Club Linux Coffs Harbour

Launchpad code hosting will be offline Friday between 8.00 and 9.30 UTC for unexpected hardware maintenance. This means you won’t be able to browse, push to, pull from or otherwise access code hosted on Launchpad.

Going offline: 8.00 UTC 3rd September 2010

Expected back: 9.30 UTC 3rd September 2010

[Discuss Code Hosting Maintenance Friday, September 3, 2010 on the Forums]

Originally posted here by Gary Poster on September 2nd, 2010.

Well it seems that my insanity knows no bounds. During the LCA2011 call for papers I had an idea for a mini conf based on the ever growing arena of FOSS based mobile systems.

It turns out that I'm not the only one interested in this :)

I got the okay a couple of days ago and today I was told that I could start talking about it. So the next step is going to be setting up the site for the miniconf and working out Call for Papers and so on.

W00t.

Copyright Harms Australia Again

Amazon (AUD) Booktopia Australians Ripped off by The Wealth of Networks: Ho... $15.63 $27.80 78% Ajax: The Definitive Guide $36.19 $66.75 84% Star Wars Clone Wars Chara... $13.27 $23.40 76% Heads $14.06 $19.95 42%

So, for example, the US price of the Wealth of Networks book when expressed in AUD is 1.78 times the best price from Booktopia in Australia, or Australians pay 78% more for the book.

Prices exclusive of delivery.  Delivery is calculated differently, but price is roughly equivalent, with longer nominal delivery time for Amazon (weeks vs days).

I also looked up the first two in the Nile and emporium books but the prices were slightly more expensive.

Today I installed iTunes 10. Apple has stopped requiring you to reboot your computer the moment you get an iTunes upgrade – I consider this a plus point. Its now sporting a new logo, and things look a little more polished in the application.

Noticing no Ping, which seemed to be all the rage in the morning, I wondered what the cause might be. Quite clearly, you don’t get in on Ping, Apple’s new social network, if they don’t run an iTunes Music Store in your country! The moment I made the change to my US-based iTunes account, all seemed to be OK, and I could start playing around with Ping.

Then it became clearer why they didn’t want me to use Ping. “Each time you purchase, review, rate or like music on the iTunes Store, it will appear here” (so it said on my profile). At the moment, Ping does not fit my use case – I rip audio CDs that I purchase, and they have information within iTunes thanks to the CDDB database it syncs with. I have never purchased music from the iTunes Music Store, because I cannot be bothered with using a foreign credit card or looking for iTunes gift certificates.

Does this in any way hamper last.fm/AudioScrobbler? Probably a little, considering Ping is built-into iTunes. Plus you can follow your favourite artistes ;-) Does this mean people will quit last.fm for Ping? I find it highly unlikely. But last.fm is probably on their toes now, since there’s some overlap – concert recommendations, etc. Ping also is run within iTunes, you can’t use a web browser. There does not seem to be any API either.

Then, people got excited with Apple’s new Apple TV. I didn’t. Its not international. OK, not international enough. I can still buy the old Apple TV from the Malaysian or Singaporean Apple Store. The new ones seem to be available for sale in Australia, UK, the US, and probably a few other countries where you can rent/buy movies from the store.

The iPod Touch? Some good changes, but the camera isn’t all that hip. Good enough for FaceTime. Speaking of FaceTime, it is apparently based on open standards. Steve Jobs said something like it will be open. When will Apple release some information about how others can independently implement FaceTime? Or inter-operate with FaceTime?

Game Center looks interesting. Social gaming is going to be big (also, big in iOS4.1). The new iPhone 4’s don’t have iOS4.1 yet, but when the update comes (next week?), you will get Game Center too. And the iPod touch should be fast – sporting an A4 chip. Apple has successfully made devices do multiple things (iPod touch: music player, game machine, video conferencing tool, etc.). Would I buy one? I’m still too smitten with my iPad, so much so I haven’t used my 1st generation iPod Touch since April 2010!

The new iPod Nano looks cool. Its a pity they’ve removed the camera. And the shuffle, well, its a shuffle – I’ve never owned one.

So the Apple Music event turned out to mostly be a bummer, unless you live in a country where the iTunes Music Store is available.

Related posts:

1. Apple launches the Malaysian Online Store
2. Apple opens up Podcasts, iTunes U in Malaysia
3. A plea to Apple

Jon Sackett joined the Launchpad Registry team a couple of weeks ago. Here’s a quick run-down of who he is.

Matthew: What do you do on the Launchpad team?

Jon: I’m part of the Registry team; we maintain the people, teams and projects bits and pieces used by all the other parts of Launchpad.

Right now I’m mostly helping pay down technical debt, but I’m also helping with features that help those core objects be smarter about the way they use other applications.

Matthew: Can we see something that you’ve worked on?

Jon: Almost everything I’ve done has been internal without a real UI component.

Matthew: Where do you work?

Jon: I work in my home office in an apartment in downtown Durham, NC. Sometimes I change it up and work from my porch.

Matthew: What can you see from your office window?

Jon: The old brickface and industrial windows across the road. On days where I’m working from my porch I get a better view of the downtown

Matthew: What did you do before working at Canonical?

Jon: I worked as a Python/Django developer at a company called MetaMetrics, that does some really neat things in education with natural language processing.

Matthew: How did you get into free software?

Jon: I was introduced to Linux in college as a better environment for coding in my CS classes. Since moving into web programming and Python, I think almost every tool I use has come from free software.

Matthew: What’s more important? Principle or pragmatism?

Jon: In concrete matters (like code), pragmatism. It’s no use to anyone if your principles only prevent you from doing things.
That said, principles are still important; when you opt for the pragmatic approach, your principles can still influence how that plays out.

Matthew: Do you/have you contribute(d) to any free software projects?

Jon: Sadly, precious little. I have a patch in the Django project, and a couple of my own projects are available under a BSD license. One of the reasons I wanted to work on Launchpad was to do more with and for free software.

Matthew: Tell us something really cool about Launchpad that not enough people know about.

Jon: How completely well it supports the whole development lifecycle — I think a lot of people consider Launchpad just another code hosting service, and it’s so much more than that.

Matthew: Thanks Jon!

[Discuss Meet Jon Sackett on the Forums]

Originally posted here by Matthew Revell on August 24th, 2010 .

Sarcasm and satire usually don’t work on the Internet. One cause of this is the lack of out of band signalling via facial expression or tone of voice. Another issue is the fact that in real life people usually know something about the person who they listen to while on the Internet it’s most common to read articles without knowing much about the author. So the reader can’t use “I know that the author isn’t an asshole” as a starting point to determine whether a message should be interpreted literally.

This is really nothing new. The standard in printed communication for a long time has been to use Emoticons (Wikipedia) to indicate emotion and other interpretation that might not be deduced from a direct reading of the text. The Wikipedia page cites examples of emoticon use dating back to 1857 – although the combinations of characters used for different emotions has changed significantly many times. The common uses that we now know on the Internet date back to 1982.

In my experience the symbol :-# is commonly used to note sarcasm or satire. Unfortunately it seems that none of the Internet search engines allow searching for such strings so I couldn’t find an early example of this being used. While I haven’t found a reference describing this practice, I regularly receive messages annotated with it and find that people generally understand what I mean when I use it in my own email. But that is usually applied to a sentence or two.

For a larger section of text a pseudo-HTML tag such as </satire> can be used to signal the end of satire. It seems that a matching start tag is optional as recognising the start of satire is a lot easier once the reader knows that some of the content is satirical. In spoken English a phrase such as “but seriously” may be used for the same purpose, but such a subtle signal may be missed on the Internet – particularly by readers who don’t use English as their first language.

Another way of signaling a non-literal interpretation is by using Scare Quotes – the deliberate usage of quotation symbols to indicate that the writer disagrees with the content that is written. That is common for the case of referencing a phrase or sentence that you disagree with, but doesn’t work for a larger section of text.

A final option is to make the satire or sarcasm so extreme that no-one can possibly mistake it for being literal. This is not always possible, Poe’s Law holds that “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing” [1]. I think that Poe was understating the case, it is impossible to create a parody of religion that most people won’t mistake for the real thing without signals or context. For an example read LandOverBaptist.org and Chick.com, of course if you know those sites then you will know whether they are satirical or serious – but I expect that most readers of my blog won’t invest enough effort into either of those religious sites to determine whether they are serious or satire.

But satire and sarcasm without signals or a reputation usually fails. One example of success is The Onion which is a long running and well known satirical news site [2]. But even The Onion it is regularly mistaken for being serious – the number of occasions when people forward me Onion articles for amusement are vastly outnumbered by the number of occasions when I see people taking it seriously.

Even when material is known to be satirical it can still fail grossly. An example is the Chaser’s satire of the Make A Wish Foundation [3]. Even material that is well known to be satirical seems to fail when it attacks bad targets or attacks in a bad way. One difficulty is in satirising bigoted people, to effectively satirise them without attacking the minority groups that they dislike can be a difficult challenge.

Finally, when you write some satire and members of your audience don’t recognise it you should consider the possibility that you failed to do it properly. If you can’t get a hit rate close to 100% for people with the same background as you then it’s probably a serious failure.

• [1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poe's_Law
• [2] http://www.theonion.com/
• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_chaser

Waseem Daher of Ksplice posted some interesting SSH trick on his blog recently. Most of them are old-hat, but one in particular was interesting to me – SSH’s escape key (tilde). This lets you send commands to the SSH session itself, like backgrounding the session.

chris@localhost ~ $

chris@localhost ~ $ ~?

Supported escape sequences:

~. - terminate connection (and any multiplexed sessions)

~B - send a BREAK to the remote system

~C - open a command line

~R - Request rekey (SSH protocol 2 only)

~^Z - suspend ssh

~# - list forwarded connections

~& - background ssh (when waiting for connections to terminate)

~? - this message

~~ - send the escape character by typing it twice

(Note that escapes are only recognized immediately after newline.)

Neat.

The Ubuntu kernel team has prepared a new proposed kernel for Lucid (2.6.32-25.43), containing a large number of fixes. This is a larger number of updates than we would usually push at one time, but processing of the upstream stable updates was delayed by a couple of security updates.

This kernel should fix a lot of issues, including this one that people have been asking about a lot.

You will get this automatically if you have updates from lucid-proposed enabled. Note that if it breaks you get to keep all the pieces, so don’t try this on production machines.

Please test against your favorite bugs in the changelog and provide feedback.

[Discuss New Ubuntu Lucid Proposed Kernel on the Forums]

Originally posted here by Steven Conklin, Ubuntu Kernel Engineer on 1 September 2010.

13:07: Mikal shared: Penn and Teller take on vaccines | Bad Astronomy

Nice video about the dangers of vaccination.

Tags for this post: blather Comment RSS with no blather

This week’s Bug Day target is *drum roll please* Empathy!

The task is to assign to the right package and triage those as well:

• 44 New bugs need a hug
• 109 Incompletes bugs need a status check
• 23 Confirmed bugs need a review

Bookmark it, add it to your calendars, turn over those egg-timers!

• Thursday, 2 September 2010
• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay/20100902

Are you looking for a way to start giving some love back to your adorable Ubuntu Project?

Did you ever wonder what Triage is? Want to learn about that?

This is a perfect time!, Everybody can help in a Bug Day! Open your IRC Client and go to #ubuntu-bugs (freenode) the BugSquad will be happy to help you to start contributing!

Wanna be famous? Is easy! remember to use 5-A-day so if you do a good work your name could be listed at the top 5-A-Day Contributors in the Ubuntu Hall of Fame page!

We are always looking for new tasks or ideas for the Bug Days, if you have one add it to the Planning page https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay/Planning

If you’re new to all this, head to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs

[Discuss Announcing this week’s Bug Day target - Empathy! - Thursday, 2 September 2010! on the Forums]

Originally sent to the Ubuntu Devel Announce Mailing List by Kamus on Tue Aug 31 21:25:39 BST 2010

I previously wrote about my experience handing out How To Vote (HTV) cards at the federal election a couple of weeks ago [1].

One comment noted that at one polling place “all the volunteers for different candidates had combined into a single team, handing out all the cards together“, which makes sense. There is some advantage in forcing cards on people, some people decide who to vote for once they are inside the polling booth based on information on the HTV cards (a couple of voters stated an intention to do so which disappointed the politically aware people who hand out the HTV cards). But for most voters there is no benefit in competing to hand them a HTV card.

Some of the comments expressed a dislike of being subjected to people handing out HTV cards. As a voter I don’t particularly like having a group of conflicting people wanting to hand me a HTV card either. Also it is obviously a waste of resources to hand out so much cardboard that goes to waste (particularly the Liberal and Labor parties that use glossy non-recycled paper).

I think that the ideal solution would be to have the officials at the polling booths hand out HTV cards on request. A voter would have to specifically request the card from a party and the poll officials would not be able to offer them a selection, “sorry I can’t tell you who is running for election, but if you express a desire to vote for a particular party I can give you a card instructing you how to do so“. The parties would be responsible for providing the HTV cards (according to strict specifications regarding the acceptable sizes), and if the supply runs out then the officials would decline requests.

This could even be made self-financing by making the parties who want their cards distributed pay for a fraction of the wages of the people who hand out the cards, if each polling place had one person handing out the HTV cards at a salary of $500 for the day and there were 5 parties cards to hand out then each party would have to pay $100. The reduced print runs for HTV cards would probably save each party more than $100.

Something like this should satisfy the real need of voters who want advice on how to support their preferred party while not annoying the voters who know how to vote without any assistance. I expect that most members of the parties would be in favor of this idea. The only reason we go to the significant amount of effort and expense to hand out the HTV cards is because everyone else is doing so.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/08/22/telling-people-how-to-vote/

This Month we have profiled a member of the Canonical family, who has been with us almost from the start

*Henrik Omma*

Read on to see his recollection of what Canonical was like in the early days and why he enjoys working here.

*Take 60 seconds with Henrik Omma*

Henrik works as the Enterprise Applications Team Manager and has been with Canonical for 6 years.

*In layman’s terms what do you do?*

I manage a small team that develops & maintains in-house systems used for sales, finance and HR.

*What did you do before joining Canonical?*

I was doing a Doctorate in Astrophysics at Oxford. I actually started with Canonical part-time while I was still writing up my thesis. It was good to balance the two activities because thesis writing can be a long and monotonous process. I moved to full time in May 2005, after completing the thesis.

I had been using Linux for fluid dynamics simulations on super computers for my thesis research, which then introduced me to the world of Open Source. I became interested in the philosophy and the world changing potential of Open Source and started my own project called the OpenCD. Later I also co-founded ‘Software Freedom Day’. Both these projects were about spreading the message of Open Source and increasing adoption.

I meet Steve Alexander at a conference who in turn introduced me to the Shuttleworth Foundation and the ‘Go-Open’ project, which was also about spreading Open Source, specifically in South Africa. They decided to distribute the OpenCD to about 300,000 people there, which was of course our biggest distribution to date.

This was happening in Spring/Summer 2004, when Ubuntu was still a secret project operating as no-name-yet.com :)

I was then invited to attend one of the first sprints (which later evolved into UDS) in Oxford where they were putting together the first Ubuntu release. I meet Jane (Silber, CEO) and Mark (Shuttleworth, Founder). They had decided they wanted to add some Open Source applications for Windows to the Live CD to help ease the transition for new users and that the OpenCD project might be a good base for that. In later releases that function has been replaced by Wubi which actually lets you start Ubuntu from a Windows system.

*How has Canonical evolved since the early days?*

Now there is more structure, back then we would all pitch in a do a bit of everything. I have filled quite a few roles myself; I was running the Open CD project within Canonical for a while, then I became the Web Master. I have also guided various community teams like the Art & Accessibility teams and acting as forum liaison. I also built up the Ubuntu QA team before taking my current role.

The original core of the company was made up of a group of open source hackers, largely from Debian. So we’ve taken much of our culture, ideals and technologies from there. That’s for example why we use wikis, IRC and mailing lists while other companies this size might use a proprietary intranet system.

*So what kind of person do you need to be to survive here?*

You need to be able to work independently, structure and motivate your own work. I am speaking as some one who works from home, and structures my own hours. You also need to keep informed about what going on around you and not just wait for someone to tell you what to do.

*So what excites you about being here?*

The top thing is working with lots of great people and the projects that we are involved in, trying the change the way software evolves in the world. I remember when I attended the first sprint in August 2004 that I was struck by what an amazing group of people were gathered there — that this group would do something amazing and that I wanted to be a part of it! It’s great to actually see that potential playing out now.

Over these 6 years I have had the opportunity to change my role within Canonical several times as the company has grown. Personally that has been a good thing, as I am able to do something different day to day while still being part of that bigger picture and ideal of increasing Ubuntu’s accessibility to the world.

At Canonical many of us work from home, which I find very convenient and it also means that you can choose where you want to live while staying in the same job. I moved to Norway shortly after my thesis was complete (having started at Canonical), which is where I am originally from. But after two years I opted to move back to the UK and Oxford, where I had really enjoyed living as a student.

*What you you say to anyone thinking of joining Canonical?*

Depends on what sort of role they are looking for, but I can speak mostly on engineering roles. It can be an exciting place to work but you need make sure you connect in with the pulse of the company and work out how you can make contributions. We welcome initiative and encourage people to suggest and start projects, but you need to understand how things fit together to see the right opportunities and then know who to work with to implement your ideas. So you should spend a some time at the beginning to ensure you’re connecting to the information streams within the company. The mentoring scheme is very useful and newcomers should take full advantage of that.

*What is your next career goal within Canonical?*

After being in various roles I find I really enjoy managing a team of engineers, as I did on QA and now in CDO (Core Development and Operations). So for the moment I just want to grow to do that better. I know on thing though: it all starts with hiring top rate engineers onto the team.

[Discuss Henrik Omma on the Forum]

Originally sent to the ubuntu-jobs mailing list by Lynda Phillips on Wed Sep 1 10:55:28 BST 2010

 Sigh, so close and yet so far.

This morning a message hit the Android Australia mailing list claiming that Australia had been added to the small list of countries that  were allowed to sell Apps in the Android market.

Alas, it wasn't so. Instead it appears that Australias addition to the list was in error and we are still part of the great unwashed who are unable to take advantage of googles sales infrastructure.

Come on guys and gals at Google! You have an excellent product and people want to be able to take advantage of it, people are begging to be able to give you money via whatever cut you take via the marketplace, why are we being locked out? Why are you ensuring that those of us outside of the US/UK have to turn to iphone development to make our mark in the mobile world?

Sigh.

 Just a quick update on the iphone version of the openaustralia search app:

House of Reps Search:

Currently hardcoded to search by postcode. Need to include a Picker so that people can choose how they search for their members, however, the Picker widget on the iPhone is hucking fuge! Seriously, the thing looks like something out your local hotels Pokie room.

Senate Search:

Nothing done here yet

Hansard Search:

While the general search functionality hasn't been touched yet, I've started working on the  Rep related Hansard search, tends to crash right now, but still going :)

My Rep:

Nothing done as yet.

If you want to have a look at the horror that is my objective c then have a gander over here

Here’s what I’m saying: I’m a woman, I’m in my late thirties, I can’t handle first-person shooters, I’m afraid of Comic-Con, and I really, really liked Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

I hope I’m not, you know, blowing your mind.

– Linda Holmes in her incredibly cool meta-film-review, ‘Scott Pilgrim’ Versus The Unfortunate Tendency To Review The Audience

After wrestling with various Gmail extensions with similar aims, I was pleased to hear about the new Gmail Priority Inbox which I have now turned on for my Gmail. I don't think they have it quite right yet, but I expect it will evolve over the next few months and that it might just become so useful that I end up feeling that I did the right thing moving all my email to Gmail.



I’d be interested to see what other people think about this feature as they try it out.

Today is the day affectionately known as “Twitter’s OAuthpocalypse”. Twitter is shutting down basic auth completely, which Gwibber has relied on. So after today Twitter will cease to work for anyone that hasn’t updated to the OAuth enabled version of Gwibber. I have uploaded packages for both Maverick and Lucid to the ~ubuntu-desktop PPA for testing. We need to get an SRU out pretty quickly for Lucid.

Any testing would be greatly appreciated, please provide feedback on this list.

https://edge.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-desktop/+archive/ppa

Make sure you restart gwibber-service, you should be prompted to authorize Twitter.

[Discuss Call for testing, Gwibber (Lucid and Maverick) on the Forums]

Originally sent to the ubuntu-desktop mailing list on Tue Aug 31 2010

10:40: Mikal shared: chumby hacker boards (now available in beta)

Very very tempting. It is a bit of a shame that ethernet isn't built in though.

12:09: Mikal shared: Lloyd's of London - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lloyd's has an interesting history. I like the coffee shop beginnings.

14:02: Mikal shared: FDA Finally Inspects Tainted Egg Farms, Discovers They're Unsanitary

Why isn't the FDA inspecting places like this? That seems like a pretty fundamental requirement to me.

Tags for this post: blather Comment RSS with no blather

Announcing Ubuntu App Developer Week!

It’s that time again! Ubuntu App Developer Week (Formally Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week), is happening online between September 27th through October 1st, 2010.

“What is Ubuntu App Developer Week?”

Ubuntu App Developer Week is a week of sessions aimed at enabling and inspiring developers to write applications that scratch their itches. Our goal is to give all attendees a taste of the wide variety of tools on the Ubuntu platform that can be used to create awesome applications, and to showcase some applications that have been created and explain how they were put together.

“When is Ubuntu App Developer Week?”

Ubuntu App Developer Week is scheduled for Monday, September 27th through Friday, October 1st, 2010.

“Where will Ubuntu App Developer Week take place?”

Ubuntu App Developer Week will take place in #ubuntu-classroom and #ubuntu-classroom-chat on freenode.net.

Still undecided? Here is how Jono Bacon, Ubuntu Community Manager described this event last cycle:

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

Like the other weeks this cycle, Lernid is being used and all session leaders are being encouraged to create slides for their sessions . As each session is confirmed it will appear in Lernid and on the wiki page.

Just like the other Ubuntu Weeks we are looking for volunteers! So what are you waiting for? If you feel you could give a tutorial about a given Python module or associated technology (e.g. Glade, Launchpad, Bazaar etc), please drop Jono or myself an email at jono AT ubuntu DOT com or akgraner AT ubuntu DOT com and we will work with you to get everything scheduled.

Thanks in advance to all you session leaders that I know are waiting to volunteer. We’re looking forward to another awesome Ubuntu Week and seeing what itches get scratched during this Ubuntu App Developer Week!

[Discuss Announcing Ubuntu App Developer Week! on the Forums]

ISBN: 0441013430

LibraryThing

This is actually a relatively simple story, but padded out with a series of historical interludes. These are presented as when the main character is exploring a VR world, but most of them don't directly further the plot. However, they also don't make the story drag along, and are some of the most entertaining parts of the story. Relatively light reading, like The Coming and Marsbound. I enjoyed it.



Tags for this post: book joe_haldeman combat colonization vr nanotech disease

Related posts: Body Armor: 2000; Bill the Galactic Hero Series; First Family; Marsbound; On Basilisk Station; Death Bringer; Cyteen: The Vindication; The Complete Hammer's Slammers Volume 1; Space Soldiers; Cryptonomicon; There Is No Darkness; Without Warning; The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress; Bolo Strike; A Separate War & Other Stories; Blood River; Bolos 4: Last Stand; The Complete Hammer's Slammers Volume 2; Dragonsdawn; Cyteen: The Rebirth; Colony



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