Read more…

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Changes: The standard parameters to call containers and elements have been changed to simplify the way to call the libraries in standalone mode. All the containers and elements are now into the structure, and hooked into WA.Containers and WA.Elements. All the libraries in PHP have been integrated into a single file that is easier to call. simpleContainer.js has been released and working. Some minor bugs have been removed.

Release Tags: major enhancements, Minor bugfixes

Tags: javascript framework

Licenses: GPLv3

Changes: The administration interface was cleaned up. Automatically generated images may now have a timeout. <gxml> and its documentation was improved. There is improved support for MySQL. Pike was updated to 7.8.408. There are many minor bugfixes.

Release Tags: Stable, Minor bugfixes

Tags: Internet, FTP, Web, HTTP Servers, Database, Front-Ends

Licenses: GPL

Changes: This version adds some fairly obscure options for unusual network configurations.

Tags: Internet, Networking

Licenses: MIT/X

Changes: This is mostly a milestone release. It contains an insignificant number of fixes in logging debug messages and a call for new features.

Release Tags: Stable, Minor

Tags: Desktop Environment, tools, Monitoring

Licenses: GPL

U-turn on 'blanket blocking'

Open Source code repository SourceForge.net has pulled a U-turn on a widely unpopular decision to ban users from accessing its website from countries under US trade restrictions.…

'Full disclosure' yields results

Oracle issued an emergency patch for its WebLogic Server almost two weeks after a white-hat hacker disclosed a vulnerability that allows criminals to remotely execute commands on the webserver with no authentication necessary.…

Web threats: Why conventional protection doesn't work

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!

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.

Replace battery warnings correct, says Redmond

Microsoft says that extensive testing and conversations with OEMs indicate that Windows 7 is handling notebook batteries exactly as intended - despite user claims that upgrades to the new OS have caused significant degradation to battery life.…

The KDE web team is pleased to announce a major redesign of the KDE.org frontpage and buzz.kde.org, just in time for the pending release of our updated Workspace, Application and Development Platform compilation. The redesign is the result of many hours of work by artists, coders, writers and testers. Keep reading to gain some insight into the people and processes behind the retooling.

read more

• 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.

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!

Fedora has updated chrony (F11, F12: denial of service) and ocsinventory (F11, F12: multiple vulnerabilities).

Mandriva has updated squid (denial of service) and kernel (multiple vulnerabilities).

SUSE has updated kernel (multiple vulnerabilities).

CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, February 08, 2010

New Projects

• Agile Poker Cards for Windows Mobile: During a scrum or other agile processes, you have to estimate the size of a user story during a planning session. With the Agile Poker Cards progr...
• Allegro.net Computational Libraries: Allegro.net libraries provide computational support on the .NET platform. Allegro Mathlib contains classes that implement mathematical operations. ...
• Assembly Signer: This tool is designed to sign unsigned assemblies(in compiled libraries) with specified key .snk file for .net 1.1 and 2.0. This is a required t...
• AxLINQ: AxLINQ provides a LINQ like query syntax for the X++ language found in Dynamics Ax. enumerator = xFrom(myInt).in(myIntArray) ...
• Begin C#: kano's personal project
• BITSCopy: Transfer content by BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service). Command line utility. Add item to Explorer Context Menu.
• CC.Votd: A screensaver that displays a verse of the day or a random verse. Verses are provided from the RSS feed hosted by Good News & Crossway at www.gnpc...
• CKEditor SliverlightUploadImage plugin: An image manager plugin for CKEditor that uses Micheal Posts Silverlight uploader Control (http://slfileupload.codeplex.com/). The source included...
• Claymore MVP: Claymore is a simple MVP (Model View Presenter) framework targetting .NET developers.
• CMT Lite: CMT Lite is a content management project I started some time ago and have used to develop a number of websites.
• Dynamic Unity: DynamicUnity
• ferrum.contract: Design by Contract library implemented using PostSharp
• GTAScript.Net: GTAScript.Net is a collection on CLI wrapper classes & services to provide an object oriented scripting structure in .Net CLR languages for GTA IV.
• KleinWereldje: At first this is a pet project meant to be a ducth social community building site. Meanly meant to learn MVC architecture
• Netology SuperHero: Hero is data access layer generator for Microsoft Application Block. I wanna try mini O/R Map tool. Enjoy !
• NukeCS: this is a complete c# version of DotNetNuke, based on the latest version(5.2.2).
• RaidTracker: RaidTracker is lightweight Raid and DKP tracking system.
• RetryActivity Sample: This project contains examples of the use of WorkflowQueue in Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF). Language: C#
• Team Legacy: Here is our Legacy project because we are a Legacy
• Team WTF - Software Project: This software project is for Team WTFs course project at Concordia University. The aim is to build a game from the ground up using C#, using the un...
• TwitterPad: TwitterPad is a software to work with twitter.com web site without any proxy or anti-filter
• Urdu Controls: This is a library of .Net controls for easily developing Urdu applications. The edit controls support phonetic Urdu keyboard. The included sample a...
• VFPnfe: Projeto Open Source sob licença pública GNU,GPL para emissão de nota fiscal eletronica em Visual FoxPro. Visite o blog -> http://supervfp.blogsp...
• VSV: VSV A Visual Basic Syntax Highlighter written in Visual Basic .net.
• WCF Metal: By utilizing LINQ to SQL classes (made by either the designer or SqlMetal), WCFMetal generates configurable, extensible WCF based data access web s...
• WebLoadGen: I created this application for the analysis one of my ideas. This application would simulate n web users by initiating a thread for each user, rand...
• Whale watch: Whale watch is a volunteer developer whale watch site, uses C#, MVC, Fluent NHiberate, NUnit and Castle. The project is at a vey early stage, bu...
• WpfTelemetry: WpfTelemetry is a library for WPF projects to allow tracking of feature usage and client computer capabilities.
• Xplora Web Browser: Xplora Web Browser is an advanced Visual Basic 2008 Web Browser. Xplora is now gradually moving to C# WPF.
• xProject: system for online marketing

New Releases

• Aero Wizard .NET Library: Aero Wizard 1.0 Release: Public 1.0 release. Includes control library and test/demo application. Since beta 2: Updated control toolbox bitmap Fixed problem with WizardC...
• Agile Poker Cards for Windows Mobile: Agile Poker Cards v1.0.5.0: Agile Poker Cards v1.0.5.0 This is the first release of the Agile Poker Cards application. Use this application to display poker cards in a planni...
• Assembly Signer: Initial Release: The initial release. Sources and binaries are in archive below
• AxLINQ: AxLINQ version 1.0: AxLINQ provides a LINQ like query syntax for the X++ language found in Dynamics Ax. enumerator = xFrom(myInt).in(myIntArray) ...
• BITSCopy: BITSCopy 1.0.0 x86: BITSCopy Setup x86
• CC.Utilities: CC.Utilities 1.0.10.208: Minor update release of CC.Utilities to add some new features. Still marked as beta since I don't have much outside feedback yet.
• DiskLight.NET: Disklight 1.0.2 (compatible with .NET 2.0 and up): The Disklight 1.0.2 setup project has been rebuilt so that it no longer has a dependency on .NET 3.5
• HSS Interlink File Upload/Download: HSS.Interlink_2.0.0_Installer_x86: BE SURE to download and install the HSS Core Framework first!HSS.Core_4.0.200_Installer_x86.msi Release Notes: http://highspeed-solutions.net/down...
• IdeaSparks ASP.NET CoolControls: Build 20100207: Release Notes COLGROUP and COL is back. These are generated for the header, table content and footer. Added AllowResizeColumn property to CoolGr...
• jQuery Web Controls ASP.Net: jQueryWebControls 1.1: Se han solucionado varios problemas que tenían los controles. Se ha compatibilizado el ControlFx para que detecte los controles de las páginas Mast...
• MiniTwitter: 1.07: MiniTwitter 1.07 更新内容 追加 ハッシュタグの入力補完を実装 更新チェック機能を実装 変更 入力補完が大文字と小文字を区別していたのを区別しないように変更 ハッシュタグとして認識する条件を変更 検索パネル周りの挙動を改善 140 文字を超える場合は強制的に...
• OAuthLib: OAuthLib (1.4.0.1): Same for the last one of 1.4.0.0 except for version number.
• Ox Game Engine for XNA: Release 69 Beta - Removed Superfluous Interfaces: There were a large amount of API changes this release. I'll explain. For a year or so I've been regretting my massive overuse (abuse) of C# interf...
• Paint.NET PSD Plugin: 1.0.5: Notes Retargeted to Paint.NET 3.5.2 and .NET Framework 3.5. Changes Smaller file sizes for multi-layer images. Layer blend modes are now saved c...
• PoshOnTap: PoshOnTap 2.1.0: Added NFS module! Fixed a couple typo's, and reworked installer.
• RaidTracker: RaidTracker: This is fully working version with not so user friendy administration.
• SAF - (A SharePoint Build and Deployment Tool): SAF 2.0.3900.09: SAF is a way to automate and repeat configuration changes in SharePoint using "Actions". These actions can then be grouped together as Xml into a "...
• SharePoint LogViewer: SharePointLogViewer development release: This is the development release which has live monitoring support.
• Task Scheduler Managed Wrapper: Release 1.5 Beta: Stable and production ready for all classes and controls other than TaskEditDialog and TaskSchedulerWizard. Labeled Beta as those two controls are ...
• Urdu Controls: Urdu_Controls_v_0.01: This is the initial release of the .net library of Urdu Controls.
• VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30207.0: Automatic drop of latest build
• VFPnfe: vfpnfe: Projeto VFPnfe - Emissão de nota fiscal eletrônica sob licença pública GNU,GPL desenvolvido em Visual FoxPro para maiores informações visite o blog...
• Visual Studio DSite: Monster Hunter Mouse Cursors: These cursors of monster hunter were made by me monsterhunter445 aka Daniel Lopez. The windows installer package will install the cursors in the d...
• VivoSocial: VivoSocial 7.0.1: VivoSocial version 7.0.1 VivoSocialzip includes a DotNetNuke 5.2.2 Community edition site setup using the modules listed as "Other Available Downl...
• WCF Metal: WCFMetal 0.2.9.1a: By utilizing LINQ to SQL generated classes (generated by either the designer or SqlMetal), WCFMetal generates configurable, extensible WCF (Windows...
• WinForms Group Controls: WinForms Group Controls 1.1: Full release. If you find problems, please post them. If you like it, please comment.
• XsltDb - DotNetNuke XSLT module: 01.00.78: The module was tested in a new commercial project (~50 instances fo XsltDb). Also some new features were added: PA or SU modules (PA - Portal Admin...

Most Popular Projects

• Rawr
• WBFS Manager
• AJAX Control Toolkit
• Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database
• Silverlight Toolkit
• Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
• BlogEngine.NET
• PHPExcel
• ASP.NET
• Microsoft SQL Server Community & Samples

Most Active Projects

• Rapid Entity Framework. (ORM). CTP 2
• BlogEngine.NET
• patterns & practices – Enterprise Library
• Rawr
• Ox Game Engine for XNA
• iTuner - The iTunes Companion
• TwitterVB - A .NET Twitter Library
• PHPExcel
• DotNetZip Library
• SharePoint Learning Kit

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.

read more

Values your business on Windows

Customers of FAST's Enterprise Search Platform (ESP) on Linux or Unix better develop a taste for Windows or look elsewhere for their enterprise search.…

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

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!)

I like your fork!

Linus Torvalds hates cell phones. But that doesn't include the Googlephone.…

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.

Stakkato's abrupt transfer

The prosecution of a Swedish man charged with breaching the computer networks of NASA and Cisco Systems and making off with sensitive source code will be transferred to Swedish authorities, US federal prosecutors said Monday.…

Changes: This release adds a new menu, "System/System Info", where you can view the system settings and the database statistics. With that menu, you can also change the database title, which is used for the title of the HTML pages. A minor edit checkbox was added to the fragment edit form. If you check the box, the fragment's updated-timestamp will be unchanged. The #home and #bookmark tags were changed to be owner-privileged (so only an owner can handle those tags).

Release Tags: Minor feature enhancements, Minor bugfixes

Tags: Documentation, Information Management, Document Repositories, Metadata/Semantic Models, Wiki, Dynamic Content, Web, Internet, education

Licenses: Apache 2.0

Changes: This version of SVEditor adds support for source indenting and better support for auto-indent. Auto-indent is now enabled by default, and can be disabled via the SVEditor preferences page.

Licenses: Eclipse

Changes: Statistic synchronization (master-slave) was implemented. Many major fixes were made to the statistics system. A new logging system with the capability of partial logging was added. An SPF parser, new plugins, filters, and other features were added.

Tags: Email, SPAM, Filter

Licenses: BSD Original

Changes: A crash could occur when you did some changes on relations used by "modeled" class instances (non-pure graphical class instances) or when you reload a project defining "modeled" class instances. This was fixed. In a class diagram when the drawing setting "draw all relations" was false, the only way to show not yet drawn nesting relations was to set "draw all relations" to true, then to remove undesired shown relations. Now the menu of a nested class proposes to show the nesting relation when it is not yet drawn and the container class is present. XMI2 Import 1.7.2, C++ Reverse 2.12.3, and C++ Roundtrip 1.0.2 are used.

Tags: Documentation, Information Management, Metadata/Semantic Models, Scientific/Engineering, Electronic Design Automation (EDA), Software Development, Code Generators

Licenses: GPLv2

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

Changes: Basic support for international fonts was added. FTP real-time logging was removed to increase listing speed (by about 20%). An iDisk transfer bug was corrected. The text menu was enhanced. A rare division by 0 bug was fixed. A rare email masking bug was fixed.

Release Tags: Major additions

Tags: iweb, Web, JavaScript, HTML, HTML Editors

Licenses: Shareware

Changes: This release fixes the downloading of sent messages and allows a user to move messages to a specified Yahoo! folder.

Tags: Communications, Email, Mail Transport Agents

Licenses: GPL

Now you see it, maintenant... non

Top flight outsourcing firm Tata Consulting Services appeared to have lost control of its website to hackers today, with the domain apparently being touted for sale.…

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.

Changes: Major bugs were fixed regarding memory and session management. The JIVariant(Object) and JIVariant(Object, boolean) ctors have been removed. The JISession.createSession() method was introduced. This does not require any user credentials and uses the credentials of the "logged-in" user. It is native and works only on Windows with NTLMv1 only. The Java library path using -D"java.library.path" must be set to point to "NTLMAuth.dll", which is available with the jTDS project (http://jtds.sourceforge.net/).

Tags: Software Development, Object Brokering

Licenses: LGPL

Changes: This version was completely rewritten and modernized. Stability and sanity were improved. New features added were added. Some obsolete stuff was removed.

Tags: Monitoring, Hardware, Diagnostics

Licenses: BSD Original

Changes: Recording of complete conferences was added as a new feature. Recorded sessions can be downloaded in FLV or AVI format. The built in recording player also shows some metadata about the attendees of the meeting and when they are speaking. The SOAP & Integration API also permits you to load recordings directly, similar to the direct access to conference rooms. A new screen sharing module was added, which runs on the same port and protocol like the usual audio/video transmission.

Release Tags: Major

Tags: Conferencing, Collaboration, Video, e-learning

Licenses: LGPL

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

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 :-)

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!

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!

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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!

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?

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.

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.

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 are to change things we have to recognize mere facts first!

The point:

So before you get me going with my rant and I bore you to death: The Internet has allowed individuals from al parts of the globe to communicate  and in the process it has changed the way we think of ourselves,  people around us, country borders and the world itself. I guess we can link this to the idea of the Internet being a global conversation driven by argumentation, and this does not only apply to markets, but also has political and social implications. Thus, Discourse ethics can seem to be a valid tool to search for interpersonal relations and moral implications in this global polilogue of ours.

Not surprisingy, as I have taken my stand, I will take a libertarian approach and analize if this global conversation actually has brought us some amount of peace or, at least, less violence. Anyway far less damage than Nobel’s invention.

From Wikipedia’s article about Discourse Ethics:

Drawing on the work of Habermas and Apel, Hoppe, a former student of Habermas’s, asserts that argumentation, or discourse, is by its nature a conflict-free way of interacting and requires individual control of resources; thus, he argues, certain norms are presupposed as true by anyone engaging in genuine discourse. These norms include the libertarian principle of non-aggression, which itself implies libertarian rights. Therefore, no one can argumentatively deny libertarian rights without self-contradiction.

Now let’s see Gary B. Madison’s analysis on the subject:

“the various values defended by liberalism are not arbitrary, a matter of mere personal preference, nor do they derive from some natural law. . . . Rather, they are nothing less and nothing more than what could be called the operative presuppositions or intrinsic features and demands of communicative rationality itself. In other words, they are values that are implicitly recognized and affirmed by everyone by the very fact of their engaging in communicative reason. This amounts to saying that no one can rationally deny them without at the same time denying reason, without self-contradiction, without in fact abandoning all attempts to persuade the other and to reach agreement.”

These implicitly recognized values include a renunciation of the legitimacy of violence. Thus,

“it is absolutely impossible for anyone who claims to be rational, which is to say human, outrightly to defend violence …. [As Paul Ricoeur writes:]‘. . . violence is the opposite of discourse. . . . Violence is always the interruption of discourse: discourse is always the interruption of violence.’ That violence is the opposite of discourse means that it can never justify itself—and is therefore not justifiable—for only through discourse can anything be justified. As the theory of rational argumentation and discussion, liberalism amounts, therefore, to a rejection of power politics.”

Thus, Madison, like Hoppe, argues that the fact-value gap can be bridged by an appeal to the nature of discourse.

While Hoppe attempts to show that the non-aggression principle (i.e., self-ownership plus the right to homestead) itself is directly implied by any discourse or argumentation, Madison’s arguments are a bit different. For instance, he argues that, because discourse has priority over violence, this validates the Kantian claim that people ought to be treated as ends rather than means, which is the principle of human dignity. The principle of freedom from coercion then follows from the principle of human dignity.

Out of this we can derive, among others, that the internet is just the platform for this global argumentation, and it’s infrastructure hosts the reflection of this argumentation as text. But the conversation itself is driven by its users. All of them.

So, give the Nobel Peace Prize to all of us, to humanity that always finds ways to do what we have evolved ourselves to be best at: cooperate!

Go back to the top for the conclusion.

I know this whole analysis is quite naive, but I had to get it out of the system.

Thanks for reading!

Hey All.

So, some of you might be curious as to where I have been for the last week or so. I’ve been unusually absent from the usual day-to-day on Ubuntu work, so I figure that I’d put a post up to explain this a bit.

I am, as most of you know, a student at a Jesuit university in Ohio, John Carroll ( JCU ). There is currently a bit of noise about the LGBTQ ( Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, Questioning ) community, and their rights.

The long and short of it is that the Administration of John Carroll decided on creating an “agreement” to dictate conduct, rather then a legally binding statement to protect the LGBTQ community. I have been involved with this a good deal, and it would mean a lot if you were to post your opinions here, or send an email to my University in support of creating a legally binding clause protecting LGBTQ members of the University. Any opinions you would like to share can be directed to the President of JCU, Father Niehoff, S.J.. Father Niehoff is supportive of this change, so if you are to send an email, please be respectful.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. Please consider helping us bring equity to Ohio, and John Carroll University.

*Edit*

Rbt Y-Lee was nice enough to share this link here. I figured someone else might find this as interesting as I did. Thanks Rbt!!

I have just uninstalled hal from my laptop running unstable, and everything still seems to work, including suspend & resume.

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #179 for the week of January 31st – February 6th, 2010 is now available here.

In this Issue:

* Open source industry veteran Matt Asay joins Canonical as COO
* Lucid Translations now open
* Ubuntu Developer Week Re-Cap
* Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS Maintenance release
* Lucid Ubuntu Global Jam Announced
* Project Awesome Opportunity
* New Ubuntu Review Team: Reviewing bug with patches
* Jane Silber Interview
* Dustin Kirkland Interview: Encryption in Ubuntu
* Ubuntu Stats
* Nicaraguan LoCo Team’s Third Anniversary
* Report on Launchpad down-time of 4th Feb 2010
* The Planet
* In the Press & Blogosphere
* January Team Meeting Reports
* Upcoming Meetings & Events
* Updates & Security

* And much, much more!

This issue of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

* John Crawford
* Craig A. Eddy
* Dave Bush
* Liraz Siri
* Amber Graner
* J. Scott Gwin
* Nathan Handler
* And many others

If you have a story idea for the Weekly News, join the Ubuntu News Team mailing list and submit it. Ideas can also be added to the wiki!

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License BY SA Creative Commons License.

* daily builds of stable alsa-driver snapshots (thanks, Brad!);
* massive alsa-lib and alsa-plugins debugging (thanks, David!);
* continued alsa-driver/linux quirking;
* uploads of latest stable alsa*, libsdl1.2 (including direct seeding of the pulse backend in the Ubuntu desktop seed), openal-soft, and pulseaudio source packages;
* re-addition of HDA power down for Sigmatel/IDT in pm-utils-powersave-policy 0.3.

I recently read an article that made me shake my head. It was full of misinformation, uninformed conclusions, over generalizations, and red herrings. It was about how the argument for Open Source software is being detrimental to our schools. I am going to link to the original and comment on the article here, but I really would like to hear what your thoughts are.

The article starts off with a very insulting over-the-top paragraph:

“The Case against Open Source is really a case against the “Free and Cheap” mantra that some Open Source Advocates chant when they solicit action (and wrong-headed decisions) from school district leaders. This is a case against folks (who know little about instruction and even less about the needs of teachers); who, despite their lack of knowledge, pitch this “save-money fantasy (delusional) strategy” to school district executives (who should know better than to listen, but don’t).”

It becomes obvious from the opening salvo that the author either did not talk to an actual Open Source advocate or did not properly process the message. Open Source advocates are not about Free and Cheap (as in beer); they are about Free as in Liberty. It makes me think that the author is either more interested in a flame war than real discussion or they are of limited intelligence; neither is particularly good.

“These folks could even be school district employees, Techies, who have used Windows™ Open Source software (the most prevalent kind); but, most of these folks are “outsiders” that…”

I love the derisive “Techies” moniker that the author uses here. This term is usually used by the technically inept as a way of devaluing the skills of a technology professional. I recognize that I have no experience in a classroom and value the professional experience of teachers. Regardless of software and hardware choices there must be a synergy between professional IT and professional teaching staff for technology integration to work in schools.

This is followed by a quick sidebar which has several bullet points; I would like to address a few.

“Don’t understand what teacher want or need”

I agree I do not know what a teacher wants or needs. As a technician I view my roll as helping the teacher know what is available and to ‘cut through’ the sales pitch that companies often deliver. I can not tell you the number of times vendors represent their product as web based when it is, in fact, not web based.

“Don’t comprehend the compatibility issues that are associated with running software within a school district ‘technology ecosystem’”

For my part I do have an idea. I know that software and hardware compatibility happen regardless of platform. Even in a closed Apple ecosystem there are compatibility issues that plague school districts.

“Don’t realize that Technology Integration is a failed concept…unless an entire program is funded to an adequate level, with additional funding contingency funding”

I guess the author misses that Free and Open Source (FOSS) software can lower the cost of software which in turn makes it easier for available funding to be adequate. Certainly there still has to be funding for hardware and training.

“Don’t have a clue about how software costs add a minor (almost trivial) expense in the overall success of a technology program”

I think the author truly does not understand how much software costs. I would like to give an example of a typical windows based computer.

• Computer:  ~$500
• Windows Active Directory CAL: $8
• Windows License (Enterprise or Professional): $54
• Microsoft Office: $54
• Photoshop Elements: $54
• Antivirus License: $8
• Altiris Management License: $8
• A package of three ‘educational’ titles: $54

The balance is ~$500 for the hardware and ~$240 for the software for the ‘typical’ windows based instructional computer. There are other solutions that would raise the price for specific departments. This does not include the labor to install and support the systems, but I believe those costs would exist regardless of platform choice and are, thus, a red herring. With the numbers above the software cost 32% of the cost of the computing environment. Perhaps the author considers this amount trivial; I do not.

“Fail to recognize that Apple™ computers provide better solutions to their arguments for “Free and Cheap Open Source” than Open Source software does”

I am not even sure how to respond to this. Apple computers are nothing more than a hardware platform. They are PCs running OS X. The initial purchase of an Apple does come with some software included, but the higher cost of the computer pays for that software. Much of the software must be paid for if you upgrade it in the future.

“A second cost center, training and professional development, should be at least 30% of project cost.”

I would hope that reducing the cost of software would assist in making funding available for training.

“For example: If a project costs $30 million USD, then training and professional development costs should run about $10 million USD. But, school districts seldom allocate more than single-digit percentages to training and professional development…funds for stipends, trainers, follow-up support, release time, software and equipment for teachers to use at home, etc. School districts skimp and under fund in this area, and the results (as observed nation wide) is technology that is un used, under used and under utilized.”

“For example: For the $30 million project, $10 million for hardware, software and infrastructure, $10 million for training and professional development and $10 million for Back-End programming, interoperability, automation, development and support.”

In the scenario the author describes there would be 10 million spent on hardware and software. Given the numbers I gave this would result in a 3.2 million dollar savings. 3.2 million to put towards more training, more hardware or just reduce the total cost of the project.

Computer: $400
Installation: $60
Three Year Warranty: $125
Network Drop (to connect the computer to a Switch): $130
Cost of Port on the Network Switch: $125

Using the authors numbers, which may or may not be valid, the total cost of a computer with proprietary software would be $1080 and a completely open source computer would cost $840. While this reduces the cost of software to 22% of the computing environment; that cost is still far from trivial to me. The author makes no attempt to normalize these costs either. A network drop and switch will have a significantly longer life span than the computer or the software. Those two items might last as long as two or three computers depending on the replacement cycle set for computers. The author proposed a three year replacement cycle which would result in three computers and three software upgrades in the lifespan of the switch and drop. That alters the cost of software to 27% of the cost of the computing environment.

The author also specifically cited the issue of “software and equipment for teachers to use at home” while apparently not grasping that teachers must pay full retail cost for many of the titles schools pay very little for.

• Office $149 w/o a database program or $419 w/ a database program
• Antivirus $39
• Photoshop $129

With open source adoption the teachers cost of applications to replace the core three listed above would be zero.

“Move to full SIF Compliance”

Having worked with several proprietary vendors in regards to SIF compliance I am shocked to see this brought up. Under SIF I have seen product A support a sub-set of data and product B support a different sub-set of data rendering the two products incapable of integration via SIF. Proprietary products and vendors tend to tie your data down in their format.

The article also ignores the fact that the world is moving more and more towards using open source. I agree that one can not just rip and replace all Windows or Apple computers, but it is foolish to not pick and choose quality open source applications for use in the educational arena. It is foolish to ignore the cost of ‘home use’ for both teachers and students if one wants to close the digital divide.

While I agree with the parts of the article that talk about ignored costs of technology integration such as infrastructure and training I can not understand how the author missed the fact that reducing software costs should increase available funding for those two areas. The other wrong-headed idea the author pushed was that the adoption of FOSS is an all or nothing game. It is not.

Link to original article

Right now I’m preparing some tests regarding virtualization without VMWare.

Yesterday I tested LXC (aka Linux Containers) on my local desktop, because this machine is too old to have some AMD/Intel virtualization extensions. Anyways, that worked somehow, but using KVM was the goal.

So, looking at my root server (hosted by Hetzner), checking if this machine is able to carry some KVM machines on it.

It does, so I started to grab some documentations from the Ubuntu Documentation about KVM.

Most of the things are straight forward, but what is not as simple as it should, is to bring up the network to play nicely with the Hetzner system.

When you booked a server in 2008 or before that, you got one static IP address from Hetzner. Regarding the contract, you are able to get more then one IP for your root server, you get a 8IP subnet, where 6 IPs can be used.

So, what I can’t use is a bridged interface directly connected with the main ethernet device (eth0).

Therefore I need a virtual tunnel device (tap device from UML).

So what to do:

1. ďťżGet your additional ip subnetwork (for this to work, check your Hetzner Robot Login for this)
2. sudo apt-get install bridge-utils uml-utilities
3. add a tap device to your /etc/network/interface
4. add a bridge device to your /etc/network/interface

So point 1. and 2. are straight forward. Adding a tap device to your /etc/network/interface is mostly simple:

/etc/network/interfaces:

auto tap0
iface tap0 inet manual
   up ifconfig $IFACE 0.0.0.0 up
   down ifconfig $IFACE down
   tunctl_user <your user who runs the virtual machines>

Adding the bridge interface is also not complicated:

/etc/network/interfaces:ďťżďťż

auto br0
iface br0 inet static
   address <one address out of the additional ip network, I use the last usable address>
   netmask <netmask of the additional ip network>
   bridge_ports tap0

Now, the address is one of your additional ip addresses you got from Hetzner. I used my last usable address. This IP Address on this bridge interface will be your default gateway inside your KVM machines.

The “bridge_ports tap0″ is important, because if you enter here e.g. your main ethernet device (e.g. eth0) it will give you a non accesible system anymore (you need to rescue it, via Hetzner Robot system -> Rescue system and Reboot System).

What does it do: the tap0 device is a tunnel to your eth0 device. And br0 will bridge all IP traffic from your KVM machines to via this bridge to tap0. The tap0 device then uses your default interface to leave your host and vice versa. (to make this understandable for the non technical audience, the reality what is happening under the hood is more complicated)

After that you can use vmbuilder to create your KVM image, according to the Howto on https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KVM. Just give the KVM machine an IP address from the additional IP subnet (not the one you used for the Host Bridge (br0)) and set the default gateway (–gw) to the IP address of your host bridge (br0).

Couple of days/weeks ago I’ve issued call for testing of new cluster stack for Ubuntu 10.04. At that time, most of the stack was finished, but we lacked proper support for clustered file system. Now, I’ve modified ocfs2-tools package so that it compiles with support for libdlm (provided by redhat-cluster) and pacemaker. I’ve also modified redhat-cluster package so that it builds with support for pacemaker.

As a result, there is now a new test case which needs testing - cluster with drbd for underlying device and ocfs2 as a filesystem. So, please visit - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ClusterStack/LucidTesting#Pacemaker, drbd8 and OCFS2 and give it a go.

After completing this milestone, only thing left for proper cluster stack in Ubuntu 10.04 is submitting MIRs (Main Inclusion Requests) for packages that are still in universe and demoting cman (and others) to universe.

For those that would like to test their own setups and are familiar with corosync/pacemaker/drbd8/ocfs2, ubuntu-ha’s PPA is located here: https://edge.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-ha/+archive/lucid-cluster/.

Yes, we got a great set of features in this release of ground control, as well as the regular set of fixes for problems that seemed to crop in last time. Thanks to everyone who reported to bugs and kept me on my toes fixing them.

You can download the version 1.3 at my PPA or keep up with the daily builds of the ground control trunk (which may not always work)

So waht do we have? well as you can see from the screenshot we have a new feature where you can search for bugs in launchpad and attach them to commits, much like you would use –fixes= on the command line. The difference is that the search feature makes it easy to pinpoint the exact bug you need.

Not only that, but we now have the Jono Baon inspired bug fix work-flow, there is a new button on the projects and project view which allows someone to search for a bug and then let the code do all the hard work of downloading the right branch of code and giving it an appropriate work-name. Then when your finished fixing the code, there is just a simple one button which commits, pushes and merges into launchpad including attaching the bug you originally specified.

If the bug you selected has a project assigned which doesn’t have a default development focus, then it’ll bring up a branch selection so you can choose which branch you should fix the bug in.

So we need testing of both of these new features, as well as testing of existing features which have been there for a few releases. Obviously we’re trying to make sure everything is stable for the 18th Feb (only 11 days away) so we need your immediate assistance in picking out problems with the release.

And I have to say that I’ve been loving the encouragement from you guys, I’m glad yu like this work and can see value it in being done.

I really like this below:

And these options:

Hugs and Good Luck! 
My Brazilian Blog
Get involved
http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate

1. Server NIC failure
2. Network cable failure (such as being cut or unplugged)
3. Network switch failure (such as a planned firmware upgrade or unplanned outage)
   

"Adaptive load balancing: includes balance-tlb plus receive load balancing (rlb) for IPV4 traffic, and does not require any special switch support. The receive load balancing is achieved by ARP negotiation."

I love being married, it has opened up an incredible sense of commitment and security in my life and my wife’s life. Love is love, and I would never want to prevent anyone from enjoying what I am afforded the privilage of enjoying. This includes gay people. As such, I have joined this Facebook group to get 1,000,000 who support same sex marriage. I usually hate these kinds of groups, but I think it could be interesting to visualize the support behind this issue. Worthy, methinks.

Shane blogged about the me menu, I want to show you the full blown experience. Thanks to the intense amount of hard work by Ryan Paul and Ken Vandine, we now have this:

They’ve fixed major parts. Moving to desktopcouch has made the application more stable, use less memory, and syncable with your computers. This is the version of Gwibber we’ve all been waiting for. Unfortunately Ken just got on a plane so for Lucid you’ll have to wait until Monday. They should be in the latest PPA though ….

It took a long time for Dojo Toolkit to reach Debian and therefore Ubuntus package archives.

Well, but now it’s in and it’s time to give Zend Framework what it needs to be mature ;)

With the next upload of zend-framework we’ll suggest to install the dojo packages as well.

Why suggests? Because ZF doesn’t need Dojo for functionality. Neither it’s a recommt, because you as a developer could use another JS library like JQuery.

People ask “what’s the big deal about application indicators, they’re just little icons!” As it turns out, when you drain a swamp you can make cool things. KDE applications support StatusNotifier already so AurĂŠlien Gâteau has started landing fixes that will make things like this possible:
Check out the video here.
(Sorry, I failed at video tag and I’m at the airport so I went with the easy fix)

What you see here in the middle is Rhythmbox, ported by Cody Russell (upstreamed patch), then Kopete, and Kmix. You’ll notice that since we’re running GNOME the KDE apps look LIKE THEY SHOULD. If you run KDE and run rhythmbox it will look like IT SHOULD. Nice and “nativey”.

• More accessability, and note how he’s scrubbing through the menus with his keyboard.
• For third party applications of the world this means they can support one “linux” thing.
• Everything behaves the same in both desktops and everything is consistent.
• My tray doesn’t feel like a back alley.

We have work to do, the stuff in the old notification tray (on the left in my video) need to be ported. We have committed to fixing the things in main for this cycle. Here you will find a list of bugs of apps we’ve listed to so far. I’ve filed corresponding wishlist bugs in upstream GNOME Bugzilla. If you want to help with this, it’s not considered done until it’s submitted upstream – we also offer a fallback method so that application maintainers can support both with minimal effort.

Find more about our rationale, guidelines, and porting guide here.

PLEASE FEEL FREE to check into application indicator support for your favorite apps in Universe, we need help to figure out which apps people love and want support for. We’ll handle the things on the CD, but we need help to catch all the little fish too. Even filing wishlist bugs and tagging them would be a help.

If you have an upstream with questions, send them to me or #ayatana and we’ll be there to support their efforts, we want people to use this. If you want to go ahead and just port an application then this is an excellent way to get something slick into user’s hands.

Ive been testing out lucid since a little before alpha 1 and all is well from what I can see. What landed recently was the me menu and I have say that its cool.

I love the idea of posting to twitter on the fly from the desktop rather than waiting for Gwibber to load up(which takes a good 20 secs ish on my machine). Oh and the new version of Gwibber from the daily ppa looks awesome.
Some extra things to look forward to is the new indicators, an improved software center, Pitivi and the music store. I cant wait to try out the music store which should land alpha 3(ish) but what songs should I buy…? And will Severed Fifth’s album be available? (kidding its free go get it if you want)

Well as many of you know, there are a load of KDE SC 4.4 release parties going on around the world. I just wanted to write a short post mentioning the second Canadian one and to again point out the release party page!

There are a lot of parties going on, and YOU should get yourself to one.
Check the page: http://community.kde.org/Promo/ReleaseParties/4.4 to see if there is one in your area, and if not, there is still time to create your own!

If you need more info, you can come join #kde-promo on freenode and ask for nightrose or jussi01. alternatively you can email me at jussi01 at ubuntu dot com

Cheers and have a rockin party!

So I told them:

<maco> apt-get dist-upgrade differs from apt-get upgrade in that it will remove obsolete packages and add new dependencies, while apt-get upgrade will not. this is necessary when upgrading from one distro release to another, but it is not the *only* time it is necessary. thus, in aptitude, dist-upgrade has been renamed to full-upgrade
<maco> apt-get dist-upgrade will only change you from one release to another if you've modified /etc/apt/sources.list to point to a newer release, but this method of upgrading is not recommended

They also asked "and if i do want to upgrade the distribution (not that i do), how do i go about that?" to which I responded:

<maco> the recommended way to change distro releases is sudo do-release-upgrade

They said it was the best explanation in the shortest amount of text, so I'm posting it here, hoping it'll make it easier for people to find. By the way, man apt-get does explain all this…just in slightly more technical terms.

From http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com

• 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.

• So you live in an apartment? Permaculture for renters seems like a good resource. Grow fish and strawberries and a worm bin out of table scraps, in under 2m?.

• "A Pattern Language", by Christopher Alexander et al, is the book that I have been preaching around with patterns for architecture and urbanism. See the full online version.

  (That online version is a bit weird; you have to click on the leftmost vertical frame to access the page for each pattern. Other than that, it seems to work mostly fine.)

• If you are into that sort of thing, the Emergent Urbanism blog is excellent. It takes Alexander's ideas and tries to mathematize them, while exposing a plethora of examples and insightful results.

  You may want to read an introduction to that blog in its introductory essay.

• And by the way, a lesson on usability based on these principles.

• The New York City Department of Transportation has a very enlightened administration these days. See their new Street Design Manual for some great information about how to improve streets with gradual changes: geometry, materials, safety, bicycles, trees, pedestrians, etc.

• A note about hackfests

  If you are a proprietary software company and you don't employ all the world's experts in a certain domain, well, you are essentially screwed.

  But if you are a free software project, you can gather most of the domain experts at a hackfest, and be totally awesome.

• Dear lazyweb,

  I just started using Emacs 23 in openSUSE 11.2. Running this:

  emacs -fn "Inconsolata Bold 12"

  actually gives me Inconsolata, but definitely not Bold. Why? How do I make it Bold?

  (Inconsolata is a truly beautiful font for programmers, by our GNOME Emeritus Hacker Raph Levien.)

• This dialog greeted me when I updated my GNOME version:

  

  "You won't have it. You won't have it. You won't have it. Just kidding, here you go."

• Mapping the geographies of Wikipedia content. Very interesting analysis of what regions have the most content written about them. Via the ever-excellent Global Guerrillas blog.