Some welcome news for all Qt on Maemo developers out there: Nokia intends to deploy the currently in Beta Qt 4.6 to all devices via software update — most probably already with the next major update PR1.2. Currently, Qt 4.6 (available from extras-devel) is completely optified and resides in /opt/qt4-maemo5. That will change with PR1.2, where it will move to the rootfs, replacing the community-supported Qt 4.5. What does this mean for Qt applications?

• Qt 4.6 applications: If all goes well, nothing needs to be done. Deployed applications should pick up the libraries in /usr. You might need to edit your build scripts so they won’t look in /opt/qt4-maemo5/bin if you’re using qmake.
• Qt 4.5 applications: This one is trickier. Qt 4.6 is neither API nor ABI compatible with Qt 4.5. This means that you’ll need at least a recompile, and probably also source code modifications if you’re doing anything Maemo5-specific. Qt 4.5 applications on device will stop working until there is a Qt 4.6-based update available.

So all you Qt 4.5 users out there, install libqt4-maemo5-dev in scratchbox and start porting. :)

3 0

February 09, 2010 07:58 AM

February 09, 2010 06:37 AM

Young men’s fancy turns to thoughts of, well, it depends.

It’s been well into the Celsius teens in recent days, with splashes of sun. Certain public-spirited young women leap at the chance to celebrate by way of a short skirt. I’m young enough to appreciate that, but old enough to be a gardener.

After all, the short skirts and these vibrant colors are closely related in their intended function.

For the younger men, specifically my own 10½-year-old, the season’s thoughts are of videogames. I succumbed Sunday morning to intense lobbying and took him and his friend off to the mall to visit the local EB Games AKA GameStop for some swapping and shopping. The secondary market for games has a liquidity that approaches foreign-exchange trading, and on this particular Sunday morning my boy made a major score; the obscure Wii title he was trading in was “on promo”, so the obscure Wii used title he took home cost him only C$1.11, net. I’m sure his whole class will hear of this triumph.

Like most parents, I find my son exceptionally good-looking. Objectively, he has tumbling curly hair and strongly-colored eyes that match it; he’s already complaining about being pestered by the girls in his fifth-grade class.

His best friend is remarkably similar in size, and in his curls and coloration; strangers often think them twins. The two of them walking side by side, their faces alive with the joy of their aftermarket coup, presented quite a picture; entirely oblivious to the wide wave of smiles coming from all ages and genders.

Ah, spring.

February 09, 2010 06:37 AM

If you’re anything like me, you’d sooner forgo water than Firebug when working on a web project. The little ’bug is a fantastically useful html/CSS/JavaScript/Ajax debugger. But did you know it can also be used to debug PHP? Yes, thanks to an additional Firefox extension called FirePHP.

By combining this extension, which sits on top of Firebug, with a server-side library, your PHP scripts will be able to send debugging information to the browser, handily encoded in the HTTP response headers. Once you’re set up, you can log warnings and errors in your PHP scripts to the Firebug console, just as if you were developing JavaScript.

To start, you first need to install the FirePHP extension from Mozilla’s Firefox Add-ons site. This requires that you already have Firebug installed. Once FirePHP is installed, when you next open your Firebug panel, you’ll now see an additional blue bug. Click on that bug and a menu will appear allowing you to enable or disable FirePHP:

This, of course, won’t do anything yet. You also need to install the FirePHP server-side library, which is available here. This is a stand-alone version of the library that can either be downloaded manually or installed using PEAR. After that, you simply need to include the library in your code. There are also versions designed to integrate with various frameworks or content management systems, such as the WP-FirePHP plugin for WordPress or the JFirePHP plugin for Joomla. For the sake of this walk-through, I’ll focus on the stand-alone functionality.

Once you have the FirePHP library on your server, you need to include it in your script with a line like:

require_once('FirePHPCore/fb.php');

Because FirePHP sends its logging data via the HTTP headers, you’ll need to buffer your script’s output so that the response headers can include content generated further down the script. In PHP, this is accomplished by calling ob_start near the top of your script:

ob_start();

With these steps done, you can start using FirePHP. All you need to do is call the fb function with whatever you’d like to log, along with an optional label and an optional constant to define the message as a standard log, a warning, an error, or information. For example:

$var = array('a'=>'pizza', 'b'=>'cookies', 'c'=>'celery');
fb($var);
fb($var, "An array");
fb($var, FirePHP::WARN);
fb($var, FirePHP::INFO);
fb($var, 'An array with an Error type', FirePHP::ERROR);

This code will produce the following output in the Firebug console:

You can also use FirePHP to give you a trace of your application’s execution: by passing in the FirePHP::TRACE constant, you’ll get to see the line number, class name, and function name from within which fb was called. So this code:

function hello() {
  fb('Hello World!', FirePHP::TRACE);
}
function greet() {
  hello();
}
greet();

Will produce an output as follows:

This trace functionality can be fantastic for debugging more involved scripts, as it lets you know exactly from where your functions are being called.

Of course, you need to remember to remove your debugging statements before your code goes live!

There’s a lot more to FirePHP than what I’ve covered here. I’ve been showing you the simplified procedural API for FirePHP, but there’s a more advanced object-oriented API available with a number of additional features. You can learn all about it on the FirePHP site, so be sure to check it out.

<script src="</body>"/>

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 1212 bytes)

February 09, 2010 06:07 AM

From The Economist an article dealing with general fragmentation of technology in financial firms, and the issue of people needing to use ad hoc desktop applications comes up: a manager says 'The big task of management is to manage down the number of spreadsheets'.

February 09, 2010 05:57 AM

February 09, 2010 04:48 AM

#i109055# - Installation: Trying to install OpenOffice
#i109054# - Presentation: Impress is crashing in slideshow when pressing [FN]+[F4] on laptop
#i109063# - Presentation: selected grid font-resize problem
#i109062# - framework: extensions: Extension Manager not working if extension contains wrong description.xml (here: extension-description)
#i109059# - qa: Distribute OOo 3.2 RC5 as final (Solaris
#i109061# - qa: Please distribute 3.2.0 pt binaries
#i109060# - qa: Release for 3.2
#i109057# - sc: DataPilot field subtotal function is loaded as display name
#i109053# - sk: Update of Slovak dictionary package
#i109058# - sw: Can not remove page break
#i109056# - sw: auto capitalization after a "1. " number @ the end of a sentence.

February 09, 2010 04:43 AM

[root@ip-ns01 ~]# mtr www.mozilla.com --report
ip-ns01.phx.mozilla.org           Snt: 10    Loss%  Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
10.8.75.1                                     0.0%   0.4   0.4   0.4   0.4   0.0
v500.core1.phx.mozilla.net                    0.0%   1.1   1.3   1.0   3.1   0.6
xe-1-1-0.border1.phx.mozilla.net              0.0%   0.7   0.7   0.7   0.8   0.0
64.124.201.177                                0.0%   1.1   1.1   1.1   1.1   0.0
ge-0-3-0.mpr3.lax9.us.above.net               0.0%   9.4  13.0   9.4  44.3  11.0
xe-0-1-0.er1.lax9.us.above.net                0.0%   9.5  13.7   9.4  51.4  13.3
xe-0-1-0.mpr1.lax12.us.above.net              0.0%  94.3  21.3   9.3  94.3  27.8
xe2-3.cr01.lax01.mzima.net                    0.0%  10.0  14.0  10.0  23.0   4.6
xe1-0.cr01.lax02.mzima.net                    0.0%  16.9  15.7  10.2  22.8   4.8
te1-3.cr02.sjc02.us.mzima.net                 0.0%  18.1  22.5  18.1  30.0   4.9
ge1-mozilla.cust.sjc02.mzima.net              0.0%  18.4  18.6  18.4  19.1   0.2
v8.core2.sj.mozilla.com                       0.0%  18.4  19.7  18.2  30.8   3.9
mozcom.acelb.sj.mozilla.com                   0.0%  18.5  18.6  18.4  19.5   0.3

February 09, 2010 04:41 AM

On 25 february, I'm giving a workshop on Zarafa, the open source alternative to MS Exchange.
If anyone is interested in signing up (for free), they can still do so at http://www.open-future.be/zarafa-workshop

February 09, 2010 04:31 AM

February 09, 2010 04:30 AM

Let’s say you have a box that (completely legally) spits out 1 dollar per day. I’m using “box” in an abstract sense here: maybe it’s an investment or a business opportunity. How much would you pay for this box? In other words, what’s its fair market value?

What if it spit out one dollar per hour? Would you pay exactly 24x as much for it then? Or one per week–would you pay 1/7th as much?

What if it’s hard to measure how much money comes out of it–maybe sometimes it emits a dollar, but sometimes you have to put one in. Then what? -m

February 09, 2010 04:17 AM

We’re in San Francisco for a month so that my wife Stephanie can get knee surgery from a really, really good surgeon.

Since I’m in his clinic every day, this morning I asked him to take a look at a nagging pain in my knees.

While he was examining my left knee, it made a “clunk” sound.

“Huh,” he said.

“Yeah, it always does that,” I said, “what is that?”

“It’s a clunk.”

He then gave me a really good explanation of where the clunk comes from, which I had never understood in 20 years of clunking. (Apparently there’s a fat pad underneath the knee cap which the knee cap rolls over, and if the fat pad is too big, the knee cap makes a sound when it slips over the hump and clunks into place.)

And then he pulled out his medical recorder and started dictating. “Thirty-two year old male presenting with medial pain and clunk in left knee.”

I thought it was pretty funny, the way he kept saying “clunk,” but when I got home I googled and it turns out that patellar clunk syndrome is an actual medical term.

So then we go to see the physical therapist, and the surgeon tells him what’s up with my knees, and I lie on the table and wait for the therapist to get some supplies.

And after a few minutes he walks into the room with a plunger. Like this:

Which he situates over my knee so as to form a seal, and starts pumping up and down, as if to clear an American toilet (German toilets never clog. Seriously, I have never seen a plunger in a German bathroom).

So this whole knee-pluging frenzy, right on the heels of all that talk about clunking, was in my view pretty comical and I was enjoying it all as a piece of art well worth the physical therapy fee, as long as it didn’t do any actual damage.

That is, until the plunger succeeded in detaching the fat pad from underneath my patella and my knees suddenly felt better than they had felt in years.

The clunk is still there, but I’m looking forward to my next therapy session with these crazy knee geniuses.

I took a plunger home with me, too.

February 09, 2010 04:11 AM

Hey all. Got board, and figured I’d throw this up. Just got done getting my machine set up nice.

Photo after the break

February 09, 2010 04:06 AM

git archive provides an easy way of producing a tarball directly from a project's git branch.

For example, this is what we use to build the Mahara tarballs:

git archive --format=tar --prefix=mahara-${VERSION}/ ${RELEASETAG} | bzip2 -9 > ${CURRENTDIR}/mahara-${RELEASE}.tar.bz2

If you do this however, you end up with the entire contents of the git branch, including potentially undesirable files like .gitignore.

There is an easy, though not very well-documented, way of specifying files to exclude from such exports: gitattributes.

This is what the Mahara .gitattributes file looks like:

/test export-ignore
.gitattributes export-ignore
.gitignore export-ignore

With this file in the root directory of our repository, tarballs we generate using git archive no longer contain the selenium tests or the git config files.

If you start playing with this feature however, make sure you commit the .gitattributes file to your repository before running git archive. Otherwise the settings will not be picked up by git archive.

February 09, 2010 03:57 AM

‹prev | My Chain | next›

Yesterday, I encountered a problem in the pre-release of couchdb-lucene 0.5. By this morning the issue was resolved. So, before anything else, I will check the fix. I grab code updates:

cstrom@whitefall:~/repos/couchdb-lucene$ git pull
remote: Counting objects: 138, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (89/89), done.
remote: Total 112 (delta 49), reused 0 (delta 0)
Receiving objects: 100% (112/112), 23.01 KiB, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (49/49), completed with 12 local objects.
From git://github.com/rnewson/couchdb-lucene
 * [new branch]      gradle     -> origin/gradle
   8e81244..a3513da  master     -> origin/master
Updating 8e81244..a3513da
Fast forward
 README.md                                          |   14 +---
 TODO                                               |    2 +
 pom.xml                                            |   35 +++++---
 src/main/assembly/dist.xml                         |    1 +
 .../rnewson/couchdb/lucene/DocumentConverter.java  |   49 ++++++++++--
 .../couchdb/rhino/JsonToRhinoConverter.java        |   71 ----------------
 .../couchdb/lucene/DocumentConverterTest.java      |   86 +++++++++++++++----
 7 files changed, 136 insertions(+), 122 deletions(-)
 delete mode 100644 src/main/java/com/github/rnewson/couchdb/rhino/JsonToRhinoConverter.java

Then rebuild couchdb-lucene:

cstrom@whitefall:~/repos/couchdb-lucene$ mvn
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building CouchDB Lucene
[INFO]    task-segment: [assembly:assembly] (aggregator-style)
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Preparing assembly:assembly
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building CouchDB Lucene
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
...

Which the proceeds to download a bunch o' dependencies—didn't it get enough the first time? After maven finally finished doing its thing, I have a new tarball, which I install into my local directory:

cstrom@whitefall:~/local$ mv couchdb-lucene-0.5-SNAPSHOT couchdb-lucene-0.5-SNAPSHOT.bak
cstrom@whitefall:~/local$ tar xzf /home/cstrom/repos/couchdb-lucene/target/couchdb-lucene-0.5-SNAPSHOT-dist.tar.gz
cstrom@whitefall:~/local$ ls -l
total 8
lrwxrwxrwx 1 cstrom cstrom   27 2010-02-04 20:02 couchdb-lucene -> couchdb-lucene-0.5-SNAPSHOT
drwxr-xr-x 6 cstrom cstrom 4096 2010-02-08 20:53 couchdb-lucene-0.5-SNAPSHOT
drwxrwxrwx 7 cstrom cstrom 4096 2010-02-04 20:03 couchdb-lucene-0.5-SNAPSHOT.bak

After restarting the couchdb-lucene index server, replacing yesterday's workaround, the previously failing spec now passes:

cstrom@whitefall:~/repos/eee-code$ cucumber features/site.feature:31
Feature: Site

  So that I may explore many wonderful recipes and see the meals in which they were served
  As someone interested in cooking
  I want to be able to easily explore this awesome site

  Scenario: Exploring food categories (e.g. Italian) from the homepage # features/site.feature:31
    Given 25 yummy meals                                               # features/step_definitions/site.rb:1
    And 50 Italian recipes                                             # features/step_definitions/recipe_search.rb:131
    And 10 Breakfast recipes                                           # features/step_definitions/recipe_search.rb:131
    When I view the site's homepage                                    # features/step_definitions/site.rb:87
    And I click the Italian category                                   # features/step_definitions/site.rb:131
    Then I should see 20 results                                       # features/step_definitions/recipe_search.rb:260
    And I should see 2 pages of results                                # features/step_definitions/recipe_search.rb:264
    When I click the site logo                                         # features/step_definitions/site.rb:112
    Then I should see the homepage                                     # features/step_definitions/site.rb:163
    And I click the Breakfast category                                 # features/step_definitions/site.rb:131
    Then I should see 10 results                                       # features/step_definitions/recipe_search.rb:260
    And I should see no more pages of results                          # features/step_definitions/site.rb:167

1 scenario (1 passed)
12 steps (12 passed)
0m6.615s

Nice.

With that fixed, I check my remaining scenarios—I am down to three failures:

cucumber
...
Failing Scenarios:
cucumber features/ingredient_index.feature:17 # Scenario: Scores of recipes sharing an ingredient
cucumber features/rss.feature:16 # Scenario: Recipe RSS
cucumber features/site.feature:7 # Scenario: Quickly scanning meals and recipes accessible from the home page

39 scenarios (3 failed, 1 pending, 35 passed)
344 steps (3 failed, 12 skipped, 1 pending, 328 passed)
1m25.189s

All three are caused by the same problem—the ingredient index feature contains a not-fast-enough reduce. I detailed the map-reduce last year. To summarize, it is not much of a reduce. Last year, with CouchDB 0.9, I was able to get away with it. In 0.10, I cannot.

When run by itself, the ingredient index scenario fails with:

cstrom@whitefall:~/repos/eee-code$ cucumber features/ingredient_index.feature:17 # Scenario: Scores of recipes sharing an ingredient
Feature: Ingredient index for recipes

  As a user curious about ingredients or recipes
  I want to see a list of ingredients
  So that I can see a sample of recipes in the cookbook using a particular ingredient

  Scenario: Scores of recipes sharing an ingredient # features/ingredient_index.feature:17
    Given 120 recipes with "butter"                 # features/step_definitions/ingredient_index.rb:22
    When I visit the ingredients page               # features/step_definitions/ingredient_index.rb:43
      HTTP status code 500 (RestClient::RequestFailed)
      /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/net/http.rb:543:in `start'
      ./features/support/../../eee.rb:227:in `GET /ingredients'
      (eval):2:in `visit'
      ./features/step_definitions/ingredient_index.rb:44:in `/^I visit the ingredients page$/'
      features/ingredient_index.feature:20:in `When I visit the ingredients page'
    Then I should not see the "butter" ingredient   # features/step_definitions/ingredient_index.rb:64

Failing Scenarios:
cucumber features/ingredient_index.feature:17 # Scenario: Scores of recipes sharing an ingredient

1 scenario (1 failed)
3 steps (1 failed, 1 skipped, 1 passed)
0m3.548s

Checking the CouchDB log, I see that yes, this is being caused by a slow reduce:

[Tue, 09 Feb 2010 02:40:48 GMT] [debug] [<0.2409.0>] Stacktrace: [{couch_view_group,request_group,2},
             {couch_view,get_map_view,4},
             {couch_httpd_view,design_doc_view,5},
             {couch_httpd_db,do_db_req,2},
             {couch_httpd,handle_request,5},
             {mochiweb_http,headers,5},
             {proc_lib,init_p_do_apply,3}]

[Tue, 09 Feb 2010 02:40:48 GMT] [debug] [<0.2409.0>] httpd 500 error response:
 {"error":"reduce_overflow_error","reason":"Reduce output must shrink more rapidly: Current output: '[[{\"id\": \"2009-06-06-recipe\",\"title\": \"Yet another butter recipe\"},{\"id\": \"2009-06-07-recipe\",\"title'... (first 100 of 653 bytes)"}

This worked in the 0.9 version of CouchDB because it was a little more lenient with reduces than is 0.10. There is a configuration setting in 0.10 that allows for a 0.9 lenient style reduce. I add this to /etc/couchdb/local.ini:

[query_server_config]
reduce_limit = false

After restarting and re-running the failing feature I find:

cstrom@whitefall:~/repos/eee-code$ cucumber features/ingredient_index.feature
Feature: Ingredient index for recipes

  As a user curious about ingredients or recipes
  I want to see a list of ingredients
  So that I can see a sample of recipes in the cookbook using a particular ingredient

  Scenario: A couple of recipes sharing an ingredient                   # features/ingredient_index.feature:7
    Given a "Cookie" recipe with "butter" and "chocolate chips"         # features/step_definitions/ingredient_index.rb:1
    And a "Pancake" recipe with "flour" and "chocolate chips"           # features/step_definitions/ingredient_index.rb:1
    When I visit the ingredients page                                   # features/step_definitions/ingredient_index.rb:43
    Then I should see the "chocolate chips" ingredient                  # features/step_definitions/ingredient_index.rb:47
    And "chocolate chips" recipes should include "Cookie" and "Pancake" # features/step_definitions/ingredient_index.rb:52
    And I should see the "flour" ingredient                             # features/step_definitions/ingredient_index.rb:47
    And "flour" recipes should include only "Pancake"                   # features/step_definitions/ingredient_index.rb:59

  Scenario: Scores of recipes sharing an ingredient # features/ingredient_index.feature:17
    Given 120 recipes with "butter"                 # features/step_definitions/ingredient_index.rb:22
    When I visit the ingredients page               # features/step_definitions/ingredient_index.rb:43
    Then I should not see the "butter" ingredient   # features/step_definitions/ingredient_index.rb:64

2 scenarios (2 passed)
10 steps (10 passed)
0m4.569s

The reduce seems no the worse for the leniency, so I am tempted to leave the reduce_limit setting disabled. As I decided way back when I first wrote that reduce, it seems perfectly fast enough for my ~1,000 document database. Any alternate that I can conceive would require caching the results separately, which seems silly given that the scenario is taking less than 5 seconds to complete as-is.

I will ruminate on this, but, unless I can think of something better, I will likely leave my CouchDB server configured without a reduce limit and move onto the next link in my chain.

Day #8

February 09, 2010 03:52 AM

February 09, 2010 03:44 AM

Steph's MacBook is affectionately known as the FrankenMac. It was built from the parts of 3 other MacBooks. The other night it started going into what seemed like swap death. Turned out to be catastrophic hard disk failure. Also, in what can only be described as a massive oversight, her laptop was not being Time Machined (whoops).

Anyway, after trying and failing to read the disk back using targeted disk mode plus dd_rescue on another Mac, I ended up swapping the disk into my Thinkpad last night and booting an Ubuntu LiveCD, ran dd_rescue and copied the hard disk image to an external hard drive. The filesystem is a little corrupted, and OSX can't read it... but Linux can! [Gotta say, this surprised me.]

I probably could have just booted the Mac itself with a LiveCD, but after targeted disk mode didn't work, I was worried it might be a logic board failure (let's just say Apple and I have a jaded history regarding logic boards). Also, I forgot for a bit that Macs can run Linux.

Since it did just seem to be a bad disk, I went and bought a new hard disk today, and have just successfully gotten the machine reinstalled and running again. The FrankenMac lives again!

So in summary, I am secretly brilliant, and Steph now has a 500GB USB harddisk to use with Time Machine.

P.S. something I forgot. This is for people who write articles for online Apple magazines: just because something is an Apple filesystem, they are still inodes, not iNodes.

P.P.S. I had to laugh, but I also forgot to give kudos to gnome-disk-utility which popped up a dialog during my dd_rescue, something like "One of your hard disks may be failing". Let's just say OS X loses here, being an OS that can't tell the difference between disk failure and filesystem failure.

February 09, 2010 03:38 AM

In Ubuntu, I uploaded an rng-tools that supports the RNG in TPM devices (my patch is waiting in Debian). This hardware is available on a bunch of systems, including several Thinkpads and the Intel Q35, Q45 and newer main boards.

While most TPM RNGs aren’t really heavy-duty hardware RNGs, they are at least a mild source of randomness. I’ll be using an entropy key eventually, but for now, the TPM can supplement my collected entropy.

/etc/default/rng-tools:

HRNGDEVICE=/dev/null
RNGDOPTIONS=”–hrng=tpm –fill-watermark=90% –feed-interval=1″

After it’s been running a bit:

Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: bits received from HRNG source: 6180064
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: bits sent to kernel pool: 6166144
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: entropy added to kernel pool: 4624608
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2 successes: 309
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2 failures: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Monobit: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Poker: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Runs: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Long run: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Continuous run: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: HRNG source speed: (min=5.207; avg=6.145; max=6.200)Kibits/s
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: FIPS tests speed: (min=66.925; avg=75.789; max=112.861)Mibits/s
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: Lowest ready-buffers level: 0
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: Entropy starvations: 308
Feb 8 19:10:51 linux rngd[13143]: stats: Time spent starving for entropy: (min=3150263; avg=3178447.994; max=3750848)us

And now the kernel entropy pool is high:

$ echo $(cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail)/$(cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/poolsize)
3968/4096

February 09, 2010 03:32 AM

I've been messing with finding a decent desktop backup application this weekend to run on all the family laptops. I thought backintime would do the trick, but it turned out not to work over sshfs (due to the lack of hardlink support) and doing backups to the same disk that holds the data seems like a bad idea to me.

So, today I found an article on deja-dup in my RSS feed, installed it and it's wonderful. It has a built in scheduler and supports all filesystems that gvfs does, but adds nice things like encryption for your backups and it integrates very well with Nautilus.

I can just select a file or folder and revert it to the state of any of the listed backups, which is exactly the functionality I've been looking for.

Just a shame that I didn't find it in the first hours of looking... but I am happy now :-)

February 09, 2010 03:22 AM

Bacula is a backup system with three different retention periods: Volume Job File I set all three to the same value. It is important to note that these values affect only the Catalog. It determines how long a given record is held in the database. For example, if you set File Retention to be 45 days, it means [...]

February 09, 2010 03:08 AM

It looks like we’re in for more snow this Tuesday night into Wednesday. If we get what is expected the scheduled CALug meeting with Jonathan Riddell and Justin Kirby will be postponed until Thursday at best and canceled at worst. There are several moving parts right now that need to be coordinated before the final determination is made.

So keep an eye out here, on the CALug mailing list, my identica account, the CALug identica group and/or my twitter account. Those last three will be the same message across them all so pick your favorite (Hint: The Identica site runs Free AGPL software). The CALug website will also be updated but may be a bit behind the announcements I make via my feeds.

Also don’t forget that the local KDE release party will be at Fuddruckers in Columbia, MD on Friday the 12th. With luck the snow will be gone by then!

February 09, 2010 02:59 AM

One of the best features in CouchDB is the change notifications.

Basically, it’s a Comet style push service that informs you of updates to a database. This is great when you’re building Browser apps because you get Comet for free!

However, one thing that’s missing is being able to write some code in your design document that consumes these changes on the backend and doesn’t depend on another active client. To remedy this situation I decided to write a generic change consumer that you could point at CouchDB and it would find any change handlers in any of the design documents and keep them running, consuming changes, and removing or replacing them when the design document changed.

The best part is that it’s written in node.js, which means you can also make HTTP connections out to the rest of the world and put data back in to CouchDB. And since it’s a service that is intended to stay up indefinitely with only one instance, you can also use setInterval to take care of tasks you would have previously put in cron

All the code is over on github.

To start:

node service http://localhost:5984

To define a listener in your design document.

{ ....

"changes":"var sys = require('sys');
           var listener = function (change) {
             sys.puts(JSON.stringify(change));
           }
           exports.listener = listener;",
}

February 09, 2010 02:35 AM

Those of you who have an interest in the SQL functionality of Qt may have seen my name floating around a bit for the last year or three. I’ve taken over the care and tending of the SQL subsystem. Sometimes you have to make hard decisions. Decisions to prune parts of the garden that you’ve [...]

February 09, 2010 02:34 AM

I have pushed further changes to the rnotes repository. Here is a high-level summary of the changes so far: The script is now called rnotes.py. The script now maintains a list of contributors up to and including Sage 4.3.2. After each release, this list should be updated to reflect new contributors. You can generate a template of a [...]

February 09, 2010 02:06 AM

I do not like it when people tell Web 2.0 sites to send me invitation e-mail. I won’t enumerate the reasons here. But there is one reason for why I don’t like you passing on my address to those sites, which is subject of this article:

Unlike popular belief, the Web 2.0 is not a money-printing machine. It’s a long road until you can actually generate real money with user content. Therefore, some shadey sites are probably selling contact details to advertisers to make ends meet while hoping for the big cashflow.

I don’t have any data to back this up, and I want to change that:

Please tell all your Web 2.0 sites to send me an invitation! Please use an address in the signmeup.madduck.net domain for that, and make sure to include the domain name of the service to which you sign me up before the @ symbol. Also append a hyphen/dash and a random, short string. More on that in just a sec.

For instance, if you are one of those people that believes that letting people know where you are (and have been) at any point in time, tell Foursquare to send an invitation to:

foursquare.com-ponies@signmeup.madduck.net

The reason for the random, short string (“ponies”) is simply so that I can later cross-check that a message receiving spam actually went through a social networking site — I intend to catalog the invitation messages.

Thank you for your time. Keep in mind: the more, the merrier. I’ll make sure to report back on the outcome of this little experiment right here, so watch this space.

NP: Billy Joel: Cold Spring Harbor

February 09, 2010 01:45 AM

You have to admire the sheer market power and dominance that Google has these days. They announce speech-to-speech machine translation on future Android-powered phones – and the whole tech blogger universe goes ballistic in talking about it and likening it to the famous Babel fish of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy.

So why does everybody think machine translation should suddenly work? If you happen to be bi-lingual or even just fluent in more than one language, you know very well that tools like Google Translate can only convey the basic and most rudimentary nuances of any document. Now combine that flawed and unreliable piece of technology with something equally unreliable: speech recognition. What do you get when you mix these two and stir well? Possibly the foundation for a new Tower of Babel, but certainly not the famous Babel fish!

But do not take my word for it. Or rather, please do take my word for it exactly as it is being processed by those two technologies. After drafting this little blog entry I decided to put Google to the test. As a Google Voice user I already get access to their famous speech recognition, so I called my own Google Voice number and recorded this script. I then took the transcription that Google provided and fed it through the Google Translate service twice: once translating it into German, and then translating it back to English for your enjoyment.

Do you now see what I mean… this is the stuff that can start wars…

Transcription of the above text recorded with Google Voice:

You have to. My but she in market power dominance that Google has these days. Again that owns speech touch each machine translations in future, and with Pulte Homes and to hold tech blog universe goes the lease taken talking about it and liking it to the famous people cessation of. Douglas Adams the Hitchhiker's Guide. To, galaxy. Why does everybody think machine translation should probably work. If you happen to be bilingual, or you can just fluent in more than one language. You know very well but tools like Google Translate can only come database. He can mostly. Maintree nuances of any documents and I'll come by and that's log on reliable piece of technology was something equally unreliable speech recognition. Both you get when you mix these two Lindstrom well. Possibly the foundation for a new tell label, but certainly not the same Staples which but then I'll take my word for it. Or rather, please do take my word for exactly as it is being processed by those to Technologies at the draft this little blog entry. I decided to put group of the test, google voice use them. I would get access to the famous Peter deficient. So I called my own voice number and records the script. I didn't took the transcription of Google provided and said he'd through google plates of twice, one is translating it into driving and then translating it back to English for your enjoyment. Do you know see what I mean, this is the stuff, but in stock awards.

Taking the Google Voice transcription and translating it into German produces:

You have to. Meine aber sie der Marktmacht Dominanz, dass Google in diesen Tagen. Auch besitzt die Rede berühren sich maschinelle Übersetzungen in Zukunft und mit Pulte Homes und Tech-Blog-Universum zu halten geht den Mietvertrag aufgenommen, darüber zu sprechen und Zuneigung es zu den berühmten Einstellung der Menschen. Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide. So, Galaxie. Warum alle denken, die maschinelle Übersetzung, sollten Sie vielleicht zu arbeiten. Wenn Sie gerade sind zweisprachig, oder Sie können einfach fließend in mehr als einer Sprache. Sie wissen sehr gut, aber Tools wie Google Translate kann nur Datenbank kommen. Er kann vor allem. Maintree Nuancen von Unterlagen und ich komme vorbei und das ist log auf zuverlässige Teil der Technologie war etwas ebenso unzuverlässig Spracherkennung.Beide erhalten Sie, wenn Sie Mischung dieser beiden Lindstrom gut. Möglicherweise die Grundlage für ein neues Label zu sagen, aber sicherlich nicht die gleiche Staples, die dann aber ich werde mein Wort zu nehmen. Oder besser gesagt, bitte nehmen Sie mich beim Wort genau so, wie es von jenen, die Technologien auf den Entwurf verarbeitet diese kleine Blog-Eintrag. Ich beschloss, Gruppe die Probe gestellt, Google Voice verwenden. Ich möchte Zugang zu dem berühmten Peter mangelhaft. Also rief ich meine eigene Stimme Anzahl und zeichnet das Skript. Ich habe nicht nahm die Transkription von Google zur Verfügung gestellt und sagte, er würde durch google Platten zweimal, ist eine Übersetzung in die Lenk-und übersetzt sie dann wieder auf Englisch für Ihren Genuss. Weißt du was ich meine, das ist der Stoff, sondern in Wertpapieren.

Taking the German translation and translating it back to English yields:

You have to. My but they dominate the market power that Google in those days. The question has come in contact with machine translation in the future, and Pulte Homes, and Tech Blog Universe to hold the lease is taken to talk about it and love it to famous people's attitudes.Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide. Thus, galaxy. Why do all the thinking, machine translation, you might want to work. If you are not bilingual, or you can just fluent in more than one language. You know very well, but tools like Google Translate can only database. He is above all. Maintree nuances of documents and I come by and this is log on reliable piece of technology was something as unreliable speech recognition. Both of you get when you mix these two well Lindstrom. Perhaps to say the basis for a new label, but certainly not the same Staples, which then I shall take my word. Or rather, please take my word for it just like it from those technologies are processed in the draft this little blog entry. I decided to put the sample group to use Google Voice. I want access to the famous Peter deficient. So I called my own voice number and characterized the script. I did not take the transcript made available by Google and said he would be counted twice by google tiles is a translation into driving and then translated back to English for your enjoyment. You know what I mean, this is the substance, but in securities.

But this isn’t limited to just English>German>English translations. You can have as much fun going via a detour into Japanese. Taking the Google Voice transcription in translating it into Japanese results in:

あなたがしなければならない。私が、彼女は市場の力を支配するには、Google、これらの日があります。もう一度、音声将来的に各マシンの翻訳を触れると、所有しているとPulteホームズとハイテクのブログ宇宙保持するためには、リースはそれについての有名な人が停止することand liking話して撮影だ。ダグラスアダムズヒッチハイクガイド』。 、銀河する。なぜ誰もが機械翻訳はおそらく動作するはずだと思う。もしあなたがバイリンガルにするか、またはだけで、複数の言語に堪能することができます。 You know非常によくしかし、ツールGoogle翻訳のような専用のデータベース来ることができます。彼がほとんど。任意のドキュメントのMaintreeニュアンスと私が来るから、技術の信頼性の高い作品には、そのログ何か同じように信頼性の音声認識された。 Both youするときにも、これらの2つのリンドストロムミックスを取得します。新しいが、確かに同じステープルズは、しかし、私はそれを私の言葉を取るよていないラベルを伝えるためのおそらく基盤。というか、してください正確には、ドラフト、この小さなブログのエントリでこれらのtoTechnologiesによって処理されている私の言葉を取るか。私は、テストのグループに配置することを決定、Googleの音声を使用します。私は、有名なピーター欠乏へのアクセスになるだろう。だから、私は自分の声を数と呼ばれるスクリプトを記録します。私は提供される転写of Googleしたことはなく、彼を2回、1つして運転英語を楽しむために戻すの翻訳には翻訳さのプレートのGoogleのだという。私の言いたいことを知って、このものですが、在庫あり賞を受賞した。

Last, but not least, taking the Japanese translation and translating it back to English yields:

You have to do. I, her ability to dominate the market, Google, these days there. Again, and touch each machine in the future translation of speech, and owns space to hold Pulte Holmes and tech blogs, the lease is known to stop people talking about it, shooting it and liking. Dagurasuadamuzuhitchihaikugaido 』. To galaxy. Why Machine Translation I think everyone should probably work. If you or a bilingual, or just can be fluent in several languages. You know But very often, you can get Google tools such as a dedicated database of translations. Most of him. Any documents and I'll come Maintree nuances, reliable technology work is recognized as a reliable voice something that log. Both you even when these two get one Rindosutoromumikkusu. The new Staples is certainly the same, but I was probably based on a label to tell I do not take my word for it. I mean, exactly please the draft, those in this little blog entry to Technologies take my word for it or being handled by. I decided to put to the test group, Google will use the voice. I would want access to the famous Peter. So, I called the script logs the number of your voice. Of Google I never provided a transcript, he twice returned for one to enjoy the English translation of the two drivers is that Google's translation of the plate. You know what I mean, that is, the award-winning stock.

Now imagine any of the above translations being read back to you with text-to-speech synthesis. Wait. You don’t have to imagine that. You can actually listen to it here! This is the German version:

And this is the English version:

And that is why I’m very skeptical about such announcements of speech-to-speech machine translation – even when they come from Google.

February 09, 2010 01:36 AM

Let me start off by saying hats off to Dell for giving us Ubuntu as an option. Any company that supports and contributes back to the community is always a good thing. With all that said I found the ordering experience to be quite frustrating.

read more

February 09, 2010 01:16 AM

I followed through and canceled my DirecTV service today. My MythTV / Boxee setup has been running great the last couple of weeks and I kept DirecTV through yesterday just as a backup as I hosted a Super Bowl party.

This all started due to extremely poor customer service from DirecTV. My high-def DVR was dying in November, specifically the hard drive, as I could hear it grinding from twelve feet away over the sound of my speakers and the buffering and audio / video playback was terrible.

I had to reboot my DVR every 2-3 days, and performance would be better, then degrade. Calling DirecTV, they made me jump through a number of hoops to diagnose it which resulted in it taking almost a month and three phone calls before they agreed to replace it. Now, I don’t own this HD-DVR receiver – I lease it from DirecTV. When I first signed up for DirecTV 11 years ago you had to buy your hardware, now you just lease it from them for $5 / month.

They finally agreed to replace it, but they were going to charge me a $20 shipping & handling fee. My wife runs a small business out of the house, and I know it doesn’t cost $20 to ship one of those, especially in bulk. To say I was livid that I had to pay to get a receiver repaired that they own is an understatement. Each time I called in, they also tried to “upgrade” me on the last receiver that I actually owned – so I’d have to pay them another lease fee. I always told I’d only upgrade if it was a DVR, not just a standard receiver, and they always declined. (I had been able to take advantage of this a couple years ago, so I know they can upgrade old receivers to a DVR).

I emailed and called their customer service to complain – and their response was: “Sorry, that’s our policy”.

So now they’ve lost a customer. I may have had their lowest tier of service, but I also bought the March Madness and NFL Sunday Ticket packages each year, so from a revenue per customer standpoint I was above average.

When I called to cancel, they offered me $20 per month off for the next twelve months and a free DVR upgrade. Too little, too late. When they asked why I was cancelling, I said poor customer service for my HD-DVR experience this past November. So the customer service rep processed my cancellation, and then let me know I’d be receiving a box with pre-paid shipping to send my HD-DVR back to them. Where exactly was this pre-paid box when I needed to get it repaired? (The state of Washington is suing DirecTV over hidden fees).

What gets me is the focus DirecTV, cable companies and cell phone companies have on customer acquisition rather than keeping existing customers happy. Even though I had already contacted them and complained they weren’t willing to do anything about it until I actually cancelled. In my opinion, they need to keep a balance between these two groups of customers. This wasn’t the first customer service incident I’ve had with them over the years, but enough was enough. Thanks to innovations like Boxee I can make up some (but not all) of the content I’ll be missing from going over-the-air only. A loyal customer will pay dividends – do you think I’ll be recommending DirecTV to friends in the future?

The Mutliplayblog today published the results of a survey measuring customer satisfaction levels in satellite, cable and telco TV subscriptions:

Low Perceived “Value for Money” among all Digital Pay TV customers

Virtually across the board—and irrespective of platform—respondents reported low satisfaction in the metric of `Value for Money.’ There was very little measurable difference by platform among respondents, and in all cases, fewer than 22% of respondents felt the service “exceeded” or “greatly exceeded” expectations of value for money.

This is among the most important findings of study, as it underlines the vulnerability of pay television in its current state. Indeed, in a report published in 2008, we found that over 50% of US digital pay television customers would be willing to scale back or completely drop their television service if household budgetary circumstances dictated.

I highly recommend reading the rest of the blog post, as these companies are at a tipping point. We’ve seen it in the music industry, the video industry is feeling it, and now pay TV services will be feeling the pressure as technological innovations will put their business models at risk. Will they embrace their customers and these new technologies or will they become extinct? First they need to look in the mirror and see if they’re keeping their existing customers happy before trying to sign up more. And I’ve already had a few people ask me about my setup and express interest in ditching pay TV…

February 09, 2010 01:12 AM

The following is a guest post from Chelsea Novak, Marketing and Fundraising Manager at the Mozilla Foundation

A few add-on authors have asked about directing contributions to the Mozilla Foundation. You definitely can- if you’re an add-on author and
interested in directing your contributions to the Mozilla Foundation, it’s simple and easy to do. Just set the PayPal e-mail to accounting@mozilla.org and contributions to your add-on will be directed to the Mozilla Foundation PayPal account.

You can add the following text to your add-on description so that contributors know where their money is going:

“All contributions for this add-on go to the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla promotes openness, innovation and participation on the Internet. Learn more at www.mozilla.org/foundation.”

If you have any questions about the Foundation or our activities, please contact us at donations@mozilla.org or ping us in the #foundation IRC channel.

ShareThis

February 09, 2010 01:08 AM

I'll try and post these regularly when I make major additions/removals.

drm-radeon-testing is the cutting edge KMS radeon branch, it is going to be rebased and things will be added/removed as they are worked on by developers. So you can base patches on it but you should talk to the developer who owns the area first.

git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/airlied/drm-2.6.git drm-radeon-testing

I've just pushed a rebased tree now with the following:

latest i2c algo + hw i2c engine code + all fixes squashed: This adds support for hw i2c engines found on radeons and
exposes them + sw i2c buses to userspace so i2c tools can use them. (agd5f).

pll algorithm reworking + quirks: cleans up the code to allow for the selection of the old pll algorithm on some hardware. (agd5f)

pm support so far: Adds all the current PM patches - just does engine reclocking so far using the power tables from the BIOS. (Zajec/agd5f)

Evergreen (Radeon HD 5xxx) support: basic KMS support for the evergreen range of devices - no irqs or accel yet. (agd5f)

radeon unlocked ioctl support (airlied)

bad CS recording (glisse)

misc cleanups/fixes - Dell/Sun server support ported from userspace hopefully.

The tree did contain Jerome's r600 CS checker but I've dropped it for now at his request as he has newer patches
in testing.

February 09, 2010 01:07 AM

Last week was our first week in our new office in Old Downtown Oakland. It's a really neat area with lots of restaurants and bars, and hardly any murders.

Oh yeah, we've changed our name to Couchio. Our new blog will be here http://blog.couch.io/ soon.

Our office:

Our office manager Claire:

Chris and Mikeal:

Claire and Jan:

Nitin:

Super Awesome Art by Julie Armbruster:

Me:

My Office:

So far we are really disorganized and discombobulated. But I'm are working on it! I even bought Management for Dummies. Things will be running smoothly in no time ;)

Also we are looking hard for someone to help us offer CouchDB support and hopefully build a whole support organization. Email me damien@couch.io if you are interested or know someone who is.

February 09, 2010 12:40 AM

I hope a few people wondered why my blog looked a little bit neglected in the past few months. Well finally I can say that I have been busy with several larger projects I was not supposed to talk about.  For two projects I am involved in there are related press releases from our customers and business partners.

One project is the Linux port to the Höft & Wessel skeye.pos mobile – I really like the press release because it mentions the fact the supplied devices are running Linux and what the devices are used for. The filesystem on these devices is built with OpenEmbedded and is based on an older Angström release.

The other big project is closely related to both my job for kernel concepts and OpenEmbedded which is one of my favourite open source projects. The µCross distribution will support chip- and device vendors who are going to ship Linux-based solutions. The main idea is to combine the power OpenEmbedded and its large community with a good portion simplicity and a few additions. I do not want to mention too many boring details here so I will just introduce the basic concept: The idea is to offer customers binary packages matching their target architecture, matching toolchains and tools for assembling and configuring filesystem images for their devices.

There is not really an offical announcement yet but one of our business partners just announced a nice SBC module which will come with a µCross-based SDK. The TK71 is a QSeven format module powered by a Marvell 88F6281 SoC (Sheeva core based).

A third project that gained some love is the updated Linux port to the Toshiba Topas910 and TopasA900 boards. I am trying to maintain an upstream compatible and up to date Linux port to these devices here – for the people who do not want to use several year old kernels or this strange Aura stuff.  The latest achievement is that I got some patches to make NAND flash work which is vital for the TopasA900 because its small NOR flash can’t keep a decent filesystem image with GUI.

Ok now I’m done with showing off and I should return to do something useful… such as writing a short report about FOSDEM!

February 09, 2010 12:36 AM

Given that they occur on the same continent 2 months apart, many people are confused by PostgreSQL East vs. pgCon. Let me run down the comparison so that people can be clear on what each offers (and go to both, of course!):

February 09, 2010 12:02 AM

I'll try and post these regularly when I make major additions/removals.

drm-radeon-testing is the cutting edge KMS radeon branch, it is going to be rebased and things will be added/removed as they are worked on by developers. So you can base patches on it but you should talk to the developer who owns the area first.

git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/airlied/drm-2.6.git drm-radeon-testing

I've just pushed a rebased tree now with the following:

latest i2c algo + hw i2c engine code + all fixes squashed: This adds support for hw i2c engines found on radeons and
exposes them + sw i2c buses to userspace so i2c tools can use them. (agd5f).

pll algorithm reworking + quirks: cleans up the code to allow for the selection of the old pll algorithm on some hardware. (agd5f)

pm support so far: Adds all the current PM patches - just does engine reclocking so far using the power tables from the BIOS. (Zajec/agd5f)

Evergreen (Radeon HD 5xxx) support: basic KMS support for the evergreen range of devices - no irqs or accel yet. (agd5f)

radeon unlocked ioctl support (airlied)

bad CS recording (glisse)

misc cleanups/fixes - Dell/Sun server support ported from userspace hopefully.

The tree did contain Jerome's r600 CS checker but I've dropped it for now at his request as he has newer patches
in testing.

February 08, 2010 11:58 PM

The RunnerManager interface in libplasma which powers KRunner (among other interfaces) was designed to allow plugins a-plenty so that one search term could be matched in "real time" by several different components, each one looking for answers in different ways or places. This isn't a particularly unique design by any means, and the concept can be seen in many search interfaces out there.

A "run command" app faces a challenge with this sort of design: in usage, one expects the interface to appear "instantly" when called up and remain responsive during use. This isn't the web where pages can take significant fractions of a second without anyone caring or where we can stack dozens/hundreds/thousands of servers behind your queries to offer mindcrushing amounts of compute power to chew through whatever gets thrown at it. No, we have to be fast with limited resources while looking in all kinds of places. Basically, KRunner has be as responsive as the KDE 3 minicli while doing orders of magnitude more processing. Interesting problem.

To address the problem we made the query plugins, or "runners", multi-threaded even when we only had 2 of them. This ended up involving lots of queue management, but Threadweaver made that as easy as possible. We got rid of many locks as development went on, improving interactivity, and eventually ended up introducing the concept of a query "session". In KRunner, a session starts when the user interface is shown and ends when it is hidden. Runners are given the opportunity to set what they need during searching up at that point. Later, when the session is over, they can tear down all of that allowing us to conserve resources and not wake up KRunner every time a window twitches. This also helped speed up querying in some cases as it meant moving initialization routines that were being run in some cases on every keystroke to once-per-session.

The prep and teardown for sessions is not multithreaded, however. Or rather, the signals that a session is about to begin and end are not. This gives runners some comforting guarantees as to their ability to manipulate pixmaps or x.org information (things that can not be safely done from outside the main application thread) as well as to the order of events: prep, querying, teardown is a guaranteed order.

The new issue that query sessions brought was that some runners have grown time consuming code that is run during session preparation. There were a handful of runners that were taking 20-80 milliseconds each every time the user interface was to be shown. That may not seem like much, but it quickly added up to over 150ms on my dual core 2Ghz laptop which is very noticeable to the human eye. Since this code was running in the main application thread, popping up the KRunner window felt really slow. The question was: which runners were responsible for this and why? Some profiling was in order!

So I popped a small three-line patch into libplasma that measured how long each runner was taking during session preparation. The problem plugins were immediately highlighted. So I went through each of those and did some profiling to see where they were spending their time and pushed code around until the prep time was more reasonable. Most of the work was taking synchronous operations and making them asynchronous. At this point, none of the runners on my system take more than 1-2 milliseconds to prep, which means instead of waiting 0.15 seconds for something to happen after I press Alt+F2, it appears almost immediately. The difference is very noticeable and very pleasing.

What's interesting is that, with one exception, none of the runners are doing any less processing. In fact, in a couple cases they are doing a little more (though nothing to write home about), but the result is something that feels much smoother and more pleasant to use.

I backported the results after testing to the KDE SC 4.4 branch. I don't think the improvements will make it into 4.4.0 (it's already tagged and being packaged) but should be in the 4.4.1 release at the latest. So if you have been finding KRunner sluggish to appear and build from sources, try updating kdebase/workspace/plasma/generic/runners/ and kdeplasma-addons/runners/ and see if things improve after a restart of KRunner.

February 08, 2010 11:39 PM

February 08, 2010 11:29 PM

Normally you would not call something a load test if there are just 40 user connections opened to the server.

This time, however the Tigase was running on the mobile phone which is itself an interesting achievement. One thing, however is to just run the application and another is to actually make it do something useful.

The Tigase running there was just the standard version you can download from the website, no single line of code was changed. And also the N900 was running all the standard applications as a fully functional mobile phone.

The only change I made to the phone was installation of the JRE and Bash shell, the rest remained unchanged and none of applications running on the phone was stopped.

All the connections to the server were established via mobile network and all the connections were encrypted with TLS.

read more

February 08, 2010 11:16 PM

My wife strongly dislikes the new Firefox 3.6 tab behavior (where tabs opened from links appear immediately to the right of their parent tab, instead of at the extreme right of the tab bar).

I do like the new behavior, because by keeping related tabs closer together, it reduces the amount of time I have to spend interacting with the tab-bar scroll buttons (my least favorite UI element in all of Firefox).

She dislikes it for consistency reasons: when you open a new blank tab, it still appears at the far right. So now tabs can appear in two different places, depending on where you opened them. It violates the principle of consistency, which is generally considered one of the most important UI principles. This inconsistency hasn’t really bothered me personally. I’m not sure why; maybe it’s because opening a tab through a link, and opening a new blank tab, feel like different actions to me. There’s a difference in what I’m thinking about. But I can certainly understand how it feels like a consistency violation to other people.

My wife also doesn’t like that there’s no way to change Firefox back to the old behavior without going through about:config. (If you’re interested: type “about:config” in the location bar and hit enter, then do a search for a preference named browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent and set it to True or False, as you like.)

February 08, 2010 11:11 PM

In January, FSFE was awarded the Theodor Heuss Medal as a "trendsetting organisation". This recognition for the hard work of the past years was a good start into the new year.

February 08, 2010 11:00 PM

So it seems Jaroslaws post at [1] caused some discussion on the pros and cons of shipping a library internally.

Its likely that Kexi will switch to using the system SQLite (especially as not doing so could cause Kexi not to be distributed by some major distros! ;).

Ive already asked the Mandriva maintainer to use the SECURE_DELETE option, and its been comitted [2]. Ubuntu, Debian, and i think Fedora already use this option.

So what are the options used by other distros? We probably need to build up a wiki page of the options used by different distros, so we can be sure of being compatible with all.

[1]http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/4156
[2] http://svn.mandriva.com/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/packages/cooker/sqlite3/current/SPECS/sqlite3.spec?view=log

February 08, 2010 10:55 PM

After just a few weeks, SourceForge has backed off its policy of imposing a blanket ban on all users trying to access the site from countries on the U.S. "banned" list. Instead, it announced on Sunday that it's putting the decision in the hands of each project that hosts on the site.

According to SourceForge's Lee Schlesinger, the company has no way of knowing which projects should or shouldn't trigger a block. So it will leave that up to the individuals running the project:

Read the rest on OStatic

February 08, 2010 10:45 PM

Today we are officially marking the transition of mb_server (that’s the code name for the MusicBrainz Server – the website) from Subversion to Git. This is now hosted at git.musicbrainz.org, and the “musicbrainz-server/core.git” repository contains the stable and unstable development branches (named master and next, respectively). If you are just interested in setting up MusicBrainz locally, [...]

February 08, 2010 10:37 PM

Am kommenden Donnerstag, den 11.02.2010 findet wieder ein öffentlicher Vortrag im Mayflower Büro in München statt (Mannhardtstraße 6, S-Bahn Isartor).
Beginn ist um 18:00 Uhr, Thema des Vortrags ist "Continuous Integration und Cruise Control im Projekteinsatz"

Sebastian Springer zeigt wie man Continuous Integration in PHP-basierten Entwicklungsprozessen einsetzen kann, insbesondere mit dem CruiseControl Framework.

Die "Donnerstags-Vorträge" werden sowohl in München als auch in Würzburg gehalten. Bei Interesse einfach das Blog beobachten, um auf dem Laufenden zu bleiben!
Wir freuen uns auf viele Teilnehmer!

February 08, 2010 10:35 PM

A few add-on authors have asked about directing contributions for add-ons to the Mozilla Foundation. You definitely can! If you’re an add-on author and interested in directing your contributions to the Mozilla Foundation, it’s simple and easy to do. Just set the PayPal e-mail to accountingATmozilla.org and contributions to your add-on will be directed to the Mozilla Foundation PayPal account.

You can add the following text to your add-on description so that contributors know where their money is going:

“All contributions for this add-on go to the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla promotes openness, innovation and participation on the Internet. Learn more at www.mozilla.org/foundation.”

If you have any questions about the Foundation or our activities, please contact us at donationsATmozilla.org or ping us in the #foundation IRC channel. Thanks to Nick and Shawn for this idea!

February 08, 2010 10:28 PM

February 08, 2010 10:15 PM

Watching a new Nena video today on VIVA, I realized that a) she's hot for her age but makes crap music and b) I really need an evil-bunny-man costume.


Naturally, that made me think of Jono's wonderful costume (not to mention the effects it had on the ladies and other random people on the street).


We should make a rule that in order to get Ubuntu membership you need to have a pic of yourself as your alter-ego.

February 08, 2010 10:14 PM

Dear all digiKam fans and users!

The ui of the picasaweb exporter gains some love and is refreshed in current trunk. Its look now fits to other kipi export plugins with imagelistview support showing you the current processing element and a non-modal progressbar to let you work on your next photos while uploading.

Besides the exporter, a basic importer has been added, to let you download all your favourite albums.

read more

February 08, 2010 10:05 PM

Before I start – no, this isn’t a Star Wars post Sorry!

I currently have an iPhone, and no, I’m not ashamed to admit it, though it is a little awkward that I can’t sync it with my desktop. I’m also not ashamed to admit that I love it, I really do. But as with a lot of things, I find the Apple design of the phone a little restrictive. Sure it’s polished, and it looks sleek and sexy (to some at least), but I just can’t help feeling that I’d prefer an Android phone.

I’ve been looking, albeit briefly, at what Android phones are available on the UK market. Out of the choices, I think I’d prefer a Nexus One, though as far as I’ve seen – they’re Vodafone exclusive, and I’m on an O2 contract, so it’s a no-go. I’d love to hear from some of you guys that have Android phones, and what phones they are, because I’m definitely in the market!

February 08, 2010 10:04 PM

Last week we sent out the second issue of about:hacks, Mozilla’s newsletter for web developers.

Here are highlights from the topics covered in this new issue:

• Firefox 3.6 released: what’s new, how to give feedback
• Firefox for the Nokia N900 with Weave Sync released
• Developer Tools: Firebug 1.5
• Demos: an HTML5 image editor and uploader, a WebGL demo
• Behind the Scenes: Firefox release timeline, experimenting with sound and light
• New on MDC: Firefox.next, WebGL docs
• Hacks blog redesign

If you do not subscribe to about:hacks, you will find the second issue in the archives. If you enjoy the content, consider subscribing to make sure you receive the third issue, coming in March.

Finally, we’d love to get your feedback on the newsletter: what do you like, what would you change, what topics would you like us to cover. Please take a minute to fill out the feedback form.

February 08, 2010 10:02 PM

The Floyd-Warshall-Roy algorithm is an algorithm for finding shortest paths in a weighted, directed graph. It allows for negative edge weights and detects a negative weight cycle if one exists. Assuming that there are no negative weight cycles, a single execution of the FWR algorithm will find the shortest paths between all pairs of vertices. This [...]

February 08, 2010 10:01 PM

As you may or may not know, Ubuntu has a “membership” available to anyone who has shown significant contributions to Ubuntu. This can be in many ways, not just developing. Being an Ubuntu Member has a few perks that come with it. One of these is that you get an @ubuntu.com email address. This address forwards to your email address which you define on in your Launchpad account. I recently received the honor of being accepted as an Ubuntu Member, and as such, now have an @ubuntu.com email address. (chrisjohnston AT ubuntu dot com)

The thing about my new email address is that I can only receive mail using it. Ubuntu doesn’t have a way for me to send mail using it. Luckily Google’s Gmail has a way for me to set up my account to where I can send mail from either my regular email address or from my @ubuntu.com email address. This is great, except.. I have an iPhone, and I quite frequently will check my email on my iPhone, which creates an issue when I want to reply to something from my @ubuntu.com email address, because the iPhone doesn’t know that Gmail is setup to allow me to send email from both my regular email address and my @ubuntu.com email address, so I either can’t respond until I get to a computer, or I have to respond using my personal email address.

Joeb454 from the Ubuntu Beginners Team and myself were discussing using our @ubuntu.com email address on mailing lists and the lack of being able to respond the the mailing list with our @ubuntu.com addresses from our iPhones. After a little bit of searching on the internet, I was able to come up with a working solution on how to send email from an @ubuntu.com email address. To do this, you are going to create a dummy POP account on your iPhone with your @ubuntu.com email address, which will login and send the email through your personal gmail account.

Here are the instructions:

Go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Add Account

Click Other

Add Mail Account

Fill out the appropriate information and click save. (Note: Put your @ubuntu.com email address in the Address field)

Select POP for the type of server.

Incoming Mail Server:
Host Name: pop.gmail.com
User Name: your @ubuntu.com email
Password: doesn’t matter.. Make something up

Outgoing Mail Server:
Host Name: smtp.gmail.com
User Name: your Gmail address (NOT your @ubuntu.com email address)
Password: Your Gmail password

Click Save

It will display an error saying POP account verification failed.

Click OK

Click Save again

Now it says This account may not be able to send or receive emails. Are you sure you want to save?

Click Save

That’s it as far as setup. Now when you open the Mail App, you will see your personal email address and your @ubuntu.com email address. The @ubuntu.com is a dummy address, and opening it will do nothing for you. Plus you will get an error.

To send mail from your @ubuntu.com email address, start a new email.

Click on your email address in the “Cc/Bcc, From:” line to expand the different fields.

Now click on your email address in the “From:” line.

Select your @ubuntu.com email address

Now fill out the rest of the email like normal and hit send. You can see that your @ubuntu.com email address is in the From line.

I hope this works well for you. Any comments or questions please feel free to post on my blog!

February 08, 2010 09:54 PM

Following Libcaca 0.99beta17 release (including plenty of new stuff like dirty rectangle framework, troff output, php and java bindings, triangle texture mapping), I uploaded today the first package of neercs into Mandriva Cooker.

Using the power of my new laptop I also captured a video demonstrating process grabbing (ogv, Youtube), and one showing the cube effect (ogv, Youtube).

Process grabbing still only works under Linux x86/x86_64 so help to port it to *BSD, OSX, Windows, Hurd and other Linux architectures is welcome.

neercs is still experimental so actually all tests and bug reports are welcome (patches too of course)

February 08, 2010 09:54 PM

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 05/2010 (February 1 - 7, 2010):

• Releases:
  I prepared SeaMonkey 2.0.3 builds, which are now available on FTP as well as the beta update channel for testing by our community, offering well over 100 bug fixes. If things go well, we should be able to release this update in sync with Firefox 3.5.8 on February 16th.
  The 2.0.x nightlies now carry a 2.0.4pre version number, but we have no firm schedule for the following updates yet (will coordinate with Firefox, possibly also Thunderbird drivers on that).
  Work on 2.0.3 also included putting up a first version of the release notes.
  I also tried to let the release process generate 64bit builds for Linux this time, those are fully experimental and will only appear as "contributed" builds though, they have no official status at all.
• Build Infrastructure:
  The move of our core buildbot master code to a shared location could be completed, Thunderbird will look into using the same code in the future and we closely mirror the Firefox setup now, making it easier for people patching their side to fix ours as well (and the other way round).
  Revision reporting on packaged tests is now both generic and respecting applications that are built from different repositories as the platform (like SeaMonkey or Thunderbird).
  Additionally, I continued working with Mozilla teams to get SeaMonkey data up on the graph server, which needed a firewall rule and a correction on the staging server's database, but testing looks good now and we should be able to go live on the real server soon.
• Download Progress Windows:
  I created screen shots of some additional proposals for improving the progress windows, requested ui-review on them to see which one wins out with our "UI tsar", and finally implemented the winning proposal in a patch, which should be very close to positive review by now.
• Build System, Packaging:
  After a few runs on the Mozilla Messaging try server, I could finalize the patch for merging our package manifests and also make Mac use a manifest, get reviews and check it in.
  Another patch I worked on is about making branding usage fit Mozilla standards more closely, which should also ease the life of people wanting to ship suite versions with a different branding than the official "SeaMonkey" trademark designs.
  Some discussions about build system variables reminded me that I should re-test and attach the papering-over patch for mailnews Qt port bustage which I've had locally for quite some time now.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Starting with SeaMonkey 2.0.3, the language packs are marked compatible with all 2.0.* versions.
  Also with this release, Japanese is joining the collection of officially available localizations.
  This was also the first time I played with and used the new L10n sign-off dashboard for a release - further opt-ins / sign-offs for SeaMonkey 2.0.x will all run through this tool now. See the m.d.l10n thread for more details on using this tool.
• Various Discussions:
  2.1 planning discussions, Alpha 1 and further steps for 1.9.3, Gecko 1.8.1.24 and SeaMonkey 1.x EOL, KompoZer integration work, new machines, FOSDEM, places history changes, module ownership, mozilla.org planning and "Mozilla" vs. "Firefox" websites, EOL for Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" on 1.9.3, langpacks and switching, etc.

I may not have posted a lot of Mozilla-related blog posts this week, but I got around to do quite some actual work. I wondered for a bit if I should post separately about the progress window work, but the ignorance of hard work I have been and am putting into those tiny windows as well as the vitriol from people who can't stand designs being modernized made me decide not to mention this work much. I know that it needed my work to even have progress windows at all in SeaMonkey 2.0 and I'm convinced that my current proposals and work can fix some of the shortcomings I had already know when doing the initial work and that were criticized by users, but a number of those users seem convinced that our team (especially myself) is not caring about what they say at all, so I don't feel like taking their dreams away. And the attempt of humor in the title of my post about the initial work was not well-received as well. In any case, I feel an obligation to improve work I started, but discussions with those users have taken any fun out of working on this part of the code. Maybe my rare tries of actually doing some coding should stay that rare or even stop completely. It's not like I wouldnj't have enough other work on my TODO list.

February 08, 2010 09:40 PM

We've started building and publishing a core set of multimedia/codec related packages at Packman for openSUSE Factory again, now that 11.3 M1 has been published.Currently available packages include: MPlayer, ffmpeg, fluidsynth, lame, xine, twolame, vlc and xmms, as well as the gstreamer stack and a pile of additional libraries. We don't build all the stuff that's in our 11.2/11.1/11.0

February 08, 2010 09:32 PM

Patrick, Joe and I will be talking about/demoing Bespin at the Mountain View JavaScript meetup, this week on Wednesday at 7pm. If you’re in the Bay Area, we hope to get a chance to meet you there!

February 08, 2010 09:31 PM

The Release Engineering:Future bugzilla component alternately inspires feelings of sadness, loathing, and contempt…and that’s just within the RelEng team!

I’m certain most developers first response to having their bug moved to the Future queue is, “Oh, look, my bug has fallen down a well.” Historically speaking, that may not be far from the truth.

What goes in Future?

Why does the Future component make people get punchy? For a long time, the Future component has lacked a decent description, so developers don’t know what it means when their bugs are moved there. Many have started hording their gigawatts in anticipation.

Bugzilla currently has the following small description of the Release Engineering:Future component:

“For longer term projects that have been agreed should be done, but have no immediate plans to so. These are not be part of the regular recurring triage. Advanced planning and placeholder goals for next quarter also go here.”

Despite the grammatical errors, this description is mostly accurate, but what does it actually mean:

• Triaged bugs with no immediate owners go here.
• Sadly, most enhancement bugs end up here unless they will make the core release process better, more streamlined, etc. quickly.
• Bugs that are blocked on longer term projects in other groups go here until there is something for RelEng to do.
• Advanced planning and placeholder goals for next quarter (or later) also go here. That’s pretty self-explanatory.

Remember: this description is for the Future component ONLY. The RelEng team continues to pick up and work on bugs that need to get done on a daily basis.

I’m thinking about how to improve this description, and will get the description updated in Bugzilla once I have achieved some rough consensus. In the meantime, I’ve posted this description of the Future component in the wiki as an ongoing reference.

The (Ever-Increasing) Numbers

At the time of writing, the Release Engineering:Future component has 343 bugs in it. This number has grown steadily over the past year despite having more release engineers on staff, and having made a great many improvements to our release automation and our continuous integration infrastructure.

Our turnaround time for bugs in the Future component is also not stellar. At our urging, the Mozilla Metrics team recently started setting up a dashboard to give us various statistics on our Bugzilla usage. Bugs don’t get fixed in the Future queue, so it’s hard to make truly accurate assessments here, but there are a lot of aging bugs in there. According to the numbers, fully 50% of the bugs in the Future component are older than 1 month and more than 25% are older than 6 months. How this compares to other teams or areas, I can’t say, but it certainly makes me empathize with developers who feel their Future-ed bugs have gone walkabout.

If it makes you feel better in a sadistic way, the majority of bugs filed by RelEng team members go directly into the Future queue. We’re not overly happy about it either.

I have a way? Is that better than a plan?

Things are getting done, though. For example, over the past month, the number of non-Future, release engineering bugs that are actively being worked on has gone from a low water mark of 130 up to over 200 today. For comparison, over the same period, the total number of bugs in the Future queue has slowly crept up from a low of 302 to 323. Mozilla is growing along so many axes that sometimes it feels like keeping the increase in the number of Future bugs to a linear relationship rather than exponential one is an accomplishment in itself.

So how do we stop the increase and start wrestling the Future component back under control?

The first step is triage. Starting this Thursday, February 11th, the RelEng team is going to have bi-weekly triage meetings to specifically prune down the Future queue.

As part of the triage, we’re going to be touching every bug and updating the whiteboard field with searchable tags. Our goal here is to make it easy to find classes of bugs in the Future queue so that duplicates and overlap can be easily eliminated, and fixes can be batched as much as possible.

We’ll be keeping a list of the tags we’re using in the wiki in case you want to follow along.

There are some classes of bugs that we won’t be able to eliminate (e.g. future goals), but hopefully within a few months, we’ll have the Future queue back under control.

It won’t be a quick fix, but it’s one we’re committed to.

February 08, 2010 09:22 PM

February 08, 2010 09:17 PM

Had to approve a email message to foundation-list. Noticed a spam message in the queue from WebEx. Already knew that company, but apparently it is (now?) owned by Cisco. Anyway, there is no excuse for sending this to foundation-list.

The email ends with a sad:

This email may be an advertisement or solicitation. If you do not wish to receive marketing messages from WebEx, please select this link for removal.

Wonder what other solutions like WebEx exists. This as the company I work for unfortunately is a customer of WebEx.

February 08, 2010 09:08 PM

A bit of the summary of things since my last Blog Post - :-/


Home

To say I have been busy the last few weeks is an understatement at best. However, I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing, unless I don't stop to smell the roses in my life - my family, and they are awesome! My husband has traveled continuously for the last 5 weeks, stopping at home long enough to repack a bag, have meal with us and back out - we've missed him. My kids, they are awesome. There have been a few days I had appointments for various things and gotten home after they did, (They are teenagers so old enough to home for a few hours alone) and on those occasions, I have returned home to find they worked together to straighten up whatever it was I had missed doing that day. Gotta luv it when teenagers clean without being told - that is so awesome.

I've been spending more time with the kids after they get home from school, and after their homework has been completed taking time to laugh, watch a movie, talk about the day, play a game . I am not sure why but the kids were even more humorous than usual. I love laughing with them. Of Course they still throw in the occasional joke about "Ubuntu stole my Mom" or teasing me about "fine then I am installing " depending on the point they trying to convey it can range from other Linux distros to windows. That should be in the book of how kids of geeky Linux parents rebel. :-/

So I've been stepping away from my computer for a few hours, especially when they are home from school in the evenings and trying really hard not be on at night while they are still awake. This past weekend I took the kids out to eat, then to the mall, and to the movies. I was doing more than just smelling the roses I was attending to my garden. The fragrance is so much sweeter, when care is taken in the nurturing of them and yes they are in those teenage years so we still have some thorns that snag us everyone once in a while. We laughed, and talked about all the things that are on the calendar and they even added a few more things. In short we had fun!

We are still remodeling the house and due to the weather conditions our Kitchen installation had to be postponed a couple of weeks until the ground could dry out enough for the delivery trucks to make it up to the house without tearing up the driveway. Painting the living room, Kitchen, and dining room will get completed this week.


Events

SCaLE 8x
I have been working with the SCaLE 8x coordinators, and the CA Loco Team for the Ubucon event at SCaLE. I am giving a talk at the WIOS event at SCaLE - A Year NTEU the Ubuntu Community and the FLOSS World. I will also be giving one at the Ubucon at SCaLE - Every NTEU is someone's Guru - How to encourage the NTEU* in your organization. I'm also trying to see how many ubuntu community folks will be there and see if we can't grab a picture while there. I am looking forward to seeing the CA LoCo team members, Akkana Peck, Emma Jane Hogbin, and many many more folks in about 10 days or so.

(NTEU - Pronounced like In-To - stands for Non-Technical End User)

Southeast Linux Fest
I have also been working helping with the Southeast Linux Fest, as there will be an Ubucon there this year as well. The Call for Papers is still open so I don't know if I have been selected for the main event at SELF yet, but regardless it will be a great event and the Ubucon should rock. There will be an Ubuntu Booth at this event as well, any Ubuntu LoCo team who are planning on attending please feel free to volunteer your time to help staff the booth or help with the Ubucon. Please feel free to email suggestions for topics or submit a session for the Ubucon. Please include SELF Ubucon in the the subject line.

Atlanta Linux Fest
I have also been busy with Atlanta Linux Fest planning. There should be an announcement shortly as to the date and location of this event. The numbers from last year have pushed ALF beyond the capacity of all donated space we had. Good problem to have right. :-)

FOSSevents
I have also joined in on FOSScon, and FOSSevents discussions and planning. Though I can't claim to contribute much to these, but I am enjoying participating where I can. More on this in a separate post.

Did I mention I love event planning! :-)


Blogging

Not nearly enough. Though several posts are in some form progression I really need to polish them and get them added to both this blog , which is my personal one, and my You-in-Ubuntu blog, as there are several interviews in need of posting for my - People, Personalities, and Planners: Who's behind your FOSS events? series, Not to mention sending out questions for ongoing events. So you have events related to ubuntu, things that are happening in the community that Ubuntu Users can get involved in and contribute too - let me know let's get the word out. :-)

I enjoy blogging to, I really had know idea all the cool stuff you can find to talk about. Don't you just hate it when life interferes with all the fun stuff you like to do. (just kidding - well maybe)



Ubuntu Projects
Ubuntu Women Project
The Ubuntu Women Project is moving forward. As the team has defined that the "official " team member list will come from Launchpad. Subscribers to the mailing list and forums as well as those who are in the IRC channel are encouraged to join the LP team in order to participate in any voting issues. Also members on the Team on LP who are subscribed to the mailing list are encouraged to do so as well, this is another step ensuring communications of all current activities are disseminated to team members. Once the team defined who would vote, a condorcet vote was sent to the LP team members and a decision on the IRC channels was made. Almost all blueprint goals for the Lucid cycle have been meet and soon it will be time to look toward UDS-M.

The International Women's Day Competition will end in just a few weeks. February 22, 2010. If you are a women or know a who uses Ubuntu encourage them participate in this Competition. There's a great prize pack, sponsored by Canonical, Linux Pro Magazine and Ubuntu User Magazine also included in Jono Bacon's newest book, The Art of Community.

If you a woman in the Ubuntu Community and not a member of the Ubuntu Women Project please consider joining. There are women who's skills range from the highly technical to the just installed ubuntu and everything in between. So whether it's spring boarding into community contribution, developing a talk for an event, planning events, advice on dealing with sexism, or how to encourage women to get involved in Ubuntu and Open Source and more - the Project aims to provide an opportunity for women who want to be involved in the Ubuntu community thereby increasing the diversity in Ubuntu-Linux. Go here to learn more.




LoCo Leadership Series
At UDS-L, the idea for a LoCo Leadership Series was rolled out. It was The goal is to have Chapters 1-3 completed by UDS-M. Chapter 2 has been written now Chapters 1 and 3 need to completed. If you want to help with that email me.

USTeams
Ubuntu USTeams - New interview series targeting approved LoCo teams. These interviews will be posted on the USTeams Website, and the goal is to have the 1st one completed and ready fr March 1st. Looking for a place to help out and like to getting to know people in the community interviewing them is a great way and I already have some questions to start with if you are worried about how to start.

NC LoCo Team
Luv it - Ubuntu on a local level. The team is really working hard on becoming an approved LoCo team. There are now Ubuntu Hours in Winston Salem and a regular basis, and the folks in the Asheville area are looking at setting up regular Ubuntu Hours. Members of the LoCo team are working on building up the wnclug group as well. Right now it has an IRC channel on freenode (wnclug) and a mailing list. If you are in NC and you are interested in all things ubuntu please considering joining the team.

Ubuntu Weekly News
This is my Saturday/Sunday activity. It's fun seeing all the stories folks find to add to the newsletter and helping summarize them. The news team rocks! If you have links to articles or blog posts you would like to see included please send email to: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/Ubuntu-news-team

Oh I am sure there is something else I've been working on but it escapes me at the moment :-) Here's to another awesome week!

February 08, 2010 09:04 PM

The 2010 Linux Storage and Filesystems Workshop has been announced: http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/2/8/221 One of the things I like most about the file systems workshop is the avoidance of canned presentations: Presentations are allowed to guide discussion, but are strongly discouraged. There will be no recording or audio bridge, however written minutes will be published as in previous years [...]

February 08, 2010 08:59 PM

On the Xebee blog there's a recent post looking at test-driven development with the Zend Framework and PHPUnit . They show how they work well together and make it simpler to use TTD to create and test your applications.

February 08, 2010 08:50 PM

I got Reddit to set up an interview with Noam Chomsky, prolific linguist, cognitive scientist, philosopher, activist, and modern day anarchist thinker. The man is a genius, and really knows his politics. He'll be answering the top ten questions submitted by users in a video interview, so feel free to ask him anything, or vote on existing questions you'd like to hear answered. Here's my question: 

What are some of your criticisms of today's Anarchist movement? How to be as effective as possible is something many anarchists overlook and you are perhaps the most prolific voice on this topic so your thoughts would be very influential.

Being an anarchist is very fulfilling for people, and most seem to get lost in self-fulfilling work. Many spend their time learning all they can only to get lost in philosophizing and not take any real action, and there are also many others who are very active but, as helpful as their services are to the community, don't really enlighten any new minds.

In addition, there is the ethical dilemma of living in a capitalist system. Is it better for an anarchist live the way they believe everyone should, even though in this case it makes it harder to convince other people to do so, or to temporarily compromise some ideals in order to reach out to more people? It is easy for anarchists to spend most of their time avoiding capitalism in as many aspects of their life as possible.

Perhaps we just need more Noam Chomsky's in the world. Any advice for those who aspire to be more like you is appreciated! Thank you so much for taking the time to answer our questions, and you're always welcome in the Reddit community if you ever want to join us

Please vote it up, participate in the discussion, and catch the interview when it goes online! 

February 08, 2010 08:40 PM

I gave a three-minute not-actually-lightning-talk-but-let’s-call-it-that-anyway on ECMA-262 5th edition, what’s in it, and the state of Mozilla’s support for it at the Mozilla weekly meeting this week. It’s probably old hat if you’ve been following the standard closely, but if you haven’t it gives a short and sweet overview of what’s new; there’s a three-minute video of the actual talk on the meeting page (start at around 7:00 into the complete video). If you’re strapped for time, view the slides and turn off stylesheets (View > Page Style > No Style in Firefox) to see notes on what roughly accompanied each slide.

February 08, 2010 08:32 PM

You get a T-Shirt!

Thanks Jaroslaw!

February 08, 2010 08:27 PM

This is a quick blog to outline my upcoming job change and how it affects JSR-310.

February 08, 2010 08:25 PM

It's with great pleasure that I announce Elgg 1.7 beta has been released! Grab a copy from the downloads page and start testing!

I would like to remind everyone that while many bugs have been corrected, Elgg 1.7 is still beta quality software and should not be used in a production environment. When upgrading, be sure to back up your current installation and closely follow the documented procedures in UPGRADE.txt. In addition to these instructions, Cash has written an informative series of posts on the community site about preparing for the 1.7 upgrade.

As previously mentioned, Elgg 1.7 enhances security by requiring security tokens on all actions. Plugins that have not been updated to use security tokens will produce a "Form is missing __token or __ts fields" error. For authors of plugins that do not have security tokens, please review the documentation on actions and security for information about how to add tokens to your plugins.

Some of the biggest changes in Elgg 1.7 include:

• Full UTF8 support in the database
• Full text search (as a joint effort between Curverider and the MITRE corporation)
• More manageable user data directories
• A new entity-fetching API
• Working and re-written REST API (thanks to Cash Costello).
• Tons and tons of bugfixes!

I ask everyone evaluating Elgg 1.7 beta to please make bug reports to the appropriate Trac. For Elgg core, bug reports should be made at http://trac.elgg.org/elgg while any problems with extensions should be submitted to http://trac.elgg.org/extensions.

Again, I want to thank everyone who has helped to bring Elgg this far! In the last couple weeks there have been some great bug reports and information from users like Thomas, gv, and Mike Lietz. Please keep up the great bug reports and feedback!

February 08, 2010 08:17 PM

This is my update for work done for the GNOME Foundation. For a higher level overview for what I do as the Executive Director, see What do I do as Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation? or my earlier updates.

Edited a GNOME Journal article. Check out the latest issue with its multimedia focus!

Published the GNOME Q4 2009 Quarterly Report! Thanks to all the teams that wrote things up - we have some great write-ups about some awesome work.

Submitted the GNOME Google Adwords account for approval. I was bummed when the automated response says it could take up to three months to get approval. However, it was approved within a few days! We've been running ads for Friends of GNOME and Women's Outreach for the past week or so. I've played with the keywords and ads some and gotten some feedback from the marketing list as well. Anyone with experience with Google Adwords would be appreciated!

Conversations with several board members about how things are going for the Board and how things are running with the GNOME Foundation.

Many one on one conversations with GNOME Advisory Board members. These were mostly brief chats 20-30 minutes about how things were going for them and how we could best work together. Discussed things like hackfests and GUADEC as well.

Friends of GNOME update for December 2009 and January 2010. We had a stellar 2009! In 2009, Friends of GNOME raised $29,578 for GNOME! That is the same amount raised by 3 large companies. From community contributions. It's enough for several hackfests and close to the amount needed annually for a part time system administrator. In December we raised $2,663, more than any other December. Spread the word!

Sent thank you's to people who donated money to GNOME. Sent a few postcards out for the Adopt a Hacker program. Sent on addresses to others who also owe thank you postcards.

GNOME Jobs. Heard about several GNOME jobs and asked people to post them on the GNOME Jobs board.

Had 1:1 meeting with Rosanna. Still working with her to try to get her workload balanced.

GNOME Board of Directors meeting.

Pinged a lot of people about a lot of things. Including GUADEC sponsorships.

Checked on getting a Euro account for the GNOME Foundation. Found one option that is good for large amounts but has excessive wire fees for small amounts.

Attended the Women in Free Software IRC meeting.

Attended a "Benchmarking Women Leadership" event put on by the White House Project. I was expecting more data about the new report but instead I met a lot of interesting people that may be able to help with contacts for the GNOME Outreach Program for Women.

Started planning a "Meet the Funders" event with other free software projects. We'll invite people from Foundations and other funders to learn more about free software projects.

This week:

• Attending the FOSS Workshop.
• Hoping to meet with Rosanna and a few more advisory board members.
• Blogging about the GNOME Outreach Program for Women.
• Pinging lots of people about lots of things.

February 08, 2010 08:08 PM

I still don’t know how to submit my slides into the FOSDEM website, so I’m linking them here by now:

2 0

February 08, 2010 08:00 PM

Last time, I showed a very hacky way to get Qt 4.6 applications built for Maemo 5 on Mac OS X using MADDE, the stand-alone cross-compilation toolkit for Maemo 5. The newly released technical preview of MADDE fixed some of the issues (bugs #7821 and #7773) that made Qt 4.6 development painful. Also, I’ve finally found [...]

February 08, 2010 07:54 PM

Novell and VMware are making it easier for independent software vendors (ISVs) to optimize their applications for SUSE Linux Enterprise and VMware ESX. Novell is the first operating system vendor to offer Unified Certification for ISVs with VMware.

Unified Certification status means that applications tested and certified on SUSE Linux Enterprise within a virtual machine are automatically certified to run in a VMware virtualized environment with no modifications. Participating ISVs will be able to utilize each company’s partner programs, meaning expanded market opportunities through these extensive ecosystems. This offering complements Novell’s VMware Ready status–a certification that ensures optimal performance for virtual appliances built through the SUSE Appliance Program, the fastest and easiest way for ISVs to create and manage software appliances–and deployed within the VMware virtualized environment.

February 08, 2010 07:51 PM

On February 25th, 2010, the Open Video Alliance is holding its first Wireside Chat, featuring Lawrence Lessig. Tune in, visit a screening event in your city, or host your own.

Our partner in Toronto, the Centre for Social Innovation, brings guests McLean Greaves (Zoomer Media), Mark Surman (executive director, Mozilla Foundation), and Brett Gaylor (director, RiP: A Remix Manifesto) together after his talk to continue the discussion about digital media and fair use. Their panel will be moderated by Qasim Virjee of Design Guru, and of course, attendees will have the chance to mingle with the panelists and each other over refreshments after the talks are over. The event begins at 5:30 and space is limited, so if you’re in the Toronto area, hurry over to their site to secure a seat.

Go to our event page to find out about more Wireside Chat locations, or drop us a line if you’d like to host a screening event in your city. Wireside Chat is made possible with support from iCommons and the Ford Foundation.

February 08, 2010 07:40 PM

Hi,

during the Weekend i was in Brussels, Belgium and visited the FOSDEM 2010 !

I was a great experience and a very great conference and great to meet a lot of coworkers and  friends from all across Europe and the rest of the world   !

Also of course Mozilla had a booth at FOSDEM !

Mozilla @ FOSDEM 2010

We got a lot of visitors and was awesome to talk with the Community and have to say the Mozilla Community just rocks !

Also my talk about the Open Source Meetups in Germany, togehter with Florian, worked great and you can find the slides here !

A big thanks to everyone who made this Weekend possible, especially to William Quiviger!

William always at work

He worked basically around the clock on the weekend to make our Booth, Hotels, the Saturday Event etc possible – William just rocks !

- Tomcat

February 08, 2010 07:37 PM

I spent a little time this weekend doing one of the things I've wanted to do for years - eradicate one of the oldest files in Banshee: banshee-dialogs.glade.

The vast majority of Banshee's UI is custom widgetry that is laid out dynamically at runtime. The main window and the preferences dialog hasn't been restricted by Glade for a couple of years, but all the other dialogs were defined in part in Glade:

• Open Location
• Seek To
• Import Media
• Smart Playlist Editor
• Error list dialog (very unlikely anyone has ever seen this)
• Last.FM Station Editor

These were all fairly simple dialogs in Glade -- mostly consisting of a table, some static labels, and placeholders to pack in custom widgets at runtime (e.g. the import source combo box in the Import Media dialog, or the actual query builder UI packed in the Smart Playlist Editor dialog).

Old Banshee Glade Dialogs

These are now fully defined in code, allowing the dialogs to derive directly from BansheeDialog, which provides extra common functionality for dialogs on top of Gtk.Dialog.

The big take-away here is no longer depending on the deprecated libglade/glade-sharp libraries (well, almost -- later this week Gabriel will port Muinshee -- an alternative Banshee client in the image of Muine, but not a core component). Additionally, I removed our dependency on libgnome/gnome-sharp, which is also deprecated.

This means that Banshee 1.5.4 will be GNOME 3.0 ready. The last thing to do is implement a udev hardware backend. We already have partial DeviceKit support, and GIO support. However, we don't take a hard dependency on HAL. The removal of the last Glade file represents the eradication of any hard obsolete GNOME 2.0 dependencies. Exciting!

As a quick aside: what was really nice about the porting from Glade to C# was the use of C# 3.0 features - specifically type inference and object initializers. This permits interface construction using a more terse syntax than available in C# 2.0, yielding improved readability and organization. For instance:

    var table = new Table (2, 2, false) {
        RowSpacing = 12,
        ColumnSpacing = 6
    };

    table.Attach (new Label () {
            Text = Catalog.GetString ("Station _Type:"),
            UseUnderline = true,
            Xalign = 0.0f
        }, 0, 1, 0, 1, AttachOptions.Fill, AttachOptions.Shrink, 0, 0);

Bring it on, GNOME 3.0. We are ready!

February 08, 2010 07:32 PM

A quick introduction.

Rail has joined Release Engineering, and will be based in Moscow.

Some of you may already know him from his automation work in the Turkish and Russian locales for various Mozilla projects including Firefox. Or maybe you know him from his work in openoffice.org, or debian, or pootle. Anyway, he’s been using his skills in automation to make each of those better, so we’re delighted to have another like-minded automation person joining RelEng.

On irc you’ll find him as “Rail”, which is pronounced “ray-eel”.

(Oh, for the curious - he’ll be based in Moscow, as Toronto is “not cold enough” for him right now!)

February 08, 2010 07:31 PM

Hi all,

We're almost there - the release team hasn't slept in days, the www team just went crazy (troy promised to blog about that) and the promo team is running around like the devil's on their heels.

Yes, the next major release of the KDE workspaces, applications and our development platform is just hours away.

And we now need you all to make a big splash. Of course we've been preparing things - but to really make this an event the whole IT world is aware of (and it should be), you all need to help out. Blog, dent, tweet. Digg, reddit, bookmark. Post pictures on flickr, screencasts on youtube or blip.tv. And submit the news to as many news sites as you can - especially the local news sites. The announcement is translated so make use of that (unfortunately, the feature guide is not, but feel free to summarize it of course).

And use KDE44 as tag, please, so things can easily be found!

You will be able to follow the buzz on the revamped buzz.kde.org and of course on our fresh homepage kde.org!

Lydia posted an email about the web stuff we'll be doing, help out if you can!

Exciting times, all, let's make this one rock like we've never rocked before!

February 08, 2010 07:26 PM

One of my new responsibilities as I work with John Slater and the Creative Marketing team on Mozilla.com is to test, improve and optimize our web pages. This joint project with Blake Cutler and the Metrics team is one of many in the A/B testing pipeline.

One of the first pages we're working on is the First Run page.



The First Run page is a huge page for us for two reasons:

1) It's our first impression.
The First Run page is the first page that loads immediately after Firefox is launched for the first time. Everyone who downloads Firefox sees this page, and it's our first opportunity to visually (and verbally) introduce ourselves to a new user.

2) It's one of our only touch points.
We have very few ways to get in touch with our users. The First Run page is the first time we can make contact with a Firefox user to share information, answer questions and differentiate ourselves from other browsers outside from the normal product interactions.

We are currently testing three different designs inspired by some of the most popular sites on the Web:

Design A:


This is the "Task" oriented design, with expandable tabs that open to show more content. This page was inspired by Southwest Airlines.


Design B:



This is the "Tab" oriented design, allowing users to click on tabs to see relevant information. This page was inspired by Mint.com.

Design C:



This is the "Process" oriented page, where users can go through steps to "get started". This page was inspired by the Skype and Digg sign-up processes.

These are just three of the different rough layout concepts that The Royal Order came up with during the brainstorm process to try and improve engagement*. It will take another month or so to finish the initial testing, but there will still be plenty to do! The winning design will need to jump through many more hoops as we test variations of the design to find the best or most "optimized" page before it will be implemented on Mozilla.com.

Big Thanks Blake Cutler and the Metrics team, Steven Garrity, Stephen Donner and the WebQA team, The Royal Order for all their help on this project.

Thoughts? What do you think should go on the First Run page?


[*Improved engagement for this particular page means more clicks on our CTAs (Personas and Add-ons), longer times spent on the page, and lower bounce rates. ]

February 08, 2010 07:18 PM

... or why I mutilated your java package in Debian

This post is especially addressed to what we Debian Developers refer to as upstream maintainers, that is the people who write/maintain the software that we package for Debian. It is meant to explain why, in some cases, Debian Developers prefer to mutilate your work rather than upload it to Debian Archives in a state that gives it proper credit. And to apologize.

These opinions are my own, but I have a faint feeling that I'm not the only Debian Developer working like that, and that this few words could help soothe the relation betwenn Debian Developers and Upstream Maintainers, which can be quite tense some times...

It happens unfortunately quite often (too often!) that I disable (or don't enable) features in programs I package. Exact reasons vary, but they essentially fall into two categories:

• A feature requires code that does not comply to Debian Free Software Guidelines, which Debian cannot distribute. This is a no-go.
• A relatively minor feature depends on other software that are not packaged yet, and in which I don't have specific interest, which means I would not be able to maintain them properly (or it would require too much packaging work and so on...).

When a program has features which falls in one of these categories, I have two choices: either I give up packaging the software or I give up some of the features... For packages for which I care, obviously the second option looks better from my point of view as a Debian Developer.

Java packages are especially affected by this problem, for a very simple reason. Java is one of the few (I don't say only because I'll probably be flamed to death) programming languages which allows very easy distribution of binary platform-independent libraries, in the form of JAR files. Many projects simply reuse and embed JAR files published for other projects in their own JAR files, often without precise references to where the source code can be found. Packaging a moderately-sized Java application often rely on dozens of embedded JARs, which we need to remove from the packages we build (as Debian does not distribute binaries without sources for many reasons), and for which we need to hunt down the original source code and often packaging the original project, which might pull in yet other dependencies and so on... A true nightmare ! That's why it is so tempting some times to simply drop some of the code, possibly write patches to disable references to removed libraries, and be done with it.

Therefore, I would wish to publicly apologize to any upstream developer I've offended by stripping down apparently carelessly their beautiful software before uploading to the Debian Archives; I hope they now understand why I've done that.

Note to users: it is not because one of the features of your favorite software has been disabled by its (Debian) maintainer that you need to turn away from Debian ! Rather, file a bug report against the package. You'll get the reasons why the feature was disabled, and you have a chance to convince the maintainer to switch it back on.

February 08, 2010 07:18 PM

The world greatest FLOSS event take place on 24th of April. openSUSE Ambassadors from LATAM dont forget to participate on FLISOL!

February 08, 2010 07:13 PM

I didn’t come up with this idea, but the manner in which it is being expressed is mine. The idea itself is a very old one and has been expressed many times and ways across many ages.

Censorship steals from people the opportunity to exchange error for truth, whether it is one who is being censored at the hands of the masses or the masses being censored at the hands of one. Silencing the expression of ideas necessarily prohibits any exchange of ideas in either direction. Regardless of which side may be embracing truth, censorship forbids the other from receiving it by breaking down communication. It also prohibits both sides, when wrong, from having their ideas adjusted through discourse.

Share and Enjoy:

February 08, 2010 07:06 PM

For the past two months participants in Mozilla’s Jetpack 4 Learning Design Challenge have worked on Jetpack prototypes to turn the open web into a rich social learning environment and explore new possibilities for learning online. Today 10 teams were selected to participate in a hands-on Design Camp. The Jetpack 4 Learning Design Challenge is sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The selected Jetpacks support a wide range of learning activities. They help users learn foreign languages, support the development of sophisticated web-skills or turn the web into a quiz engine. A list of finalists (and all Jetpack prototypes) can be found on the Mozilla Wiki:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Education/Projects/JetpackForLearning

The Design Camp in March will give the selected teams an opportunity to complete their prototypes with support from some of the world’s foremost Jetpack experts. The event is co-organized by Aspiration. An overall winner of the Jetpack 4 Learning Design Challenge will be selected during the camp and announced at the Mozilla SXSW event.(*)

The Jetpack 4 Learning Design Challenge uses an innovative combination of competition, training, and workshop to build skills in web development and drive innovation for learning on the open web. Online seminars provided participants with the necessary background on extension development and Jetpack technology. An active mailing list was used by participants to discuss and solve challenge they faced. All seminars and discussion are openly available for anyone to review and help them build their own Jetpacks.

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that sponsors the Mozilla project and devotes its resources to promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the Internet. We do this by supporting the community of Mozilla contributors and by assisting others who are building technologies that benefit users around the world. Through the Mozilla Education initiative we work with computer science, design and business schools around the world to create learning opportunities for a new generation of Mozilla community members and help to drive a new wave of participatory, student-led learning. By doing this we hope to move closer to Mozilla’s broader goal of making openness, participation and distributed decision-making more common experiences in Internet life. More information is available at education.mozilla.org.

The MacArthur Foundation supports creative people and effective institutions committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. In addition to selecting the MacArthur Fellows, the Foundation works to defend human rights, advance global conservation and security, make cities better places, and understand how technology is affecting children and society. In 2006 MacArthur launched its digital media and learning initiative to explore how young people are changing as a result of digital media use and what the implications are for libraries, museums and schools. More information is available at www.macfound.org/education.

(*) The Design Challenge is not connected to or affiliated with SXSW in any way.

February 08, 2010 06:54 PM

Version 0.2 of Progression is now available on Hackage. There’s a few minor changes; here’s the relevant entry from the ChangeLog:

Fixed a bug where the argument to the -c and -p options were not split on commas as the documentation described. Also added in settings for: drawing the graph with a logarithmic Y axis, plot size, and the way the benchmarks are sorted on the X axis.

Most changes to Progression are likely to touch the Config types, which will therefore entail a major version number bump (in accordance with the PVP).

February 08, 2010 06:51 PM

* Cyril Brulebois (kibi) is my hero…

February 08, 2010 06:39 PM

Finally, I got my notebook working again. It seems a full Gnome installation isn’t exactly what my old MacBook needed. So it lay around for weeks, or rather months now, not being used for anything remotely relevant to anything. After all I then decided to get rid of Gnome at least on the notebook and instead installed LXDE… what can I say? It’s amazing. Removing all the stuff I don’t need anyways on this system (even the pbuilder/cowbuilder stuff is gone) made it really fast again. I’m happy now and the vacation can come with my notebook at hand, since it’s running again.

Yet that’s actually not what I wanted to write about. After a three week break due to illness (and, I admit, bad weather — although it still is pretty snowy and icy outside) I’m back on the track. And it wasn’t even that bad. Of course I’m not back on the level I had before but at least it’s about 5.5 km in 35 minutes. For a beginner who just had a forced break from training, I’m quite satisfied with myself. So, I’m running again.

Yay!

February 08, 2010 06:19 PM

Last week, another ISV announced a software appliance built as part of the SUSE Appliance Program from Novell. ROC Software has released the ROC EasySpooler SUSE-powered appliance, based on the company’s ROC EasySpooler core technology and a fully-supported version of SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell. ROC Software joins the ranks of GroundWork Open Source and Zmanda, ISVs who also recently announced SUSE-powered appliances.

Paul A. Scripko, ROC’s VP Business Development, said, “Joining the SUSE Appliance Program and having access to the SUSE Studio appliance building tools and marketing support from Novell helped ROC reduce development time to a matter of weeks and release product to market at a fraction of the usual time required.”

February 08, 2010 06:05 PM

• Luciana was munching on sausage slices. She grabbed the curved end of one sausage, looked carefully at it, and exclaimed, "look, a little vault!".

  I guess that's what she learns in this house.

February 08, 2010 05:52 PM

FOSDEM 2010

Another year over and FOSDEM has come and gone.  It was an amazing weekend, full of interesting talks and meeting people.  With so many attendees on this subject, there are so many opinions on subjects, technology, languages and operating systems flying about it can get heated. It’s also rather entertaining!

Friday night I met up with the Freenode Staffers for dinner, I’ve only been involved in Freenode since last summer, and work on community areas, so nice to meet the folks who do a lot more work than I do.   Followed by the Friday beer event, leaves you set up for the weekend ahead of you!

Saturday morning consisted of me in the lightning talks room, nice way to ease myself into the day after the night before! I popped down to the Ubuntu booth, passing all the others and listening to what was being said, great chatterings.  I brought along some extra Karmic, Kubuntu , Server CDs and stickers as we’d some left over to give out to folks.  Nice to put the faces to the names and chat to people. Always great, even though I am woeful with names!

Popping in and out of talks, and finding people I chat to on IRC to wave hi, and grab a bite to eat with others was great.  I got to bounce ideas off others and get some feedback, which was handy. Saturday night was the Ubuntu Dinner, if there were folks going we asked them to sign up, most did.  Thanks to JanC who organised it, as to seat a large number of people is rather difficult. 18 of us went for dinner, nice to chat to people sitting down,Muharem Hrnjadovic from the Launchpad team joined us, nice for community and non community to meet up a these events. Went to the GNOME drinks meet up as it was close by, but I really needed an early night so homewards I went.

Sunday was the day I’d been looking forward to, more lightning talks, followed by Make your users happy, “cloudify” your app with desktopcouch which was interesting. Afterwards I ran to the Ubuntu Debian talk, but this was wedged packed, I got to hear the first 2 minutes before I had to leave due to the heat and over crowding.

Lucas is both a Debian and an Ubuntu developer and stated that at the beginning of the talk, followed by he had friends on both teams and the talk was being recorded, trying to lighten the humour I suspect as the room was very packed and a show of hands for Debian was rather over whelming where as when it was show of hands for Ubuntu maintaining, it was one other person.

It’s a developer conference so I must admit I found that rather saddening to be honest.  There was a distinct lack of Ubuntu developers there for what ever reason, it’s the largest OSS developer conference that I’m aware of, I could be wrong. You could see the sea of Red Fedoras and Debian kilts, BSD, Gnome, KDE and many more around the conference.  So it would seem Ubuntu should have a larger presence at it.

Afterwards I went to the short presentation from the Mozilla team on WoMoz -  Woman and Mozilla and  then chatted to some of the women involved and exchanged contact details once I explained my role in what I do.  I pointed out their ideas sounded great, and that other groups had done similar, we should pool our resources together. I was even shortly interviewed for the Mozilla team on women in open source, for those who don’t know me, I hate speaking in public on my own, in discussion groups I’m fine.  On my own, I tend to get rather embarrassed and speak even faster than normal, plus I also hate cameras and usually want to punch the person with the camera pointing it at me.

The afternoon was filled with more lightning talks, this time they were from the  Mozilla room, then finally the end talk for me was the Inside StatusNet: How Identi.ca Works.

It was a very enjoyable weekend, I’m glad I went, following the tweets/dents for #fosdem did help to highlight some of the other talks I didn’t get to, which was rather handy.  Lots of the talks were recorded for later viewing.  One tweet that caught my eye was – Debian’s conclusion about Ubuntu at FOSDEM, add that to google and you get the interesting views of the talk which features photos of slides of the presentation, and also a thread

Key Signing at FOSDEM

Patrick and Declan from Ubuntu-ie at Fosdem 2010

JanC talking to Alan from ubuntu-ie

I want the talking penguin

Met some folks and got some hugs

Art of Community on sale at Fosdem

Having a sense of humour at FOSDEM

Tux the friendly face of linux

February 08, 2010 05:46 PM

Haskell Weekly News: February 08, 2010

Welcome to issue 149 of HWN, a newsletter covering developments in the Haskell community.

Hello Haskellers, this week's HWN was delayed a bit in the hopes of making it a bit more substantial. I hate putting up thin HWNs, but of course this must occasionally happen. We have several new CFPs for workshops this week, a new benchmarking package, and some fun quotes. Till next week, Haskellers, your Haskell Weekly News!

Announcements

Call for Papers: Haskell Symposium 2010. Jeremy.Gibbons announced a call for papers for the 2010 ACM SIGPLAN Haskell Symposium 2010 in Baltimore, Maryland; on 30th September.

2nd CfP: LOPSTR 2010. Temur Kutsia announced a second call for papers for the 20th International Symposium on Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation, being held in Hagenberg, Austria, July 23-25, 2010 (co-located with PPDP 2010).

PAR 2010: First CFP. Koen Claessen announced a first call for papers for PAR'10, the Workshop on Partiality and Recursion in Interactive Theorem Provers.

data-ordlist-0.2. Leon Smith announced a new release of ordlist, including a change to the module name and bug fixes.

progression-0.1. Neil Brown announced Progression, a metalibrary which consolidates various existing tools for Haskell optimization (notably Criterion).

HList darcs repo. Oleg He who inhabits all types, but is not _|_, has announced a new darcs repo for HList (and OOHaskell) on community.haskell.org.

Discussion

a beginner question: decorate-op-undecorate. Aran Donohue asked about how to write a function which can 'inspect' inside a datatype.

Translation of Haskell type classes. Enrique Martin talked about some experiments he's done with type classes, and asked some questions regarding optimization related to them.

Category Theory woes. Mark Spezzano asked about resources for learning about category theory.

Blog noise

Haskell news from the blogosphere. Blog posts from people new to the Haskell community are marked with >>>, be sure to welcome them!

• Dan Piponi (sigfpe): The Categorification of the Naturals.

• Roman Cheplyaka: hledger.

• Luke Palmer: Associative Alpha Blending.

• Neil Brown: Progression: Supporting Optimisation in Haskell.

• Holumbus: Hayoo! Webservice API.

• apfelmus: The Operational Monad Tutorial.

• Dan Piponi (sigfpe): Tagging Monad Transformer Layers.

• Darcs: darcs weekly news #53.

• JP Moresmau: EclipseFP 1.110 released, with debugging support.

Quotes of the Week

• lispy|web: This curses binding appears to be terminally broken
• lispy: I did, 'cabal install mage' and it complains about curses
• lament: Just use fix to find the least funny joke
• copumpkin: A monad is just a lax functor from a terminal bicategory, duh. fuck that monoid in category of endofunctors shit

About the Haskell Weekly News

New editions are posted to the Haskell mailing list as well as to the Haskell Sequence and Planet Haskell. RSS is also available, and headlines appear on haskell.org.

To help create new editions of this newsletter, please see the information on how to contribute. Send stories to jfredett . at . gmail . dot . com. The darcs repository is available at darcs get http://patch-tag.com/r/jfredett/HWN2/pullrepo HWN2 .

February 08, 2010 05:43 PM

After a week of initial testing of MaePad 1.0 in Extras-Devel and some very helpful feedback from users, MaePad 1.1 "The Large Hadron Collision" hits the street (or more precisely, Extras-Testing). You can read the list of changes or go straight to the package page to test it.

In other news, gPodder 2.2 "LA X" (release notes on gPodder.org) was uploaded to Extras-Devel at the end of last week. This new release includes the promised UI changes and some other under-the-hood changes, but there have been some minor regressions (broken streaming for example) which have since been fixed in the development repository. Please test gPodder 2.2 (on the package page) and report bugs against it in the bug tracker, so that any issues can be fixed before the next package version.

Again, please report any bugs you find to the bug tracker, and don't go whining in the forums - it's a hassle to search and hunt for bug reports on the web, and your "bug report" forum post might never be seen by any of the developers of any given app.

gPodder 2.2 is of course also available for Maemo 4, and has been pushed into the Diablo Extras repository already. Starting from this version, no Chinook builds will be provided for gPodder anymore, but due to the interpreted nature of Python code, you can install the gPodder package from the Diablo repositories should you really need to run gPodder under Chinook. If you are reporting bugs against gPodder for Maemo 4, be sure to mention "Maemo 4", "Diablo" or "N8x0" in the bug report.

Ready to go into Maemo Extras during this week: Panucci 0.3.9-1 and headphoned 1.6 (thanks to all the testers for taking the time to test, review and rate these packages).

3 0

February 08, 2010 05:40 PM

Something about my Current Status post the other day touched a nerve, and a substantial number of people wanted me to pass on the fact that they’re hiring and might well be interested in Sun alumni. (Hmm... now this piece is provoking “us too” notices. I’ll update, for a while anyhow.)

Of course, I should mention that at the recent Oracle/Sun media event, all the executives we’re wearing “We’re Hiring!” buttons; probably not Sun alumni right now, but lots of people aren’t and we get to be at the top of the list. Here are the rest:

• The Googlers were well-represented; I heard from Denton Gentry (“There are many Sun alumni at Google, and many reqs open. To me Google feels similar to Sun in 1990s”), John Panzer, and a couple others whose tweets I can’t find now.

• From Nuxeo, Stefane Fermigier.

• From Salesforce.com, Peter Morelli (“Why not join the party”).

• From Red Hat, Rich Sharples (“java, virt., Linux — always happy to put a good word in for ex sunnies I know and respect.”)

• From NexJ Systems, Greg Fenton. Greg worked for me as an intern about 100 years ago.

• From Yahoo!, Sam Pullara suggests following @YahooEngRecruit. Mary Smaragdis adds a pointer to their careers page.

• From VMware, Jian Zhen.

• From Mozilla, Rob Sayre suggests visiting their careers page.

• David Van Couvering says his group at Symantec (based in SFO) is hiring too.

• From Accenture, Will Snow.

• From Microsoft, Matt Thompson.

• From Twitter, Alex Payne points at their jobs page.

• From Atlassian (JIRA & Confluence); hiring in both Sydney and SF, says Dave O’Flynn.

• From Joyent, Mark Mayo remarks that, as the world’s largest OpenSolaris installation, they’re particularly interested in Sun alumni.

• From Performable, Elias Torres.

• From LinkedIn, Alex Feinberg, who goes by @strlen on Twitter, which has to tell you something.

• Tony Haile from Betworks says they’re the company behind bit.ly, Summize/TwitterSearch, Chartbeat and Tweetdeck, and are hiring for a bunch of different companies for those interested in the real-time web and social media.

• Robert Hahn points to the careers page for Primal Fusion, “A very young company looking to make a big splash with our semantic technology platform. We're doing a lot of development with Java and Python.”

• From The Collaborative Software Initiative, Mike Herrick, in particular looking for a Core Developer - NoSQL Database.

February 08, 2010 05:20 PM

#i109041# - Database access: Acessing PostgreSQL stored procedures not possible with SQL queries and parameters
#i109045# - Database access: SRB crash in REPORT editing
#i109047# - Database access: crash when opening srb report from macro
#i109050# - Presentation: Impress crashes when switching to another output device via FN+F5
#i109042# - Presentation: Native table : copying text from one cell to another brings back default formatting
#i109037# - Presentation: Office crashes when opening comment
#i109052# - framework: -headless does display windows
#i109039# - framework: ActiveX control shows only half of a template document
#i109040# - framework: OOo has crushed
#i109048# - l10n: changed \" to ' in 2 strings
#i109044# - qa: Distribute OOo 3.2 RC5 as final
#i109051# - scripting: Support exit property
#i109049# - scripting: Support visibility specifiers for type
#i109036# - sw: Bad Export to RTF or DOC
#i109043# - sw: Some Chinese characters crashed writer.
#i109038# - sw: window opens in not existing external monitor
#i109046# - tools: OOo 3.2.1 release stoppers / blockers

February 08, 2010 04:44 PM

Well, FOSDEM 2010 is now over and it all seemed to go pretty well. The PostgreSQL Project was represented well (as one would hope for our second biggest annual European gathering), with the majority of the Hotel Agenda Louise seemingly occupied by database geeks.

On the Friday night we had a database dinner at Les Brasseurs de la Grand Place where we were joined by Sergey Petrunya and Kristian Nielsen from MariaDB. Good conversation, good beer and good food followed later by an aborted attempt to join the FOSDEM Beer Event at Cafe Delirium (it was just too busy) and a successful landing at the Irish pub a short walk form the Hotel.


Saturday morning was the start of the conference itself. We'd hoped to scrounge an extra table (much needed, with the number of people and the amount of swag we had), but unfortunately that didn't work out. Somehow, we managed to squeeze onto one.


The talks started at 1PM in our dev room (which we only had for Saturday afternoon unfortunately). Magnus and Jean-Paul started with report on the state of PostgreSQL Europe, and then it was my turn with my talk on "Developments in PostgreSQL 9.0". Slides and the full schedule can be found on the PostgreSQL Wiki. The dev room was basically packed solid with people sitting on the floor for every talk. Please FOSDEM organisers - give us a bigger room next year!


Saturday night was a late dinner at possibly the slowest restaurant in the world, who clearly weren't expecting too many diners. Food wasn't too bad though, when it finally arrived.

Sunday was spent mostly on the booth and (in my case) in lots of ad-hoc meetings on topics such as the new PostgreSQL project infrastructure thats in development, as well as PGDay.EU 2010 which is being planned in Paris.

Most of us left at around 5PM, with Heikki, Greg, Magnus, Stefan and I heading for the airport. After pizza and a brief scare when Stefan lost his boarding pass, we left for home. Goodbye Brussels, see you next year.

More photos can be found here.

February 08, 2010 04:29 PM

This past Friday, February 5th, WebDevQA held a testday for the new AMO.  Overall, the test day was very successful.    We had 27 people in the #testday channel at the testday's peak.  Participants ranged from eager to learn first time community members to veteran community members.  Everyones testing efforts resulted in 7 bugs and enhancement suggestions being filed against AMO.  I'd like to thank everyone who came out to the test day and stephend and krupa for helping guide testers and answering questions.  If you want more details about the testday, see the folowing links:
 
Testday Details
Testday Detailed Results

February 08, 2010 04:28 PM

February 08, 2010 04:26 PM

I finished reading “Unlocking the clubhouse” on Saturday, finally. The book is only about 150 pages long, but it’s full of useful information about increasing participation of women in computer science.

The chapter that most stuck with me was chapter 6, “Persistence and Resistance: Staying in Computer Science.” I have said more than once, in a tongue-in-cheek way, that Code-n-Splode’s mantra for men who think that we should not have the “dude token” policy should be: “It’s just not about you.”

My feeling is that establishing a culture where female voices dominate, rather than are assimilated in, creates a social environment that’s fundamentally different. And that that difference is *good*. I wouldn’t say that the book totally supports that notion, but it points out situations where women found peer groups that did not conform to a male hacker stereotype, and that foundation of social support helped them stay in their course of study.

The students referred to in the paragraph are undergraduates at Carnegie Mellon University:

Women who accept the prevailing culture as the norm and who continuously compare themselves to this norm and find themselves coming up short are the ones who suffer the most.

The majority of women struggle to find a place where they can feel comfortable in the prevailing culture…

Ironically, it is in this area of relationship to culture that international women may have an edge. The international women do not as readily use the U.S. male hacker as their reference group. Since they are not fully part of this culture, their reference group is elsewhere. Many international students have alternative success norms and social bonds that protect them. Other priorities are dominant, and with these come other scales for self-evaluation.

So, rather than bringing their cultural norms to the hacker culture and modifying it, the international women have their own social structures which exist outside of the dominant culture. “Cultural resistance” was the title for this section, and it’s a great way of characterizing the lack of assimilation.

I have more than a few times heard women-specific groups discouraged because of they emphasize differences that the dominant culture feels should be unimportant. I’m interested in further research that discusses the effects of splinter groups, particularly when they are created for women.

The second interesting topic in this chapter concerned learning communities.

Former University of California calculus professor Uri Treisman (1992) believes that a supportive learning community is critically important for the success of minority students in math and science.

The story went on to describe Professor Treisman’s observation that Asian students tended to socialize *and* study in supportive groups, which tended to help students stick with the courses and get better grades. He established similar groups for Hispanic and African American students, and found across several universities and colleges that these groups helped retention. Our observations and the resulting user group for women mirrors that Professor’s experience.

There’s a special connection created when you live and engage with material in a supportive learning community. They take time to create, and are a bit harder to maintain outside of an academic context (where life, work and diverging interests can be a bit more challenging to coordinate).

Code-n-splode has been fairly quiet about its successes, but I think now is the time for us to start talking a bit more about how well the group has succeeded.

Photo courtesy of DrPantzo under a Creative Commons License.

February 08, 2010 04:07 PM

A while back I submitted a couple of talks for PG-East 2010 in Philly, and over the past couple of weeks I've been nagging the organizers semi-frequently to get some pre-info on whether I've been accepted or not, since flight prices started to climb fairly rapidly. The site clearly says information that the information will be available on Feb 15th, so I can't really complain that the answer kept being "don't know yet".

A couple of days ago, I got a note from Dave pinged me with a message asking if I was approved. Turns out this press-release had been posted (by his company, no less). Which explicitly names me as a speaker at the conference.

Took me two more days of chasing down JD, but I now have confirmation I'll be there. I don't actually know what I'll be speaking about, but it's a pretty safe bet it will be PostgreSQL related.

I call this Time management by press releases. If I could only get it to apply to all meetings, I would no longer need to keep my own calendar up to date.

So, I'll see you in Philly!

February 08, 2010 04:07 PM

If you’ve happened across the GetFirebug.com web site recently, you’ll notice everything has a rather pleasant freshly painted smell. After a much-too-long delay, we’ve finally updated the design and layout for the official Firebug web site, and introduced a lovely new icon by our resident Iconmaster General Sean Martell.

Even with intense competition from tools integrated into other web browsers, Firebug is arguably still the leading web development tool in use, with nearly two million active daily users. Its web site needed to reflect Firebug’s capabilities more clearly. With that in mind, the primary goals with this redesign were to make the official Firebug web site easier to use, more pleasant to look at, and give Firebug more of a traditional software-style layout to highlight its many positive qualities.

GetFirebug.com: Before

GetFirebug.com: After

It’s a fairly straightforward design, so there’s not a lot of interesting production notes to highlight, but here’s some specifics on what went into this redesign:

• The layout is roughly based on the 960 grid system. The original hope was to do the site in a fully fluid layout, but time constrains intervened.
• Headers and pull text are in the gorgeous (and open source!) Tittillium, thanks to @font-face. The body text was originally set in Droid, but due to a legibility issue on Windows machines with text-smoothing disabled, it was switched to the more common Trebuchet MS.
• The pages are build using the HTML5 doctype, with JQuery and the Fancybox plugin powering the modal pop-ups.
• The screencast on the homepage uses the Video for Everybody system to embed the OGG video, with MP4 and Flash fallback for other user agents.
• The homepage blog feed pulls in from the Firebug weblog RSS feed using SimplePie.
• For this iteration, we wanted to switch the site over to a simple content management system, and ended up settling on Perch. It has its shortcomings, but it was straightforward enough and easy enough for me (mostly a designer/UX guy) to implement.
• Sean passed along a few images that inspired the sparkly new icon. Originally, we tossed around the idea of doing something cartoony and heroic, like this lil’ dude, but ultimately decided to go with a more, well, buggier bug.
• Photographic inspiration: Bug 1 • Bug 2 • Bug 3 • Bugs!

It’s been a long time coming, and we hope you like GetFirebug.com’s new set of clothes. The content is currently being updated and will roll out as it is completed, but in the meantime, please kick the tires and let us know what you think.

February 08, 2010 04:03 PM

You can grab my fosdem's slides here http://people.freedesktop.org/~glisse/glisse-fosdem2010.pdf hope it might highlight some of the thing i am doing :)

February 08, 2010 03:54 PM

Another attempt to shorten my list of movies where not having seen them makes me an absolute philistine, according to various friends: Papillon, with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffmann. Ignoring the tragic history behind it (the French penal system in French Guiana during the colonial era — I didn't know about this from school), it's great entertainment. There is a kind of happy end, but nowhere close to what Hollywood does to its stories these days...

February 08, 2010 03:41 PM

TMO member Fake has just announced his latest invention — a laser-cut stand for the Nokia N900.

The 3-piece acrylic or wood stand is now for sale for only $10, $15 if you buy two, and $20 for three (shipping included). Details on how to order, more stand pictures, and the long discussion is over at talk.maemo.org.

5 0

February 08, 2010 03:23 PM

The organization “Bits of Freedom is a Dutch NGO Privacy watchdog. It has been re-vivified in the past years. It hands out semi-regular Big Brother Awards (say, isn’t the estate of George Orwell going to wake up at some point?) for the worst offenses against privacy in the Netherlands. Worth reading if your Dutch comprehension is ok. BoF has garnered some mainstream media attention as well, which offers hope that privacy isn’t completely a lost cause in this country. [Current schemes of nationwide chipcard travel and road-pricing deny that hope] There’s also a “Winston Prize” for someone fighting for privacy, which went to the Euro-MP Sophie in’t Veld. It took me a minute to figure out the “Winston” name, but since I’d read 1984 (it says so right there in my book list) the light dawned eventually.

Anyway, cheers to BoF, and keep watching over your own privacy.

February 08, 2010 03:20 PM

In his recent blog-article: “XPath needs virtual axes. Making XPath more XPathy?” Rick Jelliffe sais:

“I really like XPath2. I would never recommend anyone start with XPath1, unless you were doing very basic transformations with no text processing or data formatting.

But the niggle I have with XPath2 is that it is less XPath-y than XPath1. It does not significantly improve the central syntactical feature of XPaths: the location steps. (The only improvement that springs to mind is that XPath2 did improve the use of parentheses in location steps.) Instead, XPath2 provided much more conventional features like a for iterator. I think these significantly decrease the comprehensibility of an XPath, are anonymous and therefore require may comments to explain them, and fracture the line. To an extent, once you start to use nested syntaxes and iterators, why both using XPath at all?”

Rick gives this example:

find-rep( find-client(//manager/clients/client-ref)/rep-ref)/name

and proposes to improve the expression above by introducing “virtual axes” so that it could be written as:

//manager/clients/client-ref/find-client::rep-ref/find-rep::rep/name

So, curious reader, pause for a while, don’t read below, and think: has Rick uncovered a hole in XPath? 

Here is my answer:

What you are asking for can be expressed almost exactly in the same form (actually I prefer the current XPath 2.0 form of expression).

You are asking for:

//manager/clients/client-ref/find-client::rep-ref/find-rep::rep/name

One can write this in XPath 2.0 as:

//manager/clients/client-ref/find-client(.)/rep-ref/find-rep(.)/name

The current XPath way of expressing this is cleaner -- no need for virtual axes.

This is a feature of XPath 2.0 that is not widely used and known: any function can be used as the current location step. The syntax rules that resolve its use are (at http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/REC-xpath20-20070123/#id-grammar):

[27] StepExpr ==> [38] FilterExpr ==> [41] PrimaryExpr

and the fact that a FunctionCall is a PrimaryExpr:

[41]   PrimaryExpr   ::=   Literal | VarRef | ParenthesizedExpr | ContextItemExpr | FunctionCall

 

Also, consider that the axes in XPath have been useful so far mainly because there are just a few of them. Imagine having to deal with zillions of axes and struggling to remember what they mean. And if everyone can introduce their own axes, then why bother with them at all?

Dear reader, it's up to you to decide... as I have already done.

February 08, 2010 03:17 PM

If you are using Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) and the Kubuntu Beta repository, you may have noticed that the release of 4.4 RC2 broke the PyKDE bindings, which were left at version 4.3.x; for (temporarily) solving the issue, I have rebuilt the 4.3.95 packages from Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) to Karmic, without any modifications, and you can find them on my PPA. I don’t know if the Beta PPA will provide the final 4.4.0 bindings, mine are just for the RC2 release.

Please notice that they are absolutely not to be considered as stable or widely tested or any of this; they just Work For Me, and they may work for someone else, but I cannot guarantee anything on that.

February 08, 2010 03:12 PM

Lately we've been working a lot on Gallium but we haven't been publicly talking about it enough. I, personally, spent a considerable amount of time last week coming up with my strategy for the inevitable monster invasion. In general I always thought that if, sorry, "when" the monsters attack I'd be one of the very first ones to go on account of my "there's a weird noise coming from that pitch black spot over there, I better check it out" tendency. Obviously that's not ideal, especially if the need to repopulate the world arises; I just really feel like I should be present for that. In conclusion I'll quickly go over some things we've been doing with Gallium. Admittedly that wasn't one of my best transitions.
There are three new major APIs that we want to support in Gallium. OpenCL 1.0, DirectX 10.x and DirectX 11. DirectX 10.x was somewhat prioritized of late because it's a good stepping stone for a lot of the features that we wanted.
Two of my favorites were the geometry shaders and new blending functionality. I want to start with the latter which Roland worked on because it has immediate impact on Free Software graphics.
One of the things that drives people bonkers is text rendering. In particular subpixel rendering, or if you're dealing with Xrender component alpha rendering Historically both GL and D3D provided fixed-function blending that provided means of combining source colors with the content of a render buffer in a number of ways. Unfortunately the inputs to the blending units were constrained to a source color, destination color or constants that could be used in their place. That was unfortunate because the component alpha math required two distinct values: the source color and the blending factor for destination colors (assuming the typical Porter&Duff over rendering). D3D 10 dealt with it by adding functionality called dual-source blending (OpenGL will get an extension for it sometime soon). The idea being that the fragment shader may output two distinct colors which will be treated as two independent inputs to the blending units.Thanks to this we can support subpixel rendering in a single pass with a plethora of compositing operators. Whether you're a green ooze trying to conquer Earth or a boring human you have to appreciate 2x faster text rendering.
Geometry shaders introduce a new shader type, run after the vertices have been transformed (after the vertex shader), but before color clamping, flat shading and clipping.
Along the support for geometry shaders we have added two major features to TGSI ("Tokenized Gallium Shader Instructions", our low level graphics language). The first one was support for properties. Geometry shaders in Gallium introduced the notion of state aware compile. This is because compilation of a geometry shader is specific to, at the very least, the input and output primitive they respectively operate on and output. We deal with it by injecting PROPERTY instructions to the program as so:GEOMPROPERTY GS_INPUT_PRIMITIVE TRIANGLESPROPERTY GS_OUTPUT_PRIMITIVE TRIANGLE_STRIP(rest of geometry shader follows)The properties are easily extendable and are the perfect framework to support things like work-group size in OpenCL.The second feature is support for multidimensional inputs in shaders. The syntax looks as follows:DCL IN[][0], POSITIONDCL IN[][1], COLORwhich declares two input arrays. Note that the size of the arrays is implicit, defined by the GS_INPUT_PRIMITIVE property.
It's nice to see this framework progressing so quickly.
Summing up, this is what yin yang is all about. Do you know what yin yang is? Of course you don't, you know nothing of taoism. Technically neither do I but a) it sounds cool, b) I've been busy coming up with a "monster invasion" contingency plan, so couldn't be bothered with some hippy concepts, c) the previous two points are excellent.

February 08, 2010 03:07 PM

A small addition has been made on the RDFa distiller service (pyRdfa): there is now a possibility to upload an XHTML file to be distilled, beyond referring to a URI or copying a text to a text box. This feature has been asked for by several users. Both the upload and the text box alternatives use POST, whereas distilling via URI-s uses GET. (Note that the text box version used GET before, which was really not the right way to go...)

Just as for all new services bugs may have been overlooked; contact Ivan Herman if you find any!

February 08, 2010 03:05 PM

I'm home from my first ever trip to FOSDEM and I'm pleased to say had a great time there, most of all because of the chance to meet up with so many fantastic KDE people.  I've never been to a conference with so many different FOSS groups involved and the vibe from so many geeks was incredible.  It was especially refreshing to see so many female contributors there and so actively involved in their communities.  I had planned to blog more about my impressions while there, but my laptop was quickly expropriated as the booth demo machine, and there was no free wifi at the hotel, so here's a long brain-dump of some random thoughts. You can see a few photos here.

I spent most of my time manning the KDE booth, more than I had planned and I missed a few talks I had wanted to see, but it was a pleasure to be able to interact with so many people, almost all of whom were overwhelmingly positive about KDE4.  I had only one "Amarok 2 sucks" (he didn't have the guts to tell Sven on the 'rok booth to his face though...), and one "I stopped using KDE after 4.0" but who was very keen to give 4.4 a go as he believes our technology is on the right track.  Much of my time seemed to be spent directing traffic.  There was the guy who wanted to get involved with the Windows port who I demo'ed stuff to in Virtualbox and referred to the Windows team.  Several people were eager to point out bugs they had found (directed them to bko). Others wanted to know if an obscure bug was fixed (err, I may be a dev, but I don't know every bug or feature). Someone wanted help with the openBSD packaging (hmm, dunno, Sune wasn't about, try Ade or the freeBSD guys?). Someone else wanted to know how to get the latest version of their app packaged by all the distros (talk to them at their booths just along the hall, or attend the OBS talk in 5 minutes time...).  Someone demanded to know why KDevelop had made certain design choices (palmed off on Milian, sorry!).  Someone else wanted to recruit some KDE devs to work on some desktop stuff (company business cards were quickly produced and handed over).  Someone wanted to know about colour management in KDE, so they got Boud's e-mail address :-)   An openSUSE developer wanted to check if a patch of his worked on my install (it didn't).  And the guy wanting to interview a Dutch-speaker for a podcast was directed towards Jos (poor soul ;-).

The best chat I had was with a guy from the Netherlands who walked up to the table and loudly declared "I Love KDE!" (no, not Paul).  He explained he was asked by a friend to help their mother with some PC problems.  He visited her at her retirement village and replaced Windows with Kubuntu.  A while later she asked him to visit again as some of the other residents wanted this Linux stuff too.  He refused to install it himself but instead he taught them to do it themselves.  Long story short, it spread like wildfire, last time he visited to give a talk there were over 80 very happy users aged 60 to 90 who had their own support community going.  They love Linux for how fast and stable it is, but also because they can play with it.  The beige box is no longer some mystery machine, but something they understand and control, and they are now contributing back to projects like OpenStreetMap and doing translations. Inspirational stuff.

For all the positives however, I think we can do some things better next time.

I know it's been talked about before, but we really do need a small demo machine with nicely pre-configured demo users that can easily be restored once messed up.  The obvious tricks we missed this time were to have an open-pc as our demo machine (cross promotion and sales opportunity there), an N900 running Qt/KDE stuff (the one on the Gnome table was constantly being pawed at), and a netbook to show off the new Plasma Netbook containment (I had planned to bring my eee but it died last week). And the biggest screen we can lay our hands on, with some kind of very flashy demo program running to draw people in (could we steal one from the openSUSE booth???).

We also need to give more thought beforehand to what we want to achieve with the booth.  Are we just there to sell t-shirts?  Or something more?  It's a decision we need to make for each event, and for FOSDEM I don't think the traditional "attract new users with a flashy demo" mode is going to work.  I think we need to focus on attracting new community members and interacting with upstream/downstream projects.  People mostly either wanted swag, or wanted to talk about technical stuff, there were no "What is KDE?" style questions.  These people are either already involved in a FOSS community and wanted to know how we can interact with them, or were looking to get involved.  Saying "visit the website" or "Google it" just doesn't cut it.  The "KDE Handbook" was hugely popular and we need more handouts like it.  We need to have "How can I help? / How to get involved?" handouts pointing potential contributors to the main participation entry points (wiki, mailing list, irc etc).  We may need some kind of (private?) KDE directory to know which person or mailing list project X needs to talk to about problem Y.   Knowing the areas of expertise of each KDE attendee would also be useful so you can grab an expert when needed.

There probably wouldn't be room, but rather than a table cutting us off from the people who wanted to talk, I think a "KDE Kafe" could work well at this sort of event.  Several chairs or beanbags, a few developers/translators/packagers/etc, a few demo workstations and laptops, free coffee for those who stop to talk, and lots of time to talk, network, bug triage and collect brainstorm ideas.

FOSDEM itself is impressively well organised, as you need to be with 5000+ visitors.  I'll just highlight two points, firstly their signage was very good, there was lots of it and it was very big, no getting lost here.  That's something I've always thought we could improve on at Akademy/Desktop Summit.  Not so good was the room allocation, where each project/stream got one room to use regardless of the size of audience each talk was likely to generate.  So talks about "What's in the KDE 4.4 Release" and "What's new in Drupal 7" in smaller lecture rooms were massively overcrowded and had to turn people away while bigger auditoriums next door on obscure topics were sparsely populated.  While staying in one room is good for a stream's more specialised topics, each major stream's keynote talk aimed at the mainstream could be given an auditorium slot.

Free foot massages for booth volunteers would be a welcome feature :-)

Fingers crossed, I'll be back next year, if only for the chance to eat waffles and drink beer at 11am while listening to a talk!

February 08, 2010 02:48 PM

One more week, one more release, here's SMOB v2.2. This one fixes a few bugs (apparently the #tag tabs where unavailable on the 2.2 due to a bug I introduced in the .js file) and provides the following new features:

• geolocation of microblog messages (see example below), which shows one more benefit of the LOD cloud, as coordinates of posts are provided thanks to the GeoNames integration and OPO;
• ability to delete messages (deletion being then propagated to other hubs using SPARQL/Update) and to automatically purge messages older than X days (mainly to keep the DB lightweight - starred messages are not removed);
• on-demand creation of FOAF profile, in case one wants to try SMOB but does not have one (or does not want to provide it);
• parser for hyerlinks in microblog posts; and
• updated installer, allowing to select if SMOB should be used as a Twitter client (read / write settings).

BTW, as for the previous updates, you have to remove your config file and re-do the install procedure, and it will not remove your existing messages.

February 08, 2010 02:34 PM

Q. What is the difference between a Taxonomy and an Ontology? A. Not much.

February 08, 2010 02:24 PM

What a wonderful age we live in! An age where almost a quarter of a million non-obvious ideas without prior art are invented every year.

February 08, 2010 02:24 PM

XPath is a family of small query languages for XML: they have a simple data model and syntactically were based on directory paths: so to find the attribute id of the parent of a chapter element which has a title...

February 08, 2010 02:24 PM

Returning home now — sitting in the EasyJet plane somewhere over Germany and sipping coffee.

Tenth FOSDEM is past now. We had a stand as usual but this year it looked much better then ever: white sheet, less cables floating everywhere (one central power extender with 8 sockets helps), interesting devices on table… We had:

• EVBeagle (German Beagleboard clone with blue PCB)
• 2 BUGs showing different things (camera view on mine, dual screen X11 on Denis one)
• Ulf bring new Atmel AT91SAM9M10 board (more on it in next days as it is in my bag above my head), there was also raffle in which other one was a price
• Archos 7 media player
• Psion netbook (with ‘Prototype’ text on it)
• Openmoko Freerunner
• HTC Dream (running OpenEmbedded distro instead of Android)
• FriendlyARM with WVGA screen
• Toshiba topas
• Atmel NGW100 which uses AVR32 cpu
• and some more which I forgot about

For next year it would be great to have power supply which would provide several +5V and +12V cables so there would be less plugs in use. Someone wants to donate such one? We probably need to think about creating kind of ’standard stand stuff box’ which would be used on next events so no more grabbing power extenders, USB cables etc. This is a thing to discuss.

At stand there were many people asking different questions. Some thought that we are selling hardware, some known already what OE is.

But FOSDEM was not only OE stand. This year I decided that there are talks which I want to attend and did that. I saw (titles are not original ones):

• ‘20 minutes about Openmoko history’ by Mickeyl Lauer. I got there a bit late to check did he mentioned ’super secret project’ name
• ‘Freesmartphone.org — what it is and why it is cool’ also by Mickeyl. He shown few of his DBus related tools — I need to package them for Maemo5 as they should be useful. Talk was interesting and worth being there.
• ‘Cross building systems: who we are and what our plans are’ panel was set of presentations from Ptxdist, OpenWRT, Crosstool NG, Buildroot, OpenEmbedded, cegcc projects. Everybody said that we need to share patches and help people to fix their software.
• ‘Maemo Community Counsil: who, why, what for’ was nice talk by Dave Neary (sorry man, that we did not met for talk). MCC is between community and Nokia and they do good job.
• ‘How to be good upstream’ by Gentoo developer was interesting as they have similar problems that we have in OE.
• ‘MINIX 3: system which do not want to die’ was the best entertainment during whole trip. Author was blaming Linux for being terrible buggy while his ‘baby’ was nearly bug free. But maybe because of very small user base? Not that I have something against microkernel idea — I used AmigaOS which chosen that way and know how it works.

Met some people, some planned to but time was too short as usual… Some of new faces were nice surprise: Martin Guy (the only one who understand Cirrus Logic EP93xx FPU hardware bugs) or Bluelighting from OPIE project. Tias (author of XInput calibrator tool for making touchscreens work as they should) hunted me during whole event and finally we had occasion to discuss about changes which he did due to my suggestions or problems. I shown BUG with two screens for him and he understood why I need device parameter. And next year I need to catch one guy from staff and talk with him as this year again he told that he know me and I do not know him (something like that anyway).

There was one change when it comes to stands — this year we were not next to PostgreSQL because MariaDB was between. I hope that next year we will be still nearby as I got used to the youngest person in their team :)

Speaking about future: it was last year with Astrid for me. It is in nice location (direct bus to FOSDEM place, near to Delirium Cafe) but no free wifi available in XXI century starts to be an issue. And no more going to tourist area for dinner — it was too costly I think.

Now I am in a bus which is my last way of transport today. plan to be at home before midnight. Post has to wait for Monday.

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz FOSDEM X was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. FOSDEM 2007
2. GUADEC continued
3. Free Your Phone

3 0

February 08, 2010 02:16 PM

Year ago when I was going to FOSDEM I took my Nokia E66 phone preloaded with Belgium maps to not get lost in Brussels. It was working quite good. This year I took Nokia N900 as the only device to use (no laptop, no other phone) and BUG to show something.

How did N900 worked as navigation device? Terrible! The problem started before travel. I installed whole set of map applications which were available:

• Ovi Maps
• Maemo Mapper
• Maep
• Mapbuddy
• Navit

Only first one had support to preloading map data (by using Nokia Map Loader under MS Windows). Maemo Mapper had such functionality in OS2008 but newer version has something totally broken. Navit required use of extra tool for conversion but after looking at UI I decided that will not even try. Maep and Mapbuddy always fetch from network so roaming costs would kill me.

So I used Ovi Maps as less bad then others. Lacks of offline POI support suxx, lack of adding own ones suxx even more as in Symbian version I just added few interesting places at home and used them during walking on streets of Brussels. Nokia needs to spend lot of money and developer time if they want to make it usable.

So software was more or less disaster but I managed to get to the ‘peeing boy’ so (after seeing’ peeing girl’ year ago) that part of tourist attractions is done. Would be nice to have some way of preloading AGPS data as without network connection it takes ages to get fix.

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz Maemo5 and (lack of) navigation was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. Maemo mapper
2. Driving with Ovi Maps
3. Car navigation with N810

3 0

February 08, 2010 02:15 PM

remember Mutt's mail in Org-mode and jump back to them

As already anticipated, I've been implementing my own Getting Things Done work flow. This post documents one of its main bricks: the integration between Mutt and Org-mode.

As a geek, my main incoming stream of TODO items and information in general is email. As emails hit my INBOX, I either deal with them immediately (reply, archive, delete) or I need to store them elsewhere, possibly adding extra information such as a deadline, a personal note, the associated next action, the context in which it is actionable, etc. This need of adding extra information is what defeats the usage of my mail client (Mutt) as a list manager (in the GTD sense), and that's where I plugged Org-mode in. My main goals are:

1. create Org-mode notes from Mutt, referencing the current email, and possibly inlining some of its metadata (e.g. subject, sender)

2. quickly retrieve referenced emails from Org-mode notes; ideally that should happen in my usual email environment (i.e. Mutt), so that I can process the retrieved mail as usual (e.g. to inform the sender that I did something about it)

In fact, both would be straightforward to achieve if I were using some Emacs-based mail client such as Gnus, but I resist the Emacs operating system syndrome, and therefore I insist in using my beloved Mutt.

Let's see how the two parts of the interaction between Mutt and Org-mode work.

(1) Mutt → Org-mode (there ...)

The interaction from Mutt to Org-mode happens via org-protocol. Using it external applications can feed content to Org-mode note templates, which are then interactively edited (via emacsclient), and finally filed away.

The Mutt glue macro from my ~/.muttrc is as follow:

macro index \eR "|~/bin/remember-mail\n"

The remember-mail script is trivial: it parses the fed mail from STDIN (using a couple of legacy Perl modules) and then invokes org-protocol.

The relevant configuration from my ~/.emacs is reported below; the comments explain the various parts:

;; standard org <-> remember stuff, RTFM
(org-remember-insinuate)
(setq org-default-notes-file "~/org/gtd.org")
(setq org-remember-templates  ;; mail-specific note template, identified by "m"
      '(("Mail" ?m "* %?\n\n  Source: %u, %c\n  %i" nil)))

;; ensure that emacsclient will show just the note to be edited when invoked
;; from Mutt, and that it will shut down emacsclient once finished;
;; fallback to legacy behavior when not invoked via org-protocol.
(add-hook 'org-remember-mode-hook 'delete-other-windows)
(setq my-org-protocol-flag nil)
(defadvice org-remember-finalize (after delete-frame-at-end activate)
  "Delete frame at remember finalization"
  (progn (if my-org-protocol-flag (delete-frame))
     (setq my-org-protocol-flag nil)))
(defadvice org-remember-kill (after delete-frame-at-end activate)
  "Delete frame at remember abort"
  (progn (if my-org-protocol-flag (delete-frame))
     (setq my-org-protocol-flag nil)))
(defadvice org-protocol-remember (before set-org-protocol-flag activate)
  (setq my-org-protocol-flag t))

The result is that when you hit ESC-R in Mutt, emacsclient will be fired up in place presenting a note template that already contains relevant mail information (date, subject, from) and lets you add extra information before going away. Additionally, the email message-id will be hidden in the note as a mutt: hyperlink with anchor text "mail".

(2) Org-mode → Mutt (... and back again)

Going back means that clicking on a "mail" hyperlink within an Org-mode note should bring up a Mutt instance showing the original message, in its context (e.g. its own mailbox). Achieving that consists of 2 separate steps:

1. looking up a specific message by Message-ID
2. firing up Mutt on the looked up message

For the first part I use maildir-utils (AKA mu): a Xapian-based mail indexing tool, which nicely integrates with Mutt; check out my previous blog post on the subject for a sample setup. Using mu, Message-ID lookups are as simple as:

zack@usha:~$ mu find -f p m:E1NbJad-0007x9-B7@ries.debian.org
/home/zack/Maildir/Debian.project/cur/1264883664_0.9472.usha,U=6320,FMD5=2284e927bb93d8a2ec434f5614dc04ba:2,S

Note: I'm relying upon maildir-utils version 0.6 or greater, for all presented scripts.

For the second part I use the mutt-open script which fires upon a Mutt instance on the maildir containing a specific message, and then "hits" the appropriate keys to open the message and shutdown the sidebar (if desired). It is a nicely reusable script, which I've being using elsewhere too.

The needed glue on the emacs side is just a function to invoke mutt-open in a brand new terminal, and its declaration as the handler for mutt: URLs.

(defun open-mail-in-mutt (message)
  "Open a mail message in Mutt, using an external terminal.

Message can be specified either by a path pointing inside a
Maildir, or by Message-ID."
  (interactive "MPath or Message-ID: ")
  (shell-command
   (format "gnome-terminal -e \"%s %s\""
       (substitute-in-file-name "$HOME/bin/mutt-open") message)))

;; add support for "mutt:ID" links
(org-add-link-type "mutt" 'open-mail-in-mutt)

Voilà!

Download

Summary of scripts and configuration snippets discussed above:

• remember-mail - store in Org-mode a note back-referencing an email
• mutt-open - open Mutt on an email having a specific Message-ID
• Emacs configuration
• Mutt configuration

February 08, 2010 02:09 PM

I’ve had an enquiry for more details on quotients in the new Epigram setup, so I’ll take that as a cue to blog a bit. First, I’d better sketch some basics about propositions and equality. It’s the novel treatment of these things which lets us handle quotients in (hopefully) a neater way than has been possible [...]

February 08, 2010 02:02 PM

Picked up a N900 the other day. It's really quite amazing. Best of all it's linux *and* the keyboard is big enough for my thick fingers. The design isn't as nice as the iphone though.

February 08, 2010 01:57 PM

I’m happy to announce OpenOffice.org 3.2 rc5 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project and include many upstream and Go-oo fixes. See also overview of integrated features and enhancements. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE OOo build on the wiki page.

The packages are release candidates. Though, they have not passed the full QA test and might still include even serious bugs. Therefore they are not intended for data-critical usage. A good practice is to archive any important data before an use, …

As usual, we kindly ask any interested beta testers to try the package and report bugs. See also the list of known bugs.

Other information and plans:

There were more blocker bugs in the rc4, so we needed to release rc5 in the end. The good news is that no new blocker bug has been reported last few days. If nothing bad happen with the next few days, rc5 will be final and I will put it to the OpenOffice:org:STABLE project by the end of this week. Please, keep your fingers crossed

February 08, 2010 01:33 PM

Good news, for localizers. With the new release of the l10n dashboard, co-developed by Pike (Axel Hecht) and Gandalf (Zbigniew Braniecki) we're killing off the opt-in threads for localizers.

Every localizer should take a close look at all the functionality that the new dashboard exposes. There is also a 5-minute screencast, that hopefully guides you through some of the new features.

We'll start to use this new functionality once Thunderbird 3.0.2 is out of the door. So Thunderbird 3.0.3 and onwards as well as Thunderbird 3.1 beta1 will be our starting points.

February 08, 2010 01:32 PM

In Ireland we have a special relationship with software we see the goodness but politicians dont have a clue how to make sure they get delivery on the sanctioned software systems. There have been a few systems an e-voting system and PPARS(its a payroll system for the medical service) both cost a half a billion to develop and neither are being used.
This is where proprietary software failed badly so why not open source the software (for PPARS not the e-voting) and let the community fix the problem? No matter how complex the system needs to be I cant see how any company can get away with nearly €200 million and not deliver on a product.
Why not open source all failed software projects that wont see the light of day? How many games a year get cut half way through development and never get played? The answer is lots and lots of them. How about really old games (around 15-20+ years old) and open sourcing them? No one makes money on them so who is it harming? In fact we can give a new lease on life for lots of projects and I think its sad that we the community arent being considered at all. A game I would love to have a crack at porting to linux is the original Fallout game.

February 08, 2010 01:30 PM

Currently, extensions programmers have no access to the deployment process of an extension. With CWS tkr35 the new interface XDeploymentHooks was introduced. An extension programmer may uses this interface to get a notification and execute custom code during the deployment and undeployment process.

To activate the deployment hooks simple add the <deploymentHook>-Tag to your description.xml. The tag contains the service name of the XDeploymentHooks implementation.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<description xmlns="http://openoffice.org/extensions/description/2006" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
    <version value="0.0.1"/>
<deploymentHooks service="com.foo.DeploymentHooksTest"/>
    <identifier value="com.foo.DeploymentHooksTest"/>
    <display-name>
        <name lang="en">Deployment Hooks Test Extension</name>
    </display-name>
</description>

For more information see wiki.

February 08, 2010 01:20 PM

This week’s issue of Maemo Weekly News (MWKN) is now out. Some items I would like to highlight are the following:

• PUSH N900 US competition launched for hardware hacking
• Hands-on Mozilla’s pocket-sized Firefox mobile
• Forum Nokia Developer Conference, 2nd March, Sydney Australia
• February maemo.org sprint meeting minutes & actions online
• Porting Maemo’s base to other chipsets/devices
• 2009 Engadget awards – N900 nominee in 2 categories
• Maemo 6 Platform Security software home now in gitorious
• Maemo’s cellular software components’ home now in gitorious

Below is the full list of articles in this week’s issue:

Maemo Weekly News – February 8, 2010

Front Page

• BBC tech correspondent covers Nokia still ruling in face of iPhone & iPad
• PUSH N900 US competition launched for hardware hacking

Applications

• Ken-Young on Orrery, bringing more stars into view than you can see
• Hands-on Mozilla’s pocket-sized Firefox mobile
• Browser Switchboard makes it easy to define alternative browsers as default
• Foursquare social networking/geolocation service & game
• More info on community-designed levels for Angry Birds
• Low-level recovery tools: TestDisk and PhotoRec
• MaePad notepad/jotter for Maemo 5
• Comic widget in early development
• Nokia N900 running emulated SNES controlled with PS3 SIXAXIS controller
• Extension enables Flash for YouTube on Firefox Mobil
• Showtime – TV listings app

Development

• Forum Nokia Developer Conference, 2nd March, Sydney Australia
• Akademy KDE/Qt conference call for papers
• Debian Etch rebuilt for Maemo
• PyGtkEditor: On-device syntax-highlighting editor designed for Maemo
• Windows: Python & Qt for Maemo development in half an hour
• Elena Reshetova interviewed before FOSDEM about Maemo 6 security

Community

• Testing Squad for maemo.org Extras created
• February maemo.org sprint meeting minutes & actions online

Devices

• Porting Maemo’s base to other chipsets/devices
• Device quality assurance inside look

Maemo in the Wild

• 2009 Engadget awards – N900 nominee in 2 categories
• A quick round up of the PUSH N900 Showcase last night
• PUSH N900 London party pole-dancing robot video

Announcements

• Subscribe to MWKN to ensure you never miss an issue
• Marina theme for Maemo 5
• Hoops Frenzy available for $1.99
• Magnetic Scrolls adventure games interpreter in Testing
• MADDE tech preview updated for PR 1.1
• Maemo 6 Platform Security software home now in gitorious
• Maemo’s cellular software components’ home now in gitorious
• mStatus updates multiple social networks’ status

6 0

February 08, 2010 01:18 PM

I was reading some hip and literary Swedish blogs (no, actually I found this stuff on some tech blog, but swimming down the attribution links brought me these far more acceptable references) which talk about a list of books one might be expected to have read. The list has apparently been circulating for some time, witness the lonely librarian, and continues to be passed around, for instance on the symbian diaries (I can’t find any Symbian content there, though). It might be that the list stems from this story (from 2007?), but I’ve seen the Guardian reported as the original source as well.

The list itself (in the form in which it’s being passed around right now) is a little odd, since there’s some strange entries: the Bible (which version? does it matter? with or without the apocryphal books?), the complete works of Shakespeare (zounds, that’s a lot, but it also duplicates Hamlet much later in the list). The list mixes classics with much more recent work and includes some real cruft (IMO) as well. Anyway, I thought that publishing the list would be far too space-consuming and not interesting on a technical blog, so I wrote a python program to produce HTML and plain text renderings of the list, as well as a compact text representation using the initials of authors and titles and a base-3 representation.

You can run the program with something like python booklist.py text to get plain text output; alternate modes are html, code which outputs a kind of geek code, and short which produces a decimal integer. The program comes with an unread database, so it will print an all-unread text representation, or the integer 0. The integer corresponding to my own reading of the list is 472899411102988434671899921134218056756239761136, and you can add that as a second parameter to get the output showing what I’ve read; in code form that’s:

*PaP-JA *TLotR-JT *HPs-JR *TB-: *WH-EB *NEF-GO *GE-CD *C22-JH
*CWoS-S *TH-JT *CitR-JS *M-GE *GWTW-MM *TGG-FSF -WaP-LT *THHGttG-DA
-CaP-FD *GoW-JS *AiW-LC *TWitW-KG *CoN-CL *E-JA *P-JA *TL,TWaTW-CL
*WtP-AM *AF-GO -OHYoS-GGM *AoGG-LM *THT-MA *LotF-WG -LoP-YM *D-FH
*SaS-JA -ASB-VS. *ATOTC-CD *BNW-AH *OMaM-JS *TSH-DT *MD-HM *OT-CD
*D-BS *TSG-FHB -U-JJ *ACC-CD -MB-GF *CW-EW *AoSH-SACD *TLP-ADS-E
-TWF-IB *WD-RA *TTM-AD *H-WS *CatCF-RD

To generate your own book statuses, you’re going to have to edit the program and insert a status (READ or WANT) into some of the tuples that form the book database. Then run the program with only one argument for the desired output format. Once you have the code or short output, you can post it and keep the booklist meme alive (albeit in a more nerdy form).

The program itself can be downloaded as source from here, and is under the GPLv2 or later (bear that in mind if you send patches for an interactive of Qt version, and please don’t berate my python style).

There’s clearly features missing from the program: there is no Qt interface (with PyQt bindings) and no interactive mode, which would make it much easier to generate your own booklist output. Abstracting the purpose of the list would also be nice, and I can see a Meme-Plasmoid (a memeoid?) somewhere in the future where you get the checklist of the day and can enter your results for that checklist, to share across the social desktop. O noes!

February 08, 2010 01:11 PM

There’s still plenty of time, but after 4 days of voting, the Nokia N900 is losing badly to the iPhone 3GS in 2 categories of the 2009 Engadget Awards. Do you think the N900 is worthy to grab the titles Smartphone of the Year or Gadget of the Year? Vote now!

Nokia also snagged a nomination for the Booklet 3G in the Netbook of the Year category. I think they should win all the 3 categories, but this fanboy and Nokia blogger may be biased. You can vote until February 20th 11:59PM EDT.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

• Conversations on Nokia N900 Adds Support for Facebook Chat, AIM, MSN & More With Extra Protocol Plugins
• Mac OS X 10.3 Installed On Nokia N900 Because It’s Possible
• Deal: Nokia N900 $429 at Dell After Coupon – Exp 1/30
• How to Install .deb Files on Nokia N900 Using X Terminal

7 1

February 08, 2010 12:55 PM

If you read the literature on tricksters, you will confront a string of words that capture the moral quality and sensibilities of these figures, figures scattered across time and place and largely enshrined in myths and stories:

Cunning, deceit, lying, provocateur, mischief, audacious, thief, play, shrewdness, audacity, grotesque, over the top, appetite, shocking, fun, delight, wit, trap, subversive, ability, wanderer.

These figures, which include Coyote, Loki, Hermes, and Eshu, among many more, push the envelope of what is morally acceptable and in so doing, argues Lewis Hyde (in his tome on the subject), renew and revitalize culture, especially the moral stuff of culture. They are not only boundary crossers, they are boundary makers. As the title of his book so succinctly and masterfully broadcasts “Trickster Makes this World.” Or as he suggests with a bit more elaboration:

“I want to argue a paradox that the myth asserts: that the origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures require that there be a space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on” p. 9

At the opening of the book, Hyde asks whether there are tricksters in modern industrial societies. His answer is a plain ‘no.’ The con man who might share some similarities does not qualify. For in fact what is needed is either a polytheistic system “or lacking that, he needs at least a relationship to other powers, to people, to instructions, and traditions that can manage the odd double attitude of both insisting that boundaries be respected and recognizing that in the long run their liveliness depends on having those boundaries regularly distributed” p.13 He does locate the spirit of the trickster in spirited individuals: in Picasso, in Frederick Douglass, in laudable figures who push certain boundaries and renew our world for the better but nonetheless fall short of the archetypal trickster.

I bet it is pretty obvious where I am going with all of this given my object of study: phreakers, hackers, and trollers. The trickster does exist across America, across Europe, really across the world and it is not in myth but in embodied in group and living practice: in that of the prankster, hacker, the phreaker, the troller (all of whom, have their own unique elements of course, but so does each trickster). Their relationship to other powers are many and can be located in terms of information, intellectual property, the government, language itself, institutions of power like the FBI and AT&T. The list is not short.

For a few years now I have been thinking about the linkages between the trickster and hackers as well as the troller but it was only in the fall when I found myself trapped in a hospital for a week that I finally cracked open the book by Hyde and devoured it. Within a the first few pages, it was undeniable: there are many links to be made between the trickster and hacking. Many of these figures, push boundaries of all sorts: they upset ideas of propriety and property; they use their sharpened wits sometimes for play, sometimes for political ends; they get trapped by their cunning (which happens ALL the time with tricksters! That is how they learn); and they remake the world, technically, socially, and legally and includes software, licensing and even forms of literature (think textfile, the Jargon File or most dramatically, ED).

But if the trickster generally resides in myth, and the trickster of the information age resides in practice, myth matters everywhere because there is a mythos created around these figures. Sometimes the mythos is propagated these groups (take a look of ED for example or Phrack in the past) and of course the media has played an undeniable role. And yet, unlike what is represented in the pages of Hyde, there are living, actual bodies in motion, in conversation, in transformation, a group that goes far beyond the other more controlled and bounded tricksters we might be able to locate in society, such as artistic/political groups like the Yes Men.

But the most shocking (or hard to think through) element lies less in the many associations one can make, but in the following curious fact. For the most part the trickster is enshrined in myth and stories but the tricksters I am referring to are in fact full-bodied, full-blooded groups of people who are actually engaging in all sorts of acts of trickery. This is culture not in the sense of art and myth but people and practice and this of course makes an (ethical) difference. What happens when you are the recipient not of a story offered an elder, but the recipient of trickery, an act of pranking or trolling, for example? What happens when you can trace all sorts of instances of boundary re-shifting and remaking, as with the GPL? I think this, even more than the linkages, is what makes this connection so remarkable and I trying to think through what it means to have a figure that we can find and talk to, as opposed to one embodied in myth and story.

For now I am going to leave this post short and in the next installment, will start raising some of the connections between trickery and variants of hacking and trolling.

February 08, 2010 12:45 PM

February 08, 2010 12:44 PM

In the continued interests of helping to make Ubuntu rock as a platform for scratching itches and making awesome apps, I am putting together a new online learning event: Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week, happening online between 1st – 6th March 2010.

The week will be just like our previous online learning events such as Ubuntu Developer Week and Ubuntu Open Week, but instead providing a week jam packed with awesome sessions about writing applications that scratch your itch, and predominantly focusing on Python tools and frameworks, Bazaar, Launchpad and infrastructure. The goal for the week is give attendees a head start on a given technology useful for applications.

So, I am looking for volunteers. If you feel you could give a tutorial about a given Python module or associated technology (e.g. Glade, Launchpad, Bazaar etc), please drop me an email at jono AT ubuntu DOT com and I will liaise with you to get it scheduled. I am also look for some showcase sessions: stories about how you put together an application, how it scratched your itch and what tools you used. Thanks to everyone who contributes to leading a session!

The week has already been added as a Lernid event and I am going to encourage session leaders to create slides for their sessions. As each session is confirmed it will appear in Lernid and on the wiki page. Rocking!

[Discuss Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week on the Forum]

Originally posted by Jono Bacon here on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 6:53 am

February 08, 2010 12:39 PM

In a previous blog I mentioned I was trying to provide some more advanced containment control concepts to Openoffice.org. As such I have created a cws for it. My main focus is providing these controls to enhance the VBA Userform import experience, hence support in the general Openoffice.org usage case is limited to programmatic access for the moment ( probably a good thing whilst trying to mature this feature )
I do think though that the implementation ( with some minor cleaning up ) is good enough to commit, that way ,the Userform import will immediately benefit from this work and additionally developers can play with the new ‘MultiPage, Page & Frame’ controls. If you can’t wait for the cws to be integrated then you can of course try this feature in the ooo-build master branch where it is already available. The screenshot shows a MSO userform with some multiple levels of nested container controls, then the same useform imported in ‘vanilla’ openoffice and finally how it looks now in the cws. You should notice some other nice improvements that also are included in this cws e.g. the ’spinbutton’ is now imported ( unfortunately this cws does not make use of the spinbutton generally available for normal Openoffice.org Dialogs ) However this cws does enable controls in Openoffice Dialogs to now access embedded images ( note the image control from the MSO Userforms has an associated image, the filter has been modified to create embedded images on import and the Dialog controls now can handle embedded images ) Also some good news regarding the toolbar enhancements mentioned in the last blog these are now integrated in the DEV300 codebase since m70 ( many thanks to Carsten for helping make that happen )

February 08, 2010 12:19 PM

In designing Chromium, we've been working hard to make the browser as secure as possible. We've made strong improvements with the integrated sandboxing and our up-to-date user base. We're always looking to stay on top of the latest browser security features. We've also worked closely with the broader security community to get independent scrutiny and to quickly fix bugs that have been reported.
Some of the most interesting security bugs we've fixed have been reported by researchers external to the Chromium project. For example, this same origin policy bypass from Isaac Dawson or this v8 engine bug found by the Mozilla Security Team. Thanks to the collaborative efforts of these people and others, Chromium security is stronger and our users are safer.
Today, we are introducing an experimental new incentive for external researchers to participate. We will be rewarding select interesting and original vulnerabilities reported to us by the security research community. For existing contributors to Chromium security — who would likely continue to contribute regardless — this may be seen as a token of our appreciation. In addition, we are hoping that the introduction of this program will encourage new individuals to participate in Chromium security. The more people involved in scrutinizing Chromium's code and behavior, the more secure our millions of users will be.
Such a concept is not new; we'd like to give serious kudos to the folks at Mozilla for their long-running and successful vulnerability reward program.
Any valid security bug filed through the Chromium bug tracker (under the template "Security Bug") will qualify for consideration. As this is an experimental program, here are some guidelines in the form of questions and answers:
Q) What reward might I get?A) As per Mozilla, our base reward for eligible bugs is $500. If the panel finds a particular bug particularly severe or particularly clever, we envisage rewards of $1337. The panel may also decide a single report actually constitutes multiple bugs. As a consumer of the Chromium open source project, Google will be sponsoring the rewards.
Q) What bugs are eligible?A) Any security bug may be considered. We will typically focus on High and Critical impact bugs, but any clever vulnerability at any severity might get a reward. Obviously, your bug won't be eligible if you worked on the code or review in the area in question.
Q) How do I find out my bug was eligible?A) You will see a provisional comment to that effect in the bug entry once we have triaged the bug.
Q) What if someone else also found the same bug?A) Only the first report of a given issue that we were previously unaware of is eligible. In the event of a duplicate submission, the earliest filed bug report in the bug tracker is considered the first report.
Q) What about bugs present in Google Chrome but not the Chromium open source project?A) Bugs in either build may be eligible. In addition, bugs in plugins that are part of the Chromium project and shipped with Google Chrome by default (e.g. Google Gears) may be eligible. Bugs in third-party plugins and extensions are ineligible.
Q) Will bugs disclosed publicly without giving Chromium developers an opportunity to fix them first still qualify?A) We encourage responsible disclosure. Note that we believe responsible disclosure is a two-way street; it's our job to fix serious bugs within a reasonable time frame.
Q) Do I still qualify if I disclose the problem publicly once fixed?A) Yes, absolutely. We encourage open collaboration. We will also make sure to credit you in the relevant Google Chrome release notes and nominate you for the Google Security "thank you" section.
Q) What about bugs in channels other than Stable?A) We are interested in bugs in the Stable, Beta and Dev channels. It's best for everyone to find and fix bugs before they are released to the Stable channel.
Q) What about bugs in third-party components?A) These bugs may be eligible (e.g. WebKit, libxml, image libraries, compression libraries, etc). Bugs will be ineligible if they are part of the base operating system as opposed to part of the Chromium source tree. In the event of bugs in a component shared with other software, we are happy to take care of responsibly notifying other affected parties.
Q) Who determines whether a given bug is eligible?A) The panel includes Adam Barth, Chris Evans, Neel Mehta, SkyLined and Michal Zalewski.
Q) Can you keep my identity confidential from the rest of the world?A) Yes. If selected as the recipient of a reward, and you accept, we will need your contact details in order to pay you. However — at your discretion, we can credit the bug to "anonymous" and leave the bug entry private.
Q) No doubt you wanted to make some legal points?A) Sure. We encourage participation from everyone. However, we are unable to issue rewards to residents of countries where the US has imposed the highest levels of export restriction (e.g. Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria). We cannot issue rewards to minors, but would be happy to have an adult represent you. This is not a competition, but rather an ongoing reward program. You are responsible for any tax implications depending on your country of residency and citizenship. There may be additional restrictions on your ability to enter depending upon local law.
We look forward very much to issuing our first reward and featuring it on our releases blog. We're happy to take questions at security@chromium.org. Alternatively, feel free to leave a comment. We will update this blog post with answers to any popular questions.
Finally, if you're interested in helping out Chromium security on a more permanent basis, we have open positions.
Posted by Chris Evans, Google Chrome Security

February 08, 2010 12:11 PM

February 08, 2010 12:08 PM

Apache members, committers and contributors descend on the Google headquarters in Mountain View, enjoying a rare chance to get together face-to-face, and getting some really great work done!

January 25th and 26th saw the oldest project at the Apache Software Foundation join forces with one of the newer Incubator podlings for a fantastic hackathon. More than twenty developers from the two projects met at Google for two days of hacking, learning, collaboration, and fun!

Members of the Apache HTTP Server team worked side-by-side with committers to the Traffic Server podling, on everything from documentation formats to getting code to build on new platforms!

The HTTP Server team finalized and released Apache HTTP Server 2.3.5-alpha, the newest version of the ever-popular web server. We also worked on tidying up our download page, and wrote up the CHANGES file and announcement texts for the release of 1.3.42. This is the final release of Apache HTTP Server version 1.3, which has now reached end of life.

Some of the issues and action items that needed to be addressed before Traffic Server can do its first release at the Apache Software Foundation

The Traffic Server podling team was even busier! The following are just some of the things they managed to do over the two days:

• Finalized the issues that need to be addressed for the first Traffic Server release at Apache (v2.0).

• Worked on migrating the last remnants of Yahoo! specific code into the Apache repository.
• Patched the existing code to build on OS X.
  

• Gave several interesting presentations, including a discussion of a number of changes in the pipeline for v2.2, the current "dev" branch.
• Cross-signed developers' GPG keys with several ASF members, to broaden the web-of-trust for code-signing of Traffic Server releases.
  

On behalf of the Apache Software Foundation, the Apache HTTP Server Project, and the Traffic Server Podling, it's my pleasure to offer Google a huge vote of thanks for their support!

By Noirin Shirley, Vice President, Apache Software Foundation; Technical Writer, Google

February 08, 2010 11:44 AM

Let’s think about this creating command:

vmbuilder kvm -c karmic.cfg \
--domain ubuntu-server.eu \
--dest /vmachines/kvm/ \
--bridge br0 \
--hostname testvm02 \
--user shermann \
--pass foobar \
--mem=256 \
--ip=<whatevr ip> \
--mask=255.255.255.0 \
--dns=<your dns server >\
--gw=<your default gw> \
--libvirt qemu:///system \
--tmpfs=-

The correspondent karmic.cfg looks like this:

[DEFAULT]
arch = i386
part = ubuntu-karmic.part
user = shermann

[ubuntu]
mirror = <your package mirror>
suite = karmic
flavour = server
addpkg = openssh-server, vim-nox

[kvm]
libvirt = qemu:///system

and the partition file looks like this:

root 5000
/boot 100
swap 1000
---
/var/log 2000
/home 1900

Now, when creating the VM everything works fine. But after creation and starting of the VM via virsh, the machine doesn’t boot up. Could be that this is all my fault ;) Or I’m too ESX…or I’m hitting a bug…

February 08, 2010 11:33 AM

As many of you may have heard, from blogs by Eitan, Mike and Joanie, as well as an e-mail to the gnome-foundation-lists by Fernando, the Gnome a11y community is having a tough time.

I have been interacting with the a11y community for over two years now, and in that time the funding situation has never looked good. I do not wish to insult or demean companies that are no-longer involved in funding Gnome a11y. Companies and individuals have their own priorities that they must follow. Work they have done in the past on Gnome is very much appreciated by me, even if they cannot continue that work in-to the future.

That said, I believe that in the past two and a half years Gnome a11y has lost a huge amount of funding. First from IBM, which, to many peoples dismay, pulled out of a11y funding before I started work on AT-SPI. I was glad to hear that Mozilla is providing $10,000 to the Gnome foundation for a11y work. I’m extremely grateful for that, but I do not believe that Mozilla are providing the level of funding that they have done in the past. Our work on AT-SPI D-Bus has been funded jointly by Codethink, Sun, and another un-named benefactor. None of this funding is likely to continue past the end of February. All of this would seem slight were it not for the news that Oracle have let-go of important Gnome a11y community members working for the Sun Accessibility Project Office. Sun have been the major contributor to Gnome a11y, and this is a worrying signal that Oracle do not intend to continue the current level of contribution.

Assuming that Oracle do not wish to involve themselves in Gnome a11y, my back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate that we may have lost greater than $200,000 in anual funding over the last three years.

Although huge amounts of Gnome development takes place un-funded, by hackers, volunteers, users and hobbyists you would probably be surprised how much is done by folks working a 9-5. I don’t expect the figures to be the same, but as an example, 75% of kernel developers are paid by corporations for their work. The loss of the Sun Accessibility Project Office and other sources of funding will be felt very heavily by the Gnome a11y community.

Accessibility is incredibly important to the Gnome project, and not only to its users. Gnome has a fantastic, credible, accessibility story. This, to me, marks Gnome out as a class ‘A’ open-source project. Were we to lose this, it would be a turning point. In my eyes Gnome would then be a project in decline.

What can we do?

Firstly we need to go on a cohesive search for funding. The Linux Foundation has an accessibility group that I have been involved in for a long time. This seems to me the best place to combine our efforts in the great funding drive. Funding channeled through the Linux Foundation would not be Gnome specific, but cross desktop a11y technology is what we have long been striving for.

Ideally enough funding would be found to hire someone to work full time on Linux Desktop accessibility.

Outside of the search for cash all Gnome developers need to spend more time on accessibility. Its not always easy to make ones application accessible, and I’m sure it can seem daunting. There are still a11y community members ready to help out though. All is not lost. I’m damn near certain that we are going to pull together. Gnome 3.0 will have the same great accessibility that has made me proud of past Gnome releases.

February 08, 2010 11:25 AM

Two weeks ago I got myself a nokia n900 phone which is running maemo 5. So far I am quite happy with it, given that my previous phone was a sony erricsson p1i which is pretty crappy.
I've taken some notes about my experiences:

• under normal use the battery lasts for ~ 2 days, if I'm using 3G the whole day I need to recharge it daily though


• the terminal has a bug which results in the enter key not working under some conditions, ctrl-m works as a workaround though


• playing normal dvdrips in mplayer is absolutely no problem without downscaling, 720p doesn't perform though


• I somehow managed that my screen flipped and I wasn't able to flip it back, only a reboot solved that


• It is not clear to me which tools you will find in the list of installable packages and which are only visible with apt-cache search. I also managed to end up with a doubled launch icon in my application list for some application


• the termininal is not usable anymore after an ncurses program crashed, "reset" doesnt help either


• wireless uses less battery than umts, way less


• the back button in the browser is per default opening a fancy eyecandy browse history which is slow, so I mostly use backspace to browse back


• there is lots of useful tools in the extras-devel repository, e.g. I can control my mpd via mmpc from the phone which is great



• importing contacts works flawlessly, also merging existing contacts works as expected


• jabber (including xmpp calls) are integrated in the contacts information (you can merge a jabber uid into an existing contact)


• i've no idea yet what the internal video player is, but i wasn't able to play a non downscaled XviD file with it, mplayer does play it fine


• freely placeable widgets are awesome


• it's is really userfriendly and no geeky linux user phone


• i would prefer not having busybox per default, i can install bash but the libc is still from busybox which implies world readable password hashes in /etc/passwd, so no other user accounts on my mobile


• is there disk encryption available?


• n900fly can't cause any good


• gps with nokia maps is ok and I find it pretty usable even if a google maps client would be nice as well


• the mp3 mplayer sucks unless you have tagged your music properly, you can't just play some folder without having a playlist for it


• mplayer as an alternative from the console is no real alternative either, if you don't redirect its output to /dev/null it gets stuck in a loop when the display blanks,


• app manager locks dpkg lock even if you just list available programs, no idea why this is needed and no idea how aptitude and synaptic are doing this


• is there a good todo manager which comes with a widget listing todos?


• is it possible to install armel debian packages without having a debian chroot?


• sms are nicely organized per contact in an instant messaging fashion


• the builtin accelerator works nice and you can automatically flip the screen when you want to dial a number, sometimes happens by accident though


• the multiuser support works awesome and you get a nice overview of open applications in a composé fashion, it may be wise to have not 40 applications open though


• the list of processes is already huge (like 160 processes running in the background)


• i haven't checked out the sdk yet but I will do that soon as I need e.g. newsbeuter for RSS


• hardware feels robust, arm cortex a8 is imho a very good processor, RAM could be more (the phone is heavily swapping)


• you can not yet use the phone as a wireless access point without building your own kernel images, some people seem to be working on this


• you can manipulate all kinds of stuff through the sysfs, including the phone led and the vibration


• wireless certificates are sometimes shown to be invalid but there there is no details button, you can click only "done"

Those are the things I came up with while using the phone. The calling functionality and everything which is only phone related really works fine and the sound quality while talking to someone on the phone is also really good. So far I am really happy with the phone and I can only recommend it. I hope I'll have some time to port some applications to maemo soon.

February 08, 2010 11:21 AM

February 08, 2010 11:18 AM

February 08, 2010 11:12 AM

February 08, 2010 11:09 AM

You work on developing a software forge, you’re an admin for a software forge, or a project administrator.

Join us and discuss (in english) forge matters on discussions@planetforge.org, to try and improve communication, sharing, reuse and interoperability among various hosting platforms, and collaborative development tools.

You may prefer joining the PlanetForge RSS aggregator if you blog about forges (feel free to add it to your preferred RSS reader).

February 08, 2010 11:07 AM

Thanks to the work of David Henningsson, we now have a proper Apport symptom for audio bugs. It just got updated again to set default bug titles, which include the card/codec name and the problem, so that Launchpad’s suggested duplicates should work much more reliably.

So from now on you are strongly encouraged to report sound problems with

$ ubuntu-bug audio

instead of trying to guess the package right.

February 08, 2010 10:58 AM

As part of COCLICO, we’re working on an exchange format for forges, that should help dump, restore, export and import from different software forges.

There are various use cases for this, like moving a project from one forge to another, but also as backup/restore feature for forge admins. More about the rationale here.

We’d like this format to be a standard some day, so it should have good properties so that it’s generic enough and at the same time easy to adopt. Thus it would be relatively easy to contribute new exporters or importers to an framework (for which we’ll implement basic core tools), while having a long-lasting format that can still be used in the future.

A lot of work ahead of us, and this is just a short notice in case you’re interested and you’d like to know more

Stay tuned, and if interested, join discussions@planetforge.org to discuss this topic.

P.S.: yes, it’s a rebirth of CoopX, somehow (see the coopx tag in my blog for more details)

February 08, 2010 10:56 AM

Its been a slow start today, I don't know why? A few of my friends seem to have the same feeling a sort of cant-be-bothered-to-get-out-of-bed mood. I've tried forcing myself to get enthusiastic but for the minute even studying belly button fluff is not holding any interest for me.

I've done a sort of montage of things I need or at least should be doing ho hum!
 

February 08, 2010 10:52 AM

A look at some simple extensions to the file browser

February 08, 2010 10:32 AM

I'm glad to announce that we accepted a new member in bash-completion's upstream team: Dan-Leonard Crestez. He's an active guy in the F/OSS world, and I'm glad he's now in our team.

Welcome on board!

February 08, 2010 10:19 AM

Now that we're moving full-steam towards the Lightning 1.0 beta2 release, it's also time to make clean slate and show you in terms of fixed bugs, what has happened since the last status update back in late November 2009.

Overall we have fixed an impressive 55 bugs since then, keeping in mind the whole release process hassle, the holidays and Philipp's exam schedule. Here's the complete list of fixed bugs:

• Bug 313822: Make Lightning work on SeaMonkey
• Bug 357332: Holidays in Chile for 2010
• Bug 364487: Argentina Holidays 2008-2009
• Bug 376139: Sri Lanka Holiday 2010
• Bug 397180: South African Holidays 2010
• Bug 432440: Israel Holidays 2010
• Bug 472466: No small icons in edit event/task dialog available
• Bug 489882: Building with "NECKO_DISK_CACHE=" fails with unresolved external symbol
• Bug 500399: Event Dialog: Help Menu is uselesss and could be removed
• Bug 509100: Holiday file for Namibia
• Bug 511193: [Mozmill] Recursion tests
• Bug 518610: Tasks no longer work in TB3/Lightning with Kerio Mailserver
• Bug 524574: Polish holiday 2009-2020
• Bug 528676: e-mail list not updated when using next/prev button in New Calendar wizard
• Bug 529810: Views borked using wcap: dayHeaderBox.mItemBoxes is null
• Bug 529853: Creation of local calendar fails (DB Error no such column: recurrence_id_tz)
• Bug 530096: Tracking bug for Sunbird/Lightning 1.0b1 release
• Bug 530097: Create release notes for Lightning/Sunbird 1.0b1
• Bug 530100: Bump version numbers for 1.0b1 release
• Bug 530165: [Mozmill] Timezone test
• Bug 530842: Upgrade Sunbird/Lightning 0.9 to 1.0pre fails
• Bug 531028: Linux: Delete Task button in Task view is missing its icon
• Bug 531418: Allow building lightning with all locales at once
• Bug 531685: Build problems on linux and win32 due to insufficient disk space
• Bug 531699: Spanish Holidays 2007-2010
• Bug 532656: Fix Sunbird official branding on Mac.
• Bug 533070: Sunbird nightly builds fail with |No rule to make target
• Bug 533089: Malta Calendar 2010
• Bug 533259: Sunbird website does not validate to its doctype
• Bug 533324: Finnish Holidays 2010
• Bug 533329: [Mozmill] Verify that Calendar is working properly with UTF-8 characters
• Bug 533458: Fix mac and windows trunk builds
• Bug 533466: calendar-multiget REPORT should not specify the calendar collection URL
• Bug 533498: Build config changes for Cocoa Printing
• Bug 533713: gdata-provider.xpi should support SeaMonkey 2
• Bug 533747: Mention required version of Thunderbird in system requirements of Lightning
• Bug 533943: CalDav access to my calendar doesn't work on RC2, lightning 1.0, using CGP
• Bug 534969: Add sq to calendar/locales/all-locales
• Bug 535379: Create more l10n.ini files to builds against 1.9.1 and central
• Bug 535574: [Mozmill] Writing to a local ICS calendar
• Bug 535812: [Mozmill] Event with no changes shouldn't prompt to save
• Bug 536185: Update calendar/ copyright dates to 2010
• Bug 536189: Wrong Lightning version in install.rdf
• Bug 536354: getItem doesn't set calendar for items
• Bug 536525: Turkey holidays for 2010
• Bug 537066: Scrape dead bits out of credits.xhtml
• Bug 537470: Russian Holidays 2010 and onward
• Bug 537628: Building localized Sunbird l10n nightly builds fail since 02-Dec-2009
• Bug 537885: Add Arabic (ar) to Calendar builds
• Bug 538170: Mac trunk builds failing running merge-installrdf.py
• Bug 538439: static Sunbird builds from comm-central/mozilla-central fail
• Bug 538576: Singapore Public Holiday 2010
• Bug 539681: Puerto Rico Holidays
• Bug 539943: Set up builders for Lightning 1.0b2pre for Thunderbird 3.1
• Bug 543359: Adjust Lightning version and required Thunderbird version

As always, our thanks go to all developers, contributors, localizers, testers, and supporters that have made this possible.

February 08, 2010 10:14 AM

February 08, 2010 09:32 AM

Hello all. As some of you may have read at osswatch, or in Jeanie's open letter to Oracle, or even from mark doffman of codethink (or experienced yourself in some cases) the state of free accessibility technology is somewhat lacking as of late. I've spent some time investigating the various players, testing solutions, discovering what's out there, etc. and would like to give an account of how things are from my perspective as a KDE developer and as one who would like to see desktop accessibility on Linux and our other platforms flourish.

First maybe an introduction of the key pieces of this puzzle would help.

The first piece of the puzzle from a KDE developer's perspective is Qt's Accessibility classes here. As part of QtGui module most (maybe all) Qt widgets are accessible as far as they can be. They all provide description, state, role, and actions in Qt's way that allows them to be "seen" via accessibility on Windows, should allow them to be "seen" on linux/unix via at-spi2 (will discuss this piece a bit later) and allows them to be "seen" with carbon builds on Mac also (accessibility for cocoa is a feature request that has not been scheduled at the moment). So as far as gui developers are concerned, as long as existing Qt gui widgets (or derivatives) are used, we should be in good shape. Unfortunately, the next piece falls a bit short.

The next piece of the puzzle is the qt-atspi2 bridge. This is in the works and can be found here. This takes the form of a qt plugin backend for qaccessible. It bridges the gap between qaccessible classes and at-spi2 dbus interface. Though Mark Doffman at codethink has done amazing work here. The latest version is not quite ready to work with at-spi2 because of recent changes in at-spi2 itself.

The final piece of the puzzle for kde/Qt apps is at-spi2 itself. This has been developed quite a bit by various members of the gnome-accessibility community. I know Mark Doffman spent some time optimizing some things and fixing issues in there. Gnome is going to be switching from corba to this new dbus-based at-spi2 for gnome 3.0 (and possibly sooner, depending), so desktop accessibility will at last be unified on linux platforms. Unfortunately for Qt apps, the api recently changed quite a bit in january of this year, so the qt-atspi2 bridge needs to be updated to work with these changes. I have a description from Mark of what needs doing, but need to wrap my head around it before being able to help with the effort here, come join irc.gnome.org #a11y if you'd like to lend a hand. This really probably needs to become a community effort in the long run.

As can be seen above there is lots to do to make kde accessible, lots to do to make linux desktop accessible and lots to do to make sure everything is in place for everything to work nicely. So... come join the effort! join #kde-accessibility (I was often alone in there until recently Luke Yelavich of speech-dispatcher fame joined). join irc.gnome.org #a11y. get on some mailinglists, come to akademy (I hope to have a talk there, we'll see).

February 08, 2010 09:18 AM

It seems that the N900 is able to run for > 3 days in standby, I unplugged it Friday on 7:00, and it lasted until Sunday 23:50. I used it for browsing the web a bit and to listen to music via FM transmitter.

Filed under: General

February 08, 2010 09:05 AM

Assignment for Dailyshoot 84 on 2010/02/07: “Challenge: Practice storytelling today. Look for 3 images that tell a story, and make a set of photos that go together.”

Super Sunday: With friends in the burbs, and a sad ending.

February 08, 2010 09:05 AM

How to reason about effectful advice? Write your AOP programs in Haskell, the world's best imperative programming language. Use monads and monad transformers for effects and functional mixins for advice. In return you get powerful reasoning tools: equational reasoning and parametricity.

Update: Our paper on the topic has been accepted at AOSD 2010. The technical report has some pretty cool parametricity proofs in its appendix on non-interference of advice, based on Janis' Voigtlaender's ICFP'09 paper "Free Theorems Involving Type Constructor Classes". Slides of my PLSIG seminar at K.U.Leuven are also available.

EffectiveAdvice: Disciplined Advice with Explicit Effects
Bruno Oliveira, Tom Schrijvers and William Cook

Abstract

Advice is a mechanism, widely used in aspect-oriented languages, that allows one program component to augment or modify the behavior of other components. Advice is useful for modularizing concerns, including logging, error handling, and some optimizations, that would otherwise require code to be scattered throughout a system. When advice and other components are composed together they become tightly coupled, sharing both control and data flows. However this creates important problems: modular reasoning about a component becomes very difficult; and two tightly coupled components may interfere with the control and data flows of each other.

This paper presents EffectiveAdvice, a disciplined model of advice, inspired by Aldrich's Open Modules, that has full support for effects in both base components and advice. With EffectiveAdvice, equivalence of advice, as well as base components, can be checked by equational reasoning. The paper describes an implementation of EffectiveAdvice as a Haskell library and shows how to use it to solve well-known programming problems. Advice is modeled by mixin inheritance and effects are modeled by monads. Interference patterns previously identified in the literature are expressed as combinators. Parametricity, together with the combinators, is used to prove two harmless advice theorems. The result is an effective model of advice that supports effects in both advice and base components, and allows these effects to be separated with strong non-interference guarantees, or merged as needed.

February 08, 2010 09:01 AM

Nokia is planning to develop the operating mode of its Salo plant to ensure production is focused fully on the high-value smartphone market, especially in Europe.

The plans will result in the introduction of new and highly specialized manufacturing methods and also entail changes to personnel at the facility.

The planned new focus for Salo is expected to affect a maximum of 285 employees involved in production and in related support functions at Salo. Today, Nokia's Salo facility employs approximately 2 200 people. Nokia will support alter... .. .

4 1

February 08, 2010 08:57 AM

February 08, 2010 08:52 AM

The second week of our action plan for optimizing Krita was devoted to optimizing painting in Krita. Although there are many great paintops in Krita, digital painters tend to use most of the time the simple default brush engine which we call Pixel Brush. Painters can use GIMP brushes here, the text brush, but the most used brush tip is called Autobrush. You can setup the brush attributes like shape (circle, rectangle) and you can change the ratio to get an ellipse. Then you can change softness by vertical and horizontal fading. If you play with spikes and ratio, you get stars and other funny shapes. The brush has many dynamic attributes thanks Cyrille Berger’s work on concept called sensors. E.g. tablet can control the size by pressure, by tilt or anything you want (e.g. interesting is drawing angle) and it can be tuned by curve.

The algorithm, which computes the brush mask, stamped on the canvas regular as you stroke, is computed by the KisCircleMask::valueAt(). It is a computationally expensive function according valgrind logs we did week ago and many times before. David Revoy, team member of the Durian project, said that using 70px brush on 2500×2500 image was very slow in Krita. So we needed to optimize that.

I started with exploration of the code. I’m not the author of the autobrush, though I did most of the paintops in Krita (10 paintops are mine out of 19, many are experimental). First catch was the interpolation in the brush mask computation. We called valueAt() 4 times per pixel of the brush mask. We found out with Cyrille that the valueAt function used to take integer parameters a long long time ago and double values of the brush mask pixel positions were computed with interpolation. So I decided to remove the interpolation as the function has been capable to take double input long time ago. And the results of the valueAt() are more precise then interpolation. The benefit was great. Painting was 4x faster. Benchmark for random lines with changing size according pressure dropped from 18 seconds to 4 seconds on 4096×4096 image. Check it in the wiki, related table is called Just with performance fix.

From the valgrind logs we noticed that the atan2 function is called too often. “Chickenpump” suggested some cool old school tricks in comments. And so we gave that a try. I used double hashing with QHash in QHash for the 2D function atan2, but that was very slow due to low cache hit ratio and expensive hashing. Then Cyrille posted some links with free code which implemented a fast atan2 with an internal lookup table. So I ported that code to Krita. Cyrille did some magic stuff like computation with fixed precision on library loading time and some little tune ups to speed the fast atan2 computation and we managed to get more speed up around 1.3x faster then without fast atan2 function. There is probably some more room for optimizations as the fast atan2 implementation uses a quite small lookup table. Also I tested some other implementations, but it had problem with precision. It had 3 degrees error. That is too much for us, so I dropped that.

I remembered a quite interesting magic function for fast inverse square root used in Quake III. So I gave it a try as we use inverse square root in valueAt() too. I found out by benchmark that fast inverse square root is slower then directly computing the inverse square root (1/sqrt(x)). It used to be 4 times faster a long time ago. Probably Intel implemented that in processors already. Or the optimization done by compiler was not so effective in case of fast version. Again we dropped that.

Most of the use cases for painting include brush masks which are symmetrical. The algorithm could compute just 1/4 of the mask. Next step was implementing this.

First version used 4 pointers to the memory and compute 1 pixel and copy 3 pixels to the right region. I managed to get another 1.7x speed up (from 3.555 ms to 1.9 ms).

Memory access is very important and can slow down computation. It is like when you use setPixel/pixel method to access pixels in pixel buffer – you supposed to use scanlines, that is faster. Here is some interesting article about it. If you don’t have something to read, here is also nice CPU memory bible.

First version used 4 iterators over image pixels. One computation per pixel. And copy the values.

So I decided to make it little faster just by using two pointers. I compute 1/4 of the mask and copy this part to the NW region. And then I copy the rows in the lower part of the mask in correct order – I mirror it.

Improved version used two iteratiors and memcpy the second half of the brush mask.

I found out on friday evening that it does not work though. Circle masks seems symmetrical from user point of view, but they are not. The brush mask respects sub-pixel precision in Krita, so the edge pixels of the circle are not symmetrical. The sub-pixel precision is visible when you work with big zoom level. I have an idea for computation 1/4 of the brush mask, but I decided to post-pone it.

Other possibilities are still around:

1. mip-mapping : pre-compute various levels of brush mask to buffer and interpolate the masks. We do this for Gimp brush. We would interpolate two computed brush masks instead of computate the single mask. Maybe it could be faster, maybe not. The reason for mipmap in GIMP brush painting we have, was to increase the quality of the scaled brushes as Adrian Page, hacker in the Krita team, wrote me in an email. Mip-mapping would require to split rotation from the mask computation. This can lead to different results regarding of the brush mask. Now we consider the rotation in the mask computation. Then we would rotate un-rotated mask by image processing – rotate image. Some conformation rendering test would be needed. The advantage would be support for rotation of the gimp brushes in Krita.
2. cache the brush mask for mouse users: cache the dab as the mask doesn’t change. This would be nice if we did not compute sub-pixel precision. But we do that, so the cache hits ratio would be very small. It would be usable for 100% zoom, when sub-pixel position is zero. And of course big condition for checking of the parameter changes would be required.
3. Compute the mask with graphics card – use shaders: that would be cool, I have some initial experience with shaders but integration would be harder and probably too experimental for our plan. I’m mentioning this as we discussed this with Sven Langkamp in Oslo and so that it is not forgotten.
4. We will probably do some garbage recycling – memory allocation is slow, we can benefit from recycling memory. It is a matter of discussion on IRC at #krita on freenode. You are welcome to join.

Final time of the computation in benchmark for random lines is 1,449.2 ms. It dropped from 18,576 ms. So the painting was 16xtimes faster.But I revert the 1/4 of the brush mask speed up, so the current speed is 3.555 ms. Painting will be 6xtimes faster. The speed is considered to be usable for big brushes now. I invite you to do check-out of the trunk and try to play with big brushes. 200 px is now very usable on my laptop. What about yours?

I updated my WordPress blog. I dropped the previous classic WordPress theme and selected the default one – lazy developer. I did not like the font in the previous one. I don’t have much time to play with web-designing these days. But at least I customized the default Kubrick theme. I changed the fixed width of the theme to wider values. I did also simple custom header with some random strokes with my paintops in Krita. I hope you will like it. Every image in the blogpost is made in Krita.

February 08, 2010 08:44 AM

A little off topic but I'm very pleased to see that the timetable for Django 1.2 seems to be holding since they just entered feature freeze with beta 1. Among my favorite of features to come is, of course, support for multiple database backends. Other ...

February 08, 2010 08:24 AM

Writing code is easy. Instantiating objects, calling methods, memorising functions (or using the documentation instead); these are all trivial tasks that we have all taken time to study and practise. But engineering software is so much more than coding. As a software engineer you take on several roles throughout the software development life cycle. Let us take a look at some key roles that developers play during the software development life cycle, some problems you can run into, and how to solve them.

The Planner

The secret to planning any successful project is good estimates or no deadlines. Since the latter never happens, you need to take on the former and become a planner. This is the most challenging step of software development and the most critical. A lot of software engineers would like to think that planning is not useful to a project. The concept of ‘the software will be done when I finish it is very appealing, allowing you to continue developing with no outside interference. However in practice that is not feasible for most businesses. In order to run a project, a business needs to have a plan of what will be done, including a timeline which relates to the budget, and feel confident that in the end they will have a working deliverable. This means you must bite the bullet and make a plan before you begin to code.

A common claim is that planning doesn’t work because its impossible to predict the future, however this is only true to an extent. It is entirely possible to plan how to write a particular piece of software and how long it will take. It is also perfectly feasible to stick to this plan and deliver on time. The problems arise when an unknown is encountered during the course of the project, throwing you off schedule. This is totally normal but you cannot prevent, predict or stop this from happening. The only thing you can do is change your reaction to it. Flag the event as soon as it appears and tell the client about it. Be prepared to tell them the solution to the problem at the same time and the new delivery date if it will change.

Making accurate estimates is entirely possible if you take your time and really think about what you need to do. Break the project up into smaller pieces of work, called features or stories. Do not simply accept your gut instinct of how long it will take to do something. Think about each step you will need to take in building each piece of the software. There could well be a step you didn’t consider in your initial estimate. This hidden work will cost you a lot of time over the course of the project. Once you’ve estimated how long it will take to write the code, you should add to your estimate the time it will take to complete all the other work including architecture, testing and documentation. The easiest way to do this is to figure out a scale which you can calculate against. For example, if you spend 7 hours coding something, it will take you 1 hour to document it. This scale will vary depending on your project or team.

The Architect

Architecting software is actually part of the planning process. It is a very lengthy part involving a lot of research, thought and work; thus it becomes our second role in developing software. In order to build software, you need to have a plan. And in order to have a plan, you need to know what you will build. If you do not give a developer some general guidelines on how to write their code, they will improvise and do it in their own way. If you begin to code up front without taking time to design the system, you’ll find yourself re-doing a lot of the work in refactoring later on. This is not good for the stability of the product and can cause problems or bottlenecks during the development process. You may end up repeating the same work over and over again if you have not taken a good look beforehand to determine what to do.

All too often when building a system we overlook the importance of the system infrastructure. This is traditionally a systems administration task, but as a team lead or member of the planning team, you are responsible for determining what is needed and getting it implemented so your software can be used. You need to allow time to determine the system infrastructure and implement at least a development environment before starting the project. If this infrastructure is not in place beforehand, you’ll have a lot of time wasted by developers trying to set up and maintain their own environments.

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 10962 bytes)

February 08, 2010 08:00 AM

It has been some time since the last regular Camino development status update, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been hard at work—it just means that I’ve been pretty busy with all sorts of things, and the status updates have been fairly low on my to-do list.

As I said, though, we’ve been working on all sorts of things so far this year. Dan Weber has been hard at work on patches for some of the most visible issues with the new autocomplete experience, and I landed the fix for the magically-reappearing autocomplete window tonight. Dan is also still working on improving the speed of autocomplete for large histories, though that patch is not yet ready. Chris Lawson has also been working on various and sundry other bugs, including changes to the Flashblock exceptions list so that pasting URLs into the field will work as users expect. Philippe Wittenbergh is hard at work polishing some of our toolbar icons.

Christopher Henderson has been working on a patch that moves our history off of Mork, which is both the sane thing to do and critical for moving forward to the new Mork-less world. As usual, I have been chasing down bugs here and there and wrangling patches to get ready for the upcoming 2.0.2 and 1.6.11 releases. We’ve also seen Alex Jones, who has been working off-and-on on supporting Mobile Me sync, again recently, though it sounds like Sync Services wants to do things in a manner that is not easily compatible with Camino’s bookmarks implementation. All in all, we’ve been fairly productive since the new year began.

Which brings us back to the title of this post and to this weekend’s developments. Late Saturday afternoon, I got a debug version of Camino to build, launch, and run using Gecko 1.9.1, and early Sunday evening I was able to make a static (i.e., distributable) build do the same thing. (Even better, Christopher Henderson was able to replicate my success.) This feat would not have been possible without all the hard work that Christopher put in for the aforementioned history migration, as well as a good bit of debugging and patching he did this weekend as we hit some unexpected code-change-related build failures. After applying those patches, I mostly deleted and added things to the project and waited for the next build failure. At the end of the day, though, Camino launches and runs, plays <audio> and <video> (with Ogg), and displays pages with @font-face (with raw TrueType fonts).

This doesn’t mean that we can turn around and release a version of Camino based on Gecko 1.9.1 (and there’s a very strong possibility we may not); for starters, there are a number of known regressions (including the loss of Find-As-You-Type), as well as possibly hundreds of other serious problems we haven’t discovered in our limited test browsing. Beyond that, the “build system” is not yet a system at all; it involves pulling mozilla-1.9.1 from hg, checking out Camino from cvs into mozilla/camino, and applying a large patch. But if you’re brave or crazy, you can try this at home now (and for those less brave or more sane, there’s an Intel-only build here that you can use to help us find other broken things. N.B. You should treat this build as highly experimental. It might eat all of the cheese in your house. It will eat your profile, so make a backup copy first).

We also know (thanks to earlier attempts by Philippe Wittenbergh and Kai Rune Mathisen to build mozilla-central) that there are more serious code breakages in newer versions of Gecko, so this is only the beginning. In between other things the last few weeks, I’ve also been working on a new repository and fleshing out issues and solutions for the build system. There’s a long road ahead, and Camino 2.1 might be ready before we’ve gotten to the end of the road; we’ll have to see. However, as Christoper said on Saturday night, “it’s been a great day in Camino Land.”

February 08, 2010 06:57 AM

FCKEditor!

This news is a bit old now (since it appeared briefly on Planet Mozilla the other day half-buried in a PR round-up, and since reader James reported it in a comment on January 21), but FCKEditor is the winner of the 2010 edition of the annual “we break our site for your browser when the new year rolls around” broken browser-sniffing contest.

If you use FCKEditor on a site and it doesn’t work with Firefox 3.6 or nightly builds of any Gecko browser built since January 1, you’re probably seeing the bug that won FCKEditor this year’s prize with a stunning upset of two-time defending champion Yahoo!

My gut feeling is that this new type of contest winner is much worse than the old “major site is broken” type, since there is no single point of contact for the fix (everyone who uses the affected versions of FCKEditor will have to patch or upgrade their install), since unpatched instances of FCKEditor could break functionality on websites far and wide for years to come, and since in some ways the distributed nature of the problem means there is less visibility than when a major website suddenly ceases to work correctly.

I think this also highlights the importance of web “library” or “component” authors doing things correctly from the beginning—not browser sniffing at all, but instead testing for features—because their code will be used widely and, as I understand it, they have little control over getting consumers to update when there are fixes for broken things like this.

If you’re going to write something for wider consumption, or that you think may one day be useful to large audiences, please take the time to get things right from the beginning, especially if your code doesn’t have a dead-simple upgrade experience. Your users, and their users, and even other unrelated software vendors, will thank you for it later.

(And remember: only you can prevent broken browser sniffing! )

February 08, 2010 06:32 AM

Front Page

First edition of Maemo Weekly News

Hello, and welcome to the first edition of Maemo Weekly News. This, as the name suggests, is a new weekly digest of news and announcements from in and around the Maemo community. Our team of intrepid contributors are deeply embedded within all facets of the Maemo and 770, N800, N810 and N900 community; whether that's on IRC, talk.maemo.org, maemo.org Downloads, blogs, Twitter or the mailing lists. They read and process all the info, so you don't have to!

As this is the first issue, things are still bedding in - features such as the top downloads for the week, the newest downloads and the top bugs are still under development. Also, we're still looking for contributors; so if you feel like you stumble across Maemo items which are well hidden, and of interest to others, please hit "Read more" link to get involved. The key thing to all of us is that this adds lots of value, without taking up lots of our time. If laziness, hubris and a desire to help others are qualities you recognise in yourself, get in touch!

Read more

Firefox mobile released for Maemo 5

The news has been everywhere, but Mozilla's mobile Firefox (Fennec) has now been released for the N900. Using basically the same engine as the built-in browser, Firefox Mobile brings an interesting new take on the mobile browser user interface; can synchronise with your desktop Firefox and embraces the concepts of add-ons in the same way it's big brother does: Bringing Firefox to mobile devices is the next step toward fulfilling Mozilla's mission of providing one Web that everyone can access, regardless of device or location. Secure, powerful, and customizable, Firefox is the most modern mobile Web browser available and is optimized for a mobile experience. Key design principles are at the heart of the mobile browsing experience including minimal typing, seamless synchronization with desktop Firefox and the ability to take your Firefox with you, to name a few. It will be interesting to see whether it gets the user takeup that Firefox has had, given it's competing against its own cousin and every review lists the out-of-the-box browser as the best feature of the N900.

Read more

In this edition...

1. Front Page
   • First edition of Maemo Weekly News
   • Firefox mobile released for Maemo 5
2. Applications
   • The One Ring - Google Voice properly integrated into Maemo 5
   • Ovi store still selling DRM content the N900 can't play
   • Mac OS X iSync plugin for N900
   • ...
3. Development
   • Proposal for micro-donations for authors via maemo.org
   • maemo.org Extras definition of 'free' brought into focus
   • Network connected apps should better support proxy
   • ...
4. Community
   • UK development community used in Nokia marketing video
   • Brainstorm - how do we make it useful, and manage it?
   • Ask the Community Council
   • ...
5. Devices
   • No clarification on Maemo 6 for N900
   • N900 call volume fading out - hardware or software fault?
   • PUSHN900 pre-London meet roundup
6. Maemo in the Wild
   • N900 viral marketing in top 5 for 2009
   • Prominent N900 adverts in London Underground
7. Announcements
   • SyncEvolution 0.9.2 announcement
   • Download Assistant preview
   • Catorise sorts your #N900 apps: now in Extras
   • ...

8 0

February 08, 2010 06:00 AM

Front Page

BBC tech correspondent covers Nokia still ruling in face of iPhone & iPad

Rory Cellan-Jones is the BBC's senior technical journalist and, as with all the mainstream media, is often engrossed by Apple's product launches. However, he takes a closer look at the figures and points out that Nokia - as a worldwide company - are hoping to sell around 21 million smartphones in a quarter - as many as Apple might hope to sell in a year. Also note that mention of "mobile computers" in this category - Nokia is trying to point out, ever so quietly, that it's already in that new category described by Steve Jobs on Wednesday. He hasn't yet played with the N900, but mentions it as a sign that Nokia don't want to "get caught out again". The comments on the article also feature largely positive comments about the N900.

Read more

PUSH N900 US competition launched for hardware hacking

Following on from the success of the PUSH N900 invention competition in Europe (see the articles in the 'Wild' section for more), we’ve swung open the virtual doors once again, launching a whole new PUSH project dedicated to all the US hackers, modders and designers. [...] Now we want to see what the American hacker community can come up with. A panel of judges will choose the top three ideas from everything submitted, after which the finalist teams will be provided with a Nokia N900 and support from Nokia, to actually build their mod. Then, in March, a representative of these three winning teams will be flown to CTIA in Las Vegas, where they’ll get the chance to demonstrate their hack for final judging and the chance for their team to win cash prizes of $10,000, $5,000 and $3,000. Submissions can be made until noon (Eastern), 15 February 2010.

Read more

In this edition...

1. Front Page
   • BBC tech correspondent covers Nokia still ruling in face of iPhone & iPad
   • PUSH N900 US competition launched for hardware hacking
2. Applications
   • Ken-Young on Orrery, bringing more stars into view than you can see
   • Hands-on Mozilla's pocket-sized Firefox mobile
   • Browser Switchboard makes it easy to define alternative browsers as default
   • ...and 8 more
3. Development
   • Forum Nokia Developer Conference, 2nd March, Sydney Australia
   • Akademy KDE/Qt conference call for papers
   • Debian Etch rebuilt for Maemo
   • ...and 3 more
4. Community
   • Testing Squad for maemo.org Extras created
   • February maemo.org sprint meeting minutes & actions online
5. Devices
   • Porting Maemo's base to other chipsets/devices
   • Device quality assurance inside look
6. Maemo in the Wild
   • 2009 Engadget awards - N900 nominee in 2 categories
   • A quick round up of the PUSH N900 Showcase last night
   • PUSH N900 London party pole-dancing robot video
7. Announcements
   • Subscribe to MWKN to ensure you never miss an issue
   • Marina theme for Maemo 5
   • Hoops Frenzy available for $1.99
   • ...and 5 more

9 0

February 08, 2010 06:00 AM

Theme Bugs Filed This Week

Note: I haven’t filed any Linux bugs yet and the Wiki page is out-of-date. Still working out some details there and should have that resolved this week.

This week I filed the first round of Bugs for implementing the new theme:

• #544815 – Allow for placing Tabs over the Navigation Bar with option for Tabs under the Navigation Bar
• #544816 – Attach combined Stop/Go/Refresh button to the Location Bar
• #544817 – Create Bookmarks Widget with placement dependent on Bookmarks Bar status
• #544818 – Progress “Line” indicator for background loading tabs
• #544819 – Create a basic Home Tab linking to the current Home Page
• #544823 – [Meta] Theme Visual Refresh
• #544820 – [Windows] Theme Visual Refresh
• #544821 – [OS X] Theme Visual Refresh

This is a pretty exciting step for me after having worked on the design for so many months.

 

Wiki Updates

I also spent some time getting all the mockups and thought processes on the Wiki current:

• Theme and UI Revamp
• Windows Theme Mockups
• Theme/UI Direction and Feedback
• Mac Theme Mockups
• Mac Specific Visual Design

February 08, 2010 05:59 AM

In the continued interests of helping to make Ubuntu rock as a platform for scratching itches and making awesome apps, I am putting together a new online learning event: Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week, happening online between 1st – 6th March 2010.

The week will be just like our previous online learning events such as Ubuntu Developer Week and Ubuntu Open Week, but instead providing a week jam packed with awesome sessions about writing applications that scratch your itch, and predominantly focusing on Python tools and frameworks, Bazaar, Launchpad and infrastructure. The goal for the week is give attendees a head start on a given technology useful for applications.

So, I am looking for volunteers. If you feel you could give a tutorial about a given Python module or associated technology (e.g. Glade, Launchpad, Bazaar etc), please drop me an email at jono AT ubuntu DOT com and I will liaise with you to get it scheduled. I am also look for some showcase sessions: stories about how you put together an application, how it scratched your itch and what tools you used. Thanks to everyone who contributes to leading a session!

The week has already been added as a Lernid event and I am going to encourage session leaders to create slides for their sessions. As each session is confirmed it will appear in Lernid and on the wiki page. Rocking!

February 08, 2010 05:53 AM

There is a discussion going on in the Ubuntu Marketing team’s mailing list about creating Ubuntu videos in order to advertise Ubuntu to normal users. We got onto talking about existing adverts from Microsoft and Apple and I thought I’d share with the wider community my thoughts.

Interestingly when you look at the adverts for both companies you find an interesting pattern.

Often a leading brand / product doesn’t need to reference it’s competition, it just goes along with “We’re awesome, and everyone knows it”, The second fiddle is often comparing it’s self to the market leader.

What we have is Apple constantly comparing themselves to PC (even though an Apple is a PC and what they really mean is windows). Then Apple’s adverts were so successful that they put Microsoft on the defensive and they produced a bunch of laptop hunter adverts that mention Apple’s expensive laptops, unusual strategy for a market leader. But then the dynamic is kinda odd since Microsoft is a software company and Apple is a hardware company. so it’s not like they’re competing… not really.

But you’ll notice that every advert reinforces a set of ideas:

1) That there is such a thing as a Mac and it’s not a PC.
2) That a PC is Windows and nothing else.
3) That there are only two choices.
4) That you have to pay one way or another.
5) No one need worry about control when they get fancy features.

It’s interesting that we don’t play on our strengths of pointing this out, getting people to go “Oh hey there is something else, oh it can be installed on any PC, even Apple PCs, oh it’s free and I get to OWN it, control it, give it to my friends and even get involved with real people who make it, not just marketing departments.

There is a whole bunch of stuff we could focus on in very clever ways. But what I see a lot of here is tail chasing… lets copy them because they’ve spent money on those adverts. Perhaps people really have bought into the ideas in those adverts and that just sounds like the adverts were successful in telling their story and we want our story to be Microsoft’s or Apple’s because we were taken in.

But why do we want to tell the same story when we’ve a completely different narrative that’s run our communities for years.

Your thoughts?

February 08, 2010 05:36 AM

February 08, 2010 04:53 AM

#i109032# - Database access: CreateUnoDialog returns Null when Dialog/s running from other odb file at the same time
#i109034# - Database access: Second Listbox in table control shows ID instead of text
#i109031# - l10n: [JA]wrong translation about "Drawing scale"
#i109035# - sw: There could be a "Go to" button in the "Insert bookmark" window
#i109033# - sw: Writer hangs loading particular file with linked text frames

February 08, 2010 04:43 AM

I had a crack at creating some electronic music. I know, not metal. I figured I would share this, and I have never done this before, so be gentle.

Check out Master Of The Situation in MP3 and Ogg format.

Created in Cubase with Halion One, a KeyRig and Drumkit From Hell.

February 08, 2010 04:42 AM

I almost can't believe it - even though I really do believe in the New Orleans Saints.

When they Saints go marching in.... Too bad I can' beam over and be on Bourbon Street this night. It surely is being flooded - by cheers this time, by partying, by celebration. The "fleur de lis" made it to Football heaven!

This is a victory not only for an astonishing team, it is a victory for the whole city and people people who cherish it, restore it and rebuild it by investing their hearts in it. I've been there, and I felt what a great city it is. And I'll come back, that's a promise.

In the end, Peyton - that son of New Orleans area who has grown to be one of the greatest quarterbacks up there in Indy - could not outcoach and outcall Mr. Payton. The coach on the field needed to give in to the team he usually cheers for, a team with many great people - Payton, Bush, Porter, Vilma, and of course their own quarterback - they call him the Brees...

I'm not sure I really have fully realized that "my" Saints have actually done it and WON the Super Bowl in their first attempt ever to do so.

Who Dat!

February 08, 2010 04:05 AM

It was pointed out to me that my last post contained an error in the date. The next CALug meeting is Wednesday February 10th. NOT the 11th as was in the previous post. The corrected post follows:

Hi Everyone!

This coming Wednesday, February 10th is the next Columbia Area Linux Users Group meeting in Columbia, MD at the offices of Tenable Network Security.

Jonathan Riddell will be opening with his talk entitled “Kubuntu Community and Technology”. He will talk about the Linux distribution Kubuntu who makes it and the tools used.

Jonathan works for Canonical and started Kubuntu five years ago.

As long as Jonathan keeps to his contract and doesn’t do his Leno impression he’ll turn over speaker responsibilities to Justin Kirby*.

Justin will be presenting his talk “Making the leap from KDE user to contributor”. Justin will discuss simple ways for KDE users to become contributors, even without knowing a thing about developing code. His talk will provide specific details about various teams that exist within KDE, what you can do to help them out, and who to talk to if you have questions.

Justin Kirby is an active contributor to the KDE Promo team. He has been a user of KDE for about 3 years but more recently got actively involved in giving back to the community in July of 2009. You can learn more about the KDE Promo team on their wiki.

So join us at the Tenable offices at 6:30pm for pizza, wings and soda supplied by Praxis Engineering followed by the talks starting at 7pm.

* After minutes of negotiation with Justin’s agent I was able to secure a return appearance at a later date should Jonathan decide the evening belongs to him alone.

February 08, 2010 03:19 AM

February 08, 2010 02:04 AM

The Morevna Project aims to create an animated film in a modern anime-style retelling a very old Russian folktale known as “Marya Morevna”. It’s a free culture production project pushing the envelope in several ways — entirely using free software tools and releasing under the free Creative Commons Attribution license. The project is purely community-based, without any foundation funding, so they can probably use your help. Joining could be a terrific learning opportunity, whether your interest is in literature, music, animation, or software development.

read more

February 08, 2010 01:34 AM

I hear a lot about the problem where web server (IIS) throws an error saying that PHP script has timed out in our forums. Let’s try to understand the reason behind this. I will be using a Windows 7 Enterprise machine (having IIS 7.5) to explain this but this should be applicable to Windows 2008/Windows Vista too. The same can be told true for Windows 2003/Windows XP with some difference like IIS stores FastCGI configuration in fcgiext.ini file rather than application meta-base. However the concept should be exactly similar.

Let me now summarize some of the IIS FastCGI settings and PHP INI configuration directive to ensure that everyone is on the same page and which are most important for this discussion.

Two important FastCGI settings:

ActivityTimeout – This is the number of seconds that the FastCGI handler waits for I/O activity from a process before it is terminated. At some place you will also find this as being documented as number of seconds PHP-CGI process can run without communicating to IIS.

RequestTimeout – This is the maximum amount of time in seconds that a FastCGI process is allowed to handle a request before it is terminated.

Important PHP INI directive for this discussion:

max_execution_time – This is the maximum time in seconds a script is allowed to run before it is terminated by parser. Details can be seen at http://www.php.net/manual/en/info.configuration.php#ini.max-execution-time.

All the above three impacts your script execution time. Ideally you will have the value of RequestTimeout greater than or equal to ActivityTimeout. Well this is not a hard rule but going by meaning of these two timeouts it makes sense to do this. Assume you are uploading a file of size ‘X’ MB and it takes 500 second to upload it (assuming PHP is configured properly to allow upload of files and so the size of ‘X’ MB is also allowed) and you have below value for the two timeouts:

ActivityTimeout=501

RequestTimeout=400

This configuration will result into request timeout while uploading the file. The reason is that though an I/O operation (in this case file upload) is allowed for 501 seconds which is perfectly fine for this case, request time out is less than 501 (and is at 400) and so FastCGI will encounter a request timeout. Remember this will be done by the web server (IIS here) and not PHP. So setting the value of RequestTimeout higher than ActivityTimeout makes more sense.

However assume your max_execution_time is set to 300 seconds and you are running a PHP script which executes for time more than 300 seconds and FastCGI timeout settings are same as above. This time PHP will terminate itself.

This implies that (assuming you have RequestTimeout set to a value higher than ActivityTimeout) you script will run maximum for time in seconds which is configured for max_execution_time or RequestTimeout whichever is less.

This should help you configuring the PHP script to run for a longer period of time.

Some Frequently asked question

• I am changing the fastcgi.ini file or php.ini file but settings are not getting effected on XP/2k3 or I am changing applicationhost.config or php.ini on a IIS7 machine and changes are not getting effected.

Please recycle the application pool or restart the server to make the FastCGI/PHP process read the new settings. If you are using latest FastCGI and you do not want to restart the application and want changes to be picked up on it’s own you can as well use the feature called ‘Monitor Changes to File’. Details about this can be found at http://blogs.iis.net/ksingla/archive/2009/01/22/improvements-to-fastcgi-in-iis-7-5.aspx for IIS7.5 and at http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/248/configure-the-fastcgi-extension-for-iis-60/ for IIS6.0. For information regarding if this feature is supported on your configuration or not please refer to blog post at ">">"/>

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 7922 bytes)

February 08, 2010 01:23 AM

For all those in Buenos Aires or its surroundings, we'll be having a meeting to celebrate the release of KDE SC 4.4.

This next Saturday 13th, at 19:00 we'll meet at Dr Mason, a bar known to be friendly to FLOSS people of all nature (it has been home to a couple of Ubuntu release parties). It is located in Araoz 1199, Buenos Aires. Cost is about AR$ 30 for some beer and snacks.

We'll gather to talk about the features of the new releases, upcoming events, and of course, have a beer and socialize. Here you can find more information about it: http://kde.org.ar/node/54

February 08, 2010 12:49 AM

February 08, 2010 12:26 AM

Make me believe!

Background

The Internet has been nominated for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Conclusion

Given that the Internet has allowed a powerful global conversation to start and thus implies non-violence as well as being a platform for global voluntary cooperation, it should be given the Nobel Peace Prize. Although the prize itself is meaningless, it does have an undeniable symbolic value.

Now the analysis.

The Nobel Prize to Barack and “Scandinavian” as adjective:

One of the main reasons for Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize was his stand and preliminary work against the dispersion of nuclear weapons. Well let’s not forget that we, the world, are still facing many dangers that are not being fought against by any politician. Instead politicians ally themselves with them to set the discourse of the day, and this is true for most societies worldwide. So it’s fair to call these dangers for what they are: Press, Radio and Television = Weapons of mass destruction!

Well, as much as I was disappointed with the stupidity of the Nobel committee here in Oslo last year, I don’t blame them. I guess Thorbjørn Jagland, chair of the committee, wanted to shake hands with Barack and play the cool kid in front of the world. To me that is not surprising coming from him. In my eyes he is a poster child of the manic Scandinavian obsession with and speciality for organizing peace and freedom. He also represents the historical, and current, Scandinavian pushing for the creation (notice where the first 2 UN Secretary General are from) of a One World government. And as any politician or person of power, he likes to show off. Period.

In second though, the peace organizing behavior might actually be driven by guilt or might just be categorized as schizophrenic as the track record of Scandinavian countries (read Norway and Sweden specifically) is not as peaceful or uneventful as you might think. But please, don’t get me wrong. I love Norway and the other Scandinavian countries and their people, I just want us to acknowledge collectively that we are acting sanctimoniously. If we