@Riddell: 1. nixternal? 2. Sad this offer not on http://tinyurl.com/5sqozv? 3.T/I is/are not really a useful media to post jobapps 4. \o/

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Normally these upgrades go well, but when you accidentally unzip/untar the new version over the top of your current install, things don’t quite go according to plan

Though kudos to the WP Dev’s, I modified the wp-config file and set all the options (including a different database table prefix), and then I put all my plugins back in to place, and took the time to upgrade a couple I needed to do. Finally, after a deep breatth, I ran what would normally be the installer, which said “Your database needs updating”.

And that was all, so considering my potentially costly foul-up, things actually went very well I’m quite impressed!

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I upgraded the site to Wordpress 2.8 today. It took about 30 seconds and involved clicking a link in the admin dashboard. That is amazing! Good work, WP devs, and thank you!

Share and Enjoy:



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The second alpha for karmic is released. Download from the mirrors to enjoy the developer-y goodness and help in preparation for the karmic release.

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This post is a repost for something I sent to Linux Today. Their original message was here, where they invited people who don’t think Mono causes AIDS to justify themselves. I replied here. This is a repost, for the benefit of assorted aggregators. Some context may be lost by not reading the original “invitation” first.

—————————————————–

I am a member of the Debian Mono Group, Debian CLI Applications Team, and Debian CLI Libraries Team. I’ve been working on packaging for the Mono stack and applications which make use of it in Ubuntu (and Debian) for just under a year. And, fully aware of the flame war, threats and personal attacks which will follow, I’m going to take you up on your “invitation”. I speak for myself here – not for the Debian project, nor Ubuntu, not for the Mono project, nor for my employer.

Your request was for “a calm presentation of why Mono is desirable, why it is not a threat, and why it should be included in Ubuntu by default”. I’ll answer these three questions individually, then offer a general comment on your post, as well as the wider “anti-Mono” movement. This message is GPG-signed to ensure it is published unedited. The message as-sent will be made available at http://retro.apebox.org/herewegoagain.txt to allow people to verify authenticity signatures themselves.

Why Mono is desirable

That’s a question which depends on whom is being asked.

If you’re asking a user, then the answer is “it’s not”, any more than a Scheme compiler or LOLCODE interpreter.

If you’re asking a developer, then the answer is VERY different. Mono provides a well-balanced framework to enable Free Software to be developed quickly, effectively, and efficiently. By “balanced”, I mean it is unlikely to win every single contest that one can throw at a programming language – memory footprint, execution speed, availability of libraries, and so on – but does fairly well in ALL of them. Speedwise, Mono is much faster than Python – up to several hundred times faster according to some benchmarks. It has a fraction of the memory footprint of Java applications. It has modern features such as garbage collection which make it easy peasy to write code with compared to malloc()-happy C or C++. It is a well-balanced framework. As such, for people looking to write apps for a Free Software environment, it offers a compelling choice of framework on which to build. Several apps which have only existed for a short time – such as GNOME Do – make full use of functionality provided by Mono in order to be written very quickly and easily, compared to chasing SIGSEGV around due to human errors inevitable with C-based development. Mono was first conceived as a way to escape from the absolute horror of maintaining a large GUI C codebase (Evolution).

Taking it further, Mono on the whole also enables easier migration – for both developers and users – from legacy CLR frameworks such as Microsoft.NET. Students who learn Visual Studio.NET at University can take their skills and directly apply them to creating or improving Free Software on their shiny new Ubuntu installations, without the need to learn a new language. Businesses with investment in .NET-based applications can look at replacing their servers or desktops with Free Software. Whilst providing .NET compatibility has always been a secondary goal, it is an extremely popular one, which has prompted a lot of input and development work from assorted people into the Mono codebase.

It should be noted, however, that this use-case (Windows migration) is not cause for including Mono by default (any more than, say, Wine), and indeed, the libraries required to run the majority of Microsoft.NET applications are excluded from Ubuntu installations due to lack of necessity.

Why it is not a threat

This is a question which will cause nothing but angry flames – although it certainly won’t harm your page hits and resultant ad revenue. Mono is not a threat because it is not special in any legal regard. Many people have spent hours if not days and weeks attempting to explain this. I’ll try to do so again. There are a whole smattering of reasons why it’s not an issue, covering a wide range of topics. I’ll present these points individually.

• Mono is not the result of any deals between Novell and Microsoft. Mono was started 4 years before that unfortunate deal took place. Mono gets no special treatment under that deal. It is not mentioned in the deal (as with other apps). This is important to note.
• Mono is covered by the OIN, as with most other major Free apps. Patent attacks against Mono carry the same risk to attackers as attacks against any other OIN entrant. Attacks against Mono would risk patent “world war”, which Microsoft cannot win. Such an action would harm their business – and lose them money.
• Mono implements an international standard – albeit one from a convicted monopolist. If this is a problem, why do people use C, the standard from convicted monopolist AT&T? Mono implements an improved, Free replacement for a proprietary offering. If this is a problem, why do people use GNU (which provided an improved, Free replacement for proprietary UNIX)?
• Regardless of whether or not any specific patent licenses over ECMA 334 and 335 cover Mono’s implementation of those standards, if indeed such agreements are available (ITWire’s curlish “attempt” to secure such an arrangement aside), the fact that statements have been made in public supporting the idea of royalty-free licensing essentially reduces the financial impact of such infringement to zero. If Foocorp has a license to use patents, under a “non-discriminatory” license, and did not pay for them – then it would be discriminatory to change anyone  else for them (breaking the signed terms regarding patent licensing), and as such, those patents lose any financial value. They may, however, still hold non-financial value (such as their use in defending against patent-related attacks), hence not making the patents “free for all” in any understood sense.
• Mono cannot be “disabled” via an incompatible change to Microsoft.NET, for two reasons. Firstly, such a change would also break every single existing app for Microsoft.NET (in fact, if it were to happen, then the best option for those users would be to run their apps with Mono instead). Secondly, support for Microsoft.NET is a secondary goal for Mono – if Microsoft change something in .NET 5.0, then so what? It doesn’t prevent Banshee or GNOME Do from compiling and running fine on non-legacy systems like Ubuntu.
• Absence of “patent protection” is not the same thing as “patent violation”. If I offer to sell somebody a promise not to sue them using any of my patents, their taking me up on my offer is no guarantee that I even have anything valid to sell them – merely that they are willing to buy it. If Jim buys protection from any patents I hold, it does not mean that Jim is infringing on anything specific – nor that if Ted does the same thing, that Ted is violating anything either. If a house insurance policy includes flood protection, it does not mean that your house will be flooded – and not buying flood protection does not mean that you will be flooded either.
• Patents covering a specific implementation detail of a project cannot kill it dead – the example here is Freetype. Apple made some patent threats against the Freetype developers, for using their proprietary hinting data stored in TrueType fonts. You’ll notice that Freetype still exists today – this is because the specific METHOD that apple laid claim to was worked around, and auto-generated hinting data used instead. Apple’s threat was diffused, and the project went on. Suggestions have been made by FUD vendors that the Linux kernel contains a number of patent infringements – if specific details are ever provided, then those specific infringements can be worked around. A patent infringed in the Linux kernel would not cause all GNU/Linux distributions to be shut down overnight – and it’s disingenuous to suggest that any other Free Software is any different on that front. Even if a fundamental patent is infringed in Free Software, it’s no big deal – as a core change can be made, and applications etc which expect the “old” way can be modified to work with the “new” way, easily. Only proprietary applications cannot be fixed in the event of radical change – and proprietary apps are a secondary concern.
• The layering of escape routes is extensive in Mono, especially Mono in Debian/Ubuntu. In the first instance, the contentious Microsoft-sourced non-ISO libraries such as System.Windows.Forms are not included by default, and are rarely used in Free applications anyway (because WinForms looks like ass, amongst other things). If a reason is found to remove these non-standardised libraries, then bam, they’re gone – without harming Free apps. Secondly, if a more severe change is required, then the Mono packages can be patched to remove the infringement. If more drastic changes are required, as mentioned above, then the applications can also be patched to support any core changes. And, taking it one step further, if the whole of Mono needs to be pulled, then applications can be ported. The porting process would potentially be slow and painful, and cause great harm to an application’s future rate of development (although no worse than if the app was written in the target language from day one), but nobody who has written an app they care about would simply throw their hands in the air and say “never mind, it was fun, but the Man says I have to stop now”.

Why Mono should be included in Ubuntu by default

It shouldn’t. Not in the sense that has been publicised on blogs, newsgroups, forums, and so on. We don’t want Mono installed by default on any distribution. Mono is a software platform, and software platforms are boring at a user level. Ubuntu shouldn’t ship with Java, Scheme, Assembly, LISP, etc, frameworks by default either. They are not interesting to users.

What we want by default are GREAT APPS. A user should boot an Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, or whatever CD and say to themselves “Wow, this Free Software stuff is great, I definitely don’t need Windows anymore”. All Ubuntu derivatives, as with all distributions of Free Software seeking to convert people to Free Software, should be chasing the best applications available. In the case of Ubuntu, a decision was made to include a note-taking application and a simple photo library manager, by the Desktop Team.

They determined that the best note-taking application to offer their users was Tomboy. Tomboy has a feature set far greater than the “Sticky Notes” applets provided in both GNOME and Windows Vista, and can be seen by new users as an easy replacement for Microsoft’s proprietary OneNote product, which retails for £80. The only other comparable GNOME application is Zim, a “Desktop Wiki”. Zim is a high-quality product, but it was decided by the desktop team to use Tomboy instead, as it is easier for non-technical users (and is the default application in its class as picked by the GNOME project).

They also determined that the best photo manager to offer was F-Spot. F-Spot is directly comparable to Apple’s proprietary iPhoto application, or Google’s proprietary Picasa application. It is NOT directly comparable to “file browser” type applications such as gThumb, as one of the key features of photo album applications is allowing you to tag your photos with important metadata – gThumb works on a per-folder basis, not on a “all my photos” basis.

Both Tomboy and F-Spot require the Mono JITter, and a set of libraries such as GTK#, in order to execute. So in order to offer these best-of-breed Free Software applications to new users (determined to be best-of-breed by the Ubuntu Desktop Team), parts of a Free Software runtime are required – the same way including the GNOME System Monitor requires GTKmm. As long as Tomboy and F-Spot are best-of-breed, they should be included – and with that, whichever libraries they happen to use. If other Free applications surpass one or both of these, then they should be used instead – if a Mono-based application surpasses a different application in a different class, it should be used instead. This is not based on preference for a given framework – although it is my personal belief that a high-level language such as C# or Python enables developing such an application much more quickly and easier than C would.

The post on Linux Today

Your initial post makes it clear that you are not even-handed on this topic. Here are some specific phrases whose purpose is to “throw mud”, and show your pre-determined judgements on the topics you claim to want to hear about. It is THIS, clear preconceptions and bias, which compel those with plenty of insight on Mono-related topics, not to bother. Which leaves only the anti-Mono people to pretend they have a majority.

“There are other, better applications that could be included” – Name them.

“forcing Microsoft technologies” – Help! Help! I’m being oppressed! No, not really. Good technology is good technology, and Not Invented Here never helped anyone. None of the Desktop Team are pro-Mono (most of them are Python fans), and no unilateral decisions are made over which applications to include. Nobody is “forced” over anything. No Mono-related packages have been marked as Essential:yes.

“unholy embrace into Ubuntu” – Demagogy. Microsoft are a corporation, not a supernatural entity. Suggesting any level of “unholiness” gives far too much credit to them. They are a corporation, with a wide selection of idiot senior managers, and a limited selection of competent developers. Nothing more.

“Mono fans have been creating a giant ruckus in the Ubuntu forums” – actually, it’s the anti-Mono crowd responsible for this. If you refer to accusations of censorship, then you’re being mislead (or intentionally misleading). Those who read the specific details of those accusations can find rudeness, threats, arguments, and worse – with anti-Mono people at the core. Childishness does not win arguments – nor friends amongst moderators.

“have not bothered to say why removing Mono from the Ubuntu installation CD” – To this, I offer a quote from Thomas Jefferson – “Ridicule is he only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them”. Demands to remove Mono from a default Ubuntu system are not based on any rational suggestions – there are no packagers offering superior replacements, only people demanding that because in their personal ill-informed opinion everyone will be sued to death, that Mono applications should be purged. This is, in short, software terrorism – demanding a change in someone else’s policy and telling them they are not Free to make their own choices, based on personal politics. Rational minds can dissent on questions of Mono, but until there are adequate replacements for Mono applications, complete with functional migration path, the choice is simple – make Linux suck more by moving to an inferior default application set, or “make do” with Mono. It should be noted that people with rather more to lose than random anonymous people on web forums – such as Mark Shuttleworth – have said on record multiple times that they don’t have any such fears. I would personally support a move from any Mono-based application to a non-Mono-based one, with demonstrable technical superioriority.

“simply including it in the standard repos is not acceptable.” – It’s perfectly acceptable – however, it’s not the only argument put forward. Suggestions range from reclassifying Mono as non-Free (moving it to third-class citizen status), to its complete removal from the archive, to the expulsion from both Debian and Ubuntu for anyone who has worked on Mono packaging. Free apps in general should be in the standard repos – regardless of their implementation framework – but if a specific application is best-in-class, it should be included by default.

“The inability of Mono fans to answer that simple question has me a bit bothered, as though there is a deeper agenda.” – If you want to make accusations, make them plain. Don’t play the Fox News game of “well, I find it *interesting*” – call a spade a shovel. If you have specific accusations to make about people who are not anti-Mono, then make them, or to put it bluntly, don’t spread lies.

The anti-Mono “movement”

Some people are “for” things. They are for Freedom, or for technical superiority, or for a sports team, or whatever. Some people are “against” things. They are against political candidates, or Microsoft, or people from certain places, or whatever. Some people define themselves on the basis of what they want, others on the basis of what they do not want. Mono causes immense anger amongst that second group – specifically, people who use GNU/Linux not because they are “for” anything, but because they are “against” Microsoft. This can be easily seen – using names like “Microshaft” or “Micro$oft” or similar childish attempts to define a “them and us” situation and ridicule the “them”. Mono is symbolic – it is Free (something they are supposedly in favour of), but Free on the basis of something sourced from the Great Satan – an inexcusable mix.

Many of those who advertise themselves as anti-Mono are, quite frankly, frightening. Calling for the deaths of Microsoft employees (see comments on Boycott Novell), or trying to have people who make positive comments about Mono fired (see recent comments on Ubuntu mailing lists), or making insinuations about anyone who does not agree with them (see pretty much every news post on Boycott Novell itself) – this is ugly behaviour, the absolute worst kind of advert for the “Free Software community” imaginable. If people want to be “against” Mono, then there are sane ways to do it – for example, by working on or packaging alternative software. Calling for people to be expelled from Free Software communities because they don’t work on apps you like is, in short, the antithesis of supporting Freedom. If the anti-Mono crowd want to be taken seriously, then they need to UNDERSTAND what they fight against – they need to have sufficiently intimate knowledge of what Mono is, how it works, and why, in order to know where to direct their energies (and general shouts of “ZOMG! MICRO$HAFT!” isn’t well-directed). I would LOVE to see some high-quality apps for GNOME written in, say, Java or Python – as the competition would only result in better applications.

However, the vast majority of the anti-Mono crowd are not developers or packagers – they are back-seat drivers. They make proclamations about how other developers (who are surrendering their time to developer Free Software) should instead use the framework of THEIR choice, not the developer’s. This is another reason why anti-Mono arguments are given so little respect – the sheer cheek, the PRESUMPTION that they somehow are in a position to make demands of other developers, is galling. Free Software is a meritocracy – those who do things earn respect. Until the anti-Mono crowd actually make a contribution to Free Software, they will continue to be treated as cranks – and their questions left unanswered.

In the end, there is NOTHING which will cause the Mono controversy to disappear – as long as vague threats of legal attacks are manufactured and fuelled by certain members of the community. Much like a presidential birth certificate, there is simply nothing which will placate those who have already made up their own minds without any concerns about basis in reality or fact. Anti-Mono arguments based in reality or fact are fine, and I welcome them – but I’ve very rarely seen them. And even when they are offered, they are offered drowning in a sauce of demagogy and FUD so thick as to obscure the salient point.

So, I think that’s what you were looking for. Repost it or don’t. It’ll make for a new chapter in the daily personal attacks I receive from the oh-so-sophisticated anti-Mono crowd.

–Jo Shields

——–
Understanding is a three-edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth

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Recently a friend of mine was talking about starting his own consulting business and it got me thinking about how viable it might be to completely run a small business on free software like Ubuntu. I mean completely run your business on free software, down to the last detail. I don’t mean mostly, but 100% create, manage and run your small business using free software. That got me thinking about what is required to get a small business off the ground, which quickly led to marketing materials. Business cards. Labels. Letterhead. The things you just assume you’d have as a small business, but don’t really think about creating until you’re in the situation.

While I was thinking about this I came across an application that looks like it’d fit this need perfectly. It’s called gLabels, and is designed specifically for creating labels and business cards in the GNOME desktop environment.  From the website:

gLabels is a program for creating labels and business cards for the GNOME desktop environment. It is designed to work with various laser/ink-jet peel-off label and business card sheets that you’ll find at most office supply stores. gLabels is free software and is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Sweet! Looks like that’d fit the bill perfectly, and it is available in the Ubuntu repositories! To install, enter the command (or click on the link):

sudo aptitude install glabels

Once you’ve got it installed it really looks like a breeze to use as well! I also found a site that has a good, more in-depth tutorial on getting started with it. Printing Labels in Ubuntu outlines some basic usage of gLabels, including screenshots. Worth checking out.

While I was at that link I also found a really detailed tutorial on creating quality business cards using Inkscape, another application available in the Ubuntu repositories. Ubuntu wins again for application availability! If you have never used Inkscape before it really is worth checking out. It can be installed using:

sudo aptitude install inkscape

Inkscape is a great tool for creating business cards, letterhead, etc. It’s great for all kinds of detailed graphic design while on Linux. Again I’ll refer you to the Business Card Tutorial using Inkscape for a great writeup of how to do business cards.

In conclusion, I have to admit that Ubuntu appears to have just the right tools to get a small business going. Business Cards. Labels. Letterhead. The best part about the whole thing is that none of these applications adds any additional cost to the difficulty of starting a small business. You’ve got to love “Free as in Beer”.
Other Points of Interest

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One of the things we discussed at UDS (for the third cycle now) is dropping everything KDE3 from default Kubuntu.  In Jaunty we got a new NetworkManager applet.  k3b is on its way.  The blocker for Karmic is OpenOffice.org KDE integration.  Well, work is underway on a KDE4 file picker.  That leaves icons — time to make OpenOffice fit in visually, at least a little.

Problem is the OpenOffice.org icon set has over 7000 files.  Most of them are named something like this: lc03241.png (that’s the new presentation icon, 32×32).  Fortunately most of those icons are for various obscure things, including images for the help and some pixmaps for easter eggs (anybody know how to get into some sort of starfighter game in OO.o?).  With existing Oxygen icons and a couple free days it’s possible to get a couple nice looking toolbars in Writer:

Unfortunately that’s as far as it gets with existing artwork.  The Oxygen team is only prepared to create office suite icons when the various office suites agree on an icon naming scheme.

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Canonical's online services team wants to hire a KDE developer to work on cool Kubuntu online services
integration. Amazing what you find on identi.ca.

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Phew...long time I didn't have the time to work on Leonov, which is very bad. Anyways, this is going to change.

Leonov Reloaded is on it's track, stay tuned, see what will happen.

Furthermore, I'm working again on FAI (Fully Automatic Installation), the rock and roll installation and deployment framework for SysAdmins Pro++ (yeah, you just can go away with your Kickstarting and Autoyasting), created and maintained by Thomas Lange. FAI SysAdmins Pro++ will get their full fledged planned server installation in less then 10 Minutes, more likely in less then 5, depending on your hardware.

I did work with FAI at ComBOTS in the past, and todays employer is going to use FAI again (Right, it was my proposal ;))

You know, it's good to know to be back in a good community...

 

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This past weekend, the wife and I headed up to Washington DC to visit her side of the family. To take a break from doing family stuff, we visited a couple of the museums at the Smithsonian. I remember going as a kid and having an awesome time. No matter how old you are, looking at seriously old bones is always fun!

Click on the image above or here to see the video.

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For anyone using Identi.ca, the Documentation Team now has a group.  If you are on Identi.ca and interested in writing documentation we’re delighted to hear from you but I’d love anyone interested in Ubuntu to add us – we often get asked for some very specialist documentation and you could be the one who knows the answers.

You can join using an OpenID too.

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Elastic IP

Amazon EC2 supports Elastic IP Addresses to implement the effect of having a static IP address for public servers running on EC2. You can point the Elastic IP at any of your EC2 instances, changing the active instance at any time, without changing the IP address seen by the public outside of EC2.

This is a valuable feature for things like web and email servers, especially if you need to replace a failing server or upgrade or downgrade the hardware capabilities of the server, but read on for an insiders’ secret way to use Elastic IP addresses for non-public servers.

Internal Servers

Not all servers should be publicly accessible. For example, you may have an internal EC2 instance which hosts your database server accessed by other application instances inside EC2. You want to architect your installation so that you can replace the database server (instance failure, resizing, etc) but you want to make it easy to get all your application servers to start using the new instance.

There are a number of design approaches which people have used to accomplish this, including:

1. Hard code the internal IP address into the applications and modify it whenever the internal server changes to a new instance (ugh and ouch).

2. Run your own DNS server (or use an external DNS service) and change the IP address of the internal hostname to the new internal IP address (extra work and potentially extra failover time waiting for DNS propagation).

3. Store the internal IP address in something like SimpleDB and change it when you want to point to a new EC2 instance (extra work and requires extra coding for clients to keep checking the SimpleDB mapping)

The following approach is the one I use and is the topic of the rest of this article:

1. Assign an Elastic IP to the internal instance and use the external Elastic IP DNS name. To switch servers, simply re-assign the Elastic IP to a new EC2 instance

This last option uses a little-known feature of the Elastic IP Address system as implemented by Amazon EC2:

When an EC2 instance queries the external DNS name of an Elastic IP, the EC2 DNS server returns the internal IP address of the instance to which the Elastic IP address is currently assigned.

You may need to read that a couple times to grasp the implications as it is non-obvious that an “external” name will return an “internal” address.

Setting Up

You can create an Elastic IP address in an number of ways including the EC2 Console or the EC2 API command line tools. For example:

$ ec2-allocate-address ADDRESS 75.101.137.243

The address returned at this point is the external Elastic IP address. You don’t want to use this external IP address directly for internal server access since you would be charged for network traffic.

The next step is to assign the Elastic IP address to an EC2 instance (which is going to be your internal server):

$ ec2-associate-address -i i-07612d6e 75.101.137.243 ADDRESS 75.101.137.243 i-07612d6e

Once the Elastic IP has been assigned to an instance, you can describe that instance to find the external DNS name (which will include the external Elastic IP address in it):

$ ec2-describe-instances i-07612d6e | egrep ^INSTANCE | cut -f4 ec2-75-101-137-243.compute-1.amazonaws.com

This is the permanent external DNS name for that Elastic IP address no matter how many times you change the instance to which it is assigned. If you query this DNS name from outside of EC2, it will resolve to the external IP address as shown above:

$ dig +short ec2-75-101-137-243.compute-1.amazonaws.com 75.101.137.243

However, if you query this DNS name from inside an EC2 instance, it will resolve to the internal IP address for the instance to which it is currently assigned:

$ dig +short ec2-75-101-137-243.compute-1.amazonaws.com 10.254.171.132

You can now use this external DNS name in your applications on EC2 instances to communicate with the server over the internal EC2 network and you won’t be charged for the network traffic as long as you’re in the same EC2 availability zone.

Changing Servers

If you ever need to move the service to a new EC2 instance, simply reassign the Elastic IP address to the new EC2 instance:

$ ec2-associate-address -i i-3b783452 75.101.137.243 ADDRESS 75.101.137.243 i-3b783452

and the original external DNS name will immediately resolve to the internal IP address of the new instance:

$ dig +short ec2-75-101-137-243.compute-1.amazonaws.com 10.254.171.132

Existing connections will fail and new connections to the external DNS name will automatically be opened on the new instance and

Using CNAME

It is not entirely intuitive to have your application use names like ec2-75-101-137-243.compute-1.amazonaws.com but you can make it clearer by creating a permanent entry in your DNS which points to that name with a CNAME alias. For example, using bind:

db.example.com. CNAME ec2-75-101-137-243.compute-1.amazonaws.com.

You can then use dbhost.example.com to refer to the server internally and still not have to update your DNS when you change instances.

Further Notes

Even though you are using an Elastic IP address, you don’t need (and often don’t want) to allow external users to be able to access your internal servers. For example, it is just asking for trouble to expose a MySQL server to the Internet. Keep the security groups tight so that the internal servers and services can only be accessed from your other EC2 instances.

Open TCP connections to the original server will not survive when the Elastic IP address is assigned to a new EC2 instance. Some applications and clients will automatically attempt to re-open a failed connection, getting through to the new server on the new internal IP address, but other applications may need to be kicked or signaled so they attempt a new connection to the server.

When using this approach, you need one Elastic IP address for each internal server which needs to be addressed. AWS accounts default to a limit of 5 Elastic IP addresses, but you can request an increased limit.

How do you solve the problem of connecting internal EC2 servers to each other?

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A year ago I started a project, as part of my work at Canonical QA team, that aimed to have a consistent way to add automated desktop tests to Ubuntu. That project was originally called Ubuntu Desktop Testing.

The project grew and as the GNOME testing community started to be interested in it, we created a mailing list and an IRC channel (#gnome-testing at irc.gnome.org) for the GNOME folks.

The problem about having two projects (one for Ubuntu and one for GNOME) is that it was very difficult to maintain both synchronized. Also, having the project named as another project (Ubuntu Desktop Testing, GNOME Desktop Testing…) confuses people, as they think that it is exclusive for Ubuntu and/or GNOME, which is not true (as soon as AT-SPI gets migrated to D-BUS KDE will also benefit from this effort, i.e.).

So, today, I am pleased to announce “Mago“, a desktop testing initiative that will replace the other two and that can be used to create desktop tests for any AT-SPI enabled linux desktop.

Mago is hosted in Launchpad at https://launchpad.net/mago and you can start adding test cases by just creating a branch of your own and propose merges as you go by.

The trunk branch is owned by a Launchpad team, mago-contributors, that it is a moderated team. Once you have contributed through merge proposals, you can apply to be part of the team and will be able to push to trunk and review some other members contributions. Join us!

Happy testing!
Ara.

P.S. For those interested, “mago” stands for “magician” in Spanish.

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I just upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.8. As a reader, you properly won’t even notice, but as a publisher it seems I will now have smoother access to themes and widgets. See this video for all the goodness.

The upgrade was more easy than ever. I just clicked twice in the web interface, and it was done.

How easy is that?!? Great work from Wordpress!

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It needs to be easier for community contributors to find out how they can help. We’ve had this discussion in Ubuntu before at past developer summits, and the ideas were generally things like “improve the participate link on the ubuntu.com front page.” Sorry, no one’s clicking that link anyway, and even if we did create an elaborate AI-powered survey system behind it we couldn’t possibly better than an actual human providing an encouraging suggestion about what’s really needed.

Human responses

Over the past few months, at least five separate people have reached out to me personally asking about specific ways they could help. I’m happy to answer, of course, but this tells me that it’s not at all obvious for them to figure out on their own. Likely, there’s five more who never emailed me since it was too much of a hassle to talk to an internet stranger, even a blogger who IMs more than a 13 year old girl.

What’s needed, then, is just a simple encouragement of human interaction. The open source community is a strange concept to newcomers, even the computer-savvy. You really can just dive right in and start offering help wherever you’re useful, and developers will just treat it like it’s the most natural thing. Maybe you’re from another project, or deploying the software in a business, or just bored around the house. There’s no such thing as an imposter in open source.

Many people who aren’t used to this kind of openness find it intimidating - there are too many people, so it’s not obvious who to go to for help getting started. We try to have mentoring programs and the like, but these are for people who want to be serious developers solving big problems. Small problems don’t need serious developers - they need a serious amount of small help.

Practical things for getting small help

At the Developer Summit, we discussed the idea of using more helpful bug tags to help contributors find where they can help. Our goal isn’t to sort half a million launchpad bugs into forty tiers of type, importance, and difficulty - our goal is to get them fixed.

So, here are the brand new bug tags, based on a simple discussion from the developer summit:

• needs-artwork - for bugs that need new art
• needs-sound - for bugs that need new sound
• needs-coding - for bugs that need actual code
• needs-design - for bugs that need UI design

Most bug trackers don’t really use tags like this because the system is obvious - if you’re looking at Wine’s bugzilla, then pretty much every bug in there really could be tagged “needs-coding-c”. Launchpad is different: we’ve got a whole mess of bugs, and half of them aren’t even in the code.

Now we’ve got a real answer to the question “I want to help, what can I do?” We just tag some bugs and say click the link: Launchpad will instantly tell them dozens of places where they’ll be useful. That’s important, as they’ll not only be able to help, but they’ll also see that they can fill a real need and feel good about themselves. Make contributing simple and rewarding, and users will do so eagerly.

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http://www.imdb.com/video/hulu/vi4271112985/

I almost died laughing at this (video is limited to the USA I believe, sorry) in the episode of The Simpsons called “Mypods and Broomsticks” the Groaning crew take the piss out of Jobs and his over priced, over hyped gear to hysterical limits.

I wouldn’t mind but this episode isn’t new, it was released last year (2008). I gotta keep up with the Simpsons more often.

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Mine is a little low considering when we signed up the ISP said “you’re looking at around 6.5Mbps”

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Besides the horrible mailing list interface and issue tracker I have a new reason to dislike Sourceforge. It accepts and OpenID login but then asks you to fill in a long form to associate that ID (from LP in my case) with a 'real account'. No thanks.

Too bad the other large scale hosting services which are much nicer are also at least partly proprietary (github, LP, Google Code).

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As ttx already announced, he is giving a session today, as part of our weekly Package Training Sessions, about packaging Java libraries. The session is today, June 11th @ 12:00 UTC.

If you’re interested in Java packaging and 12:00 UTC suits you fine, come and join us  at #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net. If 12:00 UTC is too early, too late or you just cannot make it, remember that the logs of this, and the rest of the packaging training sessions are stored at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Packaging/Training/Logs.

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So, I decided to take all of the Apport related TODO items the other day and I am almost complete with all of them. Today I ported apport-qt to apport-kde, which means went from PyQt4 to PyKDE4 loveliness. Spent some time testing it and working out the bugs and I think it is good thus far. I am sure we will have to do some tweaks to it, but it is a great start.

Another item on the TODO list was to convert the Help->Report Bug… menu item to utilize Apport to file bug reports to Launchpad instead of going straight to KDE Bugzilla. In the future I will probably look at having both implemented, but that will need to be discussed further, probably with the KDE and Kubuntu people, as well as Celeste on usability.

Next step, something about all of the apps and Apport, so I will probably start working on hooks for the apps so we can get some better reports. Like always, I will keep you tuned in. Time for bed, good night!

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As I write this, the Ubuntu archive mirrors on EC2 run by Canonical are currently unavailable in both the US and European regions. If you are running the Ubuntu images for EC2 published by Canonical, this prevents you from being able to “apt-get update” or “apt-get upgrade”.

The Canonical IS team is currently on the job investigating and correcting the issue, but if you need a quick fix in the mean time, you can run the following command on the instance to switch to a Canonical Ubuntu mirror outside of EC2 (standard EC2 network charges apply):

sudo perl -pi.orig -e 's/(us|eu)\.ec2\.archive\.ubuntu.com/$1.archive.ubuntu.com/' \ /etc/apt/sources.list

This command saves the original file as /etc/apt/sources.list.orig so you can move it back in place once the outage is over.

Alternatively, you could switch to the Ubuntu mirror in EC2 run by RightScale:

sudo perl -pi.orig -e 's/[.\w]+\.archive\.ubuntu.com/ec2-us-east-mirror.rightscale.com/' \ /etc/apt/sources.list

Note that RightScale does not mirror the source packages, so you might want to comment out the deb-src lines:

sudo perl -pi -e 's/^(deb-src)/#$1/' /etc/apt/sources.list

The Ubuntu images for EC2 that I publish on http://alestic.com use the RightScale Ubuntu mirrors by default and are not affected by the current outage.

UPDATE: The DNS names for the Canonical Ubuntu mirrors on EC2 have been temporarily switched to point to the Ubuntu mirrors outside of EC2. This is a great idea that gets things working again until the EC2 mirrors can be brought back up. If you really want to use mirrors inside EC2 for performance or (minor) cost considerations, you could still switch to the RightScale mirrors.

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Here’s a project that I’m sure will be popular. David Siegel has just blogged instructions on how to tag bugs “that will improve user experience if fixed, is small enough for users to become habituated to it, and is trivial to fix.”

You know, those tiny little nitpick bugs that drive you mad. One of my favorites is this one, which I’ve nominated to the list. David’s post shows you how to do it. Another great example is this bug, which has been driving me mad for a long time.

Now before you go into Launchpad and nominate all your pet bugs, remember that this is a nomination process for trivial fixes. So, for example, in my non-developer eyes my Nautilus bug seems simple. It might end up being complicated, so if your bug ends up not being a papercut (and more of a gaping chest wound) then don’t worry about it, we’re shooting for high-bang-for-the-buck and low-hanging-fruit. Not that non-papercut bugs aren’t important – this is an effort to fix little things, nip and tuck at the corners if you will. Have at it!

On a related note, you can now follow the Ubuntu Design Team on identi.ca – and while you’re at it, please take part in the Ubuntu Usability Study.

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In a recent post, I introduced the concept of a paper cut as “a bug that will improve user experience if fixed, is small enough for users to become habituated to it, and is trivial to fix.” Canonical’s nascent User Experience and Design team is determined to identify one hundred paper cuts to be fixed before Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” is released in October. We have dubbed this exciting endeavor “One Hundred Papercuts.” From the project page on Launchpad:

[One Hundred Paper Cuts is] a project led by Canonical’s Design and User Experience team to improve user experience in Ubuntu by identifying 100 small points of pain for users, or “paper cuts”, and healing them!

You can see the paper cuts we’ve found to get a better idea of what a paper cut is, or to start fixing one of them today. Here are some of my favorites so far:

Suggested output when printing a file to PDF is technical and generic “~/output.pdf” When you try to print using your PDF printer, the PDF created is named “output.pdf” by default and saved in your home folder. Even worse, sometimes it’s named “.ps” — good luck finding that file! Let’s give the file a sensible name and consider saving it to your desktop by default. Workspace switching via touchpad works badly Have you ever accidentally scrolled your mouse while your cursor was over your desktop, with desktop effects enabled? If not, make sure you’re sitting down when you try it. Let’s not make our beloved users nauseous. Width of notifications seem arbitrarily small notify-osd bubbles can display about three words before line wrapping occurs. Making these bubbles slightly wider will decrease strain on your eyes when reading them, and will allow you to read short messages more quickly. “Unmount” in volume right-click menu, is tech-speak and undiscoverable What’s the difference between “unmount” and “eject”? Why do I have to choose between them when all I want to do is get my CD out of the computer?

We need your help! Help find paper cuts on Launchpad by searching through existing bugs. If you find a bug that you believe to be a paper cut, here’s how you add it to the project. First, click the “Also affects project” link on the existing bug report:

Then add the project “hundredpapercuts” to the report:

You can report a new bug if your paper cut hasn’t already been reported, but please do your best to provide enough information for others to understand why the bug is a paper cut, what needs to be changed, and how it should be fixed.

If some small usability detail has been bothering you release after release, now is your chance to step up and get it the attention it deserves. If you’ve never contributed to Ubuntu, or even Free software, this is a great opportunity to get involved and make a big difference — take ownership of a paper cut by discovering and documenting a great solution, or roll up your sleeves, check out some code, and try to fix a paper cut on your own. If we can find and heal one hundred paper cuts, Ubuntu 9.10 will surely be the most usable release of Ubuntu yet. Let’s get to work!

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I recently got an email asking how does one set up an OSS group/tech meet up, I guess there are a few ways  to do it, but I’m go to go by what I did and my experience.

…After college I moved back to Athlone and since then a few of us “Techies” in the surrounding areas have been having (ir)regular meetings to just discuss anything and everything on various geek/tech related topics (along with having a few pints). We’re now looking at setting up something a little more formal or rather something more organised and publicised etc.

I’m pretty much just looking for any pointers you may have for starting and building up such a group and getting the word out and getting people interested. Initially we’d like to launch a website and maybe have a couple of events but seen as we’d be pretty small and have pretty much zero resources to begin with we’d probably be looking at arranging transportation for people to get to larger events in Dublin and other places.

Right, well firstly I got into OSS at college, I got ropped in as treasurer for our  computer society, and realised soon enough we had money to spend. So decided to get speaker in and down to us to give talks.  Face to face meetings and being able to ask a question to a person who is working on a project is very worthwhile.  You can maybe see a demo of what they are talking about, ask more questions or even get to try what people are working on.

You don’t need any resources to do any of the following, initially I’d say get a website up, and possibly use IRC depending on the people, you can create your own channel on freenode and invite people to it and get discussion going.  I also find getting colleges and staff at colleges involved really helpful, they’ll help with a venue, use a lecture room and get someone to give a talk or demo something they like to use or are working on.

So I would always say if and when possible have a face to face meet up, IRC, mailing list and forums are all great but you’ll get more outta the meet up. How best to organise the meet up is the next task.  If it’s just a regular want to catch up and find out the newest version of an OS to play with or what gadget is out now that everyone wants (Yes I want the N97).  We use a PotD - a Pint of the Day meet up on the 1st Thursday of the month, you can always find us in the Longstone pub from 7pm onwards.  It’s a given and we fire an email off letting folks know about it.  You can call impromptu ones, name a pub, pick a day and fire off a mail to folks saying you’ll be there and if folks want to turn up.

For more formal meet ups, some folks pick a venue where they can have presentations, so in these recession times, hotels may let you use a small room for free if you tell them you have 15 -20 people coming along and will happily go for  a few pints(during)  afterwards.  That way you can have people give talks on their projects and have a discussion group.

For getting the word out, I find mailing lists very useful, but that only works if people suscribe and you can miss stuff if you’ve a weekly or daily digest and don’t get around to it. Make use of social networks, Twitter, Identi.ca, Facebook and blogs, the latter mean you can get more feedback, and others can see who’s going so that can be sometimes an incentive to go to an event.

For larger events, if you can get in touch with people doing IT related podcasts, or get other people to blog about it, I tend to contact people I’ve been very lucky to make contact in the past with who write for national and local newspapers and IT sites so they have been very good and helped me publicise these events.

Also coming to events that are run locally and taking part is a great way to meet people, I’m running another Ossbarcamp in September so keep that in mind and see if your group wants to come along. Drop us a line to the Ubuntu-ie channel on freenode and come along to any of our events or take part in the discussions. Would be great to meet more people.

Anyways as I said, this is just what I’ve found has worked, there are many ways, and I’m sure others have some more ideas.

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Andrew recently blogged about some Ubuntu-related Ubiquity Scripts that he made. I personally find that Ubiquity gets in the way of my normal workflow. For the past year or so, I have been using special Firefox bookmarks to easily and quickly access various Ubuntu/Debian resources. Let me start with an example.

In many debian/changelog entries, people will use (LP: #123456) to close a bug on Launchpad. I created a bookmark that would allow me to type ‘lp 123456′ in my address bar, and be instantly taken to that bug on Launchpad. This is what the bookmark looks like:

Name: Launchpad Bug

Location: https://launchpad.net/bugs/%s

Keyword: lp

Did you notice the %s in the Location field? That will be replaced by any text after the keyword. So in the above example where I entered ‘lp 123456′, the %s would be replaced by 123456.

Here are some other special bookmarks that I have created; please note, I am only going to post the bookmark Name and Location fields. It should be pretty obvious what the bookmark does, but if you have any confusion, please ask in the comments.

—————————————————–

Name: apt-url

Location: apt:%s

—————————————————–

Name: Search packages.debian.org

Location: http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=%s

—————————————————–

Name: Launchpad Person/Team

Location: https://launchpad.net/~%s

—————————————————–

Name: Report a bug

Location: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/%s/+filebug

—————————————————–

Name: Source package in Ubuntu

Location: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/%s

—————————————————–

Name: Bugs with Tag in Ubuntu

Location: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?orderby=-datecreated&field.tag=%s

—————————————————–

Name: Debian Bug

Location: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=%s

—————————————————–

Name: Debian Package Tracking System

Location: http://packages.qa.debian.org/common/index.html?src=%s

—————————————————–

Name: Search packages.ubuntu.com

Location: http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=%s

—————————————————–

Name: Ubuntu Manpage Search

Location: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/cgi-bin/search.py?q=%s

—————————————————–

Name: REVU Package

Location: http://revu.ubuntuwire.com/p/%s

—————————————————–

I hope that you all enjoy these bookmarks.

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No, they are not producing married with children again, and again no, there isn’t that Christina Applegate is involved on weird scandal or something. Is just that i’ve the Kelly Bundy syndrome again. What’s that? Remember the chapter where Kelly went to a knowledge contest and Al teched her to be prepared for the contest? Remember what Bud told his father when he started to tech her? “Every time you teach her something she will forget something else”. Well, being bleeding edge with the technology working in free software that changes every single day and you need to learn new things again every day produces this kind of situation when your brain get’s overloaded with information and you start forgetting things, for example i’ve just been told that i ask the same single question to my boss every day, i just keep forgetting that i asked, is frustrating! Again i need to calm down, take a deep breath and rest, my workaholism is playing on me again (i posted about same issue in the past, in Spanish). I need to aviod this, at least this time has been 1 and a half year without it!

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Ciemon Dunville, Alan Pope, Tony Whitmore, Dave Walker and Producer Laura Cowen are unfathomably back again with a sun-kissed, cake-less, Alan-packed episode of the Ubuntu Podcast from the UK Local Community Support Team.

In this week’s show:-

• What we’ve been doing this week including getting a tan, fun with PPAs and less fun with broken ‘net connections
• We interview Alan Lord and Alan Bell from The Open Learning Centre and Naked Computers about Expos, their Libertus packaged solutions, MiserWare and their opinions on Mono in Ubuntu.
• The News
  • FSF are recruiting
  • Chromium is releasing
  • Google are licensing
  • Censornet are moving
  • Jolicloud are de-cloaking
  • Fedora are downsizing
  • Sussex University are surveying
• We announce some upcoming events:-
  • June 12th to the 14th - Owen Sound, Canada, Writing Open Source
  • June 13th - Nokia, Farnborough, UK, Surrey and Hampshire Linux User Groups are holding a joint meeting
  • June 13th - Clemson, South Carolina, South East Linux Fest
  • June 19th to 20th - Vanderbilt Hall, New York City, The first ever Open Video Conference will take place with speakers including DVD Jon and hackers from Firefox, VLC, Miro and more.
  • June 28th to July 4th - Conservatoire in Birmingham, UK, EuroPython 2009
  • July 4th - ULU, Malet Street, London, UK - UK Unix User Group Open Tech 2009
  • July 20th - Nottingham, UK, Open Source Schools Unconference
  • September 19th - All around the world, Software Freedom Day
  • October 24th - Newhampton arts centre, Wolverhampton, UK, LUGRadio Live 2009
• We announce the winner of episode five’s competition to win entrance and accomodation at this year’s EuroPython
• We set a new competition to win another Viglen MPC-L! Email competition@ubuntu-uk.org with your answer before Sunday 21st June 2009
• We delve into the Ubuntu Ecosphere
  • Scott James-Remnant posts about a 10s boot time target
  • LiVES 0.9.9.9.9.9.9.9.9 is released
  • Ubuntu Community Council meeting including discussion of the Ubuntu One product name
  • Adblock Plus suggests a fairer way to unblock ads
  • Breathe icon theme released
  • Okular respecting the DRM flag a bug?
  • Ubuntu Server training too expensive?
• And finally we cover your emails, tweets and dents since our last show

Comments and suggestions are welcomed to: podcast@ubuntu-uk.org
Up to 30 seconds of voicemail can be left at +44 (0) 845 508 1986
Follow our twitter feed http://twitter.com/uupc
Follow us on Identi.ca http://identi.ca/uupc
Find our Facebook Fan Page
Discuss this episode in the Forums

Ciemon Dunville, Alan Pope, Tony Whitmore, Dave Walker and Producer Laura Cowen are unfathomably back again with a sun-kissed, cake-less, Alan-packed episode of the Ubuntu Podcast from the UK Local Community Support Team. In this week's show:- What we've been doing this week including getting a tan, fun with PPAs and less fun with broken 'net connections We interview Alan Lord and Alan Bell from The Open Learning Centre and Naked Computers about Expos, their Libertus packaged solutions, MiserWare and their opinions on Mono in Ubuntu. The News FSF are recruiting Chromium is releasing Google are licensing Censornet are moving Jolicloud are de-cloaking Fedora are downsizing Sussex University are surveying We announce some upcoming events:- June 12th to the 14th - Owen Sound, Canada, Writing Open Source June 13th - Nokia, Farnborough, UK, Surrey and Hampshire Linux User Groups are holding a joint meeting June 13th - Clemson, South Carolina, South East Linux Fest June 19th to 20th - Vanderbilt Hall, New York City, The first ever Open Video Conference will take place with speakers including DVD Jon and hackers from Firefox, VLC, Miro and more. June 28th to July 4th - Conservatoire in Birmingham, UK, EuroPython 2009 July 4th - ULU, Malet Street, London, UK - UK Unix User Group Open Tech 2009 July 20th - Nottingham, UK, Open Source Schools Unconference September 19th - All around the world, Software Freedom Day October 24th - Newhampton arts centre, Wolverhampton, UK, LUGRadio Live 2009 We announce the winner of episode five's competition to win entrance and accomodation at this year's EuroPython We set a new competition to win another Viglen MPC-L! Email competition@ubuntu-uk.org with your answer before Sunday 21st June 2009 We delve into the Ubuntu Ecosphere Scott James-Remnant posts about a 10s boot time target LiVES 0.9.9.9.9.9.9.9.9 is released Ubuntu Community Council meeting including discussion of the Ubuntu One product name Adblock Plus suggests a fairer way to unblock ads Breathe icon theme released Okular respecting the DRM flag a bug? Ubuntu Server training too expensive? And finally we cover your emails, tweets and dents since our last show Comments and suggestions are welcomed to: podcast@ubuntu-uk.org Up to 30 seconds of voicemail can be left at +44 (0) 845 508 1986 Follow our twitter feed http://twitter.com/uupc Follow us on Identi.ca http://identi.ca/uupc Find our Facebook Fan Page Discuss this episode in the Forums

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Ciemon Dunville, Alan Pope, Tony Whitmore, Dave Walker and Producer Laura Cowen are unfathomably back again with a sun-kissed, cake-less, Alan-packed episode of the Ubuntu Podcast from the UK Local Community Support Team.

In this week’s show:-

• What we’ve been doing this week including getting a tan, fun with PPAs and less fun with broken ‘net connections
• We interview Alan Lord and Alan Bell from The Open Learning Centre and Naked Computers about Expos, their Libertus packaged solutions, MiserWare and their opinions on Mono in Ubuntu.
• The News
  • FSF are recruiting
  • Chromium is releasing
  • Google are licensing
  • Censornet are moving
  • Jolicloud are de-cloaking
  • Fedora are downsizing
  • Sussex University are surveying
• We announce some upcoming events:-
  • June 12th to the 14th - Owen Sound, Canada, Writing Open Source
  • June 13th - Nokia, Farnborough, UK, Surrey and Hampshire Linux User Groups are holding a joint meeting
  • June 13th - Clemson, South Carolina, South East Linux Fest
  • June 19th to 20th - Vanderbilt Hall, New York City, The first ever Open Video Conference will take place with speakers including DVD Jon and hackers from Firefox, VLC, Miro and more.
  • June 28th to July 4th - Conservatoire in Birmingham, UK, EuroPython 2009
  • July 4th - ULU, Malet Street, London, UK - UK Unix User Group Open Tech 2009
  • July 20th - Nottingham, UK, Open Source Schools Unconference
  • September 19th - All around the world, Software Freedom Day
  • October 24th - Newhampton arts centre, Wolverhampton, UK, LUGRadio Live 2009
• We announce the winner of episode five’s competition to win entrance and accomodation at this year’s EuroPython
• We set a new competition to win another Viglen MPC-L! Email competition@ubuntu-uk.org with your answer before Sunday 21st June 2009
• We delve into the Ubuntu Ecosphere
  • Scott James-Remnant posts about a 10s boot time target
  • LiVES 0.9.9.9.9.9.9.9.9 is released
  • Ubuntu Community Council meeting including discussion of the Ubuntu One product name
  • Adblock Plus suggests a fairer way to unblock ads
  • Breathe icon theme released
  • Okular respecting the DRM flag a bug?
  • Ubuntu Server training too expensive?
• And finally we cover your emails, tweets and dents since our last show

Comments and suggestions are welcomed to: podcast@ubuntu-uk.org
Up to 30 seconds of voicemail can be left at +44 (0) 845 508 1986
Follow our twitter feed http://twitter.com/uupc
Follow us on Identi.ca http://identi.ca/uupc
Find our Facebook Fan Page
Discuss this episode in the Forums

Ciemon Dunville, Alan Pope, Tony Whitmore, Dave Walker and Producer Laura Cowen are unfathomably back again with a sun-kissed, cake-less, Alan-packed episode of the Ubuntu Podcast from the UK Local Community Support Team. In this week's show:- What we've been doing this week including getting a tan, fun with PPAs and less fun with broken 'net connections We interview Alan Lord and Alan Bell from The Open Learning Centre and Naked Computers about Expos, their Libertus packaged solutions, MiserWare and their opinions on Mono in Ubuntu. The News FSF are recruiting Chromium is releasing Google are licensing Censornet are moving Jolicloud are de-cloaking Fedora are downsizing Sussex University are surveying We announce some upcoming events:- June 12th to the 14th - Owen Sound, Canada, Writing Open Source June 13th - Nokia, Farnborough, UK, Surrey and Hampshire Linux User Groups are holding a joint meeting June 13th - Clemson, South Carolina, South East Linux Fest June 19th to 20th - Vanderbilt Hall, New York City, The first ever Open Video Conference will take place with speakers including DVD Jon and hackers from Firefox, VLC, Miro and more. June 28th to July 4th - Conservatoire in Birmingham, UK, EuroPython 2009 July 4th - ULU, Malet Street, London, UK - UK Unix User Group Open Tech 2009 July 20th - Nottingham, UK, Open Source Schools Unconference September 19th - All around the world, Software Freedom Day October 24th - Newhampton arts centre, Wolverhampton, UK, LUGRadio Live 2009 We announce the winner of episode five's competition to win entrance and accomodation at this year's EuroPython We set a new competition to win another Viglen MPC-L! Email competition@ubuntu-uk.org with your answer before Sunday 21st June 2009 We delve into the Ubuntu Ecosphere Scott James-Remnant posts about a 10s boot time target LiVES 0.9.9.9.9.9.9.9.9 is released Ubuntu Community Council meeting including discussion of the Ubuntu One product name Adblock Plus suggests a fairer way to unblock ads Breathe icon theme released Okular respecting the DRM flag a bug? Ubuntu Server training too expensive? And finally we cover your emails, tweets and dents since our last show Comments and suggestions are welcomed to: podcast@ubuntu-uk.org Up to 30 seconds of voicemail can be left at +44 (0) 845 508 1986 Follow our twitter feed http://twitter.com/uupc Follow us on Identi.ca http://identi.ca/uupc Find our Facebook Fan Page Discuss this episode in the Forums

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Awhile back I hacked up a few Ubuntu releated scripts for Ubiquity. No, not the Ubuntu installer. The Firefox add-on.  Now that I have one of these fancy blog thing-a-majigs, I figured I’d share them with all of you. Hopefully some one else will find them useful.

To make a long story short, Ubiquity is GNOME-Do for your browser.

I’ve got a number of simple scripts that you can use with it to do Ubuntu related tasks in Firefox:

• AptURL – Install a package using AptURL. If you’re reading a post about a package, just highlight the package name and call Ubiquity. No need to open a terminal or package manager. Usage: apturl [package]
• Debian Package Search – One of the sites I end up using the most in my MOTU work is http://packages.debian.org/ This brings it just a keystroke away. Usage: debian-packages [package]
• Launchpad Ubuntu Package Search – You guessed it. Search Ubuntu packages on LP. Usage: lp-packages [package]
• Launchpad Team and People Search – What do you think it does? Usage: lp-team-and-people [team or person]
• Launchpad Ubuntu Bug Search – Simular to the two above…  lp-ubuntu-bug [bug # or description]
• Ubuntu Man Page Search – Read the man page! Usage: ubuntu-man [package]
• Ubuntu Package database searcher- This one searches packages.ubuntu.com It was written by David Futcher (bobbo), and it was what inspired me to make all the others. Usage: ubuntu-packages [package]
• Report Ubuntu Bug – Report a bug in a Ubuntu package on Launchpad. (Although, chances are you should really be using Apport.) Usage: ubuntu-report-bug [package]

You can grab them with:

bzr branch lp:~andrewsomething/+junk/ubiquity-commands

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Recently there have been a few discussions about licensing with Creative Commons and even some conflicts with None Commercial clauses in some existing materials and art works.

The main problem with NC is that it can be quite the pain in the arse to manage. imagine if you have a wikipedia source licensed under CC-BY-SA and then a source licensed same +NC, now you’ll have to get one of them re-licensed in order to merge the work and create effective derivatives.

Speaking of derivatives, imagine if some group of people creates an effective derivative of your work and your company now wants to use it for some reason. Now you have to do something to re-license it and if you used SA then those external people can’t really re-license it without NC anyway.

So, I was thinking about this recently, one of the ideas I had was a time limited NC term. We know why NC is placed on works, to protect the commercial interests of the work so creators can hope to make some money back from it. Well if we had works licensed as CC-BY-NC5-SA (NC applies for 5 years after initial publication). Although I suspect the legal wrangling with derivatives would be interesting.

Either we can protect the work for commercial use for a set period of time, or we can wait for the work to fall into the Public Domain in 150 years. I’d rather see works fall into the normal FOSS license (CC-BY-SA) sooner rather than in hundreds of years.

Thoughts?

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