser, please file a report in our issue tracker.

Screenshot of Video
(Screenshot only; you can watch the video on the front page!)

Let us know what you think of the video! It is Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licensed and we hope that more people will create videos to explain StatusNet, how they are using the software and service. If you do, we have created a wiki page for sharing source files and your creations: http://status.net/wiki/Video And, if you create a video that is great, I'll personally send you a nice new StatusNet t-shirt, some stickers and we'll let the world know how you are great!

Trackback URL for this post:

http://status.net/trackback/5183
AttachmentSize
Screenshot-statusnet-video-500x.png123.06 KB

September 02, 2010 02:14 PM

Planet go-oo

IssueZilla: New issues: Thu Sep 2 13:43:01 UTC 2010

#i114273# - Database access: Query wizard: cannot set more than 2 conditions at "3.Serach conditions"
#i114263# - Database access: database changes not discarded after opening a table a second time
#i114266# - framework: I want batch addons
#i114264# - framework: Registration screen options
#i114272# - framework: Remove password minimum length (5) for Master Password
#i114269# - qa: Distribute OOo 3.3.0 - Basque (eu)
#i114271# - qa: [Automation]: Adapt export tests to new dialogs
#i114265# - sw: Export or printing selection of tail part of numbered list shifts numeration
#i114270# - sw: Incorrect RTF export when using multiple footers
#i114267# - sw: code clean-up: remove SwPreviewPrintOptionsDialog
#i114268# - sw: common form document are very slow to load

September 02, 2010 01:43 PM

Planet Ubuntu

Stephan Hermann: Just in case you are a HP BL4* G6/7 user

and you have an HP NC 511i Emulex Dual Port 10GB Ethernet/ISCSI/FoE Adapter on board,
it works with Ubuntu Lucid and Maverick (Daily from Yesterday).

The only bug, which is now known as LP bug #628776, is that in the installer kernel module udeb packages the be2{net,scsi} modules are missing.

When you continue the installation without network Ubuntu Lucid/Maverick comes up and detects this card and loads the kernel modules.

September 02, 2010 01:38 PM

Planet PHP

My interview at dot KDE - Henri Bergius

Jos Poortvliet did an interview with me for dot KDE in this summer's aKademy and it has been online for a while now. In it we discuss things like Midgard as a storage engine for desktop applications, and Maemo's open QA process for Downloads applications. Some excepts:

At maemo.org we have an appstore for FOSS applications on the Maemo platform. This appstore is enabled by default on all Nokia N900s so we wanted to have some quality control. We had to create our own appstore approval process, compatible with the FOSS philosophy. Now any developer can submit an app, and anyone can test and vote. The whole process is completely transparent, auditable and visible. And it also provides a feedback channel from testers and users to the developers!

...

Midgard is a data storage service. Whether you write desktop or web applications, instead of coming up with your own file format, you just use Midgard. You can work more easily and object-based. Users have many different devices these days, so Midgard has strong replication features to synchronize between different systems. Midgard is built on top of GObject; we provide bindings to a bunch of different languages so developers can choose the tools they like - PHP, Python, Javascript. Currently (as in now, while we're talking) Qt bindings are being developed here at Akademy.

Read the whole interview.

September 02, 2010 01:31 PM

Planet RDF

Is Twitters plan to log all clicks a privacy loss?

Twitter’s planned shortening of all links via its t.co service is about to happen. The initial motivation was security, according to Twitter:

“Twitter’s link service at http://t.co is used to better protect users from malicious sites that engage in spreading malware, phishing attacks, and other harmful activity. A link converted by Twitter’s link service is checked against a list of potentially dangerous sites. When there’s a match, users can be warned before they continue.”

Declan McCullagh reports that Twitter announced in an email message that when someone click “on these links from Twitter.com or a Twitter application, Twitter will log that click.” Such information is extremely valuable. Give Twitter’s tens of millions of active users, just knowing how often certain URLs are clicked by people indicates what entities and topics are of interest at the moment.

“Our link service will also be used to measure information like how many times a link has been clicked. Eventually, this information will become an important quality signal for our Resonance algorithm—the way we determine if a Tweet is relevant and interesting.”

Associating the clicks with a user, IP address, location or device can yield even more information — like what you are interested in right now. Moreover, Twitter now has a way to associate arbitrary annotation metadata with each tweet. Analyzing all of this data can identify, for example, communities of users with common interests and the influential members within them.

Note that Twitter has not said it will do this or even that it will record and keep any user-identifiable information along with the clicks. They might just log the aggregate number of clicks in a window of time. But going the next step and capturing the additional information would be, in my mind, irresistible, even if there was no immediate plan to use it.

Search engines like Google already link clicks to users and IP addresses and use the information to improve their ranking algorithms and probably in many other ways. But what is troubling is the seemingly inexorable erosion of our online privacy. There will be no way to opt out of having your link wrapped by the t.co service and no announced way to opt out of having your clicks logged.

September 02, 2010 01:12 PM

Planet openSUSE

openSUSE News: openSUSE Announce First 11.4 Development Milestone With Improved Package Management Performance, New XOrg, KDE and GNOME



Broken-up chocolate bars symbolising parallel download of packages

Metalink multichannel download, so package candy melts your screen, not your internet connection.

openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 1 is available today, Thursday, September 2 for developers, testers and community members to test and participate in the development of openSUSE 11.4. M1 starts off openSUSE 11.4 development at a cracking pace with performance improvements in the package management network layer and version updates to major components.

This milestone contains libzypp version 8.1, which has a new backend for http and ftp package downloads. MultiCurl replaces the old MediaAria backend, and brings support for zsync transfers and better Metalink download support. These will improve both repository refresh and package install and update performance. Metalink allows the multi-channel download of packages by downloading the individual blocks of a package in parallel from multiple servers. ZSync reduces the amount of data to download by only fetching the changed parts of a file instead of the whole file. This speeds up repository refreshes, since due to the way the repository data is structured, it is easy to locate the parts of the metadata that changed since the last update. The new Curl-based zypp backend also gives libzypp and therefore zypper and YaST better support for network proxies, by using the same proxy configuration as the rest of YaST instead of its own, and adds support for HTTP BASIC password-protected repositories. And as an added bonus, MultiCurl should eliminate slow and hanging package installations that occurred due to bugs in the old MediaAria backend.

Broken up chocolate bars symbolising partial download of repo metadata

Zsync efficiently downloads only the changed metadata. Sweet!

Other major components that have received updates from upstream projects for Milestone 1 include XOrg 1.9, KDE 4.5 and GNOME 2.32.0 Beta 1. Automated testing and brave openSUSE Factory testers have been validating early builds to make sure that Milestone 1 is suitable for others to test, so please download Milestone 1 and report bugs – the earlier a bug is reported in the development cycle, the more likely it is that it will be fixed on release day, March 10, 2011.

The next milestone is scheduled for September 30.

September 02, 2010 01:08 PM

Planet Ubuntu

Canonical Design Team: Why do you use Ubuntu?

We’ve been looking at making developments to the Ubuntu website that explore and highlight the reasons for using Ubuntu above and beyond the features of the products. One idea we had was to invite community members and Ubuntu users to tweet or post about why they use Ubuntu and display this on the site. The community’s voice on the website would demonstrate one of the key drivers for using Ubuntu: showing the strength and commitment of the community, not just telling visitors about it.  Adding the voice and personality of the community to the websites will enable members and users to participate in our site’s messaging and to share their passion for the concept and principles on which Ubuntu is based.

We decided to run a test yesterday to see how you responded and whether there was interest. There are some great replies. Our favourite so far:

#iuseubuntubecause every update is like xmas

More can be found on Twitter:  #iuseubuntubecause and identi.ca: #iuseubuntubecause

Please post your own and raise awareness so we can get a broader response.

Have you got any other ideas for how we can bring this to the fore on our websites?

September 02, 2010 01:02 PM

Planet Smalltalk

Is it time to look for alternatives to Visual Smalltalk Enterprise?

Over on the ESUG mailing list, somebody complains  about “Cincom killing VSE”, a Smalltalk IDE called Visual Smalltalk Enterprise that has been officially discontinued for a very long time now. The original poster makes it very clear that he is … Continue reading

September 02, 2010 12:43 PM

Qt Labs Blogs

Qt SDK packages for Qt 4.7.0 Release Candidate available

For those who prefer to test and use a complete package, we added Qt SDK packages that contain the Qt 4.7.0 Release Candidate and Qt Creator 2.0.1. You can download the SDK packages here.

September 02, 2010 12:41 PM

Google Open Source Blog

Eclipse Day at the Googleplex 2010

Here at Google, we have engineers using Eclipse every day to build our external and internal products, as well as engineers building and releasing Eclipse tools. Earlier this year, we announced Eclipse Labs, which is “a single place where anyone can start and maintain their open source projects based on the Eclipse platform with just a few clicks.” Since we use Eclipse so much here at Google, hosting Eclipse Day at the Googleplex is one way of giving back to the community and providing an environment for Eclipse contributors and users to network and share ideas. We hosted Eclipse Day before in 2009 and 2008, and last week we hosted our third year where we tried out some new ideas: a brief lunchtime unconference and post-conference Ignite talks.

Ian Skerrett of the Eclipse Foundation wrote on his blog,

Wrap-up of Eclipse Day at the Googleplex

...Over 150 people attended the day long event that included 12 sessions related to Eclipse and Google technology. The presentations are now available online. There was lots of great information presented, like upcoming improvements to the Android SDK (based on Eclipse), Git support in Eclipse, a review of the Instantiations tools that Google just purchased and an introduction to the new Tools for Mobile Web project.
Most important, all of us at Google would like to thank Ian Skerrett and everyone at the Eclipse Foundation for assembling three of these great events. We were happy to welcome the Eclipse community to our campus, and we are happy to continue to support Eclipse. Don’t forget that we’re always looking to make this conference better, so give us your ideas! Tell us what you would like to see at future events in the comments, or if you were able to attend, tell us what you thought about this year’s program.

By Robert Konigsberg, Software Build Tools Team

September 02, 2010 01:31 PM

Planet Smalltalk

S4A - Scratch for Arduino

Jordi Delgado announced Scratch For Arduino (S4A) - a modification of the well known Scratch software (which is written in Squeak Smalltalk) that supports simple programming of the Arduino open source hardware platform.

Nice.

September 02, 2010 12:28 PM

Planet Debian

Evgeni Golov: Using plugins.svn.wordpress.org with Git

So I got SVN access to plugins.svn.wordpress.org, but I hate SVN. Let’s just use Git instead of SVN, especially when I already have my plugin as Git on github.com :)

git svn clone -s -r283636 https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/statusnet-widget/
git remote add -f github git://github.com/evgeni/wp-statusnet-widget.git
git merge github/master
git svn dcommit

(note the -r283636 – it’s very important, if you ommit it, git svn will fetch 280k revisions which takes ages, if you put it to something AFTER your repo was created, the log will be b0rked)
Done! Now you can work as usual, push to github and commit to svn via dcommit :)

PS: Dear WordPress.org Team, you have working SSL, why do you still have http-links in your mails?

September 02, 2010 12:18 PM

Evgeni Golov: The joy and pain of WordPress

As you may not have noticed, I migrated my site to WordPress some time ago as I did not want to maintain the old piece of crap I wrote myself when I was “young” ;)
Today I want to tell you a story of the development of a plugin for WordPress.

As the title says, it’s much about joy and pain and I think I should start with the pain :)

WordPress is written in PHP, so are the plugins for it. And PHP is REAL pain (but there is no decent blogging software for Django or Zope that would fit all my needs). It is especially pain when you work with Python every day. What the heck are those curly braces and dollar signs and “$this->”? That’s just not the way Guido indented it ;)
Additionally my last contacts with PHP were some time back in 2008 when I hacked on SysCP, which today result in commits like this:

-        if (is_int($new_instance['max_items'])) $instance['max_items'] = $new_instance['max_items'];
+        if (ctype_digit($new_instance['max_items'])) $instance['max_items'] = $new_instance['max_items'];

But I have to admit that the WordPress API is pretty good. Not very well documented (the wiki pages at codex.wordpress.org are sometimes outdated), so you have to read the source and google a bit, but when you found the needed sources, it’s pretty straight forward.
My plan was to write a simple widget, displaying my Twitter and identi.ca timelines. Yes, both together, not one widget per service. The reason for this is the fact that I mostly post via identi.ca and the messages get synced over to Twitter and only the local replies and retweets/redents differ.
The basic WordPress widget would look like this (source: http://codex.wordpress.org/Widget_API#Developing_Widgets_on_2.8.2B):

class My_Widget extends WP_Widget {
	function My_Widget() {
		// widget actual processes
	}

	function form($instance) {
		// outputs the options form on admin
	}

	function update($new_instance, $old_instance) {
		// processes widget options to be saved
	}

	function widget($args, $instance) {
		// outputs the content of the widget
	}

}
register_widget('My_Widget');

One only has to modify the widget() function and here you go.

From some other Twitter plugin I knew that I only had to include rss.php and call fetch_rss(url) for every feed URL to get the timelines as an array via MagPie. But when looking at rss.php, you notice the deprecation message in the header, saying one should use SimplePie now. Some google later I knew that I had to include feed.php and call fetch_feed(url) to get a SimplePie object representing the feed contents. But SimplePie is even cooler: I can call fetch_feed(array(url1, url2)) and get a merged feed, containing both.
Now I added a duplicate filter to elliminate the messages posted to both, twitter AND identi.ca and my widget was ready.

You can find the result on http://github.com/evgeni/wp-statusnet-widget and soon on http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/statusnet-widget/ :)

September 02, 2010 12:14 PM

Planet openSUSE

OMG!SUSE! team: Inkscape updates abound!

This is a cross-post from our sister site: OMG! Ubuntu!

Scalable Vector Graphic fans of the world rejoice – Open Source’s premier vector drawing application Inkscape has been bumped up to 0.48, adding lots of fixes and features for artists to get excited about in the process.

New & improved

The text tool in particular has received lots of attention and now has support for:

The new multi-mode spray tool allows users to quickly [create] effects that previously would take much longer to achieve.

Other changes include a handful of new extensions, improved exporting & select UI changes. More information can be found in the release notes.

Install Inkscape for openSUSE 11.3

September 02, 2010 12:00 PM

Planet Ubuntu

Dougie Richardson: Install web applications locally on Ubuntu

I was talking with someone yesterday who is hacking a WordPress theme together. If you work with web sites, being able to run a site locally allows testing, experimentation, developing new themes and even just checking that a software update isn’t going to break your site. You might want to keep a web application on a local network and away from the Internet – such as StatusNet, a Wiki or a project management application. All we need is to install a LAMP stack – Linux Apache MySQL and PHP. We’ve already got the “L”!

Synaptic (System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager) lets you install common groups of packages (Edit->Mark packages by task…) in this case a LAMP server. You can do the same from a command line using “sudo tasksel install lamp“. Once the components are installed, you’ll be asked for a root password – this is used by MySQL and is not the system’s root password.

The default web root is /var/www – if you check it now there is an index.html. Open a browser and enter the system’s address (usually http://localhost/), you’ll be greeted with the contents of that file so we know the system is working. So how do we get our own files up?

Apache uses virtual hosts – we can have multiple sites on the same server. Each site is defined by a configuration file in /etc/apache2/sites-available. If you look there now, you’ll see the default site, we can use this as a template for a new site:

sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/wordpress
gksu gedit /etc/apache2/sites-available/wordpress

You need to change DocumentRoot and Directory to point to the folder your site is going to be in. So lets say you want to use a folder called “wordpress” in your home folder, change “DocumentRoot /var/www” to “DocumentRoot /home/USERNAME/wordpress” and “<Directory /var/www/>” to “<Directory /home/USERNAME/wordpress/>“. We can also give an alias, so we access individual sites by name, to do this add the following “ServerAlias wordpress“.

You can then add “wordpress” to /etc/hosts (change the line that reads 127.0.0.1 localhost to 127.0.0.1 localhost wordpress) and use the address “http://wordpress” to access your site.

Ubuntu has a utility to add the site to Apache which will also need restarted:

a2ensite wordpress; sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

If you’re only going to be using one site it would be easier to use the default site (which is already configured). Ubuntu adds the first user to the www-data group, so you can either change the ownership of /var/www or add a sub-folder with either the user’s ownership or membership of www-data (note you’ll need to change the group permission too). I’m adding a folder I own:

sudo mkdir /var/www/dougie;
sudo chown dougie:dougie /var/www/dougie

This can be accessed by http://localhost/dougie. I’ve seen a few forum posts saying that people have issues with folder permissions and there are some misconceptions. I’ve even seen it suggested to edit everything with “sudo nautilus”!

Now with the letter “A” out of the way we can deal with the “M”. Most web applications need at least one database. Remember that MySQL password?

mysql -u root -p

A good example is installing WordPress. Download and extract the contents to your web folder (in my case /var/www/dougie). Create a new database called “wordpress“, with a user called “wordpress” and a password of “wordpress” by entering each command at the prompt:

create database wordpress;
grant usage on wordpress.* to wordpress@localhost identified by 'wordpress';
grant all privileges on wordpress.* to wordpress@localhost;

Type “\q” to exit then open a browser and go to your site, for me that’s http://localhost/dougie.

So lastly we get on to the “P” – PHP. Apache will recognise and run PHP, however be aware of a caveat I’ve noticed in Ubuntu. If you try to use your system hostname instead of localhost in Firefox, it will try to download rather than run PHP files. I believe this is due to the system hostname resolving to 127.0.1.1, a solution to Debian bug #316099.

PHP applications often have their own installation scripts, which WordPress does. Enter the database details we just created on the WordPress install screen:

Once the rest of the screens are complete, you’ll have WordPress installed.

So to recap, all we need to do to add an application is create a virtual host so Apache can serve it up; create a database for it to store data; and configure the application – often via a browser interface. Now you can hack away at those WordPress themes to your heart’s content.

More information is available from the Ubuntu Server Guide.

Related posts:

  1. Blogging platforms Has anyone else noticed a large amount of ping backs...
  2. What do you identify as? I’ve been looking at my site stats and it seems...
  3. Samsung NC10 – a pleasant Ubuntu experience It’s another year and I’m deploying next week. One of...

September 02, 2010 11:46 AM

Planet JDK

Dalibor Topić: Fedora gets a Java SIG

Stanislav Ochotnicky from Red Hat started a discussion last month on the developer mailing list of the Fedora GNU/Linux distribution to create a SIG for people who are interested in improving the state of Java in Fedora. The discussion seems to be finished now, with the Java SIG page established on the Fedora Project wiki, and the first IRC meeting coming up next week. ...

September 02, 2010 11:45 AM

Planet Smalltalk

Scratch For Arduino (S4A)

S4A is a Scratch modification that supports simple programming of the Arduino open source hardware platform. It provides new blocks for managing sensors and actuators connected to Arduino. There is also a sensor report board similar to the PicoBoard.

S4A is compatible with Scratch, thus you can work with Scratch projects and PicoBoard. With the Scratch translation feature, you´ll find it in english, spanish and catalan

It works with Arduino Duemilanove and Diecimila versions, maybe it works with others but we haven´t tested them yet. You can also manage a wireless board if you add a RF module such as Xbee. An important feature is that you can make an interactive project involving as many boards as USB ports you have

S4A interacts with Arduino sending actuators state and receiving sensors state. This information exchange is done every 75 ms using the PicoBoard protocol. To make it possible, there has to be a specific program (called firmware) in the board. You´ll find instructions to upload it through the Arduino environment

Arduino objects offer blocks for the basic microcontroller functionalities, analog and digital writes and reads, and also for higher level ones. You can find a block to choose direction on Parallax continuous rotation servomotors and blocks to stop and start all the actuators.

Creating Arduino objects is available in 3 different ways as in the Scratch environment. You´ll have to choose between creating a new connection or using an already created one (if any). This allows the programmer to work in an object oriented programming paradigm making Arduino virtual objects work collaboratively using the same connection (the physical object).

The connection between the virtual and the physical objects will be established automatically. For the default Arduino object, you must use the right button menu of the sensor board to begin the connection process.

See help menu for more details.

S4A has been developed by Marina conde, Victor Casado, Joan Güell, Jose García and Jordi Delgado with the help of the Smalltalk programming group of Citilab (Barcelona). Please reports bugs and suggestions to Marina Conde Ramos (scratch@citilab.eu). We will thank block translations.

In the project web page you will find videos and we will soon upload the documentation and project examples that will be available from the file menu in future versions.

September 02, 2010 11:42 AM

Planet Maemo

Developing the MeeGo community

A great deal of useful conversation during Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit 2010 (LFCS2010) earlier this year revolved around what a MeeGo community should look like.  There are of course numerous aspects to this but for now I want to focus on three only: what sort of constituency would best benefit MeeGo, how could the website structure reflect, support and encourage that constituency, and what might this mean for maemo.org.

It might be helpful for the reader to browse through threads under Community Matters at the MeeGo discussion forum, as I will be referring to points raised there.  However, that won’t be necessary for a high-level perspective.  Regardless, a community is actually taking shape so I think it’s time to discuss a few subjects. 

For members only

There’s been some debate amongst maemo.org and MeeGo community members over what actually constitutes a community in general, and more specifically, how a community arising around Maemo/MeeGo endeavors should look.  Opinions range from “every one creating an account is automatically a member” to “only those actively contributing quantifiable work are members”.

I lean toward the latter (with the caveat that not all useful contributions are easily quantifiable).  As an analogy, we can compare a physical neighborhood comprised of home buyers and renters.  Buyers tend to take a high interest in improving the home’s value; renters tend to only reside in any given one a short while and it typically makes no sense for them to invest in that.  (note: this is neither an endorsement nor indictment of either).

Planning and zoning

Quim Gil conducted a very good interactive presentation at LFCS2010 that described the roles, functions and general structure of the emerging MeeGo community.  I tacked onto that recently by drawing up my own interpretation, and then refining that based on community input.  The latest rendition is below:

MeeGo Community Model proposal, version 2

This was met with a mixed reception and the conversation around it quickly died.  The main hangup was over member groups, a feature of the vbulletin forum software.  Some see value in letting community members strive for and adopt titles that suit their interests.  Others see that as unnecessary or even divisive.  At the very least, the MeeGo Greeters program has found acceptance and I will push for a forum group supporting that activity at the very least.

MeeGo Greeters

At maemo.org we tried a little experiment to see if adding resource links to forum posters’ signatures could help newcomers.  We didn’t quantify the effectiveness of the effort, but participation was enthusiastic and feedback highly positive.

We just recently introducd the idea into MeeGo, where it has also been quickly welcomed.  The MeeGo community is much younger than maemo.org was when we created the concept, but I think that works in our favor now.  MeeGo Greeters will be seen as a natural part of the social structure and we can easily, organically grow the effort as the community grows.

Potential hazards

A highly popular presentation at LFCS2010 was the keynote by Josh Berkus: How to Prevent Community: Making Sure Your Pond Stays Small.  Josh outlined with gently sarcastic humor the sort of mistakes that poison and even kill communities, especially those built around open source endeavors.

The 2600Hz blog riffs on Josh’s theme with an article specific to MeeGo.  I’ll leave it to the reader to judge the validity of the analysis there.

A place for maemo.org

The question of course remains, what is the future of maemo.org?  Unfortunately that’s answered by a great big “it depends”.  It’s too early to close any doors completely, but at the same time, MeeGo has been named as the future so it would only be natural for Maemo to experience a slow fade.

At the same time, though, work continues on a community distribution of Maemo 4 (Diablo) which will ensure that at least the lives of N800s and N810s can be extended.  Harmattan could do the same for N900s (although at this point I question its actual usefullness).  But ultimately, those devices will wear out and their replacements will be designed around MeeGo.  At some point, and it’s difficult to determine when, the Maemo community will shrink to a size too small for Nokia to justify supporting with infrastructure and personnel.  At that time the remaining community will have to find some way to sustain itself or, like so many predecessors, accept a slow fade into the sunset.

Going forward

I’ll conclude on an optimistic note.  There’s been a great deal of buzz around MeeGo’s first international conference to be held November 15 through 18 this year.  The big event will of course be measured against previous examples, especially the energetic Maemo Summit 2009 held in Amsterdam, but it will certainly have its unique aspects that can’t be compared.  The tone will be set by the key sponsors and develop around the accepted talks and myriad attendees.  I’m confident that both Nokia and Intel are going to kick this off in a big way, and can’t wait to see how that manifests.

LFCS2010 introduced the MeeGo community.   The outcome of MeeGo Conference 2010 (MC2010), along with member contributions of course, will go a long way toward shaping it.


Filed under: Great Governance, Mentioning Maemo, Mentioning MeeGo, The Write Stuff, Views and Reviews Tagged: 2010, community, conference, governance, Greeters, Intel, LFCS, LinkedIn, Linux Foundation, Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, Maemo, maemo.org, MeeGo, membership, Nokia, structure 2 Add to favourites1 Bury

September 02, 2010 11:30 AM

Planet Ubuntu

Paolo Sammicheli: LoCo Testing Team HowTo

I finally completed the wiki page about the Italian experience in ISO Testing:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/LoCoTeam

I would really love if other LoCos would like to start ISO TESTING contributing in making Ubuntu everyday better.  I also ask you to continue improving that page sharing your experiences as well.

Ciao!


September 02, 2010 11:28 AM

Planet GNOME

Youness Alaoui: Update on PSJailbreak linux kernel (for N900 devices)

Hi all,

For all those who kept bugging me on IRC about “what’s your status” and “when will you release it”, etc.. I’d like to give you a quick status update on my project :

First, this is NOT and I repeat, it’s NOT a port of PSGroove for the N900.. I started my project long before PSGroove was released, and my code has absolutely nothing to do with theirs and we don’t share any code in common. It is NOT a port, it’s a different implementation of the same exploit!
Secondly, it’s going pretty well so far, I finished writing it, all the code is there, and I’m testing it but I’m still getting some issues, for some reason the PS3 isn’t accepting the JIG, I hope I can get this fixed soon, so please, everyone just be patient, I will release it when it’s ready! But the good news is that it’s doable apparently!

For those who read my previous post, here’s an update :

- The kernel OOPS I was getting on linux was because my ‘hub’ was a high speed one, and when a device gets connected, the reply to GetPortStatus ommitted the ‘high speed’ flag in the response.. apparently, a high speed hub can only have high speed devices plugged into it, you can’t plug full speed or low speed devices in a hub, otherwise, your linux kernel crashes! It’s a use case the kernel developers didn’t think of (or didn’t find a way to test it). I will also soon release the code to reproduce that oops so people can look into it.

- I was able to get and set the address on the controller, but I had to add two new functions to the usb-gadget API. This means that you will eventually need to flash your device’s kernel to get advantage of the new functions.

- I figured out how to send a NAK in response to a IN interrupt.. you simply don’t queue anything, the controller apparently takes care of that automatically for you! and I had to read almost all of the controller’s code to figure that one out!

By writing this exploit as a standard linux driver, this means that my module can be used on any other linux-enabled devices.. this means not only the N900, but also the 770, N800, N810, Android phones and future Meego devices. It might need a little porting for some devices though, but it should still work…

That’s it, I’ll keep you informed on how it goes. Hopefully, we’ll soon be able to run homebrew on our PS3 simply by plugging our N900 to it, what a wonderful device it is :)

KaKaRoTo

September 02, 2010 11:27 AM

Nicolas Dufresne: Mail Notification in Meego

With Meego for Notebooks 1.0 users of Google and MSN can now monitor and open their online e-mails account with a single mouse click in the MyZone panel. Thanks to Intel for hiring Collabora to implement this feature. The GUI shows the number of unread messages for each of your accounts in real-time. Clicking the button will open the online mailbox in your favourite browser. Have a look at the bottom left of the following screen:

Meego for Notebook 1.0 presenting Google Mail Notification

The feature is as been made possible by Telepathy draft API for mail notification. Meego provides the premiere integration of this API in a user interface. It fills a long standing gap in the Telepathy framework.

September 02, 2010 11:23 AM

Nicolas Dufresne: GLib 2.26 will gain proxy support

GLib 2.26, coming on September 10th, will finally gain proxy support. This contribution to GLib was made possible by Collabora Ltd. and reviewing efforts by Dan Winship. After three months of head scratching and rewriting, we finally came-up with a solution that blends into the GIO architecture and requires no code change for users of the GIO library.

Notable features are:

September 02, 2010 11:23 AM

Planet Debian

Wouter Verhelst: Frans Pop

I'm shocked to learn that Frans has died.

Even more shocked to learn that, due to me sitting with my head in the sand, I almost missed it.

You'll be missed, Frans. I didn't always agree with you or your methods, but I deeply respected you for who you were, what you did, and what you were willing to do.

May you rest in peace.

September 02, 2010 11:17 AM

Free Software Magazine

The Bizarre Cathedral - 80

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.

read more

September 02, 2010 11:00 AM

Planet JDK

Dalibor Topić: JVM Language Summit 2010 Recordings On Oracle Media Network

The recordings of the majority of the sessions from the JVM Language Summit 2010 have been uploaded to the Oracle Media Network. Paul Leahy has compiled a list of session recordings and their corresponding abstracts. Slide decks for most of the sessions are available on the JVM Language Summit wiki.

September 02, 2010 10:25 AM

Planet Open Clip Art Library

Nicu Buculei: My love story with Caroline

Caroline is one persona created to illustrate the various categories of Fedora users and she stands for the "Casual User", paraphrasing, she tries to spend as little as possible time on front of the computer but may be involved in some other communities.

Frankly, I used to root for Caroline and want to see her targeted more by our distro, but after seeing the changes in our distro made in the name of catering to her needs... I got to care very little (none?) about her and I am not far from hating her. Why? because those changes are making my life harder and my computer use less pleasant (I acknowledge is not always Caroline's fault, she's sometime used as a strawman to push some agendas).

We look desperate trying to "steal" the Ubuntu audience and forget what made Fedora Fedora and doing it poorly. As I see it, the key to the success on the desktop is: features, features, features, polish, polish, polish. Look at the features we advertise for F14 and, please, show me at least one desktop user that get excited by one of them. Of courde we are not perceived as a desktop distro and losing. Badly.

September 02, 2010 10:19 AM

Planet XML

Galaxy Tab

So, there’s a new kind of Android device in the world. The world still isn’t sure just where it is that tablets are the right tool for the job. That granted, this is a nifty product. And I’m developing my own theory of what tablets are for.

My impressions are based on a couple hours playing with one, which at this point is a couple hours more than almost anyone else. The model I played was not quite production — among other things, the product name stenciled on the back wasn’t “Galaxy Tab” — but close.

I won’t have one on next week’s trip to Mainz for MobileTech, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to take one along to GDD Tokyo and JAOO in Aarhus, Denmark.

Other coverage: At the Financial Times’ ft.com/techbog, also Android Central (with a useful iPad comparo), also Engadget.

Impressions

All the apps I tried ran just fine, including a couple of immersive games that really benefited from the extra inches. I’ve heard of a few apps that misbehave, but their problems were obvious & easy to fix; watch for details over on the Android Dev Blog, starting later today.

Samsung has sprinkled some sugar on the out-of-the-box Google UI elements, and while the community’s opinions on hardware companies’ efforts to improve Android software have been, um, mixed (my own is extremely mixed), I have to say that the Samsungers have shown restraint, putting the extra real estate to good use in good places, for example the notifications pull-down. There may be some of that integrated-social-everything that frankly gets up my nose, but my nose remained clear around the Tab, so if it’s there it‘s at least easy to ignore.

It’s snappy, especially on games where that matters; maybe there are places where servicing the extra bits in the 1024x600 screen will hurt, but I didn’t run across them.

It’s got a phone but (at least on the pre-release model I used) you can’t hold it up to your head, which is a good thing as that would look supremely dorky.

Did I mention that the screen is beautiful? Also it feels really good in the hand and looks pretty nice, and is obviously in the first microsecond’s glance not an iPad.

What Are Tablets For?

The trade-off is obvious. You win because you can show a bigger picture, which is important, and you lose because it just won’t fit in many pockets, which is important. It’ll go in most purses, though.

I know what I’ll use the Galaxy Tab for: to show off Android. The big screen just makes everything easier to see and point at, and graphics look outstanding, and it passes from hand to hand easily. Showing off Android is part of my job and this will help me do my job better.

Which leads to a general theory, reinforced by informal observation of hipsters with iPads in coffee shops: a tablet is, crucially, a more shareable computer. A laptop, with its fragile hinge-ware and space-gobbling keyboard, is just not comfy to share. A tablet is easier to bring to the café, easier to hand across the table or along the sofa, easier to seize in the heat of the moment, easier to hold up in triumph, easier to set aside when you need to meet someone’s eyes.

How big a market is that? Anyone who says they know is lying.

September 02, 2010 10:01 AM

Planet openSUSE

OMG!SUSE! team: Sprichst du open source? Check out the openSUSE Conference

openSUSE Conference hoorah!

This coming October in the beautiful German city of Nuremberg, the second international openSUSE conference will be held.

Before get out your jump to conclusions mat and assume this is just for openSUSE folks, it should be mentioned that the conference isn't just for lizard-lovers but also for all members of the open source community that can attend.

The "call for papers" has finished meaning the conference organizers are hard at work preparing the program for the event, which plans to bring folks together from various areas of the open source universe such as the Mozilla and Debian projects. The conference should be interesting for hackers and users alike with Bird-Of-a-Feather sessions, open discussions and of course, plenty of hacking on open source!

Unfortunately the conference details aren't all hammered out, but if you're on that side of the pond on October 20th through the 23rd, you should definitely mark it on your calendar. In the meantime, I suggest following @openSUSEConf to keep up with the conference preparation.

September 02, 2010 10:00 AM

Planet Ubuntu

Canonical Design Team: Happy Beta day everyone!

Happy Beta Release day one and all. If you’ve not yet upgraded surely now’s the time ;)


September 02, 2010 09:46 AM

Planet Smalltalk

Smalltalk Daily 09/02/10: Loading Network Client Support

How to load network client support into Cincom Smalltalk (VW 7.7.1 and OS 8.2.1)

September 02, 2010 09:41 AM

Planet Jabber

Process One: TextOne for iPhone, with photo sharing!

Our iPhone version of TextOne, the simple and fast messenger for smartphones, has received a nice photo sharing feature.

TextOne, the simple, light and fast smartphone messenger, is now offering a new feature to share photos with your friends.

Easy, a new icon appears at the top right of the conversation screen, you just need to tap it.

There, you can choose to take a picture or select one from your albums... and add the text you wish.

This will appear in the conversation as a taped instant photo, like any other messages.

You can also browse the photos exchanged with your contacts.

Of course, this also works with TextOne Pink!

Photo sharing in TextOne will let you share good moments with the people to whom you are close. Or alternatively play ;-)

And finally, you can play with it

September 02, 2010 08:51 AM

Planet Open Clip Art Library

Nicu Buculei: Sad/FUDCon

I am sad today: learned yesterday a good friend may possibly attend the Zurich FUDCon which would have been nothing short of awesome. Half a day later, sad reality hits: she won't be able to attend for the stupidest reason of all: didn't get a few days off from work. It's a shame! And her employer is supposedly in the FOSS business...

September 02, 2010 08:38 AM

Planet KDE

Johan Thelin: Nordic Free Software Award

The Nordic Free Software Award given to people, projects or organisations in the Nordic countries that have made a prominent contribution to the advancement of Free Software. The award will be announced during FSCONS 2010 in Gothenburg.

If you want to nominate someone or something, you can find more information here.

September 02, 2010 08:16 AM

Planet Ubuntu

Christophe Sauthier: Handicap accessibility meeting for open communities webmasters

This blog blog is taken from Kinouchou's blog. And since she wanted to reach as many people as possible, she asked me to relay it here. So please if you have any comments, post them on the original blog post.

Handicap accessibility meeting for open communities webmasters

Accessibility and free software are two very important issues for me, that's why I didn't hesitate to join the accessibility and free software workgroup of the APRIL association in December 2009, in order to combine both aspects of these issues. I am also involved in the French-speaking Ubuntu community, who works actively on redesigning the website. A lighter, more aesthetic version of the website is a good thing, but improved accessibility is better. Given that many different tools are used to operate the website, it is rather difficult to know the different rules to make them accessible.

The idea is to organise a one-day meeting with webmasters from the different free software communities and with a specialist in digital accessibility. Armony Altinier, in charge of the accessibility and free software workgroup, accepted to join the meeting as a specialist. So, this is a great pleasure for me to announce that the meeting will be held in Paris on Saturday, the 20th of November 2010 at the Fondation pour le Progrès de l'Homme. The goal of this meeting is to help "free software developers who act as volunteers to improve the accessibility of the community websites they are in charge of". This free meeting will be the opportunity for participants to establish or widen their knowledge of the stakes related to digital accessibility, to learn to grasp its rules and to think on concrete cases, i.e. their websites.

Any community promoting free software is entitled to participate. the only conditions are to be the webmaster in charge of the community's website, to master HTML/CSS, to know how scripts work and to commit to improve the accessibility of their website. All information is available on handicap accessibility and free software wiki page.

September 02, 2010 08:12 AM

Planet Mozilla

Calendar: How are Lightning users doing in terms of Thunderbird usage

Six month ago, I shared our usage statistics for Lightning with you, which showed that Lightning users on Thunderbird 3.x had surpassed Lightning users on Thunderbird 2.x for the first time.

Now it's time to look at things again and I'm happy to report, that as of yesterday roughly 75% of our users now use a Thunderbird 3.x build as can be seen in the chart below.

It's also important to note that nearly 50% are already using the latest Thunderbird 3.1.x builds, while users of the old Thunderbird 3.0.x series are decreasing fast. This is mostly due to the major update offers of Mozilla Messaging for users of Thunderbird 3.0.x.

Major update offers have recently (last week) also started for users of Thunderbird 2.x, but haven't really been unthrottled yet (throttling means, that currently only 1 in 5 users of TB2 gets a major update offer to Thunderbird 3.1.x). Once major update offers go out to every TB2 user, we expect their numbers to decrease much more heavily. The current state of things (showing the last six months) can be seen in the chart below:

As frequently noted in earlier articles, the ratio of Thunderbird 3.0.x and TB 3.1.x users is much higher on the weekends compared to the Thunderbird 2 users. The graphs show that very well.

For those interested: The "other" number contains users on older Thunderbird 1.5.x builds, SeaMonkey users and users, who have mistakenly tried to install Lightning into Firefox. Generally that number always fluctuates between 0.35% and 0.5% of our total active users.

I hope that you will find this as interesting as I do.

September 02, 2010 08:09 AM

Planet openSUSE

SUSE Studio: More secure SUSE Gallery

This week we introduced an important feature to SUSE Gallery — the appliance security summary. It is displayed for every published appliance and is designed to help you better understand what the appliance contains. This is useful for security reasons as you can easily see if the appliance contains any sources where undesirable code might slip in. It also provides a quick overview of the appliance’s contents.

Appliance security summary

The security summary will tell you if the appliance contains:

Of course, the presence of any of these does not mean that the appliance is unsafe — many regular and completely safe appliances will have some yellow warning icons displayed in the summary. But it gives you some hints and more control. If you ever encounter any unsafe appliance, simply report it. We will take it down immediately and flag the appliance creator’s account accordingly.

September 02, 2010 07:39 AM

Planet GNOME

Pascal Terjan: The most unusable branch locator I have seen so far

Today I wanted to locate an HSBC branch in London, close to either the office or my home. Thanks to HSBC I got upset before 8.

That starts fine, they have an "interactive map" or allow you to enter your postcode. Unfortunately they use only the beginning of the postcode (SW in my case) and then list you many towns in this area. Using the map stops at the same level. Then you click one of them (I should do all of them as I don't know some which may be close) and get No branch exists in ...

Is it so hard to list the closest ones from the given postcode or place them on a map? And what about just removing from the list the places without a branch?

September 02, 2010 07:35 AM

Planet Open Clip Art Library

Fabricatorz: Fabricatorz: This week (August 29 – September 4)

The Fabricatorz Team remains busy and productive as the month of September sets off. The past few weeks have seen a Fabricatorz collective, as nearly every member of our team convened in China to extend global reach and push current projects to greater heights.

Among the array of projects making serious headway, the official launch of Creative Commons’ Arab World Site is a key step forward in the global copyleft mission. CC Iftar events describe informal gatherings, set up in Arab communities, where leading social media and open web producers can network, while enjoying a meal, to celebrate the breaking of the traditional Ramadan fast. Through such events, it’s hoped that ideas are shared and foundations for new and even more innovative content are formed. In this way, a shift from “content consumption” to “content production” can take place.

Another Fabricatorz initiative, Laoban Soundsystem, is in the spotlight. Laoban is a unique copyleft hardware soundsystem. China houses the current hub for Laoban speaker production, but complete documentation exists online for the construction and implementation of the soundsystem. This Saturday, in China, Laoban is having it’s very first dedicated event showcasing the exciting capabilities of the speakers.

Expect more on these and recurring projects, like The Open Clip Art Library, in next week’s Fabricatorz update!

September 02, 2010 07:34 AM

Planet Smalltalk

September's Lulu discount code

If you use the code AUTUMN, you can get a 10% discount at Lulu during the month of September*. Enjoy!

* Disclaimer: Enter coupon code "AUTUMN" during checkout and save 10% off the purchase price. Discount cannot be used to pay for, nor shall be applied to, applicable taxes or shipping and handling charges. Maximum amount that may be applied to discount is $10.00 per account. Promotional codes cannot be applied to any previous orders. No exchanges or substitutions allowed. Only one valid promotional code may be used per order. Offer expires September 30, 2010 at 11:59 PM EDT. Lulu.com reserves the right to change or revoke this offer at any time. Void where prohibited.

September 02, 2010 07:32 AM

FTP server back up

Enjoy!

September 02, 2010 07:31 AM

Planet Haskell

Bryan O'Sullivan: Fast base64 encoding and decoding in Haskell

I just published the base64-bytestring library, which fills a surprising gap in Haskell's library coverage by adding support for base64 encoding and decoding of the ByteString type.

The library is written in pure Haskell, and it's fast:

The above numbers compares favourably to the base64 code in the Python distribution, which was handy to measure against as it is implemented in C:

Enjoy!

September 02, 2010 06:59 AM

Planet Python

Duncan McGreggor: HCI at Canonical


uTouch

Back in March, I blogged about future possibilities (in a blue-sky sense) of multi-touch, mentioning the project management I was doing for MT hardware kernel driver support in Lucid (and then proceeding to dive into the deep end of speculation). It's now an Ubuntu cycle later, and holy crap... I'm having a hard time finding the words. I think the blog title says it all. But I'll try to elaborate :-)

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably noticed the big announcements we made a few weeks ago:

For the next few days, we were all over Google news. This was quite a shock, given that we'd been heads-down into the project for so long and hadn't really come up for air nor fully anticipated the impact (to others or ourselves). Needless to say, after the intense amount of work that the team had engaged in over the previous couple months, this was quite gratifying, if somewhat unexpected.
There has been a lot of discussion in blog posts, mail lists, IRC (#ubuntu-touch on freenode.net), Launchpad bugs and merge proposals, etc., so much so that touchscreens now pursue me feverishly when I sleep at night. I'm really not interested in writing more of the same :-)

As such, I want to mix things up a bit...

HCI Remixed

I've been reading an amazing anthology of essays on human-computer interaction. I still haven't finished the book (yeah, I've got about 10 in-progress titles on my nightstand), but am relishing every word in this particular collection. The book is HCI Remixed: Reflections on Works That Have Influenced the HCI Community.
While doing some research at the beginning of the Maverick development cycle, I came across HCI Remixed at the local library -- the title intrigued me and I couldn't resist. Weeks later, after having maxed out the number of times I could renew the book, I just purchased it -- I simply couldn't get enough of the book. Every essay I'd read up to that point was fantastic; each one provided volumes of information, experiences, insights, ideas for follow-up, etc. Whenever I finished one essay, I spent days and sometimes weeks reading up on references, pondering the past and future of human-computer interaction.

Due to the unusual nature of the book, describing it is surprisingly difficult. That being said, the MIT Press page gives you a great taste:
Over almost three decades, the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) has produced a rich and varied literature. Although the focus of attention today is naturally on new work, older contributions that played a role in shaping the trajectory and character of the field have much to tell us. The contributors to HCI Remixed were asked to reflect on a single work at least ten years old that influenced their approach to HCI. The result is this collection of fifty-one short, engaging, and idiosyncratic essays, reflections on a range of works in a variety of forms that chart the emergence of a new field.
If you're into HCI, learning from others, and discovering new sources of inspiration for your own work, this is simply a must-have book :-)

A Small Piece of History

By the time I checked the book out of the Golden public library, it was May and we had begun building the MT team. By July -- once it became clear how astounding the team's work was -- I realized that in 10 or 20 years I could very well be writing an article about Henrik, Chase, Stephen, Ikbel, and Rafi. Much like those in the book, I could be sharing the conversations I'd had with Stéphane Chatty, Mark Shuttleworth, Neil Patel, David Siegel, and John Lea. And that's only the crew which which I was collaborating or discussing directly. There are a lot of folks who've been working very hard on multi-touch infrastructure solutions and exploring ways of integrating these for several years (e.g., Peter Hutterer and Carlos Garnacho).
Though many foundations have been laid, as of yet (to the best of my knowledge), no Linux distribution has released a multi-touch stack that integrated gestures in a unified manner across everything from applications to window managers and beyond. This was something that Mark wanted us to provide to the open source world. In this spirit, the multitouch team hasn't just hacked things together to get a product out in time. A lot of generative, creative thought and care has gone into uTouch. A lot of original problem solving has taken place. Physics PhDs, kernel hackers, X.org hackers, driver creators, application integrators, toolkit gurus -- all of this knowledge was concentrated, applied, and used to distill a first approximation of what a gesture stack in Linux could look like, using the latest available technology and methodologies.
To be honest, we weren't really sure we could pull it off. There was a very good chance we could have failed at our task, quietly chalking up the loss as a lesson learned. Now that we've managed to shape these ideas into actual software, taken the threads of dreams and woven something real, we are thrilled to be engaging with others to see where all of us can take multi-touch and gestures from here.
Thanks to expert input from the wider open source community, we're already looking at ways in which we can improve upon the first version, ways of bringing new ideas and experiences to developers and users of multi-touch hardware running Linux. Things are only just warming up, and the greatest contributions have yet to be made. Every single person in the community has before them a world of possibilities for getting involved and creating the future human-computer interfaces for the free and open source world in the coming weeks and months. These are indeed exciting times.

September 02, 2010 06:56 AM

Planet Open Clip Art Library

Nicu Buculei: Fedora 14 Supplemental Wallpapers

We at the Fedora Design Team are not arrogant enough to think the default wallpaper we provide is the ultimate choice for everyone, we understand the diversity of our users and their tastes and trying to make a larger audience happy we want to provide a set of alternatives. The idea is not new, we started playing with it a couple of years ago, but only now it came to fruition.

Of course, other distros are doing it too and they may arrived faster to results, but we used the "Fedora way", more Free and more Open :D It started with a wiki page collecting submissions from everyone, it was announced on blogs/Planet, Fedora Weekly News, microblogging and so (as a writer for FWN I made sure the happenings are documented as they go).

After a generous submission interval we had the members of the team expressing their option/preferences/votes (you want the selection made by someone with an understanding about design, usability, photography and such) and this ended in a "winners" page containing the most voted images, some of the submission are creation of Fedora contributors and some are Free images gathered from the internet (Flickr)


The current step is to double-check the licenses (we became quite paranoid about this after the InvinXible/Solar incident) and at the first pass we struck down a couple of them due to restrictive license (CC-BY-ND and CC-BY-NC are not Free, so not acceptable for inclusion on Fedora). The second pass is to contact the unknown photographers and learn if they are happy with the attribution we are able to provide, some already replied positively. Expect the package to hit the repos before the Beta release and get a few improvements until final.

One of the last steps we are still trying to figure is providing attribution (author name, license and URL) in the wallpaper chooser application as tooltip, the current idea is to (ab)use ane XML file in /usr/share/gnome-background-properties/) and another is to try to persuade some spin maintainers into liking and using the package (it will probably be at least part of the Design Suite).

Rock it.

September 02, 2010 06:45 AM

Planet openSUSE

Fred Blaise: Tomcat: Too many open files… but why?

Each morning, my tomcat server is out, returning 500 errors because of this:


SEVERE: Socket accept failed
org.apache.tomcat.jni.Error: Too many open files
        at org.apache.tomcat.jni.Socket.accept(Native Method)
        at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.AprEndpoint$Acceptor.run(AprEndpoint.java:1156)
        at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619)

So, I initially had a ulimit -n of 1024. No problem, changed my shell and limits.conf to have 4096 and restarted the process. The next day, same error. So increased it to 32768. Same results.

So I ran a couple cron job to see what was happening during the night:


# Monitor openfiles
* * * * *       /usr/sbin/lsof -n -u root|egrep 'java|alfresco|tomc' | wc -l >> /tmp/lsof_mon.out
* * * * *       cat /proc/sys/fs/file-nr >> /tmp/file-nr.out

Apparently, the results are OK, despite the continuing errors. The “lsof” cron job never get any higer than 1320, and the monitor on file-nr didn’t get above “2550 0 767274″.

Yes, I made sure the process was launched with the new parameter. Even after restarting the system, ulimit -n returns the correct amount of file descriptors. Even running “lsof” by itself doesn’t return more than 3000 lines.

For info, server is running CentOS 2.6.18-194.3.1.el5 #1 SMP x86_64. libtcnative is at version 1.20. Process running as root.

Any idea anyone? Thanks.

September 02, 2010 05:56 AM

Planet Ubuntu

Duncan McGreggor: HCI at Canonical


uTouch

Back in March, I blogged about future possibilities (in a blue-sky sense) of multi-touch, mentioning the project management I was doing for MT hardware kernel driver support in Lucid (and then proceeding to dive into the deep end of speculation). It's now an Ubuntu cycle later, and holy crap... I'm having a hard time finding the words. I think the blog title says it all. But I'll try to elaborate :-)

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably noticed the big announcements we made a few weeks ago:

For the next few days, we were all over Google news. This was quite a shock, given that we'd been heads-down into the project for so long and hadn't really come up for air nor fully anticipated the impact (to others or ourselves). Needless to say, after the intense amount of work that the team had engaged in over the previous couple months, this was quite gratifying, if somewhat unexpected.
There has been a lot of discussion in blog posts, mail lists, IRC (#ubuntu-touch on freenode.net), Launchpad bugs and merge proposals, etc., so much so that touchscreens now pursue me feverishly when I sleep at night. I'm really not interested in writing more of the same :-)

As such, I want to mix things up a bit...

HCI Remixed

I've been reading an amazing anthology of essays on human-computer interaction. I still haven't finished the book (yeah, I've got about 10 in-progress titles on my nightstand), but am relishing every word in this particular collection. The book is HCI Remixed: Reflections on Works That Have Influenced the HCI Community.
While doing some research at the beginning of the Maverick development cycle, I came across HCI Remixed at the local library -- the title intrigued me and I couldn't resist. Weeks later, after having maxed out the number of times I could renew the book, I just purchased it -- I simply couldn't get enough of the book. Every essay I'd read up to that point was fantastic; each one provided volumes of information, experiences, insights, ideas for follow-up, etc. Whenever I finished one essay, I spent days and sometimes weeks reading up on references, pondering the past and future of human-computer interaction.

Due to the unusual nature of the book, describing it is surprisingly difficult. That being said, the MIT Press page gives you a great taste:
Over almost three decades, the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) has produced a rich and varied literature. Although the focus of attention today is naturally on new work, older contributions that played a role in shaping the trajectory and character of the field have much to tell us. The contributors to HCI Remixed were asked to reflect on a single work at least ten years old that influenced their approach to HCI. The result is this collection of fifty-one short, engaging, and idiosyncratic essays, reflections on a range of works in a variety of forms that chart the emergence of a new field.
If you're into HCI, learning from others, and discovering new sources of inspiration for your own work, this is simply a must-have book :-)

A Small Piece of History

By the time I checked the book out of the Golden public library, it was May and we had begun building the MT team. By July -- once it became clear how astounding the team's work was -- I realized that in 10 or 20 years I could very well be writing an article about Henrik, Chase, Stephen, Ikbel, and Rafi. Much like those in the book, I could be sharing the conversations I'd had with Stéphane Chatty, Mark Shuttleworth, Neil Patel, David Siegel, and John Lea. And that's only the crew which which I was collaborating or discussing directly. There are a lot of folks who've been working very hard on multi-touch infrastructure solutions and exploring ways of integrating these for several years (e.g., Peter Hutterer and Carlos Garnacho).
Though many foundations have been laid, as of yet (to the best of my knowledge), no Linux distribution has released a multi-touch stack that integrated gestures in a unified manner across everything from applications to window managers and beyond. This was something that Mark wanted us to provide to the open source world. In this spirit, the multitouch team hasn't just hacked things together to get a product out in time. A lot of generative, creative thought and care has gone into uTouch. A lot of original problem solving has taken place. Physics PhDs, kernel hackers, X.org hackers, driver creators, application integrators, toolkit gurus -- all of this knowledge was concentrated, applied, and used to distill a first approximation of what a gesture stack in Linux could look like, using the latest available technology and methodologies.
To be honest, we weren't really sure we could pull it off. There was a very good chance we could have failed at our task, quietly chalking up the loss as a lesson learned. Now that we've managed to shape these ideas into actual software, taken the threads of dreams and woven something real, we are thrilled to be engaging with others to see where all of us can take multi-touch and gestures from here.
Thanks to expert input from the wider open source community, we're already looking at ways in which we can improve upon the first version, ways of bringing new ideas and experiences to developers and users of multi-touch hardware running Linux. Things are only just warming up, and the greatest contributions have yet to be made. Every single person in the community has before them a world of possibilities for getting involved and creating the future human-computer interfaces for the free and open source world in the coming weeks and months. These are indeed exciting times.

September 02, 2010 05:56 AM

The Fridge: Meet Jon Sackett

Jon Sackett joined the Launchpad Registry team a couple of weeks ago. Here’s a quick run-down of who he is.

Matthew: What do you do on the Launchpad team?

Jon: I’m part of the Registry team; we maintain the people, teams and projects bits and pieces used by all the other parts of Launchpad.

Right now I’m mostly helping pay down technical debt, but I’m also helping with features that help those core objects be smarter about the way they use other applications.

Matthew: Can we see something that you’ve worked on?

Jon: Almost everything I’ve done has been internal without a real UI component.

Matthew: Where do you work?

Jon: I work in my home office in an apartment in downtown Durham, NC. Sometimes I change it up and work from my porch.

Matthew: What can you see from your office window?

Jon: The old brickface and industrial windows across the road. On days where I’m working from my porch I get a better view of the downtown

Matthew: What did you do before working at Canonical?

Jon: I worked as a Python/Django developer at a company called MetaMetrics, that does some really neat things in education with natural language processing.

Matthew: How did you get into free software?

Jon: I was introduced to Linux in college as a better environment for coding in my CS classes. Since moving into web programming and Python, I think almost every tool I use has come from free software.

Matthew: What’s more important? Principle or pragmatism?

Jon: In concrete matters (like code), pragmatism. It’s no use to anyone if your principles only prevent you from doing things.
That said, principles are still important; when you opt for the pragmatic approach, your principles can still influence how that plays out.

Matthew: Do you/have you contribute(d) to any free software projects?

Jon: Sadly, precious little. I have a patch in the Django project, and a couple of my own projects are available under a BSD license. One of the reasons I wanted to work on Launchpad was to do more with and for free software.

Matthew: Tell us something really cool about Launchpad that not enough people know about.

Jon: How completely well it supports the whole development lifecycle — I think a lot of people consider Launchpad just another code hosting service, and it’s so much more than that.

Matthew: Thanks Jon!

[Discuss Meet Jon Sackett on the Forums]

Originally posted here by Matthew Revell on August 24th, 2010 .

September 02, 2010 05:35 AM

Planet Debian

MJ Ray: KohaCon10

Russel Garlick writes on behalf of the KohaCon10 Organising Committee:

“KohaCon10 starts on October 25th in Wellington, New Zealand. We have an exciting line up of speakers on a range of topics related to Koha and [Free and] Open Source and Open Standards in libraries. See our programme for details.

KohaCon is an opportunity for the entire Koha community, librarians and developers alike, to come together, meet each other, swap ideas and learn something new.

The conference is split into 2 parts.

The community conference will be held over 3 days – 25-27th of October. This is not just a developer’s conference. There will be presentations from librarians and developers alike.

The second part of the conference is the Hackfest for Koha developers that will be held from 29th-31st of October.

For more information see our website

KohaCon10 is a free conference (that is right it will cost nothing for you to attend), but you still need to register to reserve your place.

Registrations from the international Koha community have been very strong. Over half of all available spaces are already taken.

If you have been holding off on the premise that you will have plenty of time to do this later, then please register now. Please do not rely on there being free spaces on the day.

Registration is quick and easy via the website.

We look forward to seeing you in Wellington!”

Our co-op will be represented there. Will you?

September 02, 2010 05:00 AM

Planet GNOME

Máirín Duffy: Sweet Caroline

Caroline’s Identity Crisis

Remember Caroline Casual-User? After speaking with some of you after the last blog post, I think I may have misrepresented her in terms of Fedora’s target user. (The LUNIX joke was really bad, serving only to confound.) Hopefully folks from the Fedora Board who were involved in the creation of the target user base definition could also clarify what their original intention was in case I’m not understanding the intent or not communicating it as effectively as I could again. In either case, I would like to explore who Caroline is, and who she isn’t, in the hopes of at least bringing a bit more awareness that we’re probably not all talking about the same woman, if not to go so far as make it fairly clear who she actually is .

Caroline’s Origins

First, let’s look at the target user of the the default Fedora desktop:

This type of consumer is someone we think can immediately benefit from the usefulness and elegance of free software. This type of consumer is also someone who can be persuaded to participate or contribute to Fedora. Consumers who don’t fit this minimum profile, though, might very well be pleased with what we provide. We tend to favor consumers who are interested in taking a step toward collaboration. [...]

A slightly-different version of this statement from a mailing list announcement has also been widely-quoted, so let’s take a look at that too:

We found four defining characteristics that we believe best describe the Fedora distribution’s target audience: Someone who

  1. is voluntarily switching to Linux,
  2. is familiar with computers, but is not necessarily a hacker or developer,
  3. is likely to collaborate in some fashion when something’s wrong with Fedora, and
  4. wants to use Fedora for general productivity, either using desktop applications or a Web browser.

Okay. So we’ve reviewed the source material and it’s fresh in our heads. Now let’s walk through what I believe are some misconceptions about Caroline based on comments to my last blog post, and read them while referencing this source material.

Myths about Caroline

Caroline doesn’t care about technology

Caroline is supposed to be a “computer-friendly” person who is “voluntarily switching to Linux.” It may well be a flawed assumption, but I’m not sure folks who aren’t interested in technology even really understand what Linux is, nevermind would voluntarily switch to using it or describe themselves as computer-friendly.

Caroline isn’t willing to give back.

The Board’s definition and communications about it were pretty careful to point out this isn’t the case. Actually, one of the four key attributes of the target user is “likely collaborator.” The the user base definition says, “We tend to favor consumers who are interested in taking a step toward collaboration.”

“We found four defining characteristics that we believe best describe the Fedora distribution’s target audience,” states the the mailing list announcement, “Someone who [..] is likely to collaborate in some fashion when something’s wrong with Fedora.”

As Deb pointed out, “Today’s Carolines could become tomorrow’s Connies.”

Caroline only asks for mp3 and Flash support.

Well. I think do Caroline probably cares a lot more about her music collection and being able to be Rick-rolled and watch the latest Autotune the News rather than mp3 and flash technology specifically. (Although from my own guesses about Caroline, she may well be the type to write her own songs and share them or post video tutorials and video blogs – she doesn’t strike me as a straight-out consumer.) The Board-written, detailed description of her computer usage does include “locating and viewing/playing media.”

That being said, yes, Caroline has an issue if she can’t listen to her 50 gigs of music albums or see the new Snoop Dogg cameo in Katy Perry’s latest music video. The problem isn’t insurmountable, and Caroline is comfortable with computers and interested in technology, so I think she will probably find a (admittedly PITA) work-around to do these things before technologies like webm make this silliness unnecessary.

So just who is Caroline? Let’s play a game!

I think it might be helpful if we think through specific examples of places we may or may not be likely to find Caroline. So, are you ready to play……

where is caroline?


Is Caroline someone you could easily meet……


GUADEC 2006, my own photo

no

I think that the folks above are most likely to be in Pamela’s camp, and in some cases Connie or Nancy’s camp. Linux is a big enough part of these folks’ lives that they’ve taken the trouble to pay or find funding for a flight and lodging, they’ve taken time away from their family and perhaps even vacation time from work in order to spend at least a day if not a whole week at a conference revolving around it. (Or in the case of LUG attendees, an evening away from home missing dinner with the family once a month or weekly.) I just don’t think it is possible for these folks to be Carolines.


Is Caroline someone you could easily meet……


“Farmer’s Market” by Emily Prachthauser. Used under a CC-BY 2.0 license.

No

Isn’t it kind of a crap shoot? I know folks I would consider to be Carolines who each individually might go to one or two of these types of events, but I think I would be very lucky to have the chance to meet a Caroline just by going to any of these events. Unfortunately, I think maybe a lot of you came away from my last blog post thinking I meant to say that a Caroline could easily be picked out at any of these types of events.


Is Caroline someone you could easily meet……

yes!


“pre-panel get together” by Ed Schipul, taken at SXSW’08. Used under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license.

Outcome likely, yes, IMHO. These are folks who are comfortable with computers, clearly love technology, but whose lives do not center around Fedora and/or Linux. (Instead, their lives and/or passions center around MakerBots or RepRaps, Adobe products (or Gimp!), Playstations or Nintendos, technology-related research, user interface design, blogging, building awesome web applications, maintaining computers for their students, etc. etc. ….) These are not folks who would identify themselves as Linux contributors, but whom are probably a far cry from needing instruction in how to use a computer mouse or what an MP3 is, and whom are very likely to value the freedoms using free software affords them. (They may already use free software!)

If you’ll humor me the effort, keep these folks in mind and then re-read Caroline’s yellow speech bubble at the top of this blog post. Maybe it makes more sense what I was trying to do… if you replace the “coffeeshops and parties” with Makerbots, Playstations, or building kick-ass web applications.


Who is getting left out?

So, at least in this blog post, we’re probably not talking about your grandparents’ friend Etna who stands behind you in line at your local supermarket, has three cats, and always confuses you with your younger sibling. We’re likely not talking about elementary school age children in a third-world country who struggle just to find clean water to drink. We’re probably not talking about the person who drives the subway car or bus that helps get you to work in the morning, or the woman who owns and operates your favorite neighborhood restaurant.

These folks are probably not Carolines. They’ll need a different persona. Whether or not we’re meant to or should consider targeting them, I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.

What do you think?


Filed under: Fedora

September 02, 2010 04:40 AM

Planet Debian

Russell Coker: Raw Satire Usually Fails on the Internet

Sarcasm and satire usually don’t work on the Internet. One cause of this is the lack of out of band signalling via facial expression or tone of voice. Another issue is the fact that in real life people usually know something about the person who they listen to while on the Internet it’s most common to read articles without knowing much about the author. So the reader can’t use “I know that the author isn’t an asshole” as a starting point to determine whether a message should be interpreted literally.

This is really nothing new. The standard in printed communication for a long time has been to use Emoticons (Wikipedia) to indicate emotion and other interpretation that might not be deduced from a direct reading of the text. The Wikipedia page cites examples of emoticon use dating back to 1857 – although the combinations of characters used for different emotions has changed significantly many times. The common uses that we now know on the Internet date back to 1982.

In my experience the symbol :-# is commonly used to note sarcasm or satire. Unfortunately it seems that none of the Internet search engines allow searching for such strings so I couldn’t find an early example of this being used. While I haven’t found a reference describing this practice, I regularly receive messages annotated with it and find that people generally understand what I mean when I use it in my own email. But that is usually applied to a sentence or two.

For a larger section of text a pseudo-HTML tag such as </satire> can be used to signal the end of satire. It seems that a matching start tag is optional as recognising the start of satire is a lot easier once the reader knows that some of the content is satirical. In spoken English a phrase such as “but seriously” may be used for the same purpose, but such a subtle signal may be missed on the Internet – particularly by readers who don’t use English as their first language.

Another way of signaling a non-literal interpretation is by using Scare Quotes – the deliberate usage of quotation symbols to indicate that the writer disagrees with the content that is written. That is common for the case of referencing a phrase or sentence that you disagree with, but doesn’t work for a larger section of text.

A final option is to make the satire or sarcasm so extreme that no-one can possibly mistake it for being literal. This is not always possible, Poe’s Law holds that “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing” [1]. I think that Poe was understating the case, it is impossible to create a parody of religion that most people won’t mistake for the real thing without signals or context. For an example read LandOverBaptist.org and Chick.com, of course if you know those sites then you will know whether they are satirical or serious – but I expect that most readers of my blog won’t invest enough effort into either of those religious sites to determine whether they are serious or satire.

But satire and sarcasm without signals or a reputation usually fails. One example of success is The Onion which is a long running and well known satirical news site [2]. But even The Onion it is regularly mistaken for being serious – the number of occasions when people forward me Onion articles for amusement are vastly outnumbered by the number of occasions when I see people taking it seriously.

Even when material is known to be satirical it can still fail grossly. An example is the Chaser’s satire of the Make A Wish Foundation [3]. Even material that is well known to be satirical seems to fail when it attacks bad targets or attacks in a bad way. One difficulty is in satirising bigoted people, to effectively satirise them without attacking the minority groups that they dislike can be a difficult challenge.

Finally, when you write some satire and members of your audience don’t recognise it you should consider the possibility that you failed to do it properly. If you can’t get a hit rate close to 100% for people with the same background as you then it’s probably a serious failure.

September 02, 2010 04:16 AM

Christian Perrier: 100% for debconf in squeeze: 6 languages can make it

Look at the status of debconf translations for top languages in the current ranking.

Swedish, Russian, French, German, Portuguese, Czech can make it (have you noticed that French is not leading?). For lenny, French and German succeeeded in this.

You have no idea about the tremendous and constant effort it requires for the teams...(and a little bit for me) to reach this.

So, if you're the maintainer of wireshark gnumeric tripwire request-tracker3.8 bugzilla tomcat6halevt ifetch-tools isc-dhcp foomatic-filters mailgraph gitosis fts qmail, think about it. You can make 1 to 6 people happy..:-)

September 02, 2010 04:04 AM

Planet Python

Python User Groups: pyCologne Python User Group Cologne - Meeting, September 08, 2010, 6.30pm

Hello,
The next meeting of pyCologne will take place:
Wednesday, September, 8thstarting about 6.30 pm - 6.45 pmat Room 0.14, Benutzerrechenzentrum (RRZK-B)University of Cologne, Berrenrather Str. 136, 50937 Köln, Germany

Agenda:
 - Cooking Eggs - A distutils & setuptools recipe book (Christopher Arndt) - Lightning Talks

Further discussion topics, news, book-presentations etc. are welcome on each of our meetings!
At about 8.30 pm we will as usual enjoy the rest of the evening in a nearby restaurant.
Further information including directions how to get to the location can be found at:
http://www.pycologne.de

(Sorry, the web-links are in German only.)
Best Wishes,
Andi (on behalf of pyCologne)

September 02, 2010 03:52 AM

Planet go-oo

IssueZilla: New issues: Thu Sep 2 03:43:00 UTC 2010

#i114257# - Presentation: user defined animation not saved
#i114258# - framework: Cannot launch OOo 3.2.1 in OSX 10.5.8 - suddenly stopped working
#i114261# - framework: Error loading BASIC of document
#i114262# - framework: OOo.org 3.3b runs once
#i114259# - sw: Printing sets document modified status
#i114260# - sw: Will not print

September 02, 2010 03:43 AM

Planet Mozilla

Armen Zambrano Gasparnian: Firefox in Armenian: ready to download! (development builds)

Thanks to Mozilla's l10n-drivers, Robert Sargsyan, Hrant Ohanyan and other contributors we are now an official team and we are part of the Mozilla's new locales.

You can access the development Firefox builds (aka Minefield) in Armenian (Windows, Mac & Linux) which were recently announced by Seth. Armenian is going to be part of the new languages which we will try to ship with Firefox 4.0 and it is now time to get cranking at this ;) As always I will only be driving this since I can't really read/write in Armenian.

 
Here is a quick look at what needs work to be done:

Here is a breakdown of the previous section
I need a lot of help with the "Getting started" page as the Armenian web world is very unknown to me. If you are Armenian please feel free to fill out the survey or you can forward it to your friends. You can also re-tweet this tweet.

There are 2 web pieces that need translation. It is very easy. Please have a look at it.

Product translations will still be done through Narro and approvals through Robert.
Please send this post to any friends that you believe could help us with this.

Thanks a lot again to Robert, Hrant and Philip for their continuous contributions.

Regards,
Armen




Creative Commons License
This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

September 02, 2010 03:15 AM

Meeting Notes from the Mozilla community: Mobile Meeting Minutes: 2010-09-01

Mobile/Notes/01-Sep-2010

From MozillaWiki
< Mobile | Notes

Some TODOs for b1.

Core download manager work is done, a couple of bugs still in progress bug 589025, bug 567267, bug 591081

Retrieved from “https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Notes/01-Sep-2010

September 02, 2010 03:00 AM

Meeting Notes from the Mozilla community: Firefox/Gecko Delivery Meeting Minutes: 2010-09-01

Firefox/Planning/2010-09-01

From MozillaWiki
< Firefox | Planning

« previous week | index | next week »

Firefox/Gecko Delivery Meeting Details

REMEMBER

These notes are read by people who weren’t able to attend the meeting. Please make sure to include links and context so they can be understood.

Action Items