Launchpad’s web interface will be read-only, and all other parts of Launchpad offline, for roughly two and a half hours from 09.00 UTC on the 27th January 2010.

Starts: 09.00 UTC 27th January 2010
Expected back: 11.30 UTC 27th January 2010

This is for the roll-out of our Launchpad 10.01 code. We’ll post details of what’s new after the release.

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Luis already unleashed the word: GNOME 2.28.2 will be released as an online update for openSUSE 11.2 (for reference, openSUSE 11.2 was initially released with 2.28.1). You can currently help testing that everything is fine with the packages by adding the 11.2-test repository and upgrading. Please go ahead and test it, and tell us if it breaks anything. Hopefully, it should work quite fine.

What is really exciting about this is of course not that we're delivering bug fixes to our users ;-) But with 11.2, openSUSE got a new maintenance team, with more community involvement. One of the amazing result is that it is (or at least, feels) much easier now to release online updates for packages, with a process that everybody can follow — it used to be restricted to Novell employees. Another welcome change is that we can finally release new upstream versions as updates, with some obvious restrictions: the new versions should only contain bug fixes, and should fix real important bugs for users.

And this is what enabled the release of GNOME 2.28.2 as an update for openSUSE 11.2: this version bump was lead by Dominique and Magnus. I must admit I'm really glad that I didn't have to do anything ;-) The GNOME policy to only do bug fixes (and updated translations, which is something we also care about!) on a stable branch, and the fact that we're doing a good job at being reliable on this upstream, certainly helped too.

But wait, there's more! If you're crazy about GNOME but still want a stable distribution, you can use GNOME 2.29 on openSUSE 11.2! The Build Service is really helping us here, making it easy to reuse our GNOME 2.29 packages that we have in Factory on 11.2, with nearly no work at all. We have some documentation on how to use GNOME 2.29 on openSUSE 11.2, and testers are welcome. It should work fine and not eat your computer. Testing Factory is also an option, and while it used to be hardly usable in the past, the community is now doing a good job at making sure it works fine most of the time, if not all the time.

Did I mention you can get the latest version of various applications on 11.2 by just adding the GNOME:Apps repository? No need to update the distribution. No need to update GNOME. This is getting insanely cool :-) And both for packagers (nearly no effort to backport packages) and users (latest versions of their preferred applications available on a stable distribution).

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An Ubuntu Server LTS release stays around for 5 years, so during the development cycle there is an increased focus in QA, bugfixing and stability. During Lucid UDS in Dallas, we discussed of various ways of translating that effort into clear actions. One of those discussions was geared towards improving the Ubuntu Server user (sysadmin) experience: we could focus on fixing lots of minor annoyances, low-hanging-fruit bugs that traditionally get less attention than others. On the footsteps of the excellent One hundred papercuts project (from the User experience team), this project was named Server papercuts.

This project is led by the Ubuntu Server community, for the Ubuntu Server community. We discussed the implementation details during our weekly IRC meetings, a specific Launchpad project was created, together with a team to triage the candidates (with a cool badge).

Now it’s time to nominate your personal pet bug, your favorite minor annoyance, your preferred PITA ! Here is the process to follow:

1. If the papercut isn’t already filed as an Ubuntu bug in Launchpad, file a bug against the affected Ubuntu package
2. Look up the bug you want to nominate as a Server papercut, then click on “Also affects project”
3. Click “Choose another project” and type in “server-papercuts”, click “Continue”
4. Click on “Add to Bug report”

That’s it ! Your bug will now show up on the Server papercuts buglist and we’ll Confirm or Invalid-ate it soon, when we start getting a good list.

Here are a few guidelines on what makes a good Server papercut:

• Bug affects a server package
• Bug has an obvious and easy fix
• Bug makes the life of the sysadmin more miserable

Here are a few guidelines on what doesn’t make a good Server papercut:

• New features
• Large-scale improvements that affect multiple packages
• Your solution is likely to result in a new papercut for someone else

For more details, complete acceptation criteria is described in the project spec.

Good hunt !

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This will be the end of the series, as I’m leaving for the airport this afternoon.

Rusty Russell: FOSS fun with a Wiimote

Rusty told an entertaining story about his journey to produce geeky toys for his daughter, who is too young to use a keyboard or other standard human-computer interface. I always enjoy hearing about the intermediate steps of invention, and this was no exception. After five design iterations and several long distractions, Rusty produced a couple of working applications using Python and libcwiid, and demonstrated one of them.

Ariel Waldman: Space hacks

Ariel’s talk explained the (surprisingly numerous) ways in which geeks can get actively involved in advancing space science and exploration. With budgets of zero, hundreds or thousands of USD, there are projects which are accessible to individuals and schools which offer not only fun and education opportunities, but actually contribute something to the human study of outer space.

I didn’t note them down, so please watch the talk if you’re interested.

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I am surprised at some of the backlash towards the Mozilla folks on the internet for not just “getting over it” and shipping a H.264 decoder in Firefox.

It’s important to remember that fighting for this “open internet” thing is really what their core mission is all about. I totally respect that and I’m really glad that they’re around, because I get the feeling that without an organization like this that we wouldn’t even be arguing about the codec implementation part, we would just be doomed to begin with.

On the other hand as a Linux user I personally am glad that at least I have something better today than I did yesterday. You see, today a bunch of videos on YouTube that normally crush my machine kind of “just work” today or are on their way to working. Ok kind of. If I use Google’s Chrome build or I install the nonfree codecs from the Chromium PPA it just works. But at some point someone will think “Let’s see, wrestle with the 687 ways people think they can get Flash to work reliably, or just install this other browser … hmmm”

On something like a netbook or thin client this is a big deal. The ability for people to watch video on the internet is a major use case, and it’s been a pain point for people like me for as long as we can remember. Am I cheering for open video? Of course I am.

But I’ve also got realistic expectations. We’re always going to struggle with file formats and open standards, but at least today it feels like we’re making a step in the general direction. Did anyone realistically think that they would wake up one day and YouTube was going to be HTML5 with Ogg Theora? Sure, we all wanted that, and I also wanted the Red Wings to have a winning season this year. :-/

I want Theora to be successful, but I personally encode all my things in H.264 because that seems to be what everyone else is using and I get hardware acceleration on all my devices.

So yeah, I’m not really helping the cause, but people shouldn’t flame the Mozilla guys for sticking to their guns — it’ll be great in a few years when someone decides that the entire internet needs to pay the H.264 license piper, maybe by then we’ll “get over it”!

On a related note, anyone know what’s up with this?

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Andrew Tridgell: Patent defence for free software

I missed the start of this talk, but when I arrived, Andrew was explaining how to read and interpret patent claims. This is even less obvious than one might suppose. He offered advice on which parts to read first, and which could be disregarded or referred to only as needed.

Invalidating a patent entirely is difficult, but because patents are interpreted very narrowly, inventions can often be shown to be “different enough” from the patented one.

Where “workarounds” are found, which enable free software to interoperate or solve a problem in a different way than described in a patent, Andrew says it is important to publish them far and wide. This helps to discourage patent holders from attacking free software, because the discovery and publication of a workaround could lead to them losing all of their revenue from the patent (as their licensees could adopt that instead and stop paying for licenses).

Michael Koziarski: Lessons learned from a growing project

Michael, a member of the Rails core team, introduced himself as a pragmatist who is not interested in the principles of free software, only in working with the best tools he can find (many of which are actually proprietary). He gave an overview of what Rails is and where it came from, and a list of lessons he learned from its history.

Michael says that users make the best contributors, because they work to address user needs (which they understand first-hand). He contrasted this with developers who join the project to experiment with the latest technology or rewrite code without good reason. Therefore, in order to gain more contributors, it is important to market the project and attract more users.

He downplayed the conventional wisdom of “release early and often”, recommending a release early enough that there is plenty of incomplete work which contributors can help with, but not so early that the software is useless. In other words, release early, but not too early, and often, but not too often.

As is becoming thematic for the free software community, he recognized the necessity of dealing appropriately with people who do not advance the aims of the project. His example was people who don’t really want to use the software, because there is something about it they don’t like. Unless this one thing is changed, they say, it is of no interest to them. They may imply, or even state outright, that if the project changed in some way, they would join enthusiastically. Michael says that this is often untrue, and that even if they get the feature they want, they will not become valuable contributors. He also spoke of addressing trolls, not just the obvious ones, but more respectable-looking pundits as well.

Rails attracted many users early on because of its upstart status, and Michael pointed out that these people later left the project as it became more mainstream. The same was true of contributors, who left for other projects for their own reasons, to learn new things or explore a different direction.

Over time, the number of willing volunteers in the Rails community was much greater than the corresponding stack of “work to do”. Contributors became furious because their contributions were neglected; they threatened to fork the project and left the community. He stressed the importance of avoiding this scenario by tending to these contributors and their contributions.

He advised (mostly) ignoring your project’s competitors as a means of staying focused on the project’s core vision. In particular, he says that projects which define themselves in terms of their competition (“foo is like Rails, but…”) are not worth paying attention to.

He praised Rails’ use of a more permissive (non-copyleft) license, because it encouraged the growth of an ecosystem of hosting providers and tools. I didn’t quite follow his argument as to why this was.

Some of Michael’s lessons resonated with my experience of Ubuntu’s growth, while others did not. Regardless, it was useful to hear his perspective, and the differences may highlight the differing characters of the two projects.

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Ubuntu User Days is a set of courses delivered over IRC in one day to help beginner and intermediate Ubuntu users get around their system better. The next one is going to be this Saturday, starting at 7am EST. Join in to learn about things like installing Ubuntu, using the command line, reporting bugs, and much more.

I will be teaching a course on Restricted Drivers at 11am (which I still have to do some work for!) and hope to see you there.

For more information visit User Days in the Ubuntu Wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UserDays

#planet-ubuntu#

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Hello everyone, my name is José Ernesto Dávila Pantoja and I'm from Corinto, Nicaragua. I've been working with Leandro and Norman since the foundation of the Nicaraguan LoCo Team.

I was approved as Ubuntu Member in the last meeting of the membership board for the Americas. I hope my approval encourage other members of my LoCo, like Adolfo Fitoria(current team contact) and Byron Corrales to go for their membership approval too.

Thanks to all for your cheers, specially to Jorge Dardón from Ubuntu Guatemala and Ing. Forigua from Ubuntu Colombia.


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Nathan Torkington on 3 lightning keynotes:

1) Lessons learnt!

‘Technology solves problems’… no it doesn’t, its all about the meatsacks!

‘If you live a good life you’ll never have to care about marketing’… steer the meatsacks

‘English is an imperative language for controlling meatsacks.’… Tell the smart meatsacks what you want (english is declarative).

2) Open source in New Zealand:

A bit of a satire ‘Sheep calculator’, tatoos as circuit diagrams. The reserve bank apparently has a *working* water-economy-simulator. Shades of Terry Pratchett!

3) Predictions – more satire about folk that make predictions – financial analysts, science journalists.

After that, it was lightning talk time. I’ve just grabbed some highlights.

Selena Deckelmann talked about going to Ondo in Nigeria and un-rigging an election:

1. Run for political office.
2. Lose – but polls had suggested the reverse result
3. Don’t give up – protest file May 14 2007
4. Use technology – fingerprint scanning – 84814 duplicate fingerprints, 360 exactly the same fingerprints
5. Patience – 2 years and the courts reversed the election

http://flossmanuals.net – nice friendly manuals in many languages writen at book sprints.

Kate Olliver presented on making an origami penguin.

Mark Osbourne presented ‘Open Source School’ – a school in New Zealand that has gone completely open source, even though the NZ school system pays microsoft 10Million/year for a country wide license.

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The day opened with a series of Lightning Talks. Unfortunately, I missed most of these as I had some issues with checkout at the hotel. Paul Fenwick's was a hilarious satire about unfriending people on Facebook.

Next, I attended Andrew Tridgell talk on Patent Defense for FOSS Developers. Having worked at IBM previously, I (unfortunately) have read many, many patents. Tridge's talk was about how to read a patent. The most interesting point he made was about triple damages. Many open source projects (or companies) have a "don't read patents so that we're not one day liable for triple damages" policy. Tridge says this is dumb for open source projects/companies. If they're sued for damages for infringing a patent, then they're probably dead bankrupt. If they're sued for triple damages, well, they're still probably dead bankrupt ;-)

He talked about the three types of patent defense:

• non-infringement - we don't do that - best defense
• prior-art - someone did that before - very tricky
• invalidity - you can't claim that - almost impossible
  

The most important part is independent versus dependent claims. When working against a patent, focus on the independent claims. Prove that you don't offend those, and you won't offend the dependent claims either. And when looking at the independent claims, focus on the elements. Try to find elements that you omit.

I've read more patents that I care to admit, and I pray that I can avoid being dragged back into that world again. That said, God bless the people who still are doing this today. They're doing this behind the scenes, and they're getting no credit whatsoever for it. Thank you so much. What you're doing for us is more valuable than anyone knows.

Next, I attended Arnd Bergmann's talk on Virtual Network Switching across Hypervisors. Current virtual networking in KVM looks like a basic switch/router (showing a basic home Linksys router on a slide). If that's all you want, that works pretty much fine. Arnd is working on all the other complex networks, bridging, VLANs, etc. I'm following his work quite closely on the upstream mailing lists. His slides are available at: http://www.lca2010.org.nz/wiki/Talks/virtualnetworks.

I spent the next several hours with David Howells from Red Hat (author of keyutils and the linux kernel keyring). He was helping me with a small, but invasive change to the way eCryptfs Encrypted Home Directories loads keys into the keyring. He helped me move the keys from the user keyring to the session keyring. This will improve the clearing and expiration of keys once I've tested and released it. Many, many thanks to David for his help and patience. Cheers!

Rusty Russell gave his usual excellent presentation, this time about Hacking a Wiiremote for his 2 year old daughter. Funny, cute presentation. Basically, he attached a series of LEDs to a scrunchy that his daughter would wear on her wrist. The Wiiremote detects movent of the LEDs, and it's attached to a Linux system where his code runs, using libcwiid (pronounced lib-seaweed, heh). He wrote a couple of Python programs, one that lets her smear paint on the TV screen, and another that lets her smack a baseball bouncing around the screen. Rusty is the quintessential hacker ;-)

And, alas, the week is over... Finally, the Closing Session. Lots of thank you's all around. These guys and gals put on an amazing conference. I hope I'm so lucky as to attend again some time.

From here, I'm taking a couple of days off, and hiking the Routeburn Track, one of New Zealands 5 Great Walks. I'm really looking forward to a couple of days unplugged, and in the Kiwi back country. Hopefully I'll get some beautiful pictures, and have some stories to tell in another post.

Kia ora,
:-Dustin

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Diego Turcios became an Ubuntu Member yesterday during the membership board meeting for the Americas. I’ve known Diego since he joined the Ubuntu Honduras team and helped rebuild it almost from scratch. Diego earns extra bragging rights for becoming the first one in his country, where he is leading the team to bring Ubuntu to more people. Congratulations!

I guess now Elvira is up next for membership approval

I’d also want to welcome the following members who were approved yesterday at the same time:

• José Ernesto Dávila (León, Nicaragua)
• Jesse N. Richardson (Iowa, USA)
• Sergio Meneses (Cúcuta, Colombia)
• Victor Vargas (Chile)
• Cristian Baraona (Chile)
• Jamal Fanaian (Florida, USA)

I am particularly proud of the steady progress the Colombian team is making into encouraging its members to apply for Ubuntu membership. Go Sergio! Felicitaciones!

The meeting log is always interesting to review for aspiring members.

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Today I added another button to the web tab. This button lets users plug in a web url, and then photobomb will try to display all the images on that page. So for example, I've screen scaped cute overload to grab a couple of the pictures.

I was able to do this efficiently despite my complete ineptitude with regular expressions because of strycore. strycore is a fellow Ubuntu community member who took over a silly little program that I started called lolz. I had written a bunch of crappy screen scraping code using split(whatever) to get images from funny sites. strycore wrote some solid regex based code that I was able to snipe and modify for more general screen scraping.
As you can see, I am completely out of ideas for easy ways to make the buttons. I suppose I should create something that looks like a search, something that looks like an image on a page, and something that looks like a web page. Oh well, in the meantime, at least I have tooltips :)

Speaking of tooltips, I haven't been *totally* slacking on photobomb. The other night I added tooltips so you can see the file names (or URLs) of images in the get images tab area.

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Current Setup:
An application has to be limited by the most lax permission in order to maintain the functionality.  For an application that will ever have access to the user's files this means it needs to have access to all of the users files.

Possible Solution:
Have the file browser/chooser application give temporary permissions for the specific chosen files/folder to the application that launched the file chooser.  Care will need to be taken so that "recent files" in applications still work as expected.  This may require a per application recent file list to be stored in the security system.

Example Use Cases / How it does it:
Picture Viewer
1) User clicks on Picture with an active exploit in it (on the desktop)
2) Opens with default photo viewer
3) The exploit now has full control of the photo viewer, but can only access:
    Photo viewers recently opened photos
    The photo with the exploit
    Photo viewer config
    Anything else the photo viewer can access (say uploading to flickr)
    All other photo's in library (if configured, which in this example it is not)
*) All other documents remain secure...

How it did it. (behind the scenes):
the user opened 4 pictures from the file manager, the application had those 4 pictures added to it's "per application recent file permission list" thereby enabling the user to open them directly from the photo manager at any point in the future.  That list was customized for the application to limit the list to the 4 most recent due to the application only having 4 option in it's "recent list".
This list is used by apparmor/selinux to enable access to the pictures for the application.

Rhythmbox
1) User configures library (using directory chooser)\
    - Called with options to set up a permanent user/application permission for the music folder in question
    - this allows rhythmbox to access all files contained within
2) User listens to internet radio and finds a malicious file
3) The malicious file deletes everything it can touch, the user loses her entire music collection, but has all documents intact.

When configuring the rhythmbox library directory, Rhythmbox used a special call to the directory chooser to ask it to switch it's permanent directory to whatever the user chooses, thereby adding the necessary rules as well.

Of course, if you can already do this with selinux/apparmor (at about the same complication level) please tell me how :)

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Back at the conference for Day 4!

The opening keynote by Glynn Moody was entitled Hackers at the End of the World. He started out by noting how amazed he was when researching Rebel Code (Sep 1999 - Sep 2000). He conducted 50+ interviews and was struck by how nice people were. Dan Lyons said much the same thing at his keynote at Canonical's All Hands meeting last year.

Glynn talked about "free and openness" leaking out into areas beyond software. There was actually an open physics project that started 2 weeks before Linus' famous 8/23/91 post. The Open genome project was saved by a lone hacker (Jim Kent) and a cluster of 100 Linux PCs. Open Science, open access to results, data... In many ways, the hacker culture is paving the way for science.

Documentation licensing has evolved. GPL, FDL, Copyright Commons, GNU GFDL. Wikipedia is probably the easiest way to explain to other people what Free Software is. I think I'm actually going to start using that to explain my job to friends and family. "So, Dustin, what do you do?" "Well, you know how Wikipedia works? Well, I'm a computer programmer that works on software in a similar manner!"

He says that the new millennium is thus far all about sharing. Web pages mostly have visible source code. Flash/Silverlight being the nasty exception. Blogs, delicious, Flickr, Youtube, Facebook, Myspace. People want to share.

Twitter/identi.ca is the "release early, release often" principle, applied to thinking :-)

For 25 years, hackers have been showing others how to create and nurture sustainable commons through openness and sharing. Great talk!

Next, I attended a session on Flapjack Monitoring for the Cloud. It talks Nagios, and uses beanstalkd. The examples were mostly shown on Ubuntu and packaged in Launchpad PPAs. The goal of Flapjack is to be easy to install, configure, maintain, and scale. The project looks interesting, but I really couldn't quite see the application for "the Cloud" yet.

As always, Jeremy Allison's talk was excellent and entertaining. He spoke about Microsoft - The Elephant in the Room. Great talk about Microsoft, and all the dirty things they do to Open Source. He talked about a few famous cases (Samba, OOXML, TomTom). The good news is that we have made Microsoft blink in the staring contest. This is good, but we haven't had a knockout punch yet. Microsoft may be winning in court, but they're rapidly losing the mindshare battle. OOXML showed this in a nutshell -- they pushed the standard through, but everyone lined up against them. Patents are their nuclear option. TomTom was the first time Microsoft really tried this tactic; we all should be very afraid! Jeremy reminds us that IBM was once as feared and hated as Microsoft is today. Elephants can learn new tricks.

Neil Brown gave an interesting presentation on Design Patterns in the Linux Kernel. He gave lots of great examples, grepping through the kernel for some interesting recurring patterns. Jono Lange asked (what I considered to be a really funny) question. Neil had shown a few dozen binary searches in the kernel. Jono says that he's a python developer, rather than a kernel developer, but in Python, he'd just write a binary search function, and use that in all of these places :-) Things are done differently in the Linux kernel.

Finally, I attended Launchpad Code Reviews by Tim Penhey. He started out by referencing the very funny website, http://thedailywtf.com. The talk was an excellent tour of Launchpad's merge proposal and code review features.

After the conference we had a couple of beers on the waterfront at Mac's Brewery, and then headed over to the Professional Networking event held at the Opera House.

Today is the final day of the photo competition. These entries focus on the Lambton quadrant.






Cheers,
:-Dustin

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Im going to plug a bunch of projects and stuff I like in this post so I hope you guys like it.

Shot of jaq is bloody awesome. Well us ubuntu people are a little bit biased here because its done by two people who make ubuntu awesome but still it is very cool. Not only is it nice and interesting(kinda like my blog ) but it gives a nice view on things. The two guys have a good back and forth and the show in general has a good feeling and a nice tone. Plus its short enough to keep my attention which is very limited but long enough to take a dump while its on. Whats also great is the talk that gos on in the comments. People air their views and its nice to see such friendly conversation going on.The show rocks go on and listen

Zeitgeist, ive blogged a lot about zeitgeist so ill just post a few links to what I said previously. They also had a new release (along with gnome activity journal) so id like to congratulate them on that.
http://shanefagan.com/2010/01/15/debunking-the-gnome-3-myths/
http://shanefagan.com/2010/01/10/gnome-activity-journal/

Gnome Do or well Docky, I love Docky its nice to look at. It does the window management which I like. Plus you can store application shortcuts in it for added ease of use. Gnome Do is cool too, I love the plugin system and the way applications are easy to open. Its one of those things that shortens the time to get things done.

Tracker, I love tracker too. The way it gets all the files, emails, everything. The thing that always made me love it was it isnt slow. It has so many things to look through and it still isnt slow. Id love for it to be included by default again in ubuntu. For Gnome 3 if we had Zeitgeist and tracker included we would be able to get a lot of info and have a complete use history for each file (with zeitgeist) and have the metadata and cool stuff that tracker has. Exciting stuff (well for me who is interested in somewhat boring stuff)

Vala, my first programming language is Java. Then I went on and learned VB and assembly as part of my college course. Then I learned python and a few other languages(most of the main ones). The problem was that im most familiar with Java and im getting better at the others but I still wanted to find an alternative. So then I gave Vala a try and its really fast and all the Gnome stuff (GTK…etc) have bindings for it so I love it.

Quickly, Python-Snippets, Acire and Lernid. All of these projects are awesome in their own way. Quickly makes it easy to do the hard stuff in programming, starting, packaging and distributing and lets you get down to the fun bit making a project do awesome things. Python-Snippets and Acire help you do the programming. The snippets show you what to do and you can copy them into your own projects. It contains code from the simple to slightly more advanced stuff. The whole point is learning. Acire is the viewer for the Snippets and allows you to view the code but also execute it too which is cool.
Lernid is a project to make it easy to contribute to IRC events like ubuntu open wee, ubuntu user days, bug jams..etc. It has some awesome features other than simply viewing the IRC event you can also view information posted by the event host, which is really cool.

Ok so I talked a lot there so ill just give a quick list of some more cool stuff I like. Liferea, Gwibber and Inkscape check all those out too.

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Jeremy Allison on ‘The elephant in the room – free software and microsoft’. While he works at Google, this talk was ‘off the leash’ – not about Google . As usual – grab the  video We should care about Microsoft because Microsoft’s business model depends on a monopoly [the desktop]. Microsoft are very interested in ‘Open Source’ – Apache, MIT, BSD licenced software – the GPL is intolerable. Jeremy models Microsoft as a collection of warring tribes that hate each other… e.g. Word vs Excel.

The first attack was on protocols – make the protocols more complex and sophisticated. MS have done this on Kerberos, DCE/RPC, HTTP, and higher up the stack via MSIE rendering modes, ActiveX plugins, Silverlight…  The EU case was brought about this in the ‘Workgroup Server Market’. MS were fined 1 Billion Euros and forced to document their proprietary protocols.

OOXML showed up rampant corruption in the ISO Standards process – but it got through even though it was a battle against nearly everyone! On the good side it resulted into an investigation into MS dominance in file formats -> MS implemented ODF and MS have had to document their old formats.

MS have an ongoing battle in the world wide web – IE / Firefox, ajax applications/ silverlight.

All of these things are long term failures for MS… so what next?… Patents . Patents are GPL incompatible, but fine with BSD/MIT. The Tom Tom is the first direct attack using MS’s patent portfolio. This undermines all the outreach work done by the MS Open Source team – which Jeremy tells us are true believers in open source, trying to change MS from the inside. Look for MS pushing RAND patented standards: such things lock us out.

Netbooks are identified as a key point for MS to fight on – lose that and the desktop position is massively weakened.

We should:

• Keep creating free software and content *under a copyleft license*.
• Keep pressure on Governments and organisations to adopt open standards and investigate monopolies.
• Lobby against software patents.
• Search for prior art on relevant patents and destroy them.
• Working for a corporation is a moral choice: respectfully call out MS employees.

Jonathan Oxer spoke about the google Moon X-prize and the lunarnumbat.org project – it needs contributors: software and hardware hackers, arduino/beagleboard/[M]JPEG2000 gooks, code testers and reviewers, web coding, documentation, math heads & RF hackers. Sounds like fun… now to find time!

Paul McKenney did another RCU talk – and as always it was interesting… Optimisation Gone Bad (RCU in Linux 1993-2008). Linux 2.6 -rt patch made RCU much much much more complex with atomic operations, memory barriers, frequent cache misses, and since then it was slowly being whittled back, but there is now a new simpler RCU based around the concept of doing the accounting during context switches & tracking running tasks.

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Lindsay Holmwood: Flapjack

Lindsay introduced Flapjack, which is a monitoring system designed to meet the scalability and extensibility requirements of cloud deployments. It shares the Nagios plugin interface, and so can use the same checks. It uses beanstalkd as a central message queue to coordinate the work of executing checks, recording results and making the appropriate notifications. Each of its components (worker, notifier, database) can be extended or replaced using an API, providing a great deal of flexibility.

Jeremy Allison: Microsoft and Free Software

Jeremy took us through Microsoft’s recognition of, and response to, the threat of free software to their monopoly position. After reviewing the major legal battles of this ongoing war (and the metaphor is apt), he says that Microsoft is turning to patents in an attempt to split the free software community and to earn revenue from the use of free software. Jeremy predicts that the outcome will be a never-ending conflict.

The key conflicts are likely to be around netbooks, mobile phones and appliances. How should the free software community respond?

We could ignore it, and keep making free software under copyleft licenses. Jeremy points out that this is perhaps our most effective strategy in the long run, to stay focused on the vision of a free software world.

We can continue to pressure governments and corporations to adopt truly open standards, and to investigate and challenge monopolies. Transparency is key to these efforts, as “elephants like to work in the dark” (Microsoft being “the elephant in the room”).

By lobbying against software patents, we can hope to contain the US software patent system from the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rapidly accumulating software patents in the US can suddenly and dramatically spread.

We might even convince the likes of Microsoft that patents, and patent trolls, represent a greater harm than good.

In response to direct patent attacks, we should search for prior art and attempt to undermine unjust patents. He also suggests calling out Microsoft employees on the company’s actions, to promote awareness particularly in the context of free software conferences.

He closed with a hope that Microsoft could change, citing IBM as having been “as feared and hated as Microsoft is today”.

Neil Brown:Digging for Design Patterns

Neil explored various design patterns in the kernel in order to illustrate how they are discovered, what their important attributes are, and how to use them effectively.

His examples were a binary search, “goto err”, accessor functions and kref. Naming patterns is important, especially getting that name into the code itself, so that it helps to cross-reference use, implementation and documentation of the pattern (e.g. uses of the kref pattern are sprinkled with the word “kref”). A successful pattern can both help to find bugs (this binary search doesn’t look the same as that one…why?) and to avoid bugs (by getting it right the first time).

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I wrote this for the FSF's annual membership drive where it was originally published. I am reposting it here.

At its core, I think of free software as about the ability of computer users to take control of their technology. Insofar as our software defines our experience of the world and each other, software freedom is an important part of what allows us to determine the way we live, work, and communicate.

Free software is not really about software in this fundamental sense; it's about bringing freedom to users through software.

In free software's incredible success over the last two decades, many people have lost sight of this simple fact. We have created an incredible array of applications, libraries, and tools. We have created vibrant development and support communities. We have created new development methodologies, powerful copyleft licenses, and massive collaborative projects. But these are all how we give users freedom. They are not freedom itself. They are not what we were trying to achieve. They are our instruments, not our goal.

This distinction becomes central in a world where technology is in flux. Indeed, we live in such a world. We can see signs of this in how, as most users' primary computers become mobile phones and new types of network services make up most of many users' interactions with computers, the free software movement's old applications, communities, development methodologies, and licenses can become ill-suited to, or ineffective at, protecting user freedoms.

And indeed, in the next few years, bringing freedom to computer users will need to involve new software and new forms of advocacy. It will need to involve new licenses and new techniques for their enforcement. It will need to involve new forms of collaboration and organization. If the free software movement is to succeed, it must stay focused on computer users' freedom -- on the question of why we do what we do -- and then work creatively on how to best respect and protect the freedom we are working toward. If we are overly focused on how we've done things in the past, we may lose sight of the most fundamental goal of supporting users' control over their technology in general.

There are many organizations that support the how of today's free software in various ways -- they are law firms and companies and nonprofit organizations supporting various free software projects.

The Free Software Foundation is, by far, the most important organization focused on why --- on the underlying principle of software freedom. As such, it plays an essential role in keeping our broader community focused on the key issues, threats, and challenges that will affect the success of every free software project, and every computer user, in the present and in the future. In this period of rapid change in computer technology, its role is more vital than ever. The consequence of any failure is more dire.

Here are some of the ways that I will be encouraging the FSF to serve the free software movement in the coming year:

Mobile Phones

In a short essay I wrote earlier this year, I pointed out that there are now billions of mobile phones and that, although these phones are increasingly powerful computers, they represent one of the most locked-down, proprietary, and “unfree” technologies in wide use. The implications of this fact for users' control over their technology are dire. Although some widely used phones make extensive use of free software, most “free” phones are locked down and Tivoized and their users remain fettered, divided, and helpless.

We must raise awareness of free software issues among users of phones, communicate to users that phones are powerful general purpose computers, and explain that control over these devices has critical implications for individual autonomy in the future. Toward this end, the FSF staff will launch an advocacy campaign around mobile phones and software freedom in the coming year.

Network Services

As network services -- like those built by Facebook, Google, and others -- have continued to grow both in scope and penetration over the last year, the importance of a meaningful free software responses grows as well. The launch of products like Google's network-centric ChromeOS offers one glimpse of what a future computing platform may look like. The implications for user freedom, and for the effectiveness of traditional free software approaches, are frightening. The fact that many network services are built using free software does not make the effect of these services on users' autonomy and freedom any less catastrophic.

In the next year, the FSF is planning to release the first of what I hope will be several statements on software freedom and network services. Building off the work of the FSF-supported group Autonomous, the Foundation will help provide guidelines for those implementing network services, for users deciding whether to use services, and for developers trying to build services that go further to respect their users' freedom.

Reaching beyond our traditional communities

Successfully fighting for user freedom is going to mean successfully reaching out to users outside the FSF's historical “base”. The FSF continues to do so with its Defective By Design anti-DRM campaign and its End Software Patents work. In the last year, the FSF has also reached out to younger users through its "GNU Generation" campaign run by and for high school students. Additionally, the FSF convened a summit this year on women in free software. The FSF plans to build on these successes in the coming year and to expand similar outreach projects.

Of course, fighting for and promoting software freedom is more work than today's FSF has the resources to accomplish. Each of my three points above represents an ambitious undertaking, and yet just a portion of the items on the plate of the FSF's small but dedicated staff. Even just continuing its existing projects will require that the FSF adds hundreds of new members by the end of this period. Your membership and donations help make goals like this possible.

A strong free software movement focused on the principled issues of software freedom -- and a strong FSF in particular -- will determine what freedoms the next generation of computer users will enjoy. At stake is no less than that next generation's autonomy.

I know that this is not the first fundraising appeal you've read this season and I know that the weakened economy makes giving difficult for many. I understand that the cost of a membership or donation may be less easy to afford this year. But we also cannot afford a weakened FSF at this important point of technological transition.

If you are not an FSF associate member, now is the time to become one. If you've read my appeal the last two years and decided to wait, now is the time to take the plunge. Membership is $120 per year ($60 for students) and payable monthly. If you are already a member, please join me in giving generously through a tax-deductible donation, or encourage a friend to sign up. The FSF is a small, humble organization of passionate individuals working tirelessly for our software freedom. I've seen firsthand that even small gifts make a difference.

Join now with a $10 monthly donation

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Just wanted to tease you guys out there about a new feature that the Transifex guys are working on these days: Translation Reviews! Have you ever wandered if your translations conform to the standard vocabulary that your team uses? Have you ever wanted someone to take a look at what you’ve done before sending in your final work for commit approval?

From Transifex v8.0 featutes

Now, mind you this is still very alpha code but that is probably a good thing since you can play with it and give your feedback on how to improve it. As always, you can get this in an easy to consume format by using the Transifex Appliance Developer edition… or you can join the Xfce translators who are already enjoying Transifex latest code!

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I emailed the LoCo teams mailing list today but wanted to let more people know about this new process.

We the LoCo council are going to be interviewing and meeting with approved LoCos to see how they are doing, how they have progressed in the 2 years (some a bit more ) since they were first approved. If they have had any issues, how they have dealt with them. If they have any issues, or ideas and how we the LoCo council can help with them.

So many times, a LoCo is approved and you don’t hear much about them, this can be due to a language barrier in some cases, or perhaps they don’t have people who have a blog on the planet.  Many LoCos do great and wonderful things out there for the community, I for one want to hear about it.

How it’s going to work.  Very simple, we have selected a number of teams at random who have been approved over 2 years. Broken them down into groups, and assigned a  LoCo Council member to them. They will attempt to contact the loco team contact/leader 3 times in a one month period.  Once contact has been made, they will be asked to attend a meeting, where we will do a short interview like they first did to get approved.

This is one of the goals set out for the LoCo Council for the Lucid cycle, and I think it’s one we can achieve and well worth doing,. All of the teams that are going to be re approved are on the re approval process page. In case you’re not sure of the LoCo Council member are, you will be hearing from one of them over the course of this cycle.

• Laura Czajkowski (czajkowski)
• Alan Pope (popey)
• Jan Claeys (janc)
• Efrain Valles (effie-jayx)
• Christophe Sauthier (huats)
• Chris Crisafulli (itnet7)

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I’m writing to you from the Ubuntu LoCo Council. For the Lucid cycle we have undertaken to look at the re approving all approved Ubuntu LoCos. This was discussed at UDS Lucid in November.(https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/community-lucid-loco-council-plans)

We thought it best to publicise and inform everyone about the re approval process of a LoCo. It was decided back at UDS to start this process. It gives us a chance to see how LoCos are doing, if they need a hand in areas and to give you a chance to give us some feedback.

How it will work, for all teams which have been approved over 2 years, a member of the LoCo Council is selected to be the point of contact with the LoCo team for re-approval, they will contact your Team contact / leader.

They will attempt to contact you three times over one month. Once contact is made, you will then invite you to the next available IRC meeting. Using the method you were originally approved, https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoGettingApproved. We just want to see how you’ve progressed, your activity, and if you’ve had any issues, how you’ve handled them.

During this time, we may need to have more IRC meetings, but we will let you know when you are requested to attend. The re approval process is documented and the information is on the wiki https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoCouncil/LoCoTeamReApproval

The members of the current LoCo Council you will hear from are regarding this re approval process are

• Laura Czajkowski (czajkowski)
• Alan Pope (popey)
• Jan Claeys (janc)
• Efrain Valles (effie-jayx)
• Christophe Sauthier (huats)
• Chris Crisafulli (itnet7)

If you have any other queries about this, you can email us.
loco-councillists.ubuntu.com

[Discuss the Ubuntu LoCo Re Approval Process on the Forum]

Originally sent to the loco-contacts mailing list by Laura Czajkowski on Wed Jan 20 10:52:05 GMT 2010

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As elected by the Ubuntu development team, the members of the Developer Membership Board are now:

Colin Watson
Emmet Hikory
Soren Hansen
Michael Bienia
Stéphane Graber
Richard Johnson
Cody Somerville

They will serve for a 1 year term, helping to welcome new Ubuntu developers into the project, after which we will hold another election.

Thanks to everyone who volunteered to serve on the board.

[Discuss the Developer Membership Board election results on the forum]

Originally sent to the ubuntu-devel-announce mailing list by Matt Zimmerman on Tue Jan 19 20:15:32 GMT 2010

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Glyn Moody – Hackers at the end of the world. Rebel code is now 10 years old… 50+ interviews over a year – and could be considered an archaeology now   I probably haven’t down the keynote justice – it was excellent but high density – you should watch it online

Glyn talks about open access – various examples like the public library of science (and how the scientific magazine business made 30%-40% profit margins. The Human Genome Project & the ‘Bermuda Principles’: public submimssion of annotated sequences. In 2000 Celera were going to patent the entire human genome. Jim Kent spent 3 weeks writing a program to join together the sequenced fragments on a 100 PC 800Mhz Pentium processor.  This was put into the public domain on just before Celera completed their processing – and by that action Celera were prevented from patenting *us*.

Openness as a concept is increasing within the scientific community – open access to result, open data, open science (the full process). An interesting aspect to it is ‘open notebook science’ – daily writeups, not peer reviewed: ‘release early, release often’ for science.

Amazingly, Project Gutenberg started in 1971!

Glyn ties together the scientific culture (all science is open to some degree) and artistic culture (artists share and build on /reference each others work) by talking about a lag between free software and free content worlds. In 1999 Larry Lessig setup ‘Copyright’s Commons’ built around an idea of ‘counter-copyright’ – copyleft for non-code. This didn’t really fly, and Creative Commons was setup 2 years later.

Wikipedia and newer sharing concepts like twitter/facebook etc are discussed. But… what about the real world: transparency and governments, or companies? They are opening up.

However, data release !=  control release. And there are challenges we all need to face:

• GFinancialC “my gain is your loss”. Very opaque system.
• GEnvironmentalC “my gain is our loss”

Glyn argues we need a different approach to economic governance: the commons. 2009 Nobel laureate for Economic Sciences – Elinor Ostrom – work on commons and their management via user associations… which is what we do in open source!

Awesome!

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Apparently, due to our failing to pay, my connection is down and may stay down for a few days more. My servers are also inaccessible due to the fact that they are on the same connection. I apologize for any inconvienience this may cause to any users of said servers.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

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Dark black line, I hate
Low hanging fruit, cannot find
Is it far too late?

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Love or hate it, Skype is very popular program for many computer users. While not open source, I do appreciate Skype making client for Linux users. Skype had two common problems under some Linux distros.

1. Skype did not work with Pulse Audio: This was fixed with the first Skype 2.1 beta1 (2.1.0.47).
2. Skype does not work well with dark themes in Gnome: This is fix in the Skype 2.1 beta 2 (2.1.0.81)

Now, I'm a big fan of dark themes, the following is a quick guide to installing under Ubuntu with a dark Gnome theme:

1. Uninstall previous version of Skype from Medibuntu.
2. Download Skype from http://www.skype.com/download/skype/linux/choose (don't worry about the Ubuntu 8.10 version, works with Ubuntu 8.10 thru Ubuntu 9.10/)
3. Install the deb file
sudo dpkg -i skype-ubuntu-intrepid_2.1.0.81-1_i386.deb
4. Run Skype and goto Options.
5. Under the General tab, set Choose style to Desktop Settings or GTK+.

6. Restart Skype.

For more disucssion on Skype and Open Source, I suggest listening to the Shot of Jaq podcast episode: Has Skype Won the War?

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…does anybody else get bored about the topics like  ”proprietaryness of Ubuntu / Linux Powered Distributions”?

“Free” means “Freedom”.

Users are allowed to choose which software they want to use.

People, doesn’t matter if there are advocates of FLOSS or advocates of closed source software, who don’t give the User a chance to choose, don’t understand their business.

MS failed with their politics against “Linux” or “OpenSource” in general, and our beloved “OpenSource Model” will also fail because of people being “dicks” regarding people from the other camp.

Again, think about the “F” in “FLOSS” and what the “F” in general stands for.

“Free” not as in “free beer”, but “Free” as in “Free Speech”

Just my 2 € Cent on this topic

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Following the very successful Bug day we had last week, the Edubuntu project will be having an Edubuntu Wiki day tomorrow.

Wiki reorganization information can be found on this mailing-list post.

As for the Bug day last week, we'll be discussing on #edubuntu (irc.freenode.net), going through wiki pages, moving them, setting redirections and deleting these that shouldn't exist anymore.

Jonathan Carter will be coordinating that on IRC, I'll also be around during the day.

Looking forward to having a clean wiki and discussing with you tomorrow.

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I just want to share the following video. Seriously, how awesome is this? (Click this posting’s title if you’re reading via a planet to see the video.)

That thing runs Gentoo.

Source.

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I just uploaded python-apt 0.7.93 to unstable with support for Python 2.6 and Python 3.1, meaning that there is now a single development branch again.

This uploads brings developers the new API with real classes in apt_pkg (you can now use pydoc to view documentation), C++ bindings for making apt-pkg applications scriptable (although they should be considered experimental), a test suite (although aptsources fails in one test for now) and many new context managers for enhanced Python 3 coding fun. And objects are now freed when their reference count reaches 0. A more complete list of news can be found in the What’s New In python-apt 0.7.100 part of the documentation.

For the next releases until 0.7.100 release, the focus is clearly on fixing bugs and improving the documentation. We need more tests of the Python 3 builds, especially in areas dealing with str and unicode stuff.

Have fun, read the documentation, and code.

Posted in Debian

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