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Some FOSDEM 2010 photos

Now that I can see beyond the snow is time to follow the Day -1 with more photos showing what happened during the event.

Travelling with a sponsorship from Mozilla (thank you guys a lot!) and being a rabid Fedora fanboy I shared my time between the Mozilla room and the Fedora booth:


And hanged with people from both communities:


Also, had the opportunity to take part in a planning for the upcoming Libre Graphics Meeting, where it looks like the Fedora Design Team will have a good presence:

It was impressive how many people have attended, many presentations had the rooms jam-packed, with more people in the audience than seats available:

Being there with two groups, one night I partied with the Mozilla people (food, drinks, bowling and laser tag):


And the other with my Fedora friends (food, drinks, jokes, photography)


I don't know from which project they were, but some people seems they had partier even harder than us:

It was not all fun, jokes and trying to impress girls:

I even managed to get some work done (if you can call that work):

February 09, 2010 02:24 PM

Back in the trenches

The expression "back in the trenches" is usually used as a metaphor for going back to work on something... this time I use it literally, just like the digging ditches:

Returning from FOSDEM (more posting about FOSDEM is in the queue), where the weather in Brussels was not bad at all, I found Bucharest waiting me with a big surprise, when arriving home the snow was so big, it was impossible for me to open the gate, I had to take it out from its joints:

My house is positioned in such a way that it provide shelter against Crivăț, the mighty wind from the Nort-East (from Russia, Siberia, from where most of the nasties come), so during a snowstorm like that, the blizzard will blow the snow from the open areas and pile it where its sheltered (like in front of my house):

The snow had formed a crest with the peak at about 80cm exactly in front of the door and where I have to dig trails, I used a ruler to measure it:

My dog was the happiest to see me back, she was alone for those few days (with a big reserve of food) but she didn't like at all to be isolated by snow like that. I was a liberator!

Now in Bucharest is -5°C and snowing slowly...

February 09, 2010 07:41 AM

rng-tools with TPM

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

Fedora Webcomic, FOSDEM Special: The Lame Sellout

So my soul is sold for a couple of beers, I have no shame. And because people waited so long. this one is bigger, has more panels and more people.

Now back to the planning for today's beers...

February 06, 2010 12:35 PM

FOSDEM -1: FAD and beer

I am in a hurry, preparing a surprise, struggling with bad connectivity, so won't talk a lot abut the photos from the FOSDEM -1 day (didn't made even a good selection before publishing). but it was good: first I joined the gang for a good talk about ambassadors (and of course some beer)

Then we got somewhere to eat and had some nice crêpes (and some of us had some beers)

After which we moved to the traditional beer event

Where obviously everybody had plenty of beer:

February 06, 2010 11:32 AM

The Browser Is The Platform... Seriously

As I've been investigating frameworks that would let me create an installed app for Mac/Linux/Windows/iPhone/Android, the two words that have come up most might surprise you: JavaScript and WebKit.

Most of you know what JavaScript is. It's a programming language that allows you to do client-side tasks in the browser (programs you embed in a web page that are run by the user's browser, rather than on the web server). Fewer might know about WebKit.

WebKit is an engine for powering a web browser. When Apple went to create Safari, they borrowed and built upon an open source engine called KHTML which was created by the KDE project. Over the years, it's stayed open, stayed free, tried to stay ahead of the technological curve, and by many opinions, is less bloated and burdened with legacy code than the open source engine that powers Firefox.

And it's spread. Webkit powers Safari on Windows, Mac, iPhone, and the upcoming iPad. It powers much of the new Google Chrome browser and the Google Chrome OS. WebKit powers the built-in browsers on Android and the Palm Pre. It also underpins multiple cross-platform application frameworks, including Adobe Air and Appcelerator Titanium. I haven't spent a lot of time researching it, but it seems that Blackberry's going WebKit for it's main browser and you can get a WebKit browser for your Windows Mobile phone.

Basically, you get the broadest range of targetable systems not with Flash, not with Java, but by targeting development to WebKit.

Most of your smartphone users will go with the built in browser. Even if they downloaded something else, it's hard or impossible to delete the built-in browser in many phones, so they'll have it. If you want to make sure your desktop/laptop users are running a WebKit browser, just package up the front page of your web application in Adobe Air or Titanium Appcelerator and the framework's runtime will bundle your app around a runtime that gives you all that WebKit functionality.

With client-side databases, "offline" mode (web scripts can determine when the browser is offline and continue to offer various services), some pretty cool JavaScript libraries for user interface animation and 2-D gaming, HTML5's native handling of video and audio, and the ever-expanding functionality of the Canvas element, applications will continue to migrate to the browser. As more browsers offer a standardized option for user scripts (3rd party scripts that run after a page loads... with the user's permission), even more ways to blur the line between desktop and web app enter the picture.

Don't get me wrong. You're not going to see the whole computing experience handled inside the browser. For some computationally intensive tasks like video compression and 3-D gaming, you just need the pure, throaty roar of compiled code running natively on the platform you're using. But where pure speed, power, and access to various hardware devices isn't needed, you're going to find enterprising souls creating online competition for your favorite desktop apps, and it's all going to be handled in your browser by its built-in functionality.

After a week of trying to figure out the best way to structure my latest secret project, I've decided to target WebKit, because with a combination of a WebKit-based framework for the desktop and WebKit powering the default browsers on a huge portion of the smartphone universe, it's going to give my project the broadest possible reach.

February 06, 2010 09:27 AM

This Is How Evil I Am: Chocolate-Cheese-Filled Doughnut Kebabs with Salt & Pepper Chocolate Sauce

I'm not sure how the idea came to me, but it did.

I make a neat little homemade chocolate cheese from scratch (heat the milk and cream, add lemon juice to curdle, strain, drain, and mix in cocoa and sugar... that easy). I was trying to think of a dessert I could make from it and came up with the following idea.

Make the cheese (possibly with some ground chocolate chips mixed in to make it a little more gooey when hot). Form the cheese into balls and then chill. Take a chilled ball, dip it in drop doughnut or funnel cake batter, and deep fry. Let drain, then skewer three or four balls together to make a kebab. Drizzle the kebab with a chocolate sauce that's been kicked up a notch with a little salt and some fresh ground pink peppercorn.

So, who dares me to actually make this (as my wife shakes her head and begs me to just say "no")?

February 05, 2010 10:12 PM

How To Write Five Computer Programs at Once

I got an idea for an application that I wanted people to be able to run on their desktops and phones, and to be able to sync the data between their desktops and phones. I could do it as a web app and have it run on any browser, but that posed 3 distinct problems:

1. It is going to use and manipulate information the user may consider private or sensitive. I just don't want to store that information and be responsible for its security. Some elements will get stored on a server I maintain to aid in the sync, but because the juicy stuff isn't on it, I have less of a privacy/disclosure nightmare if my server is hacked. And because there's no "juicy" data on the server, it's a less attractive hacking target.

2: If I do it as a packaged application, I have much fewer headaches with cross-browser compatibility. Plus I can bring in features that some browsers don't have (and some do).

3: The more I functionality I run server-side, the more data transfer and processing overhead I have to cover. That means money I have to pay. So the more I can minimize this, the happier I am.

So I went looking for a programming framework and development environment that could support Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iPhone... at minimum. I found two.

Mono

Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .Net framework. It allows you to code in C# or the .Net flavor of Visual Basic and use a cross-platform widget toolkit for creating your user interface.

Only one problem, their IDE for Mac doesn't support the cross-platform widget toolkit's visual designer and only the most recent version started supporting debugging. And when I loaded up Ubuntu in a virtual machine so I could try it on Ubuntu, the visual designer barely worked and was completely unintuitive.

There was going to be a learning curve for C# as it was, but my primary machine is a Mac and their Mac development environment's shortcomings were going to turn the learning curve into a learning wall. Still, it remained in the running because I could always run it in Windows via Parallels, and if I surmounted that curve, there was not only the payoff of some .Net libraries I could use to avoid reinventing some wheels, there was the fact that the .Net programming skills and apps demonstrating them on 5 operating systems might actually be very marketable.

Sadly, the "documentation" for the MonoDevelop IDE contains 5 articles and 4 screencasts, some of which are out of date. The other 11 chapters merely have "TODO" placeholders, so we can wait for important articles on UI development with GTK# and "Working with Databases".

Appcelerator Titanium

Appcelerator Titanium is an interesting option for cross-platform development. It's a wrapper around the WebKit browser engine that allows you to basically create web apps that run locally. The wrapper gives you additional APIs that are accessible from the apps.

Upside, if you know a little JavaScript and HTML, you can be writing apps almost instantly. If you're a big fan of frameworks like Dojo, Scriptaculous, or JQuery, they're available. And when combined with the custom APIs for additional hooks into the filesystem and other OS features, it's pretty darn powerful. Then you add in that it offers PHP, Ruby, and Python interpreters. Then factor in the Greasemonkey style userscript capabilities (which let you write scripts that interact with pages from other web sites).

Then you come crashing to earth. Appcelerator has two development flavors: Mobile and Desktop. Desktop is sort of a Wild West free-for-all, where the sky seems to be the limit. But in the Mobile universe, you lose many of those features. If you ask why, there's one simple answer: "Apple doesn't allow it."

So if you want to develop one codebase that powers both Desktop and Mobile flavored apps, it's all going to be in JavaScript. And despite the Desktop flavor seeming to have a wealth more features, the Mobile flavor is much better documented. For example, the Mobile flavor has a "Kitchen Sink" demonstration application full of demos of UI hooks and methods for calling their wrapper API, but Desktop doesn't.

In fact, on their code wiki, their 9-chapter "getting started" tutorial only has 4 chapters finished. The remaining 5 chapters have just been outlined and left up to taunt beginners.

So if desktop seems to have so much more power to offer, why does mobile get all the documentation? Because there are 8,000 programming languages and IDEs that will allow you to rapidly develop a Windows application. The Android and iPhone spaces are just opening up. This presents a route to developing for what may well be the two hottest mobile platforms in the world with a MUCH lower learning curve than if you had to learn how to program Android and iPhone natively.

Creative agencies can start developing iPhone apps for their clients after giving one of their web guys a few days to get up to speed. You could probably code a fart button app in your first day, even if you were relatively new to web programming.

The Downside

Frameworks like Java, .Net, and Flash/Air are dependent on virtual machines. They compile the code you write not into a true ready-to-run application, but into an intermediate state called "byte code" that is then further processed by the virtual machine before it can be run. That gives them their "write once, run anywhere" capabilities. The virtual machine translates their byte code into code that the platform they're on/in can run.

The downside of this is that you can get a "decompiler" and translate the byte code back into a pretty good approximation of the original source code. If you have proprietary algorithms that you want to protect by keeping them secret instead of patenting them, you'll be out of luck, because .Net, Java, and Flash/Air applications can be reverse engineered.

But the problem with Apcellerator is that, for the most part, it's not compiling your code at all. Write your "Hello World" program. Package it in a Windows installer. Download it and install it. Then go into your C:\Program Files directory, find the Hello World app's directory, and drill down to the Resources directory. In it you'll find an exact copy of the Resources directory from your development environment with all your HTML and JavaScript files not only intact and unaltered, but you can open them up in Notepad, change them, and change the operation of the "installed" program.

That just sort of bugs me. I can't think of any way it can be exploited to harm users unless they've already been compromised, and in that instance it's more of a case of the burglar already being in the house and the Appcelerator app just being the lamp he decides to hit you with. But users being able to go in and change code in an installed application... seems a recipe for something bad.

Hopefully future versions will create unalterable checksums for these files, so each time the file is run/loaded, if its checksum is different than the checksum created at packaging time, there's an error message and the code isn't run.

You can get around some of it by using a compressor or obfuscator. Using something like Packer not only creates unreadable code, but even if it gets decompiled/decoded, it's still a lot harder to read and change than your well-whitespaced, well-commented source.

The Final Decision

I'm going with Appcelerator. I won't really create five programs at once because the Desktop and Mobile UIs are different, and there are some differences in the APIs, but a large piece of my code base can be written just once and power both the Mobile and Desktop flavors of my app, and it's not nearly as frustrating as Mono.

February 03, 2010 10:21 PM

The Public Domain Manifesto

I learned about the Public Domain Manifesto from Bogdan's blog and as soon as I read it I found it awesome and signed.

As skeptical as I am about such a document being ever officially accepted (there are so many interests and such powerful lobbyists...) I couldn't stop promoting it further. The Open Clip Art Library is an excellent use case for PD, the manifesto is all about we are doing there. I' also trying to talk one of the ambassadors (I am not one of them) into signing it on behalf of our Romanian Fedora community.

Here is the preamble of the manifesto:

"Our markets, our democracy, our science, our traditions of free speech, and our art all depend more heavily on a Public Domain of freely available material than they do on the informational material that is covered by property rights. The Public Domain is not some gummy residue left behind when all the good stuff has been covered by property law. The Public Domain is the place we quarry the building blocks of our culture. It is, in fact, the majority of our culture."(James Boyle, The Public Domain, p.40f, 2008)

Its general principles:

1. The Public Domain is the rule, copyright protection is the exception.
2. Copyright protection should last only as long as necessary to achieve a reasonable compromise between protecting and rewarding the author for his intellectual labour and safeguarding the public interest in the dissemination of culture and knowledge.
3. What is in the Public Domain must remain in the Public Domain.
4. The lawful user of a digital copy of a Public Domain work should be free to (re-)use, copy and modify such work.
5. Contracts or technical protection measures that restrict access to and re-use of Public Domain works must not be enforced.

And general recommendations:

1. The term of copyright protection should be reduced.
2. Any change to the scope of copyright protection (including any new definition of protectable subject-matter or expansion of exclusive rights) needs to take into account the effects on the Public Domain.
3. When material is deemed to fall in the structural Public Domain in its country of origin, the material should be recognized as part of the structural Public Domain in all other countries of the world.
4. Any false or misleading attempt to misappropriate Public Domain material must be legally punished.
5. No other intellectual property right must be used to reconstitute exclusivity over Public Domain material.
6. There must be a practical and effective path to make available 'orphan works' and published works that are no longer commercially available (such as out-of-print works) for re-use by society.
7. Cultural heritage institutions should take upon themselves a special role in the effective labeling and preserving of Public Domain works.
8. There must be no legal obstacles that prevent the voluntary sharing of works or the dedication of works to the Public Domain.
9. Personal non-commercial uses of protected works must generally be made possible, for which alternative modes of remuneration for the author must be explored.

February 03, 2010 09:39 AM

Inkscape used in schools

In the Los Altos School District in California, they have a Digital Design program to teach the students about graphics software and programming. For the vector graphics course they are teaching the students how to use Inkscape. Here is a gallery of art created by approximately 175 4th grade students of the seven schools that this course is being taught at. There is a link next to each of the images on the following page which will take you to the corresponding sub-gallery.

February 03, 2010 12:30 AM

Clip Art of the Month: “Locked” Technology

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Clip Art of the Month for February 2010 will focus on Content regulation.

Whether one stands in favor of Apple’s products or against them, it’s impossible to deny Jobs and Company’s impact on our technological lives. Last week saw the unveiling of what Apple believes will become a “third category” of mobile computing: the iPad. The iPad aims at simplifying the user’s computing experience by merging elements of Apple’s existing laptop and phone releases.

In the new millennium, computing platforms have trended toward more open source solutions. While it may offer the end user a more simple and streamlined experience, the iPad also seems to assert Apple’s intention to focus on technology as a controlled gateway for proprietary consumption.

Images by Frector, adam_lowe, Minduka, flomar, and Tranberry (all above) demonstrate Apple’s influence on modern design and why it cannot be ignored. The reception of their latest product has been decidedly mixed. How will the introduction of the iPad affect the Open Clip Art Community? What ramifications might this have as open source computing progresses? Time will tell. In the meantime, feel free to share your thoughts and continue supporting Open Clip Art Library by using and contributing vector artwork.

Clip Art of the month is sponsored by Worldlabel.com, a multifunctional label manufacturer.

February 02, 2010 11:47 AM

London and Scandinavian food

Went down to London yesterday for a meeting and I used the opportunity to visit the scandinavian deli and grocery store there. Turned out to be pretty nice, with a decent selection of food. I stocked up on Swedish liquorice, Norwegian lompe, Danish red hotdog sausages and a Norwegian brown cheese.

In other words I am well set for another week of scaring Abigail with Scandinavian food

February 02, 2010 11:06 AM

<1-sec X boot

Looked like we've finally gotten boot speed of X down under a second, as measured by Martin Pitt on his box. (Our objective for Lucid was 2-seconds so this is quite good news.)

February 02, 2010 02:11 AM

How KML Succeeds and Fails as a Web Format

KML is linked. It is self-descriptive, and can rely entirely on following of links to obtain more information, whether that is styles or additional data. However, the most common way of packaging KML is as KMZ -- which is sort of like packaging an HTML page inside a zip file with ...

February 01, 2010 04:00 PM

gtg 0.2.1 released

gtg 0.2.1 is released today. This release includes a feature I added for deferring tasks to a later date, so I figured I'd share about how I use it for scheduling my own todo list.

I've got a huge todo list. Work projects, bugs needing fixed, hobby software projects, baby stuff, family stuff, house maintenance... Hundreds of tasks taken all together. It's overwhelming when you look at the full list all at once.

The Work View feature in gtg is helpful because it lets you look at just a subset of the whole list. The Work View excludes tasks that have a start date scheduled for some day in the future.

So the trick I use is to set start dates on every task. By default, new tasks do not have start dates. So when starting out with gtg, setting start dates on each and every task can be a huge amount of work! This is where the defer functionality comes in handy.

In the task browser, turn on Work View. Now highlight a range of tasks that don't have a start date scheduled, which don't need to be done for a long time. Hit the right button to bring up the context menu, and go to "Schedule for... > Next month". How many tasks remain? If it is more than 10-20, pick highlight another set of tasks that don't need to be done right now, and do "Schedule for... > Next week". Repeat this moving tasks to tomorrow, until the list is whittled down to a set that can be achieved today.

I often find I overestimate what I can actually get done. Some tasks take longer than I planned. Interruptions, requests and emergencies steal time too. So as the day goes, I'll postpone items to tomorrow if it's looking unlikely that I'll get to them, so that I can stay focused on the important priorities.

Each morning, I refresh gtg's work view to get the new todo list for the day, and repeat the above process to narrow the list to just 20-30 items. I usually take a mix of high priority tasks, lower priority tasks that won't take much time, and a few fun items.

January 31, 2010 09:21 PM

Come to StatusCheck Brussels at FOSDEM 2010 Next Saturday

That’s right! The StatusNet crew invites you #StatusCheckBRU to grab a beer on Saturday night, February 6, 2010 in Brussels at nearby “A La Mort Subite” for a couple of hours to talk all things StatusNet, the free network service microblogging software. Myself (@rejon) and @Evan will be on hand and  have free limited number of new StatusNet shirts, loads of new stickers, and lots of discussions to be had. This is a StatusCheck to coincide with FOSDEM, a Free and Open Software Developer Meeting. You don’t miss StatusNet CEO and Identi.ca Founder, Evan Prodromou’s presentation on Sunday at 4 PM at FOSDEM, either.

http://fosdem.org/2010/schedule/events/820

You are invited to this #StatusCheckBRU where we will have beers, free shirts, free StatusNet sign-ups for private beta, stickers, and great discussion fun. Please go to the wiki page and let us know you are coming!

Put it on your calendars and share it with your friends!

StatusCheckBRU, 6 PM

A La Mort Subite
rue Montagne-aux-Herbes Potagères 7
B-1000 Brussels
+32-(0)2-513.13.18

Map: http://ur1.ca/l16z

http://www.alamortsubite.com/

UPDATE: In addition to some other staffers and community members, StatusNet’s own User Experience Designer, @csarven(Sarven Capadisli) will be on-hand at FOSDEM and the StatusCheckBRU.

January 31, 2010 08:13 PM

Haiti Crisis Map Effort

One of the most difficult thigns to do in time of disaster is to quickly organize, marshal, and present resources. This applies across all aspects of disaster response -- whether it be managing and distributing food, organizing volunteers, or setting up technical resources to assist with the relief effort. The last ...

January 29, 2010 11:00 PM

gtg hackfest in portland

Next Thursday (Feb 4th) evening several of us from Canonical will be getting together after work to talk about and hack on gtg. If you're in Portland and interested in showing up, drop Jorge Castro a line, he's organizing it. (Or leave a comment here with your contact info and I'll pass word along).

I'm getting to be a heavy user of gtg. As you can imagine, being the X maintainer for Ubuntu engenders a huge task load. For example, in addition to regular project assignments, bug work, packaging duties, and so on, there are also a lot of "drive by tasks" given to me by other people on irc, email, etc. In the past, while I had tools for organizing projects, I never did have a good way of capturing and organizing these drive by tasks, so they tended to either a) interrupt whatever I was working on that day, or b) get dropped on the floor and forgotten. With gtg, what I do is write down a task for the item (or forward the email to gtg, or cut-and-paste the log from irc), and defer it until tomorrow. Then I can assure the requester that it is on my todo list for the next day.

So while it doesn't solve the task overload that comes with maintaining X, it sure helps with managing the tasks in a more organized fashion.

January 29, 2010 07:42 PM

Success to much?

The price of popularity: your blog gives up with 'bandwidth exceeded' (yeah, cheap shared hosting). This just happened to our colleague who apparently became too popular, not sure if because of her slow but continuously growing photography project, the exploding (in the Spanish speaking community) series of GIMP video tutorials or due to a couple of incredibly well received articles about a crappy and cheap smartphone.

Well, the useful content can still be reached: photos on flicker, videos on blip.tv: is this an argument for using proprietary sharing platforms or just for a better hosting? If you know who I am talking about, you must know already hot to get to the content.

Nevermind, popularity is good. Or bad. Or good.

January 29, 2010 09:18 AM

Remembering The Little Things

What are the top 5 things a car absolutely must be able to do?

Don't read on until you've listed them.

Done?

Were they "go forward, go backward, turn left, turn right, and stop?"

Sometimes we forget things in a project spec that we assume are so fundamental that they're a given. We get caught up in high-level thoughts like leather seats and voice-controlled GPS, but when we hand the project off, we need to be sure that the person we handed it off to will remember to add the little details we didn't specify... like brakes.

The next time you're hiring someone to build or design something for you, whatever the project, ask yourself if you trust that person to include a reverse gear, or at least ask if you want one, even if you didn't specify it. The last thing you want is a car that meets every spec on your list, but can't back out of a parking space.

January 29, 2010 01:41 AM

Appication Indicators at UDW

Just a quick note to mention that my Ubuntu Developer Week session on Application Indicators got moved to today. It's at 1900 UTC. It'll be an overview of what we're doing, why, and some of what application developers need to think about when implementing AppIndicators in their code. I hope to leave a lot of time to questions as well. Stop on by #ubuntu-classroom on Freenode and bring questions!

January 26, 2010 02:55 PM

Norwegian Fenalår

I always try to bring some Norwegian food back with me when I have visited Norway. This year I brought a leg of Fenalår which is a leg of cured mutton. So it is just like the cured ham people eat all over Europe, except from being made from sheep. Anyway I brought it to the Collabora office today to let people have a taste and Marco snapped this picture of me holding the leg.

Of course not all scandinavian food is equally appreciated by our southern neighbours.

January 26, 2010 11:31 AM

Mark emails in mutt as tasks in gtg

Here's my latest gtg hack...

I get a ton of email, some of which requires me to do some action. If I can't do it right away I stick it in a Todo folder, but this is bad because it's too easy to ignore. What I really want is to be able to send the email into gtg as a task.

Fortunately, mutt is really extensible! Here's a simple macro to send tasks to gtg when I hit the 't' key:


macro index t "<pipe-message>gtg_new_task Follow up*<enter> <save-message>+Todo<enter>"


In addition to sending the email to gtg, it also moves it to the Todo folder, so it's out of my inbox and still available for reference.

gtg_new_task is a command line program which communicates with gtg via its dbus api to add a new task. I had to make a few small modifications to it to get it to accept input from mutt, so use my commandline-tools branch.

January 26, 2010 02:15 AM

pagination for bzr

Here's how to make bzr paginate its output:

$ mkdir -p ~/.bazaar/plugins
$ bzr branch http://bzr.oxygene.sk/bzr-plugins/pager ~/.bazaar/plugins/pager

You can verify the 'pager' plugin is installed like this:

$ bzr plugins
...
pager
Run commands producing long output in a pager ($PAGER or less).

Various other handy looking plugins can be found at http://wiki.bazaar.canonical.com/BzrPlugins

January 25, 2010 07:21 PM

GIMP on N900

Nokia N900 looks like the most awesome phone you can buy from a FLOSS point of view, but I wasn't impressed so far from what I read about it, the phone is priced way over my price range and is too big for my pockets (I don't need full keyboards and so). However, after reading a blog post about running GIMP on the N900, my views changed a bit, now I would like such a device (it would not be far fetched to say I crave for one), but the price is still to big. Make the price 2/3 and I'll get one (make it half the price, and the money got out of my pocket a couple of hour ago :D)

Speaking of phones, my current one is a Nokia from the S40 line and is almost 4 years old, it barely hold ans is in need for a replacement. Replacement with what? Not sure, but I wish with something running Linux... I thought about something with Android, there are some entry-level devices which can become affordable if you hunt for a good deal/supplier, but except Nexus One all the Android devices are tied with old versions of the operating system, you can't install the latest upstream software, and that's uncool and not geeky. Nexus One is not available and in the same price range with N900. And it can't run GIMP anyway :D

January 25, 2010 11:09 AM

I hate rebates

Me and rebates are like Charlie Brown and the football. There are so many different ways the rebate companies arrange things to trip you up so they can reject it. I know it's 90% likely no matter how careful I am there will be some nit-picky detail I overlook, and so end up wasting all my time and then get pissed off over some $10 or whatever.

I already don't factor in the rebate when doing price comparisons, but I'm to a point I'm thinking of just boycotting any product that is priced with one.

January 25, 2010 08:14 AM

Google is wardriving

So, a while back, Google started providing location services. This seemed pretty cool, but I kind of ignored it until recently when I was playing with my Android’s location API. With the GPS off, and no cell towers visible (my basement gets terrible cell service), my phone knew within about 500 feet of where it actually was. All I was connected to was my wifi.

Bottom line: it seems that Google, among other methods, is likely wardriving while photographing for Street View. They are now able to pinpoint wifi access points if they happened to see it while driving through your city.

I’m really rather astonished that no one is freaking out about this; I’m a bit unnerved. I implemented the location-of-your-wifi API quickly, so I could terrify myself further. You can do lookups via my location website too, if you want.

UPDATE: yeah, it would seem to be crowd-sourced wifi and cell tower triangulation data. I should say “Google is WarCrowding”.

January 25, 2010 04:28 AM

SHARISM2010

和希拉里谈话后的合影, originally uploaded by IsaacMao.

January 25, 2010 12:43 AM

A Successful Cover Letter

I composed this cover letter this morning in response to a Craigslist ad for a "Corporate Trainer." I got a call back within 2 hours. Sadly, they started with the travel requirements of the job which were just too high for me. But I was still excited to get the call. Thought I'd share the cover letter.

I'm an excellent cook. That's got nothing to do with training, but after reading 1,500 cover letters, I hope you'll find it's different than the same old opening. It also means I'm not only confident in my job-related skills, but I can sweeten the pot with some awesome dishes at office potlucks.

While it's been a while since I was on stage, I emceed the open mic at a major Los Angeles comedy club in the late 1980s, and in the 90s I presented online marketing seminars to business groups around Los Angeles. I am comfortable and natural speaking in front of large groups on a variety of topics.

I also have extensive writing experience, experience with documentation and courseware development, and solid web development and content management experience.

I've attached my resume and I believe you'll find that my broad range of experience and skills makes your task of finding the right person for this job that much easier.

January 23, 2010 12:58 AM

Getting Chromium onto the GStreamer lovetrain

Bastien Nocera is known for a lot of things. Most people in Gnome probably knows him as the maintainer of the Totem media player. In the Fedora community he is known as one who deals with a lot of the challenges around multimedia. Here in the UK he is also known as the only frenchman to ever get fully naturalized.

Anyway his latest effort is to try to try and kickstart some work in Google Chromium to get it to use everyone favorite media framework GStreamer. Bastiens explains a lot of his rationale in the Chromium bug report, but I am hoping to get others in the community to chime in too, and even if you don’t have anything new to add, just let Google know you care by starring up this bug report.

January 22, 2010 04:46 PM