Fedora People

A bit of visibility

2008-11-22T00:48:13+00:00

fprintd (the D-Bus libfprint front-end with PolicyKit goodness) now has something visible for people to see: Documentation!

Still a bunch more TODOs on the list, but work on the front-end for enrollment should start soon.

This Is Your Brain On Friday

2008-11-21T22:19:59+00:00

I just found myself writing the following comment in a loop as I was trying to stop it early for debugging purposes:

lists.sort().each { |list| with_each_list(list,f,months) break # for squirrels }

I am officially cut off.

Hacking up my Canon Powershot A620

2008-11-21T21:48:01+00:00

Its 3.12 AM midnight here at India, at last successfully hacked up my own Powershot A620. I am now able to shoot and process raw images taken by it. Its a great experience of post processing the pictures taken by your own camera. I am loving it …!!!!

Thanks to chdk

Dear Lazyweb...

2008-11-21T21:34:43+00:00

A good friend of mine has asked me the question, "from a geek's perspective, what websites have awesome navigation?"

I have no answers at all. I'm hoping that you all do. Otherwise, I will lose all of my geek credit.

urlsplzkthxbai :)

Fedora Versionshinweise aka Release notes

2008-11-21T21:17:00+00:00

Lieber zu spät als nie...nun sind auch die Versionshinweise komplett übersetzt. Durch die anfängliche Hilfe von Daniela Kugelmann konnten alle String vor dem Release von Fedora 10 übersetzt werden. Momentan sind wir noch im Stadium der Rohfassung und ich hoffe, dass das 'zero-day update' eine überarbeitete FAssung enthalten wird.

Weil es so schön ist, dass mal die komplette Dokumentation auf 100 % ist, ein Screenshot :-)

Für Fehler, Verbesserungen, Anmerkungen und sonstiges bitte einen Bug report in Bugzilla eröffnen. Merci

Fedora: Spicebird Beta 0.7 Final Released

2008-11-21T18:13:34+00:00

Reporting from Spicebird blog,

Spicebird is a collaboration client that provides integrated access to email, contacts, calendaring and instant messaging in a single application. It provides easy access to various web services while retaining all the advantages of a desktop application. The application is based on projects like Thunderbird, Lightning and Telepathy and adds more functionality and integration among its components.

This release of Spicebird adds the following functionality:

Chat with friends on services like Yahoo, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ and Jabber
Add iGoogle Gadgets to Spicebird
Disable the applications that are unused
Access Google calendar
Experimental support for managing blogs
Available in more than 10 languages
Basic set of add-ons
Import data from Thunderbird, Outlook and Outlook Express

For a detailed description of this release, see the release notes.

Get Spicebird!

See how to install Spicebird on Linux. I'll review the latest release very soon :)

Work Smarter Not Harder

2008-11-21T17:58:40+00:00

I was driving up to work today and thinking about productivity and how I utterly fail when having to switch contexts between say, web programming to desktop programming to filling out status reports (which I avoid for this same reason) to working on finances for the board. The problem isn’t that I can’t switch contexts fast and effectively. When there are tools around, say a fairly nice IDE, I can easily jump from hacking on Python TurboGears controllers, to ToscaWidgets to plain old HTML, CSS and JavaScript. If items are organized properly jumping from task to task, even in the middle of an ongoing task, is pretty much a non-issue.

The Promise of the Desktop

Computers in general were created to simplify our lives but the Desktop was created to simplify the lives of office workers by taking the papers on a desk metaphor and adapting it to a digital world. What we ended up with was the same (metaphoric) clutter that happens on any physical desktop, requiring us to manually reorganize our Desktop every once in awhile. In this scenario we start out very productive but then that productivity starts to decline as the clutter builds up from every day use.

Good applications however have a way of focusing us on the task at hand. To clean up in an application one can simply start from scratch. After one task is done a fresh new slate awaits the next task. Applications for the most part are fairly targeted at doing a specific task well, and if well designed presents the tools you will use for that task in a well organized fashion. Mind you there are a lot of bad applications out there and the good ones could get much better but we can agree that they are in much better shape in terms of organization and focus then the Desktop.

Traditionally Desktops are places for launchers, various bits of information and a place to stick your most used data for easy access. This is all well and good, and a tool for organizing oneself but the problem is the Desktop is global so that each task has to deal with the cruft from the last task. There is no clean slate aside from clearing all of your tasks and with the more tasks a user has to deal with, productivity starts to decelerate at an exponential rate.

If the desktop wants to be smarter it will have to think and present itself as an application which organizes a user based on tasks. Pagers take a first stab at this by allowing the user to organize open applications per workspace. Whenever I have a different task - say communications (e-mail, irc, blogging) - I open the applications up on one workspace and then switch to another workspace for say development. I still however get the same launcher and same files on the desktop, 99% of which I don’t use for this particular task.

I was pretty excited about the GNOME 3.0 mockup for workspaces in which the user had to specifically add a workspace by clicking a button. By making workspace creation explicit instead of implicit it meant people who don’t need this feature don’t get confused when all of their windows disappeared, but also that the user has a chance at discovering why multiple workspaces are convenient. The problem is the scope of the workspace changes were targeted at fixing the issue of confusion and not at making the user more organized. It is a step in the right direction but in my opinion does not go far enough.

If the Desktop was an application to organize the tasks I needed to complete, a created workspace would allow me to first name it for easy reference, un-stick itself from modifying the global Desktop state and let me customize it for the task at hand. I could then switch between tasks and have only the data I care about and the launcher for applications which would be used for the task at hand, present. The Desktop would then allow me to delete a workspace when I will no longer be performing the task it was setup for and even save the workspace so it is no longer in my rotation of tasks but still available for recall in the future when I have a similar task come up (e.g. taxes require organization to do effectively but only consume at most a month of my thought each year).

But, but, but, you can do this with fast user switching today. Well, yes and no. Completely separate sessions would archive what I am looking for if it were fast and actually worked. There is a laundry list of other features needed which fast user switching can’t provide:

Users would have to be able to be setup and removed on the fly with little fanfare (e.g. the add workspace button in the GNOME 3.0 mockups)
I still would want the ability to share a home directory and copy and paste data from one task to another
Switching to a “subuser” would need to be as easy and fast as ctrl-alt-arrowkeys are which means a spacial layout and no password dialog every time I switch

With the ability to setup a desktop focused on a task and tear it down or start from a clean slate without effecting other tasks, switching between the many hats one needs to wear in a typical day becomes much less cumbersome. It also slows down the effects of productivity sapping cruft which will always build up over time. True there is some overhead in setting up and managing each desktop but I tend to see this happen constantly. As people switch their task priorities their desktop changes with it.

We use so many external and non-integrated tools to organize ourselves already, wouldn’t it be nice if task organization was built into the desktop and applications such as a todo list could key off the current task without any extra configuration? Perhaps there is no good UI for this sessions in a session idea and it would in fact make life a lot harder for people. Think about it anyway - if a Desktop is supposed to make the user more productive by giving them tools to organize their work, why not have that built in? Why not make the Desktop and applications one big integrated application (not one big process mind you) for getting work done?

[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]

FOSS.IN - Call for participation in unofficial GNUSim8085 workout

2008-11-21T17:54:52+00:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls!!!

If you are still clueless as to what FOSS.IN is all about (even after reading through this sentence) then it probably isn’t for you And the news is I will be saying “Hola”, “Bonjour”, “Hi”, “Hallo”, “Nihao”, “Namaskara”, “Vanakkam”, “Namasthe” to a lot of my friends this year too. Apart from the “scheduled” talk on “Fedora Electronics Laboratory” on Friday (yes, my talks always coincide with a more glamorous session *always*), I have planned to have some workouts (unofficial ones from those listed on the site). One such planned workout is the GNUSim8085 Workout.

If you are interested in taking part, please use this doodle link to give your preferred time and I will blog about the timings sometime around Sunday evening. The venue of the workout is most probably the terrace or corridor or some place which has a free power socket .
The Current agenda of the workout is as follows:

Get the Windows Version of the package released (long time pending and also means people with “official” laptops running Windows are welcome and wanted for testing)
Fix lying around small bugs.
Brainstorm on further development and maybe get a base framework done on one of these ideas.

Looking at the current state of things it could either happen on Wednesday or Thursday. This is just not it. Some Fedora and Debian work will also be done. Details in another blog. See you then.

PS for Students: I believe this is a very apt small package to start contributing to Free software. You are the most welcome. This doesn’t mean oldies are prohibited .

Mind Maps: The Fedora Project

2008-11-21T16:14:32+00:00

Recently, I’ve been plagued with trying to come up with an organizational model for the Utah Open Source Foundation and it’s relationship to the Utah Open Source Conference. This is in addition to the new Non-Profit structure we’re building.

To that end, I created a very shabby hierarchical structure which I passed around a week ago at the Core Team after conference dinner. It went over okay, but people had a lot of questions about how the structure was organized and what not.

Organizing My Thoughts is Hard!

I didn’t know what exactly to do. As it is, I’ve never been an integral part of an organization before like this one. Nor have I ever created organizational charts that were very well done. I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon. But, something amazing did happen in the span between last Friday and today, that was VYM, or View Your Mind.

When a “Mind Map” was first suggested to me by my buddy Doran Barton, I thought “well, I’ll look into that later”. However, the more I kept trying to cram jobs into places they didn’t go, the more I got frustrated that there wasn’t a good application to accommodate the structure I was trying to build.

VYM is an application that helps get your thoughts out onto a structure. It lets you move it around quickly and easily and even associate pictures and notes where applicable. The problem for me was understanding how to use VYM in an environment I already knew and UTOS was not the right place!

The Fedora Project “Mind Map”

It turns out that a lot of people always wonder how the Fedora Project is structured, where the pieces go and who, what, where and how the project is put together. Because I could at least see all the pieces, I decided that would be a good place to start. While it’s not complete by any means, I present to you the Fedora Project VYM “Mind Map”. From VYM, one can create pdf, png and other output sources, so I created a pdf as well

Contribute!

I’d like to see the Fedora Community take this up and add many pieces to it as it grows and builds into something more than I could make. It’s fairly simple to add pieces as well. You can create separate maps which can be integrated into the larger map. Or, since the format is a zip file (essentially) with an xml definition file, I believe patches could work.

Cheers,

Herlo

Vacation notice

2008-11-21T13:27:41+00:00

I’ll be in Brazil from Nov. 22th till Dec. 18th, assume little if any access to mail and no ability to performing package reviews during that period. Work will resume when I get back I promise.

Kover 4

2008-11-21T11:44:09+00:00

I finally finished porting kover to KDE4. I also changed it to use cmake. There are not really any new features, but the porting to KDE4 was in large parts a complete rewrite. Some parts of the code were still using functions which were deprecated since QT2 and so I had a chance to do a big cleanup of the code while porting it to KDE4. It is still the same application with the same user interface and I probably also ported all the bugs it has.

It can be downloaded from http://lisas.de/kover/download.php3 or using git from http://lisas.de/kover/git.

moscow trip report (teaser trailer)

2008-11-21T10:58:43+00:00

A full trip report of my 3 days in Moscow with Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen (Red Hat's Director of Central and Eastern Europe) won't be ready until sometime next week.

But here are a few pictures from Andrew Markelov, including me wearing a really nice black suede Fedora (I didn't get to keep it) and a very yummy example of Trademark Fail.

Before anyone asks: the Fedora 7 backdrop in my talk wasn't my choosing. It was already being projected onto the screen when I got there. I would have used the Fedora 10 wallpaper. :)

Life: Long Time No Post , Quick Update

2008-11-21T09:49:22+00:00

I have been too busy to write a post on this very blog Here are quick update.

Released a few versions of youtube_cache in last couple of weeks. Youtube Cache now supports caching videos from 10 websites. A few ISPs are using it.
IntelligentMirror also received updates.
Placements are here. And I am still f**cking with this caching thing. Too addictive.
Inclination towards higher studies as more and more companies decline campus recruitment. How tough GRE can be?
Sudden fear of losing all the friends sucks big time
Proxy war with a professor. Just kidding
No outing in last two weeks.
Mahaveer’s Compete India is doing really great

Rest laterz.

Running for FAmSCo

2008-11-21T09:31:13+00:00

So I finally went and placed my name on the nominations page for FAmSCo. All of that after repeatedly and occasionally publicly saying that I wouldn’t run.
So what changed? Actually a number of things. First a number of people contacted me and voiced their opinion that I should run, which was followed up by a nomination from Joerg Simon. My concern was really time related and being able to provide enough time to dedicate to FAmSCo. Some of that has been greatly relieved by Brian Powell stepping up and becoming the Northeast Regional NA Ambassador Coordinator. Aside from Red Hat employees there are, to my knowledge, only three Ambassadors in the Southeast.
The other item that helped sway my thinking was when another Ambassador observed that I had repeatedly noted of late that the environment around the Ambassadors and particularly around FAmSCo was changing. Rather than constantly comment and discuss it, I decided that I should try to be part of that evolution.
On the upside that does bring us up to 9 nominees, which is the minimum number required for an election per the Election Rules.

Better Firefox in KDE4

2008-11-21T08:20:07+00:00

Well I simply love KDE4 but one thing that really annoyed me was the way firefox looked in KDE4 and so after googling a bit I found some simple solutions to make firefox look more Kde4ish.

Step 1

Install gtk-qt-engine package.

Fedora: sudo yum install gtk-qt-engine

Direct download of the package(fedora rpm) can be found here

Ubuntu 8.04: sudo apt-get install gtk-qt-engine-kde4

Ubuntu 8.10: sudo apt-get install gtk-qt-engine

Now go to System Settings > Appearance > Click on the Gtk Styles and Fonts tab on the left side and select the following options there

Use my KDE style in Gtk applications

Use my KDE fonts Gtk applications

Then finally click on install scrollbar fix

Step 2:

Install KFirefox theme for Firefox from here

I found Kfirefox theme better than the oxygen theme for firefox coz kfirefox integrates better with firefox and looks good

Step 3:

Open With

In Kubuntu 8.10 whenever I downloaded something in Firefox and tried to open it, Firefox’s Download Manager told me that its an unknown application and to select an application to open it.

Right-Click on a downloaded file and click on ‘Open Containing Folder’ and click on Select Application and give it a path to /usr/bin/dolphin and every file will open with dolphin.

Next for other file types open Firefox > Edit > Preferences click on Applications tab and choose the appropriate file types needed to open.

This error is only observed in pure KDE distros like Kubuntu .In fedora the folders open in nautilus which can also be changed to Dolphin by the above method.

Posted in Browser, fedora, Firefox, KDE4, linux Tagged: Browser, fedora, Firefox, KDE4, kubuntu

Deluge 1.0+ for Fedora 9

2008-11-21T07:10:08+00:00

(Also posted on the Fedora Forums.) Hi, all. [...]
Since upstream has decided to no longer support the 0.5.x series (and also by popular demand ), I've begun to build official F-9 packages for recent Deluge releases. An update is currently enqueued and should hit updates-testing on a mirror near you soon.

Please note that these updates will likely stay in the testing repositories indefinitely though, as the 1.0 series is a near-complete rewrite and thus requires recreation of many aspects of a user's configuration - and I do not wish to intentionally break existing configurations for those users who are happy and comfortable with 0.5.9.3 (the latest stable update for F-9).

That said, however, I intend to continue pushing new updates to the F9-updates-testing repositories as they come out and I as push them to F10-updates, so whenever you need to update it on Fedora 9, it should in theory be as simple as:
yum --enablerepo=updates-testing-newkey update deluge
Another benefit to this is that you can verify that it is an "official" and far more trustworthy package to install/use, through Yum's use of package-signing and whatnot.

Regards...

I've decided against this; and will shortly push the packages to my personal webspace instead.

Painless Wiki Editing

2008-11-21T05:46:38+00:00

A big thanks to Christer Edwards for posting on the fantastic Firefox plugin called It’s All Text!

I just started using it on the Fedora wiki and it is superb for large and complicated edits. Make sure you enter the full path to the text editor you add to the preferences or it won’t work.

After installing It’s All Text you’ll soon see a little blue edit box on certain web pages which, if you click on it, activates your specified text editor.

Posted in Fedora, Linux, Productivity

Creative Commons Highlight: Kerri Humphries

2008-11-21T05:40:29+00:00

It’s time to do another one of these. Today we’ll look at Kerri Humphries, who licenses her work on Flickr under a CC-BY license.

Fedora 11 Feature Process Swings Into Action

2008-11-21T05:24:13+00:00

Two weeks ago at the FESCo meeting we did our third post mortem of the feature process, made a few minor tweaks to the process, and started accepting features for Fedora 11 this week! This is our best start yet for the feature process because we have never started reviewing and accepting features for the next release (Fedora 11) before the current release (Fedora 10) ships. Streamlining the tracking process back in August with Paul Frields’ help made this easier to track.

If you are working on something new and exciting and want to make sure it brings attention to Fedora and the people working on it, please consider creating and submitting a feature page. It doesn’t take that long to do and I will be glad to personally guide you through the process if you have questions. My contact information is here.

See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/11/FeatureList for the accepted Fedora 11 features we have so far. This is not a guarantee of which features will be in Fedora 11, but it does give a good idea of what people are working on or might want help with.

Posted in Fedora

(I am) Running for FAmSCo Election.

2008-11-21T05:12:05+00:00

Nominated and encouraged by Sankarshan da, I decided to run for Ambassadors steering committee Election in this December.

At first I was apprehensive whether I would be able to do justice to the job, but it seemed to be a challenge worth taking up.

So here goes my nomination and agenda.

Looks like I am the only one from India and APAC (Asia Pacific) running for it.

All I want for Christmas...

2008-11-21T04:48:13+00:00

Is a an e-ink based digital photo frame. All these lcd photo frames which are clogging up the store shelves really piss me off.
Not only are they little energy vampires of the worst sort.... but the fact that they are active displays and glow really is distracting when you try to put one in a living space that needs "mood" lighting.

What really concerns me is that someone will accidently gift me one of these things thinking that since I'm such a technology geek that it would be "perfect" for me because I don't already have one. These things are the absolute wrong technology for the task...we need e-ink.

I'd pay a premium for even a black and white e-ink frame that gave me that old dot matrix ascii art feel to my own digital photos just to help kick off the adoption of e-ink or any stateful ambient light display technology that attempted to address the short comings of using LCD displays for predominately static content.

-jef

Street View: Always interesting

2008-11-21T03:23:22+00:00

Today, I took a drive through the KTA toll booth without paying a toll.

Separated at birth?

2008-11-20T23:39:12+00:00


Christoph Hellwig	Nuclear Man from Superman IV

272 pending Fedora 10 updates.

2008-11-20T23:34:51+00:00

sheesh!

Another release in the can

2008-11-20T23:19:48+00:00

I don't know why, but this one has been super stressful for me, to the point where I was physically shaking during lunch today, and I haven't been able to keep my shoulders un-hunched for a week now. Thankfully, it's all but over now. The bits are going to the mirrors, torrents are being handled by seth, and I have a liver to destroy.

I took some time yesterday while I was waiting for the second set of composes to finish to start a list of things I want to accomplish before the F11 boulder is rolling behind me. The list is depressingly long, but I think it'll be fun to work on some of that, something other than the release grind.

Now off to something far far away from computers with my wife and child. I'll hook back into the matrix at some point tomorrow.

Internet et les thèmes de Gmail

2008-11-20T23:01:00+00:00

Comme chacun qui utilise le webmail Gmail, je le trouve très ergonomique et simple d'accès, mais tout le monde à le même webmail que moi, et ça c'est triste ...

Heureusement Gmail vient à notre secours en nous proposant plusieurs thèmes pour personnaliser nativement l'interface de votre webmail préféré.

L'annonce a été faite sur le blog officiel de Gmail, il y a maintenant la possibilité sans ajout de plugins divers et variés de choisir entre 30 thèmes pour personnaliser l'interface de Gmail.

Voici quelques exemples :

De quoi donner un peu de vie et une touche plus personnelle pendant la lecture de nos e-mails. Pour ma part voici le thème que j'ai choisi :

Cliquez vite sur ce lien pour vous aussi changer votre thème.

Et vous c'est lequel votre thème?

Fisch-Logos

2008-11-20T21:21:01+00:00

Manchmal tauchen richtig schöne Logo auf. Das Logo des Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server ist so eines.
Im Vergleich dazu hat es das Logo, resp. Maskottchen von GNU Project Debugger etwas schwer.
Zum Glück hat Fedora immer noch nur ein Lo

Fedora: Youtube Cache plugin completely rebased ( youtube_cache version 1.5 )

2008-11-20T20:37:17+00:00

Till now youtube cache was storing everything in squid directories. For example,

core plugin code -> /etc/squid/youtube_cache/
cached videos -> /var/spool/squid/video_cache/
logfiles -> /var/log/squid/

The cached videos in squid sub directories created serious problems with permissions and Apache was not able to access videos due to strict permissions for /var/spool/squid/ . Due to this fact, almost every user faced access denied problem from Apache and even after disabling SELinux and IPtables, problem persisted.

Also, since youtube cache is being packaged for Debian. See this bug report. I had some IM sessions with Joao Eriberto Mota Filho, who is packaging youtube cache for Debian. He told me few things about Debian packaging guidelines. According to them, you can't intrude other packages' directories like I did above.

Keeping in mind the above things, I decided to rebase the complete plugin so that it can have its own directories to do different things. So here is the new structure

core plugin code -> /usr/share/youtube_cache/
cache videos -> /var/spool/video_cache/
logfiles -> /var/log/youtube_cache/
/etc/youtube_cache.conf is a symlink to /usr/share/youtube_cache/youtube_cache.conf .
Apache config file -> /etc/httpd/conf.d/youtube_cache.conf (can't be moved).

Apart from above, spec file to generate rpm has received a lot of improvements. The previous rpms has a flaw that they didn't actually create /var/spool/video_cache/ because it was not mentioned in %files section in spec file which lead to a tons of errors.

But another problem was that all the directories and files mentioned in %files section are deleted when rpm is uninstalled. So, have to place special code in %preun and %postun to take care that cached videos are not deleted even when the rpm is uninstalled.

All the doc files included in the package and the webpages on cache videos have been updated accordingly. The plugin takes care of the migration of cached videos. So, you need not worry about possible loss of already cached videos. And in case you were using base_dir other than /var/spool/squid/video_cache/, then replacing the same in your new config file will be enough.

The new version will not be as problematic as previous version were with respect to directory permissions and other similar stuff.

And yes youtube cache works on Mac OS X out of the box. Try in case you are interested :)

Availability

Latest version of Youtube Cache is available for download in different formats for Unix/Linux based operating systems.

Installation and Configuration

For detailed instructions on installing and configuring youtube cache, check installation page and configuration page.

In case of any doubt, checkout frequently asked questions.

Note : Even if you install from rpm, you should follow the above Readme file for configuration.

Do tell me about your experience with youtube cache on forums.

Multiseat approved as an F11 feature!

2008-11-20T20:33:00+00:00

The Multiseat proposal was approved as a feature for Fedora 11 at yesterday's FESCO meeting.

Warming up for FOSS.IN

2008-11-20T19:23:39+00:00

In the meanwhile for a month I was not in touch with my blog and the preliminary reason this time being my visit to the native. If you are moving home after about a year, you feel like heaven and at any circumstances don’t want to be back. But your work, job , responsibilities drive you away from your home.

Coming to the point of today’s blog —–> Time for FOSS.IN
After the 2nd day of Barcamp rocked and got to know many people out, I really loved Barcamp. Now its time for FOSS.IN and somehow I managed for leave at my Office and am really excited anticipating the fun out here at FOSS.IN this time. Expecting much things from FOSS.IN, hopefully it will meet up my expectations.

So on the way to meet a lotta people and having a lotta fun.

Journée des Logiciels Libres de Reims

2008-11-20T19:09:00+00:00

Dans le cadre des festivités de son 40 ème anniversaire, le département informatique de l'Institut Universitaire de Technologie organise les premières journées du logiciel libre à REIMS.

Ces journées auront lieu les 21 et 22 novembre à l'IUT de REIMS. .

cRaZy!

2008-11-20T18:42:44+00:00

Freaking out when anyone hurts you….

Never waiting to understand I erupt in my own rage…

Not knowing where I am headed but knowing… I love you and justice… is all… justice… why did they have to?

Your love and crimson, a sorrow that sweeps my very soul… Even as I mourn the blood drips from your wet clothes…
My love! My life I shall live and fight for justice and not let the freedom of your love be tarnished by my grief… I shall be strong and my hand and feet will not grow weary…

Every moment I want to commit into the arms of an angel so as to see you once more… But then again my love for you will cease and never will I be able to show to world what it means to love and be loved…

Your love powers my Lust! Blood Lust… for justice… for strength… for the meek and the humble…

For now and for ever more… I will love giving all… Never taking anything in return… Tender.. Please oh, tenderly remember me!

Never again shall my rage surge… But never will my rage stop when your love is questioned… even as you depart my dear! The Life you gave me shall flow… To struggle and live as a monument… CRAZY… A testament for you! Forever!

At my loves death bed I have sworn - “Cherish your last glimpse always I shall… A Symbol am I to what you have given me… Never will I lose it again”

Jose M Manimala

Chip and PIN

2008-11-20T18:09:02+00:00

Part of the problem with Chip and PIN is the logo. It subliminally tells you to use one out-stretched finger to type in your PIN, in full view, as clearly as possible to any onlookers.

This seems to be the wrong message. There are plenty of things wrong with Chip and PIN, but mostly it isn’t an intentional lowering of security. (In fact it mostly seems to be about shifting liability onto the consumer). But this logo doesn’t even seem to be trying to get it right.

Now, I’m no artist, so if you are disturbed by unnatural-looking hands, look away now.

Fedora 10 release party στη Θεσσαλονίκη

2008-11-20T16:32:17+00:00

(In English)

Ακολουθούμε την παράδοση των Fedora release parties. Με αφορμή το Fedora 10 που βγαίνει στον αέρα σε μερικές ημέρες, βρισκόμαστε μαζί λινουξάδες του χωριού και των περιχώρων για να γνωριστούμε, να λύσουμε απορίες, να δούμε τα νεότερα από το leading edge του Linux.

Σε καμιά βδομάδα λοιπόν ο Χρήστος Μπαχαράκης (ο ήρωας πίσω από το σούπερ-επιτυχές Serres installfest) οργανώνει το Fedora 10 release party στη Θεσσαλονίκη. Θα έχουμε παρουσίαση των πλούσιων τεχνικών χαρακτηριστικών που μαγείρεψαν οι Fedora developers — τα οποία σε μερικούς μήνες θα κυλίσουν στις άλλες διανομές… <evil grin>. Μερικά από αυτά είναι blazingly fast startup (Plymouth), Glitch-free audio, Improved webcam support, Printing simplified, RPM 4.6, Ad-hoc network sharing, First Aid Kit Automated Recovery, VirtStorage, Sectool, GNOME 2.24, Netbeans, Openoffice 3.0, και αρκετά άλλα.

Α ναι, θα έχουμε και αρκετά αυτοκόλλητα που μας περίσσεψαν από το Athens Digital Week. =)

Vergleich der Webseiten-Downtime

2008-11-20T14:20:52+00:00

Da stehen die Opensource-Projekte im Vergleich zu den Multimillionen-Unternehmen gar nicht so schlecht dar. Der Artikel bei Royal Pingdom zeigt die "ganze" Wahrheit.

Die Parallelen zwischen Red Hat und Fedora sind nicht von der Hand zu weisen.

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: On The Tubes

2008-11-20T14:03:31+00:00

The final preparations are in place, everybody is gearing for the release, so the webcomic can't stay behind. Now back to filling those tubes...

puppetdoc goodness

2008-11-20T13:46:39+00:00

More puppet goodenss from masterzen in the form of improved puppetdoc allowing inline manifest documentation:

http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/PuppetManifestDocumentation

Sample output here:

http://www.masterzen.fr/puppet/rdoc/index.html

Foss.in promo video and kde-in posters

2008-11-20T12:59:33+00:00

foss.in team made a cool promo video, you can watch it here.

Just like the last year, kde-india team came up with some awesome posters again, thanks to Kamaleshware Morjal for these nice works.

You can see them all here.

FOSS.IN/2008 next week!

2008-11-20T12:49:15+00:00

I'm preparing to travel to Bangalore for FOSS.IN, which is happening next week from the 25th to the 29th of November.

It's looking very much like the deeply developer-focused event the organizers were hoping for. On the schedule is a mix of technical talks and workout sessions. I'll be involved in the Kernel Quality Improvement Workout headed up by Christoph Hellwig, as well as giving a talk on Fedora Kiosk Mode. This will be expanded a little on the talk I gave at FOSS.MY due to extra time available.

I was going to talk about sVirt at the planned Fudcon, but the Fudcon was unfortunately cancelled. Fedora folk will still be there, though, and if anyone wants to talk about sVirt and get involved in some really cool and innovative hacking, catch up with me.

The main hall has been set aside for an entire day to host a Linux Kernel Hacker Gathering (LKHG), with sessions on Filesystems, Tracing, Power Management and Porting. It seems that this will be something like an open mini kernel summit, with participants to include Suparna Bhattacharya, Ananth N Mavinakayanahalli, Christoph Hellwig, Aneesh Kumar K V, Balbir Singh, Srikanth Srinivasan, Harald Welte, Srivatsa Vaddagiri, Amit Shah, myself, and Dipankar Sarma.

The final slot will be open for lightning talks from the audience, with the kernel hacker panel providing feedback, followed by an open Q&A session. This is somewhat based on the format of the LF symposium BoF day, and will be a great opportunity for people working on kernel projects to bounce their ideas off upstream kernel hackers. This includes people working on drivers and various kernel projects which are not currently upstream (i.e. work projects), who would like to get some advice on how to get their project upstreamed and how to work more effectively with the community.

A CfP will go out for the lightning talks soon, so if you want to participate, keep an eye out for that.

The organizers have made a video to promote and explain the conference:

And yes, you can hack on the roof of the building, or even hold talks: there's an outdoor auditorium up there.

Currently, there's over 900 delegates registered, which is a lot for a developer conference. (Linux Plumbers had 300, IIRC).

I think this promotional banner sums up my experience so far:

Not your typical Linux conference, by any means.

MirrorManager In RPM Fusion

2008-11-20T12:17:15+00:00

RPM Fusion now also has a MirrorManager instance running. I have written some minimal documentation about RPM Fusion’s MirrorManager setup but it is pretty much the same as already documented for Fedora. It took me a few days to understand how all the different parts of the MirrorManager are working together, but I think I have now a pretty good overview how it all works. Matt has really written a nice piece of software and he accepted all my patches. My patches were mostly getting rid of hardcoded Fedora URLs and putting Fedora specific stuff in configuration files.

The public mirror list can be accessed here: http://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/mm/publiclist/

The mirrorlist which is generated for yum can be accessed here: http://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/mirrorlist?…

To provide at least some kind of “high” availability mirrors.rpmfusion.org consists of two hosts. One is run by me and the other is provided by Oliver.

The MirrorManager database web interface is running at https://lisas.de/mm/. The reason for not running it under the rpmfusion.org domain was that I have signed SSL certificate for lisas.de and because it transmits a user name and password I wanted it to run over an encrypted connection. But as only mirror admins have to use that interface it should cause not too much confusion for the users of RPM Fusion.

I am using the information from the mirrorlist accesses to generate some statistics about the countries where RPM Fusion is used as well as statistics about the usage of the repositories and architectures: http://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/statistics/

ftp.cc.uoc awesomeness

2008-11-20T11:49:59+00:00

Γουάου! Μόλις πρόσεξα ότι τα παιδιά πίσω από το φανταστικό ftp.cc.uoc έκαναν ήδη mirror το νέο RPM Fusion και καταχώρησαν το mirror τους στον RPM Fusion mirror manager. Thumbs-up!

Singularity

2008-11-20T10:49:23+00:00

The Law of Singularity states that the most important aspect of a brand is its single-mindedness. What is a brand? A singular idea or concept that you own inside the mind of the prospect. It’s as simple or as difficult as that.

The wonderful folks at FOSS.IN have a promotional video out. And, as Shreyas puts it - this year it is about doing ‘big’ things. This year, and, possibly for the coming years, it is about developers and development and doing things that are used by an ever growing section of folks.

If you still haven’t registered for the event, you haven’t really taken a look at the schedule.

libvirt User Mode Linux driver and other new features

2008-11-20T10:39:51+00:00

It has been a while since I reported on libvirt development news, but that doesn't mean we've been idle. The big news is the introduction of another new hypervisor driver in libvirt, this time for User Mode Linux. While Xen / KVM get all the press these days, UML has been quietly providing virtualization for Linux users for many years - until very recently nearly all Linux virtual server providers were deploying User Mode Linux guests. libvirt aims to be the universal management API for all virtualization technologies, and UML has no formal API of its own, so it is only natural that we provide a UML driver in libvirt. It is still at a fairly basic level of functionality, only supporting disks & paravirt consoles, but it is enough to get a guest booted & interact locally. The next step is adding networking support at which point it'll be genuinely useful. To recap, libvirt now has drivers for Xen, QEMU, KVM, OpenVZ, LXC (LinuX native Containers) and UML, as well as a test driver & RPC support.

In other news, a couple of developers at VirtualIron have recently contributed some major new features to libvirt. The first set of APIs provides the ability to register for lifecycle events against domains, allowing an application to be notified whenever a domain stops, starts, migrates, etc, rather than having to continually poll for status changes. This is implemented for KVM and Xen so far. The second huge set of APIs provide a way to query a host for details of all the hardware devices it has. This is a key building block to allow remote management tools to assign PCI/USB devices directly to guest VMs, and to more intelligently configure networking and storage. Think of it as a remotely accessible version of HAL. In fact, we use HAL as one of the backend implementations for the API, or as an alternative, the new DeviceKit service.

puppetdoc goodness

2008-11-20T10:21:05+00:00

More puppet goodenss from masterzen in the form of improved puppetdoc:

http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/PuppetManifestDocumentation

Linux distros’ homepage uptime

2008-11-20T09:44:35+00:00

Interesting report from pingdom about uptime of Linux ditros’ homepage (but also Apple and Microsoft). I’m more than happy to see Fedora and Red Hat taking leading positions in this benchmark.

NetBeans IDE 6.5

2008-11-20T08:21:00+00:00

The final version of NetBeans 6.5 is out, you can grab it on http://www.netbeans.org/downloads/index.html

It can be installed in your home directory on F9/10 without problems, it doesn’t taint your system in any way. You may wonder why I don’t use NetBeans 6.1 packaged in Fedora 10? I simply need the EE version with the GlassFish server.

La Dolce Vita: chapter 3

2008-11-20T06:53:59+00:00

A very wise man said, not too long ago:

"If you're writing a desktop app or desktop development platform of any sort, you should be reading Innovator's Dilemma and figuring out exactly what you're bringing to the table against web apps and the web app platform -- how are you going to stop yourself from being disrupted by them? If you can't answer that question, you might want to think twice before writing more desktop apps or another desktop platform.

That's an uncomfortable question for fans of Sugar. It should be.

I spent a lot of my time at Sugar Camp today asking people this question. "What is Sugar's defensible value add?" Invariably someone would say something about the excellent monitor or the battery life, and I would politely remind them that those were traits of the XO hardware, not of the Sugar software, and an awkward pause would ensue.

Ultimately, for most, it came down to three things: the journal, "kid-friendliness", and collaboration.

The journal is good. In the next release of Sugar, it will be even better. But it is not necessarily a game-changer, and GNOME is already exploring some of these ideas as well. The "kid-friendliness" is largely anecdotal; Sugar may be truly more "kid-friendly" than Windows, but it's not like there's a wealth of double-blind studies from which you can draw a rock-solid conclusion.

Which leaves collaboration. The White Whale.

When I was first telling the story of OLPC to anyone who would listen, long before the device even existed, the linchpin of the story was always the promise of "collaboration by default." The idea, in theory, was fantastic, and the talking points were compelling. "When a child wants to share a toy with another child," I would say, "does the child have to install a special toy module, or sign a license to play with the toy? Of course not. Activities should be as easy to share as a ball."

Easy to say. Hard to do.

Tuesday night was a late night of pointed disagreements. On Wednesday night, with a somewhat smaller crowd and a hell of a lot more beer, it feels like we made more progress. There a ton of barriers to doing collaboration well in the current OLPC networking model, and it has been devilishly difficult to simplify our assumptions to get to a handful of key use cases. But that's what I think we accomplished tonight.

To wit:

1. It would be great to guarantee collaboration between activities regardless of the network topology involved, but the simple fact is that such a guarantee is, if not impossible, at least impractical in any near-term timeframe. The mesh networking functionality of OLPC works, but it's fragile, and the demands placed on the mesh by collaborative activities are likely to impose too high a cost. (In other words: two kids play a collaborative game, take down the entire grid.) Therefore, we have determined that we will not worry about making activites collaborate over the mesh. (Best line of the night goes to Eben, relayed to me via Scott: "we could just give the kids cat-5 cables, paint them green, and call them "collaboration cables".)

2. "Collaboration" is a very loosely defined term. This is, frankly, to our advantage; it means that we can aim for fairly modest collaborations early on. For instance, "collaborating" in Firefox could, at first, be a simple as sharing URLs dynamically. See your friend running a browser, click on your friend's icon, and your browser launches with whatever URL your friend is viewing. To begin with, simple is best. Tomorrow we will work to identify the minimal set of activities that should have collaborative behaviors (like maybe the activities that were selected to ship with G1G1), and then we will attempt to identify some simple collaborative behaviors to implement for each of these activities. If we do things right, a usable collaboration API will fall out of this effort.

3. Effective collaboration is clearly on the critical path for Sugar. However, that doesn't mean that it's the most important work item for current OLPC deployments. There are hundreds of thousands of laptops in kids' hands, all around the world, and most of their problems are more pedestrian. It's OLPC's job to support those customers -- and for OLPC to be successful, they must put customer requirements first. Therefore, Sugar Labs now has the perfect opportunity to step up and take the lead in solving this problem. It's an ideal division of labor.

4. Many of the problems of XO mesh networking can be attributed to the immaturity of the 802.11s protocol that was chosen. It should be noted, however, that 802.11s is not the only mesh protocol in town. The OLSR project is doing some very interesting things. Giving up altogether on the idea of improving the mesh is probably premature, so we're going to try to get the OLSR folks in touch with the OLPC Developer Program folks, and see whether, in exchange for some laptops, the OLSR folks can work some magic.

Another 16-hour day, but a really productive one. I'll sleep well, I think.

EXA and kernel memory manager (the DFS saga).

2008-11-20T05:50:48+00:00

So I've been going over the accel in my radeon EXA code particularly how we related to buffer management.

One thing I noticed, is I've implemented a really sub-optimal DFS.

DownloadFromScreen is meant to accelerate reading back pixmaps from offscreen. However with driver managed pixmaps, all pixmaps are
considered to be "offscreen". Now my great implementation, created two scratch buffers, and executed blit commands moving parts of the pixmap into each scratch and copying it into the supplied destination pointer.

However this sucks when you think about the use cases:

1. backing BO for the pixmap is actually in VRAM - not a bad solution
2. backing BO is actually in GTT and wasn't in VRAM - really crappy solution - we end up doing a load of GTT->GTT blits followed by memcpys.
3. backing BO never used in hw - worse we bind it to GTT, blit it, copy it.

So clearly I was delusioned when I wrote the initial implementation... however it lead me to wonder what the right answer is and where in the stack to effectively code it.

What we have now is EXA->driver->driver bufmgr->kernel layers. The buffer manager abstracts away the kernel internals and lets us just reference buffer objects in the driver code without worrying about where they are located. The bufmgr/kernel don't have any acceleration functionality, except the kernel has a fast buffer copy and buffer clear functionality, used for moving buffers around for eviction etc. So the problem is the driver bufmgr and above really don't know where a buffer object is currently located, the kernel only knows for certain. As objects may be evicted by the kernel on a whim or after a suspend/resume etc.

So ideally the driver would know that pixmap is in VRAM, I'll use the cool method, but if its in GTT or never in hw I'll just memcpy it and save the overhead of doing the other stuff. However since it doesn't know where the buffer is currently, it can't really do this. I'm suspecting I might need a kernel interface to optimally copy data to a userspace pointer from wherever the buffer is currently located, but that smacks of having more acceleration in the kernel, esp since DFS allows for rectangular blits. If for future cards like r600 I don't have a 2D engine to do this with, I don't really want a load of 3D engine in the kernel.

So for now I think I'll just pull more of my hair out.

Fedora unfiltered.

2008-11-20T03:47:09+00:00

Tonight I had the opportunity to appear on The Linux Link Tech Show for an extended interview with the crew there. I was really happy to be able to do this since fate didn’t allow us to sit down together at the Ohio Linux Fest last month. Tonight’s interview was more the kind of chat you’d have with a bunch of friends gathered around the kitchen table than a stiff, formal interview, and these guys made it a very enjoyable experience. Thanks to all of them for having me on the show, and letting me blab endlessly about every topic, from Fedora 10 features to open source ponytails. And thanks also to Dave Nalley for hooking us up.

Fedora et l'Install'party de Paris 12-2008

2008-11-19T23:06:00+00:00

Les ambassadeurs Francophone du projet Fedora vous invitent à une Install'Party qui se déroule à Paris (Cité des Sciences de la Villette) les Samedi 6 et dimanche 7 décembre 2008, de 12h00 à 18h00.

Que vous soyez débutant, confirmé ou non Linuxien, c'est la meilleure occasion pour pouvoir échanger vos avis, vos idées et vos suggestions avec les autres personnes participants au projet Fedora.

Des conférences se dérouleront tout au long de la journée dans la salle Agora afin de vous faire découvrir les principaux avantages de Fedora. Bien entendu vous pouvez venir avec votre matériel afin qu'il y soit installé Fedora et que l'on puisse vous expliquer les bases de l'utilisation de votre nouveau système d'exploitation.

Linuxien confirmé, ou débutant ou simple curieux n'hésitez pas, l'entrée est totalement gratuite, plusieurs ambassadeurs Francophone et plusieurs membres de la communauté Fedora-fr seront présent alors rencontrons NOUS.

Date : Les Samedi 6 et dimanche 7 décembre 2008, de 12h00 à 18h00.
Lieu : Cité des sciences et de l'industrie. 30 avenue Corentin Cariou. 75019 Paris
Accès : Métro : ligne 7, station Porte de la Villette ou Bus : 75, 139, 150, 152, 249, PC
Plan d'accès : cliquez ici

On compte sur vous !