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Dave Neary: Malt Appreciation Society

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 21:16:28 +0000

So when’s the Malt Appreciation Society meeting this year? I have a bottle of cask strength 12yo Glengoyne I picked up today & was planning to bring along - no idea if it’s any good. So… when do I get to find out???

Also, anyone interested in going for an early morning run (not the day after the Malt Appreciation Society meeting) drop me a line, especially if you’re in or near the Golden Horn Sirkeci… we can do some early morning tourism at about 12km/h.

Dave Neary: Ooopsie!

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 14:14:44 +0000

I rebooted my computer and went out for lunch with some friends. When I came back, it was particularly unresponsive, so I went hunting, and top showed me this:

19055 root      20   0 1343m 453m 1524 D  0.3 45.3   1:46.13 rsvg-convert

A quick ps…

dneary@sligo:~$ ps -ef | grep 19055
root     19055 19054  0 12:25 ?        00:01:45
  /usr/bin/rsvg-convert -o /var/log/bootchart/hardy-20080704-1.png
  /var/log/bootchart/bootchart.svgz

Ouch!

Does bootchart run until you log in? Is this normal behaviour? 1.3G of virtual memory is an awful lot…

Conrad Parker: Release: liboggz 0.9.8

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 10:03:00 +0000

liboggz 0.9.8 includes the first release of oggz-chop, as well as support for the new karaoke codec OggKate.

oggz-chop can be used to serve time ranges of Ogg media over HTTP by any web server that supports CGI. The oggz-chop binary simply checks if it is being run as a CGI script by checking some environment variables, and if so acts based on the CGI query parameter t=, much like mod_annodex. It accepts all the time specifications that mod_annodex accepts (npt and various smpte framerates), and start and end times separated by a /.

All you need to do is set up the following Apache config:

ScriptAlias /oggz-chop /usr/bin/oggz-chop Action application/ogg /oggz-chop

, and all your Ogg files will be handled with oggz-chop, which means that you can put a time range on the end, like:

http://www.example.com/candidate_speech.ogv?t=00:23/00:26

The minimal amount of data required to play the section between 23 and 26 seconds will be sent to you, such that it plays back immediately from the time requested. As for caching, it generates Last-Modified HTTP headers, and responds correctly to If-Modified-Since conditional GET requests.

It implements the same chopping algorithm as the Haskell version hogg chop, released in HOgg 0.3.0, so it will insert an Ogg Skeleton track which can give players hints about what time the in-sync audio and video data should start being rendered, and if any of the input files include Skeleton information that will be preserved, and the output will contain only one Skeleton track.

Many thanks to Michael Dale, j^ and John Ferlito for testing out oggz-chop during its development.

Dave Neary: dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 09:11:07 +0000

For anyone who has experienced pain when upgrading to a more recent version of Ubuntu with X and xrandr on Intel hardware, consider running this fabulous command.

This goes in particular for anyone who needed i915resolution before for wide-screens, and had a “ForceBIOS” option in xorg.conf. The driver to use for the hardware changed, and the xorg.conf got about 100 times smaller since Ubuntu 6.06 or 7.04.

This is the major weakness in the Ubuntu upgrade process, really… if hacks are needed to work around falings in previous versions, those hacks are (silently, IIRC) kept after an upgrade, even though they’re no longer necessary (and are, in fact, harmful).

Many thanks once again to Claude Paroz, wo helped me work through the projector problem & got me moving towards the fix.

Ted Gould: Bazaar Power Management

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 05:26:00 +0000

When I saw Robert's interesting and fun Bazaar search plug-in I had a few thoughts:

Wow, that's cool!

It would sure be awesome if I could say that I've written as many Bazaar plugins as Robert this month.

That sounds like work.

Perhaps I can do this with, like, 6 lines of Python.

I've now written a plug-in to provide desktop power management support to Bazaar. You can install it like this:

mkdir -p ~/.bazaar/plugins
bzr branch lp:~ted-gould/+junk/bazaar-power-management ~/.bazaar/plugins/power_management

This hack-ish plug-in uses the initialization of the plug-in to call the DBus interface for power management to inhibit the power manager. It then relies on the fact that the power manager will drop an inhibit request from a client that disconnects from the bus which happens when the process exits. Both are relatively unsupported, and mostly undocumented ways to use the systems, but it works.

Why would you need something like this? Well if your trying to create a repository from a really slow SVN server which takes longer than the sleep timeout of your laptop (not that I've done this) you can end up really wishing your laptop hadn't gone to sleep. Yes, things restart, and you don't loose everything, but you'd really rather your laptop was awake the whole time. With this plug-in your laptop won't go to sleep while Bazaar is running.

The only thing left to consider is: What is Robert going to do to retaliate? 7 lines of Python?

Bryce Harrington: Launchpad UI change - broke lp greasemonkey scripts

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 01:39:16 +0000

Yesterday I reviewed all of our launchpad-gm-scripts scripts in light of Launchpad's recent UI changes. I was a bit surprised to see half the scripts work fine, but disappointed that half show some breakage.

I fixed my buttontags script, which was not able to apply tags, and filed bugs 245042 and 245048 for the other two bugs caused by the Launchpad update.

As well, since I expect we are likely to experience future sudden Launchpad interface changes, I've written up a TESTING file to hopefully help folks doublecheck the scripts still work in such situations. Wish there was some way these tests could be done prior to new Launchpad UI updates, but lacking that we'll just have to beg forgiveness for the inevitable breakages.

If you're not yet using the Launchpad greasemonkey scripts, here's a quick plug for them, and list of what they do:

lp_buttontags.user.js - Shortcut for applying several standard tags on bugs

lp_highlight_me.user.js - Highlights your items on the +milestones page

lp_karma_suffix.user.js - Displays user's karma next to their username. Handy to spot new users vs. experienced ones.

lp_patches.user.js - Stars attachments which are patches

lp_stockreplies.user.js - Mechanism for storing and applying a set of stock replies (which you can define) to bugs, updating status dropdowns, etc. as well.

lp_workflowreports.user.js - Identifies workflow reports.

Dave Neary: Live from RMLL

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:52:29 +0000

I’m coming to the end of my two days in Mont de Marsan (and, as it happens, to the end of the charge in my laptop battery). I think the GNOME Accessibility presentation I gave went very well, certainly people seemed to get a lot from it. I’ll put my slides online at some stage (before the weekend), and I was filmed, when I have a link to the video I’ll throw that up too.

As usual, the great thing about conferences is meeting old friends, and making new ones, and there are a lot of familiar faces around.

One thing that did come out of my presentation is the need for those storyboards I proposed a while back. In particular, I tripped up when demoing Orca (no real plan to show off its functionality, other than turning on TTS, and “doing stuff”, then turning on magnification, and “doing stuff”, etc…), Dasher (it’d be handy to have a few phrases to type rather than coming up with something on the spot), and sticky & slow keys.

I hit a few problems with the keyboard a11y. When I had both sticky & slow keys activated, I got double letters (I’m sure it was a configuration issue, but anyway…). And when I used the keyboard shortcut to navigate to the top bar, I hit two bugs - if I open a menu in the top menubar, I can’t navigate away with the keyboard (Ctrl-Alt-Tab doesn’t work any more), and I can’t navigate to the notification area with the keyboard. And I got some comments on MouseTweaks (”we need a way to temporarily disable it for times when you’re reading a document or a web page, for example”) and Dasher (”not really suitable for certain classes of users” - I’ll try to get more information).

Yesterday’s presentation “Building bridges” went less well - it was a dry run for my GUADEC presentation, and I’ve taken away 3 or 4 good ideas for improvements. But like all the English presentations here, attendance was poor - I have about 10 or 12 attendees. And at 9am this morning, there was one person who turned up for my presentation in English on accessibility in GNOME - lucky enough, since when I tested my laptop with the projector, I had a bunch of problems! Many thanks to Claude Paroz, who helped me identify the problem (old driver + options which were necessary in Ubuntu 6.06 and 7.04, but have since been deprecated) and the solution (dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg). My laptop works with projectors! Yay!

MenTaLguY: Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:18:37 +0000

I think this article can speak for itself:

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

...

“What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions,” Levin said. “People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.”

...

The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”

Cyrille Berger: OpenGTL 0.9.3 and 0.9.4 : first release with Shiva

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:33:06 +0000

A few days ago, I spoke about OpenShiva, since then I have added quiet a few features, since OpenShiva can now read images, and work with different bit depth than float 32bits, I have also found a lot of bugs that are now fixed (and are covered by automatic tests ! yay !).

Now, there are all the basic features to demonstrate the technology, so it's about time to make a release. Especially that a new release of llvm has been made early June, and since they make a point to have weird API/ABI breakage at each release: before to create most instructions you would write "new InstructionName(params);" and now it is "InstructionsName::Create(params);" except for a few instructions were the old style is still in use... That said, without llvm, I would have been unable to achieve what I have achieve until now with OpenGTL.

So here comes two releases, 0.9.3 for llvm 2.2 and 0.9.4 for llvm 2.3, they have both the same feautres sets.

Beside a lot of bug fixes, and the early implementation of OpenShiva, OpenCTL has matured a lot, and now most of the standard library is implemented (it remains a very complex function that is underspecified :( and some color conversion functions). And there is also a nice debug system that allows to control output depending on library, file name and function name, which is nice, since OpenGTL, in debug mode, is very noisy (but it's all needed when debugging).

If you want to have fun, you can download everything here.

Dave Neary: Mont de Marsan, here I come!

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:00:54 +0000

This week, I will be travelling to Mont de Marsan, near Bordeaux, Agen, Bayonne and Pau (or let’s say, equally far away from all of those) to give a few presentations, meet a few friends, have a few drinks, and hopefully survive a 9am presentation slot on Thursday morning.

My three presentations (really, two, but they’re taking advantage of my bilinguality) are:

Bridges between projects : 16:45 on Wednesday. A dry run for my GUADEC presentation, presenting a variety of ways that different projects are co-ordinating, and what we’re talking about, that most people don’t know about.
Digital Ramps and Handrails: 9:00 on Thursday (in English), and 11:45 on Thursday (in French). It’s with some trepidation that I proposed a presentation on GNOME usability for the conference, since I’m by no means an expert. But I feel that we’ve done such good work in this area, and I’m so impressed with the passion of the accessibility team, that I felt that we definitely needed to talk about it more, so I’ll take my chances. I plan to give a low level overview of the accessibility tools built into GNOME, including keyboard shortcuts, accessible themes, audio events, sticky keys, slow keys, mousetweaks, alternative input methods (Dasher, on-screen keyboard), and of course a short description of Orca and our support for screen readers and GNOME Magnifier. I’ll also mention the surprising side-effects of having an accessible desktop - graphics application test frameworks Dogtail, LTSP and Accerciser. When I get to talking about AT-SPI, that’s where I get nervous, because I’ve had some trouble with gok in the past where my keyboard got disabled when I launched it… I’m going to avoid demoing gok.

Did I miss anything important? Please let me know if you saw anything braindead that I should talk about that I haven’t yet.

Unfortunately, I can’t really afford to travel for the full week, so I’m heading off tomorrow afternoon (Tuesday), eating with friends in Bordeaux tomorrow evening, and spending Wednesday and Thursday at the conference, before heading off again Thursday evening.

If anyone else overlaps and would like to meet up Wednesday evening, drop me a line!

Conrad Parker: FOMS 2009 CFP

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:10:00 +0000

We recently opened the FOMS 2009 Call for Participation. FOMS — Foundations of Open Media Software — is a developer workshop "to widen cooperation and interoperability among open source media projects". It will be held a few days before linux.conf.au, in Hobart, Tasmania.

This year's FOMS had a large emphasis on free codecs, with many of the Xiph.Org developers in attendance. In 2009 we really hope to expand the participation to include people from projects with alternate technical viewpoints, such as those of MPlayer and NUT. It would also be good to get some exposure to projects like Canola2 and Bellagio, in order to deal with the issues of mobile multimedia. If you're involved in development of those or similar projects and would be interested in attending FOMS 2009, please respond to the CFP; there will be some travel grants available to help get you to Tasmania.

Related conferences

I'll be at Linux Plumbers Conference 2008 in Portland, Oregon, specifically for the "Audio" microconf.
We hope to run a Multimedia Miniconf at LCA 2009 :-)

Dave Neary: GUADEC hotel: If you haven’t heard back, start worrying

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 14:41:10 +0000

I got a definitive answer today from the Golden Horn in ~~Sultanahmet~~Sirkeci as to why I hadn’t yet received a confirmation of my reservation: I don’t have a reservation.

I have contacted the hotel by phone, filled in the online form, and following instructions, patiently awaited a confirmation, which never came. At that stage, after waiting perhaps a little too long, I tried the hotel again (the person I talked to didn’t know anything about the group code, the online reservation system, and to be honest, didn’t speak English very well), and asked Baris to look into it. Which he did. And got confirmation yesterday that myself and at least one other person who had registered online did not have reservations.

So if, like me, you reserved online at the Golden Horn ~~Sultanahmet~~Sirkeci, and like me, you have not yet received any confirmation of your booking, then like me, you’ll need to find another hotel. Bummer.

Update: Baris informs me that the Golden Horn in Sirkeci has made more rooms available under the group code, so there’s hope for me yet.

Dave Neary: Keynote news

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 21:47:19 +0000

It’s with great disappointment that I just found out that Eric Sink is cancelling his GUADEC keynote. Eric’s been told by his doctors not to take the trip for health reasons, and while I’m disappointed (I was really looking forward to his keynote), I can of course understand his decision, and I wish him a full & speedy recovery.

I only just found out, and let Baris and the programme committee know, so I don’t know yet what we’re going to do given Eric’s cancellation. I’ll keep you all posted, of course, when I know more.

Boudewijn Rempt - Krita: Just a few days

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 08:15:33 +0000

And then I'll be able go into a restaurant again and enjoy my meal. Or go to the pub for a beer, without first flying out to hospitable Montreal, where I for the first time discovered how much fun a smoke-free pub could be. Dutch restaurants and cafes will be smoke-free from July 1st. Of course, restaurant and cafe owners are complaining that they "used to be hospitable, but now they have to tell guests they cannot do something". I've never found them hospitable.

Every time I had to eat out the past few years -- for work, for instance, or at a KOffice hack sprint I had to leave early or go home really sick. Whenever we had something to celebrate with the family, we'd go as early as possible to a restaurant, so we could have finished our dinner before the smoking customers started arriving. Sometimes that wouldn't work out, and I'd be sick again.

Kees Cook: another gnome easter egg

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 00:59:58 +0000

While I had tried the Alt-F2 “gegls from outer space” easter egg, I’d never done the “free the fish” one. It was fun, but while looking around for how to disable it (”killall gnome-panel” — there is no programmatic way to stop the fish), I found another egg that I don’t think any one has mentioned before. It re-uses the goat from the gegls game:

Right-click an open panel area
Select “properties”
Right-click on a notebook tab 3 times

Boudewijn Rempt - Krita: Yet another laptop...

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:15:15 +0000

I remember that just before Naomi was born, Irina and I said to each other "we'd better buy that hardware now, after the kid is born we won't be able to afford new computers anymore", so we bought a Psion series 3 for her and a Compaq Aero notebook for me. Little did we know....

So, when Irina's Toshiba laptop broke down a couple of weeks ago, she could make do with C20 vintage Gateway Solo laptop that used to be my work computer, until that one broke too. Enter a spanking new Lenovo Thinkpad R61e... Irina decided to run OpenSUSE 11 on it, although we had a recent Kubuntu as a fallback option.

Pretty much everyone seems to work out of the box: sound, suspend/resume, graphics, mouse, usb... But not the wifi. When I ordered the laptop, the specs said it contained an Intel wifi chip, but it's got an Atheros AR5212 a/b/g wifi adapter and I cannot manage to get it to work. OpenSUSE loads the athk5_pic driver by default, but for some reason that doesn't work (dmesg says "probe faild with error -5"). I've tried getting it to run with madwifi, but failed, and I've tried ndiswrapper, and failed, too. It doesn't work under Kubuntu 8.04 either...

It does work under Kubuntu 7.10 -- and I suspect that OpenSUSE 10.3 also works. It isn't the first time I've noticed this kind of regressions when upgrading: Naomi's very old Dell 5150 laptop has always worked perfectly. But an upgrade to Kubuntu 7.10 killed her sound.

Dave Neary: Maemo.org logo contest submissions - maemo wiki

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:59:28 +0000

The maemo.org logo competition is going strong, and we now have many dozens of logo contest submissions.

Some of my favourites so far:

The very first one, Attila’s butterfly

Jussi’s first effort - particularly with just the A and the E:

And Jussi’s second entry, with the Möbius strip. You can see the evolution of this idea, and his collaboration with Thiercito, on the latter’s talk page, which provided some insights into the creative process for me. It’d have been nice if he had trimmed some excess whitespace off the images, mind:

Think you can do better than these or other entries? There’s still lots of time left to get your entries in before the deadline! We’ll be announcing the selection process over the next week or two once the last details are sorted out.

Brian Tarricone: Advogato?

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:31:22 +0000

Some time ago I registered an Advogato account, but never really did anything with it. I was just poking around, and it seems there isn’t much I can do with the site without being certified by some unknown number of people first. So, if you believe that I’m actually me, and have an Advogato account, gimme some kind of certification.

Bryce Harrington: Responses to documents vs. streams

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:26:31 +0000

A number of people have contacted me with comments on my post yesterday about Document vs. Stream UI approaches.

Of particular note is a wiki Rudd-O has set up on Streams vs. Documents. If you find the concept interesting, you might find that a useful place to collaborate with others.

JL Dugger also shared some thoughts with me on Dataflow Languages. I wasn't familiar with the term, but the concept is one I've seen and used previously. I don't think it's necessary to write apps in one of these data flow languages - you can probably model that style of data flow processing in *any* language - but looking at how those languages are designed could probably give a ton of good implementation strategies. Another commenter echoed this with a quite informative discussion about 'functional reactive programming'.

Indeed, I think a lot of the ideas here are covering ground many others have thoroughly tread before. A few people pointed out various technologies and tools that already exist for doing stream oriented stuff; again though, my point is not that we *can't* handle streams, but rather that we already are doing lots of stream stuff, but the OS is not giving the support it should. Someone mentioned a not-yet-released Microsoft project called LiveMesh. (Personally, I long, long ago got worn out by MS products that take a great concept and implement only about half of it - with no way for me to get in and hook up the remaining bits myself, but to each their own.)

kyb outlined some thoughts about task streams with workflow aspects - something I totally agree with and have thought quite a bin on myself. I like the idea of prioritizing streams by work style type ("casual"/"concentrated"/"in the zone"). I myself find when working on bug triaging, that I deliberately break down my work in this fashion - in the mornings when I'm fresh I'll work on a handful of bugs that require a lot of thought, but in the evenings when I'm tired I prefer doing simpler triaging (typically going through and requesting bug reporters attach their Xorg.0.log's *grin*).

Both kyb and enobrev emphasized the need to be able to collate different kinds of streams (email, web urls, SMS, etc.) which may require indexing them into some neutral form, and then assigning various metadata properties to aid in organizing them, prioritizing them, determining if they must be seen or can age and expire, etc. Totally agreed.

Another user inquired about tracking changes on a collaborative SVG document in Inkscape. Glad you asked! :-) For a few years now we've been maintaining an experimental thing Ted Gould thought up called 'inkboard', an online whiteboard which allows multiple inkscape instances to interface to each other by communicating document changes through the jabber protocol. We don't ship it turned on by default, but if you rebuild inkscape from source, you can just pass configure the --enable-inkboard to flip it on. (We learned a lot of hard lessons in this; working effectively with streams is a lot more complex in practice than you realize.)

One comment pointed out that Google Apps, etc. provide these services on the server. I knew someone would inevitably bring up Google Apps. ;-) Web services obviously play a HUGE role in streams. Ignoring the open/closed issue here for now, my point is really that rather than consign my kick ass powerful desktop machine to being essentially just a dumb terminal, the underlying OS ought to get more involved in all these streams going around. Browsing lists, viewing bug reports, etc. etc. through firefox is operating at sluggish Comcast network speeds; we deserve the ability to do all this stuff at CPU speeds!

Also, a point I hope to get into in a future blog post is that an issue we have is that there are too many different UI's, and unfortunately with web services, the situation isn't much better. For instance, I love the Netflix UI approach, but it's completely different from GMail or Flickr (which also have great UI's optimized for their own purposes). Anyway, I'll leave that whole discussion for later.

This would be a good spot to mention an extremely interesting Desktop session at UDS2008 I enjoyed sitting through about UI integration of single-sign-on for web services. Ted Gould is maintaining a set of blueprints on the topic. The Ubuntu desktop team has some very intriguing plans under way.

Dave Neary: 7 young GNOME apps from a new generation

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:16:27 +0000

With the recent discussion in blogs around the GNOME world, it can be easy to forget that there have been some great new applications for GNOME appearing recently. Many of these are written by a new breed of GNOME developer, young students with none of the weight of history sitting on their shoulders, and they are great!

If you haven’t tried them yet, then you should. Most of these aren’t in the GNOME desktop suite, and could probably do with some more exposure.

Here’s a few that came to mind without me having to think too long:

GNOME Do: This is an amazing application! Its plug-in system is what makes it really great - add all music by an artist to your Rhythmbox playlist, tweet that you’re at your computer, send an IM to a contact, all with just a few keystrokes
Hamster: I discovered this app recently, and have been very impressed. A plug-in for GNOME Do, and it’d be perfect
Tasque: For the GTD wannabe that I am.A clean, small app to handle TODO lists.
Cheese!: Now that this is in the desktop, I guess everyone knows about it. A PhotoBooth clone with an authorwith a sense of humour - especially on April 1st.
Vagalume: My absolute favourite Last FM client.
Pimlico: A mobile suite of applications. I tried out Dates and Contacts on my N810, and was very impressed. Everything I personally want in a PIM - simple, functional, intuitive, beautiful.
Transmission: After using the old GNOME bittorrent client for so long, I was really happy to see someone put the work into making a sensible BT client for GNOME, and Transmission is it. Bravo.

Some of these apps have come from people working in companies like Igalia, Opened Hand and Novell, some of them from students, some of them from hack weeks, all of them have some things in common - a sense of aesthetics and attention to the user experience, lightweight user interfaces ruthlessly focussed on a core usecase. And all serve their users well.

Another thing that many of them share is a sense of humour - when using Hamster or Cheese, you can’t help but feel that the author was having a ball.

Nothing in particular set me writing this, I just wanted to point out that there are many new applications aimed at the end user coming out of GNOME, humour and creativity still live here.

Bryce Harrington: On Documents vs. Streams

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 23:10:39 +0000

The other day I was trying to figure out what was making my desktop computer run so slow. This was pretty unusual on Linux. Way back when I used to use Windows, I'd encounter such things due to running too many programs, so of course I looked at what was running.

But these days I don't really run that many intensive applications. I hardly ever use spreadsheets, presentation tools, word processors, or so on like I used to. Really the only things visible in my task bar were Firefox and Terminal. Killing off Firefox made no difference. And even more oddly, rebooting had no effect - within minutes my load average was up in the 20-30's.

Of course, the culprit was that I had a bunch of automatic cron jobs scheduled to occur at the same time. Reordering the timings got the system back on track.

But this led to an epiphany moment.

This was my *desktop* machine. The last time I'd seen this cron job I/O blocking madness was on servers. What was I doing with so many cron jobs on a *desktop*??

I looked at the individual cron jobs, and found that each and every one of them had something to do with my job. Disabling any one of them would reduce my work productivity. I could no longer do without one of these silly cron jobs than I could have done without Microsoft Excel a decade ago.

And then, as I looked around my desktop at the other things running on it - internet radio, IRC chat, mutt - that I noticed that I hardly ever use traditional "document-centric" applications. Everything running had something to do with dealing with _streams_ of information.

The realization sank in at that point, that our computer UI paradigm really stinks for what we actually use our computers for.

The prevailing UI paradigm today is built around the notion of document authoring. It expects that the main thing you do is create spreadsheets, word documents, presentations, and so on. There is a task bar to remind you of what documents you're editing, there is cross-application cut and paste so you can put pieces of one document into another. You can place documents on your desktop surface itself, so you can organize your work. You can define which applications to use for which types of docs. You can set up a default printer to put your documents to hard copy. You can set up system-wide fonts to use in documents. You can put icons to apps and even documents onto your panel. And on and on.

Occasionally, some of that is actually useful to me. But most of the time, for most of the work I do, it's all irrelevant. To pick one example, I used absolutely none of that in order to write this blog post.

Really, what I mostly do today is stream management. And I suspect this is true for the vast majority of people. I don't deal with writing documents, but with changes to documents. I put comments onto things. I slap patches onto things. I tweak the states of things. Once in a rare while I may author a completely new thingee, but even there I usually end up working with it as a stream of changes that I build up over time (and usually in collaboration with a few other people who stream changes to me).

Thinking about user interfaces this way, it occurs to me that there are a LOT of different kinds of streams. Streams of emails. Streams of spam to take *out* of my email stream. Streaming radio broadcasts. Streams of bug reports. Streams of software updates to apply. Streams of chatter on IRC. Streams of youtube video URL's from friends and family to check out. Streams of updates to my weather applet. Even my todo list is more like a stream of things coming in and going out, than like a static document I can print and save and be done with.

Each one of those silly cron jobs bogging down my computer were critically important for me, because THEY were the tools I used for helping me stay atop all these streams. They summarized my bug streams in various ways. They filtered my email streams into more organized sub-streams. They flagged tasks (and took care of certain tasks for me). They took care of updating the tools I used day to day.

It's weird that for all the document tools at my fingertips, it's a stodgy old *server* tool that is helps my productivity the most. I wonder how non-technical people not knowledgeable about crontab and scripting deal with such things?

This all got me to a key question... Since the purpose of our desktop UI is to make our work easier and more efficient, then if today's knowledge workers are, like me, more stream-oriented than document-oriented, then doesn't it stand to reason that we ought to re-think our UI design to optimize it for making stream management easier and more efficient? How would such optimization be done? How would such a UI look and feel? What kinds of toolkits would be needed?

Bryce Harrington: Inkscape (partly) switches to Cairo renderer

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 06:05:25 +0000

Cairofication of Inkscape took a big step forward today, with Bulia's announcement that several canvas items (bpaths, ctrllines, and ctrlquadrs) now being drawn using Cairo. Regular objects are still rendered as before, so there's still further work to be done.

Bryce Harrington: Contributing non-technically to open source

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 01:10:54 +0000

There were some great comments to my previous blog entry, Pay bounties in time, not money, including this one:

I would love to pay in time and not in money. But I don't have any programming skills whatsoever. I'm an office manager by trade. I'm skilled in interactions between people and (basically) herding cats... and I'm good at it, if I can say so myself :)
How can I use this experience to help Inkscape or Ubuntu? I don't really know if I can.

For Inkscape, I've already written up an answer in depth in Inkscape's FAQ entry: Are there non-coding ways to help? There has been a huge number of non-coder Inkscapers who have gotten involved with the project in these ways and helped to make it a roaring success. So for that half of the question let me just point there, and focus on the Ubuntu side of things.

A lot of people don't realize they CAN contribute. A widespread assumption is that software is technically hard and that you need advanced coding skills to do anything to contribute. It simply isn't true. And in fact if people think that way, it holds FOSS back from its true potential. Have a look-see at the above Inkscape link to see the big breadth of non-coding things that an average piece of software needs done to make it succeed: Tutorials, clipart, teaching other users, mocking up dialog changes, translating, testing, marketing, and (especially!) helping with the bug queue. Working on any of these (especially bugs!) can have the add-on effect of freeing up those who DO have coding skills to focus them on coding instead of all the other non-technical tasks that need to be done in order to make the software successful.

Let me focus specifically on management ("cat herding") since that was the question, and try to slant it towards Ubuntu.

I suspect one of the things developers enjoy about working on open source is that they don't have a boss! I'd bet that hardly any FOSS project would say they "need a manager". However, there is more to "management" than "being a boss", and indeed I think these aspects are among the highest areas of need with most open source projects.

For these reasons, let's also distinguish between "project owner" management where you are the primary lead of the project, and "contributor" management where you're a regular team member, and narrow our focus to the latter.

With Open Source management, I like to think it involves three kinds of work beyond regular development: a) Cheerleading, b) Taking out the trash, and c) Operating the switchboard.

"Cheerleading" is essentially just encouraging good behavior and motivating and inspiring people to do more work. If you've ever worked in a demoralized environment you can know how big of a productivity difference it can make when people are happy vs. not. With volunteer projects - as most FOSS projects are - morale is HUGELY important, and unfortunately there are a LOT of demoralized open source communities out there. Getting morale back is very hard, but imagine what a difference it makes for FOSS overall to take a dispirited, nearly defunct community, turn things around, and get developers excited again about pushing their software project forward.

With Ubuntu, this could involve simply cheering folks on at e.g. bug hug days, issuing thank-you's to people who fix bugs you care about, etc. or to identifying ineffective communities around particular areas of Ubuntu you think could be better, and stimulate them to be better organized and better focused towards progress.

"Taking out the trash" is the idea of handling the chores that other people don't wish to do, yet that have begun blocking up the project. This could be helping get the indefinitely-delayed release finally out the door, cleaning up an out-of-control bug tracking system, organizing a marketing effort, researching into the background of a serious blocker bug, fixing the website, or resolving some differences of opinion that have split the project. In other words, find the things that EVERYONE complains about, but no one actually does, and to devote yourself to doing THAT. Often, once you demonstrate leadership charging right into the problem, others will follow your example and assist - sometimes even taking care of the technical hard parts you are apprehensive about doing yourself!

In Ubuntu, certainly the biggest "chore" right now is the mass of bug reports in the bug tracker. Organizing testing activities is another area where contributions could make a huge difference.

"Operating the switchboard" is probably one of the most rewarding (and unrecognized) management contributions you can make in FOSS. Everyone knows that lots of issues end up just being failures of communication. So if you turn this around, you realize that many problems can be solved just by stimulating the right channels of discussion. Thus, without really needing to deeply understand a technical issue, you can solve problems just by finding the right two people, and linking them together. For example, this might be by linking a well motivated but inexperienced coder banging their head on a bug, with an experienced coder who can give advice; or it could be putting an upstream developer in touch with an engineer at a hardware manufacturing company with the data sheets about the HW you care about; or it could be getting developers of two different applications together to discuss issues like a consistent protocol format. You know when you've made the right introduction, because you see the two instantly go off into technical depths way over your head. Be sure to check back in a day or two to see how the discussions went, so you can help see that follow up actions get taken, or results communicated to third parties appropriately.

For Ubuntu, there are probably infinite areas where locating the right upstream person and hooking them to the right MOTU or core-dev person can advance a bug a LONG way.

Cyrille Berger: Shiva, a lot of excitement for a small achievement.

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 23:50:18 +0000

Shiva is the sister to CTL programing language I am developing, for the second class of graphics algorithms: kernels. Since both CTL and Shiva are heavily based on C, they can share a lot of code, almost the same parser and lexer, and the code generation is made by llvm.

Anyway, back to the point, a big excitement for a small achievement. Last night, I was at last, able to generate this image with Shiva:

I guess you are wondering wether their browser is broken and is unable to correcly display the image. I can't be serious about being excited by the generation of a gray image, can I ? Well I did say it was a small achievement. The only beauty behind this image is the way it was generated:


kernel PlainGenerator
{
  void evaluatePixel(out pixel result)
  {
    result[0] = 0.5;
  }
}

Shiva aimed at being simple to learn, and easy to share, meaning the user don't have to learn how to compile it, or how to find binary specific for its system, that he can use it without fear of virus, and last, but not least, that he can use it in any application, a few lines of code are enough to integrate OpenShiva in an application.

While the above image was the first to be generated, it's allready possible to generate more sophisticated images, such as a gradient:

Or generates fractal :

While OpenShiva is currently only able to generate images, and not mix images together, which is what a kernel is about, the most difficult part of the library has been written now, all what remains to do (and it's still a lot of work) is to connect all the bits together, and then, debug (writing the fractal generator made me discovered a ton of bugs...), and polish, and debug, and polish, and...

Kees Cook: bold fonts in libvte (gnome-terminal, terminator)

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 19:22:40 +0000

Cyrille Berger: Nightly package build of KOffice for OpenSuSE

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 00:58:47 +0000

For a while, now, I have been making nightly package of KOffice for OpenSuSE (10.3, 10.4, 11.0) using the OpenSuSE build service. I haven't make a more public announcement until now, since I am using Debian myself I couldn't test them. But Simon Schmeisser (of the flake marble shape fame) told me that he used the package with success for developing is flake shape, so I will assume that the package work.

Here are link to repository for the various OpenSuSE version for which there is currently a built:

OpenSuSE 10.3 repository

OpenSuSE 10.2 repository (you will probably need to explicitelly add the KDE4 repository)

OpenSuSE 10.3 repository (you will probably need to explicitelly add the KDE4 repository)

OpenSuSE 10.3 with the marble shape linking against KDE4.1 (you will probably need to explicitelly add the KDE4 repository)

On a side note, you can also find package for OpenGTL (and llvm) for 10.2 and 10.3. Not for 11.0, since for some reasons, OpenSuSE doesn't ship with older version of gcc.

Nightly packages for other distributions might also arrive in the future, debian is first in line. Having a debian package will make it easier to have a klick package, since it didn't work out with klick and my OpenSuSE rpm packages, the draw back is that on the build service, only the stable version of debian is available, which doesn't have kdelibs 4.0. For me, klick would be the ideal solution to reach testers, without intrusion on their system.

MenTaLguY: Grand Central WAGgery

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:49:01 +0000

Apple’s announcement of their Grand Central technology sounds interesting, but it’s pretty light on details. Here’s my wild guess, based on the intersection of what they’ve hinted at and what I would do if I were in their shoes: my guess is that they’re integrating support for fine-grained scheduling (as in e.g. TBB) into the OS scheduler, which would enable smarter global decisions about things like work balancing and cache warmth.

Think M:N threads with better kernel support, but minus the usual attempt to make the “userspace” portion of the scheduler preemptive. If they’re smart, they’ll also include non-blocking/asynchronous equivalents of standard blocking APIs, though in principle with sufficient kernel support they could also permit tasks to use some blocking operations in more transparent ways.

I guess we’ll see how good my guess was in a year or so.

Cyrille Berger: Weab 0.2 and Kalculus 0.7

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:02:17 +0000

I should do more release of both of those applications, but I mostly develop them for my personnal use, but I guess since they can be of use for someone else, why not publish the code. The two of them are developed using the QtRuby binding.

Weab

It's the application I use to manage my websites (cberger.net, Krita-Plugins, the OpenGTL family). I originally started Weab to have something simple to manage my website (add some pictures, some texts et voila), but since my website is low priority, so is Weab (and it seems that Firefox doesn't like my CSS which makes my website a poor example of what the application can do :/), so I guess it will never turn in a real widely useful application, unless it interest someone else to work on it ?

Previous release was like over a year now, and the three main changes are:

A Journal section, for writing news entry or blog entry
The possibility to insert images inside the text
There are also a lot of small bug fixing and adjustment in the gallery module.

If you are interested, you can download version 0.2 here.

Kalculus

It's a front-end to Octave, Yacas and Ruby/GSL, and all kind of command line like calcul application. I also use it to control the algorithm I make for my PHD. In the previous released, I was using bindings to control Octave and Yacas, but that was annoying, since one of the main advantage of ruby application is easy deployment without the need to compile something (and anyway the octave binding was breaking for every released), so the main new thing, in the 0.7 release, is that the Octave and Yacas back-end call directly the interpreter. I have also added some other features that are mostly useful for the back-end used for my PHD.

If you are interested, you can download version 0.7 here.

Kees Cook: Linux Plumbers Conference 2008

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:17:09 +0000

The Call for Speakers (and registration) for the Linux Plumbers Conference is open! Get those proposals in, register, and come join us in sunny Portland, OR.

The Linux Plumbers Conference was created to bring together the key developers involved in Linux plumbing - the “Linux plumbers” - and give them an opportunity to discuss problems face-to-face, both within subsystems and across subsystems. Participants include invited attendees, speakers selected through an open, competitive review process, and students. Registration is open to the general public as well.
…
The goal of the Plumbers Conference is to solve problems. The conference is arranged as a series of microconferences, each on a topic that is narrow enough to identify specific problem areas and brainstorm workable solutions. Each microconference is led by an expert in the field and organized to encourage discussion and problem solving.

Brian Tarricone: HTTPS is broken and Firefox 3 makes it worse

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:42:02 +0000

[Note: this is mainly a long rant. If you're just curious about my possible solutions, scroll to the last few paragraphs.]

I’ve been using the Firefox 3 betas (and now release candidates) for quite a few months now, and overall, I think it’s a great improvement over Firefox 2. My main issues in the past with FF2 have always been with performance and memory usage, and FF3 seems to go very far in addressing both of these (though there’s always still room to improve).

However, there’s one thing I just can’t get over: the SSL error pages. Before I describe FF3’s added annoyance here, let me start by saying one thing: the HTTPS model is broken and much less useful than it could be.

Why?

Because the HTTPS/SSL model tries to simultaneously combine two things: encryption and authentication. When you visit a HTTPS site, you get an end-to-end encrypted connection between your web browser and the web server, obviously. But you also get something else, in theory: assurance that the web server on the other end is actually owned and operated by who it says it is. This is done through a hierarchical certificate signing scheme, wherein the browser knows a few “trusted” root certificate authorities (CAs), and any web server SSL certificate that wants to be considered “trusted” (as far as the browser is concerned) needs to ultimately be signed by one of those root CAs. (In practice, this doesn’t mean each and every web server SSL cert needs to be signed by a root CA, just that every trusted SSL cert needs to be signed by another signing certificate that was signed by a root CA, or by another signing cert that is signed by a root CA somewhere in its ancestry.)

So where’s the flaw? Getting your SSL cert signed by a trusted cert authority costs money. This is fine for banks, but not so fine for some random guy who just wants secure communications with his home server, or webmail, or just a small self-funded website where an encrypted connection makes sense. A semi-solution is self-signed certificates. You can create your own SSL certificate, and your web server will use it, and people who connect to your web server on the HTTPS port will get encryption. But, as far as the browser is concerned, your cert isn’t signed by anyone on its trusted list.

So, the website visitor is usually presented with a confusing dialog box warning that the website they’re visiting shouldn’t be trusted. Visitors who understand all this stuff just roll their eyes, click the “allow” button and go on with their day. People who don’t really understand all this, but just want to visit the site, blindly click “allow” and go on with their day. Some panicky users may freak out, click “cancel,” and not visit the site.

The people in the middle there are the ones in danger. Blindly accepting dialog boxes just to get them out of the way can get you in trouble if the dialog box is actually warning you of something important. In the context of visiting Gentoo’s HTTPS bug tracker website, the warning actually is unimportant: Gentoo is just using a self-signed cert to avoid paying for a “real” cert, and just wants HTTPS for the encryption, not for the authentication. However, in the context of Bank of America’s online banking service (just to pick one), the warning is very important: it likely means that someone has intercepted your communications and is trying to masquerade as BoA’s server so they can steal your bank account credentials. Or it could also mean you typed the URL incorrectly, and someone malicious has registered the typo-hostname in the hopes of snaring someone with careless fingers.

So there’s a problem, definitely. The Firefox 3 developers have chosen to attack this problem by attempting to push people into the panicky-user camp, though they misguidedly believe that they’re actually getting users to try to read the messages and make an “informed” decision (despite the fact that they haven’t given — and really can’t give — enough information to inform most users). The new SSL error pages in Firefox 3 put up a scary, confusing, uninformative message right inside the browser window. The message, at first glance, looks reminiscent of one of the several “connection error” messages, so the first reaction is to look up at the address bar to see if you typed the address correctly, and then wonder why the site is down. Then you go and read the error message. Basically, it says a lot of confusing things — including a semi-raw error enumeration code that is sure to confuse the user even more — with a very short explanation of the real problem: “The certificate is not trusted because it is self signed.” What are the chances that the average user will know what this means? Slim to none.

Then there’s some text about adding an exception, and instead of a button, a URL link (in a small font) that you can click to add an exception. Well, sorta. Clicking the link merely modifies the error page to display another semi-scary message, and then shows two buttons: one with a stupid caption: “Get me out of here!” (don’t get me started on this one), and the other saying “Add Exception…” Ok, fine, so I click “Add Exception…” Now I get a dialog box, and my eyes automatically seek the bottom of the box, assuming the “confirm” button will be there, waiting for me to click. But it’s not. It’s there, but it’s disabled. Huh? So I look up higher, and I see that only two buttons can be clicked: a “Cancel” button (well, duh, obviously that’s not it), and a “Get Certificate” button. Ok, well, I guess I’ll try that one. Now the text in the middle of the box changes to tell me “Certificate is not trusted, because it hasn’t been verified by a recognized authority.” What? I know what all this stuff means, and I have to read it twice to get it. Your average user doesn’t stand a chance. Finally, though, the “confirm” button is active, and they’ve helpfully (wow, they actually did something remotely helpful here!) pre-checked the “Permanently store this exception” check box for me.

So, in total, I have to make four clicks, plus read a bunch of confusing terminology, to get to a website with a self-signed SSL certificate.

This sucks. The UI is absolutely terrible, and the average web user is going to have no idea what’s going on. According to the Firefox developers, one of the goals of these new error pages is to cut down on “dialog box whack-a-mole” where users just blindly click to get the dialog out of the way. I fail to see how this is going to help. Some users will now get even more confused, and not visit the site. For the *extremely* rare case where a malicious site is masquerading as the site they actually want, this is good. But for the much more common case of an innocent site that just wants SSL for the encryption, this is bad. And for most of the users in the “blindly dismiss” bunch, they’ll just get used to blindly dismissing this new page+dialog in record time.

What’s the real solution? Ideally: scrap the current system. There’s no reason why connection encryption needs to be so tightly coupled with authentication/identification. Design a new system, possibly with a new protocol scheme. One scheme should be used for “strong” security, where both the identity of the site and cryptographic strength of the connection are checked. The other scheme will just check the encryption. Users will need to be educated that you never try to connect to your banking site using the less-secure scheme. Sure, user education is always a problem, but it’s a problem we still face with the current non-solutions in place.

Of course, in the real world, we can’t just scrap a protocol that has been in use for over a decade, and expect everyone (web servers, web browsers, the cert-signing industry) to change overnight — or at all.

So I’d advocate dropping all the panic about self-signed certs and, in addition, handling HTTPS sites by keeping more state about them in the browser. For starters, at the simplest level, let’s stop putting up scary messages when we hit a self-signed site. We’re already coloring the address bar differently for HTTPS sites; why not have a different (slightly scary?) color for HTTPS sites that use self-signed certs? There could even be an easily-disableable bubble popup (that doesn’t take focus!) that points out the “problem” and is clickable for more information. Or something like that. At minimum, if you visit your bank site all the time and *don’t* see this warning and color change, you’ll think twice the time you do.

But to make this stronger, the browser can keep state about the HTTPS sites we’ve visited. Odds are, the first time you visit your banking site, it’ll probably be all correct and proper. So the browser notes the cert’s fingerprint, and the fact that it’s signed by a “trusted” authority, and checks it every time you visit the site. If the cert changes, and is now self-signed, the browser can raise a larger red flag: “Hey, this site that you visit all the time that usually has a trusted cert? Well, the cert is now self-signed and this might be someone trying to trick you.”

What about “phishing” attempts that use common misspellings? Well, if the browser knows that I’ve visited https://bankofamerica.com/ in the past, and it had a valid, trusted cert, and now I’ve visited https://bankofamarica.com/, and it not only has a self-signed cert, but has remarkably similar spelling to another site I visit that has a trusted cert, the browser can raise another big red flag. Finding similar spellings is nothing new: there are algorithms to do this that are old and very well-established.

How about phishing attempts that hide the true website URL by using an inline username/password string that looks familiar to the user? Well, we already cover this: Firefox pops up a dialog asking if you really want to connect to the site, presenting the real hostname, and showing the username passed in the URL. So, this new scheme doesn’t harm this case’s solution.

End rant.

Dave Neary: “We all have some learning to do”

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:39:47 +0000

“We all have some learning to do” - that was the core message of Ari Jaaksi’s presentation, which has turned into a massive shitstorm over the past few days.

Yet again, I’m amazed at a knee-jerk populist reaction to a news story, and completely stunned at the spin which has been given to this, and swallowed hook, line & sinker by a large group of supposedly intelligent people. It’s been going on for years, so perhaps one more time shouldn’t surprise me, but it does.

For the benefit of those living in a burrow, here’s the quote that started it all:

“We want to educate open-source developers,” said Jaaksi, who is Nokia’s vice president of software and heads up the Finnish handset manufacturer’s open-source operations. “There are certain business rules [developers] need to obey, such as DRM, IPR [intellectual property rights], SIM locks and subsidised business models.”

That’s the bit, since quoted without context, from an article which included the quote with little context in the first place. Look a little further, and you will see that this is the same message that Dr. Jaaksi delivered in San Francisco a few months ago: Nokia is learning how to interact with free software projects, but if free software developers want the software to be adopted further in mass-market products, then we need to understand the constraints that businesses work under, and address them.

In my mind, that’s a big “if”. Companies work under a bunch of constraints which don’t sit well with free software - DRM, the need for differentiation and a competitive edge. But also dealing with sub-contractors and suppliers who have their terms and conditions under which they’re prepared to work.

Some of the most outrageous things I’ve read these past few days:

“No more Nokia for me, I’m buying an iPhone”

Yeah, because Apple are a really free software friendly company.

”If Nokia can’t get the specs for chips from their suppliers, they should just build their own”

Uhmmm… do you really think that Nokia wants to go into competition with every micro-electronics company in the world? How much resources do people think Nokia really has?

Some people think that Nokia should use only free software in all their devices, regardless of the consequences of that (the consequences would be more difficult government validation of your phone with the GSM networks, no operator take-up of the phones, and thus no cheap phones subsidised when you take a subscription, and underpowered and outdated hardware). That may be fine for a user to have as an option if they don’t mind paying hundreds of dollars fora phone that doesn’t do as much as one that they can get for a tenth of the price or less - in fact, the Freerunner is aimed right at that market. It’s a niche market, not a mass market. One day, maybe…

In the meantime, the conclusion I draw from this is that the slashdot crowd aren’t as reasoned as I had hoped, many people who should know better are jumping to conclusions based on news headlines. What ever happened to critical thought?

Free software is great, a momentous gift to the world, but does not provide the answer to all questions. Sometimes, free software will not be the answer. Some sets of constraints will exclude us from the start. The battle is to change the constraints. But you cannot expect a business to lose money to satisfy philosophical arguments. If you’re ever talking to someone and trying to “sell” them free software, your starting point should be: “how will this (make|save) me money?”

Usually that answer will be easy to find - lower R&D costs, licencing fees, support costs you control better by deciding when to buy support, on what terms. But occasionally, there is no argument. There is no way to persuade Microsoft that releasing Office under the GPL would be a money-making move for them - it plainly wouldn’t be.

So if the answer to that question is “it won’t”, then wish them well, perhaps recommend something that will, and move on to another subject.

Boudewijn Rempt - Krita: OpenSUSE 11

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 12:15:24 +0000

I had to upgrade -- since moving to KDE4, I cannot get KDevelop 3 working again, and OpenSUSE's 10.3 XEmacs crashes when editing C++ files if the all-important kde-emacs extensions are active. And I cannot get used to developing with Kate -- even though the katepart in KDevelop works just fine for me. No editor, no code! A quick test with the OpenSUSE 11 live-cd showed that the XEmacs bug is fixed -- so, I had to upgrade.

Generally speaking, I'm impressed. The installation artwork is very nice, the installation was very smooth. Hardware recognition on my X61t tablet is fine, although the tablet is not activated out of the box. Networkmanager works, for the first time in my experience. The OpenSUSE guys have succeeded in making a perfectly usable and pretty desktop out of KDE 4.0. Installing software is a lot faster. Somehow, the xrandr rotation still doesn't work like it should, though.

And I need to decide: will I upgrade the 4.0 desktop to the factory packages and try to develop on that (if that's actually possible, or should I delete the 4.0 desktop and use my kdesvn-build KDE4 installation?

the GIMP: GIMP 2.5.1 Released

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 06:19:32 +0000

GIMP 2.5.1 is another snapshot from the 2.5 development series. It gives developers and interested users a view into the current development towards GIMP 2.6. The changes in GIMP 2.5 are listed in the NEWS file.

If you want to give this development snapshot a try, please make sure you read the Release Notes for GIMP 2.5.

MenTaLguY: The Museum of RetroTechnology

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 03:04:24 +0000

The Museum of RetroTechnology is a compilation of various “steampunk-type” technologies which were or are in use in the real world.

(Hat Tip: Nathan)

Boudewijn Rempt - Krita: Comparing Krita and Photoshop

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:15:25 +0000

One of the things people immediately notice when they see Krita for the first time is that we've got the same basic layout as Photoshop: toolbox on the left, palettes on the right and a single toolbar under the menubar. The second thing everyone notices is that Photoshop has nice, small widgets in their palettes, and we use ordinary Qt widgets. Qt doesn't provide any way to scale down widgets to, say, 80% (although we might use a QGraphicsView in the dockers with Widgets-on-Canvas...). KDE4.1 offers a "small" font setting that, when used, shrinks the dockers a little bit.

But... Do we actually grab more working space from the user than Adobe? The following image says not: it's a 1024x768 display screenshot of a maximized Photoshop 7 overlayed on a ditto Krita 2alpha8 screenshot, using the Oxygen style.

As you can see, our toolbox is a bit wider because of the Oxygen margins, but our dockers are a bit smaller. All-in-all, the working area is just as big as in Photoshop.

Kees Cook: zombie meme

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 06:45:20 +0000

Tollef posted a fun (and short) Zombie mem:

You are in a mall when zombies attack. You have:

One weapon

One song blasting on the speakers

One famous person to fight along side you.

I can’t resist.

BFG9000: ranged weapon that vaporizes multiple zombies at once. I should be out of the mall before I’m out of ammo.
“Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys: up beat and a little silly.
Jet Li: he could totally handle the zombies within slicing/kicking/clubbing range.

Cyrille Berger: LGPLv2 is compatible with (L)GPLv3 and later

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 23:54:29 +0000

Lets kill a myth, I often hear or read that LGPLv2 (without the "or later mention") is not compatible with (L)GPLv3 and later. Which is wrong, since LGPLv2 can be converted to GPLv3 or later, which makes it compatible with GPLv3 (and since LGPLv3 can be converted to GPLv3...) this is the content of the LGPLv2 that states this:

3. You may opt to apply the terms of the ordinary GNU General Public License instead of this License to a given copy of the Library. To do this, you must alter all the notices that refer to this License, so that they refer to the ordinary GNU General Public License, version 2, instead of to this License. (If a newer version than version 2 of the ordinary GNU General Public License has appeared, then you can specify that version instead if you wish.) Do not make any other change in these notices.
Once this change is made in a given copy, it is irreversible for that copy, so the ordinary GNU General Public License applies to all subsequent copies and derivative works made from that copy.
This option is useful when you wish to copy part of the code of the Library into a program that is not a library.

And for those who don't believe my interpretation, it's completely in agreement with the
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility">
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility">
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility">FSF faq on the subject. So, tonight, lets kill once and for all one of the many bullshit we can heard and see on the internet.

Dave Neary: IRC chat on decadence

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:24:32 +0000

This IRC conversation, in some sense, sums up all my feelings about the recent decadence wave running through GNOME.

Me:

It seems like there are lots of interesting directions to go, which would add transversal functionality to GNOME which would be really new & useful. And they’ve been around for years.

Think of a geographically aware desktop, presenting contextual data based on where you are. Or something like Dashboard, presenting contextual data based on what you’re doing. Or something like the project-based desktop, showing only data which is related to a particular project/topic. Or person-based, where your contacts are first-class objects and you’re always aware of who’s around. Or integrating with existing online RESTful services, and (why not?) creating others that meet our standards.

And we have libraries for all of this stuff - GeoClue, Beagle, LeafTag (or something similar), Telepathy.

All you need to do (!) is add useful features based on that information to all of the applications that people use, from email through web, office, communications, games, …

Simple!

ozamosi

I Would do that myself, but I’m busy writing a blog post about that someone should do it.

Dave Neary: Taking the wraps off the new wiki.maemo.org

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:37:20 +0000

A few weeks ago, a new MediaWiki instance was installed by Ferenc Szekely of the maemo team, in response to numerous requests. Many people were not fans of Midgard’s user interface for the wiki, and missed a number of features available in other wiki software. And so we have been undertaking the second major migration for the maemo wiki (we previously moved from MoinMoin).

Over the past couple of weeks or so, I’ve been organising a small team which has moved over content from the old wiki, has worked on stylesheets, templates and categories which make sense, and we’re now ready to take the wraps off! Head on over to http://wiki.maemo.org and have a look.

This is not a finished work, like most wikis. Content in the “Midgard wiki” category needs review and editing, and a lot of theofficial documentation of maemo will be wikiised over the coming weeks and months. Some content still needs migrating and categorisation. But we have a decent start, an editing team, and the new wiki has already been baptised with its first couple of pages with over 100 edits: 100Days and 2010 Agenda.

Credit where credit’s due! The following people have been outstanding throughout the migration: GeneralAntilles, jaffa, Niels Breet, ludovicus, trickie and Navi. I’m probably leaving lots of people out but these guys have made their mark with me over the past couple of weeks.

Boudewijn Rempt - Krita: Comfy...

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 20:15:26 +0000

Yesterday I suddenly realized that KDE4 is getting really comfortable to work in, even on my low-resolution (1024x768) laptop. Sure, I have to tweak a bit: all fonts are too big, the Oxygen colours are a bit too colourful, notify sounds need to be disabled, wallpaper changed. But that's simply the desktop equivalent of moving into a new house. I think I've got KDE4 configured just right now.

There are things that make me so totally go wow: the cover flow window switcher, the breath-taking new login splash, the panel resizer thingy... Krunner is much more useful and much easier to use than the old minicli. There are things that are a bit ho-hum: systemsettings doesn't do much for me, although it's comfy enough. I have to run KDE3's kpowersave to make my laptop sleep when I close the lid. And I don't like the extra space between lines, especially when using a monospace font like the old Misc Console. Akregator hangs very quickly.

But worst of all: I have broken Krita. The tools don't get activated anymore. Aargh!

But apart from that, I'm quite comfortable now.

Alexandre Prokoudine: On evil proprietary technologies

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:48:16 +0000

Some of you, people, dislike Novell for Mono. Next step would be boycotting any open source application that can make a good use of OpenType fonts. Because the OTF technology, you know, also comes from Microsoft. What’s “worse” is that Adobe participated too

Yes, I’m in a very linuxhaters mood today.

Dave Neary: GUADEC table quiz is cancelled

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 10:26:52 +0000

For those who were looking forward to the GUADEC table quiz, I’m sorry to say that it won’t be happening this year. Unfortunately, problems organising an appropriate site, and a lack of room in the schedule (which is packed with great social events) mean that it’s not going to fit in this year. Thanks for all your interest though - and hopefully the torch will get carried on to next year. Quizzes are, after all, great.

Cyrille Berger: Last week in KOffice...

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 00:09:38 +0000

The big news in KOffice this week is the released of a new Alpha. Among the nice stuff about this release, a lot of improvement on the odf support, sounds and notes in KPresenter. It's also the first release where we have binaries for three platforms linuxes, Windows and MacOSX.

But what makes me truly happy is that while KOffice, in general, is not ready to receive bug reports, since there are a lot of highly visible issues to solve, some applications are more ready, KSpread, Krita, Karbon and the report component of Kexi, and are open for bug reports, which is really exciting because it means we are getting closer to a final release.

Don't expect any update on what is going in KOffice from me in the next three weeks, since I will be in Paris without a KOffice build, and the European Football Cup will use a lot of my free time. But I expect to have a lot of bugs reports to close for when I go back in Toulouse ! So go testing Krita.

MenTaLguY: Yes.

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:33:03 +0000

(On YouTube)

MenTaLguY: The Rebellion Within

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:37:45 +0000

The Rebellion Within is a long but really fascinating and somewhat surprising look at the origins and recent development of Jihadist organizations since the 1970s.

(Hat Tip: Tim Bray)

Dave Neary: Brothers separated at birth?

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 09:04:08 +0000

I only noticed this after finally meeting him in the flesh at LinuxTag - Aaron Seigo bears an uncanny resemblance to Franck Ribé ry, French footballer extraordinaire (except for the scars that Franck got going through a windshield as a kid and the funky hairdo).

The proof?

Aaron Seigo

Franck Ribery

Dave Neary: links for 2008-06-05

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 23:31:38 +0000

Does an atmosphere generator like this exist? - Internet Tablet Talk Forums

This would be a great plug-in for rhythmbox - generate pink noise like the wind in the willows, a mountain stream, birds signing in the trees… I don’t know how you’d do it, mixing different samples + some randomisation?

(tags: pink noise audio music sounds)
Relaxing music, sleep-aids, anxiety reduction, relaxation tools

A decent source for samples for the relaxing sound generator plug-in?

(tags: rhythmbox relaxing sounds pink noise)
freesound :: home page

Another possible source of free sound samples

(tags: sound samples pink noise relaxing rhythmbox)

Dave Neary: Paperwork blues

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:54:53 +0000

There’s a curious phenomenon I’ve noticed when I attend conferences. During the conference, the energy of everyone around me pumps me up & keeps me going. I love meeting people & talking to them, hearing about the cool stuff they’re up to and making contacts for new projects. This was true of meeting the maemo guys last week - we had a great evening talking about tablets, maemo, and life in general over mugs of good German beer.

But after the conference, it’s like you’ve been on some kind of artificial high of late nights, early mornings, high concentration & caffeine charged conversations - and you get on the plane to come home, and you just deflate.

It always seems to take me about the same length to recover from a conference as I spent at the conference. Which meant that I was still in a funk on Monday, when I decided that the first thing I had to do was get rid of some Stuff.

Paperwork had built up over the past month or so, I had bits & pieces all over my desk, in stacks on the floor, in drawers… From what I can tell from Getting Things Done (I’m about half way through! yay!), this is a pretty normal situation - something comes into your hand that you can’t forget, but that you can’t handle right away, so you add it to the top of a bunch of other stuff which you couldn’t do straight away, but which you couldn’t forget, and there it lays until you’ve forgotten it.

And so Monday and Tuesday, I spent ages working through email, expenses, receipts, forms for insurance, tax returns and all of the other things that had been building up. At the end of it, my life feels a bit cleaner, but I’ve got the impression I lost half the week.

I can’t wait until the magic happens and my office space suddenly becomes magically organised so that filing becomes fun and I always have a list of things I can do, regardless of what I’m up to at the time. That’ll be fun (I’m not holding my breath).

Alexandre Prokoudine: LensFun in UFRaw

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:47:42 +0000

Just a day after I blogged that it’s unknown when LensFun will land to UFRaw the patch entered holy waters of UFRaw’s CVS I bet you’ve been waiting for that for quite a while

The user interface is built so that if the used preset is OK, you don’t go any further. But if you want to tweak options, you have plenty of them to play with:

Looks cool, eh?

(more…)

MenTaLguY: Want to Become a WiiWare Developer?

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:52:55 +0000

There was a lot of buzz about WiiWare on the message boards when it first came out, as if it were something with a low barrier to entry comparable to, say, Microsoft’s XNA.

It’s not, okay guys? WiiWare is just an alternate distribution channel for Wii games, complimenting pressed discs in stores. Since WiiWare games are necessarily smaller in scope and the distribution mechanism doesn’t involve the same financial commitments as discs, Nintendo will certainly approve titles for WiiWare that wouldn’t be worth their while to approve as a UPC to go on shelves, and perhaps will also be willing to take a little more risk with developers who have less proven experience, but that’s about the extent of the difference to regular Wii development.

That said, if you’re an indie game development company leasing commercial office space, with some published titles under your belt (or at least a wildly popular flash games site), and for some inexplicable reason you managed to get that far without knowing where to look for these things, the Nintendo SDSG has a list of requirements and an application form posted on their website.

I hope that helps clear up any confusion.

Alexandre Prokoudine: Rendering 3D models in Inkscape

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:05:38 +0000

The newly announced Corel DESIGNER Technical Suite X4 includes Deep Exploration Standard Edition that allows viewing and embedding 3D CAD models to PDF files. Which means support for over 80 file formats used in CATIA, Autodesk Inventor, Pro/ENGINEER, SolidWorks and Unigraphics NX.

Since a week or so SVN version of Inkscape can now render OBJ files. While the extension is called “3D Polyhedron”, it can actually render more than that

I also tried the version of this elephant (found in Internet) with 10150 faces (that is 5500 grouped objects) and it renders, but working with such a document is a pain on my old Centrino laptop.

Makes me wonder if it would be possible to extract import/export filters from Blender and marry them to Inkscape. For now let’s say “Thank you!” to someone called inductiveload who posted this nice extension to LP

Bryce Harrington: Pay bounties in time, not money

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 22:28:55 +0000

I can't count the number of times people have offered $100 bounties for implementing some feature or other in Inkscape.

From what I've seen - and I've seen MANY features come into Inkscape from folks who aren't developers - $100 is the wrong way to do it.

Not that people are anti-money or anything like that. Certainly we've gotten rabid success out of our Google Summer of Code projects, but these pay out $4500. So maybe $100 just isn't the right price point to stir interest (even a simple feature is going to require 10-20 hrs work, at which point you might make more flipping burgers!)

In any case, aside from GSoC, I've not really seen that many successful cash-for-code projects in Inkscape.

But I *have* seen a number of similar situations that ended up *quite* successful, but didn't involve money at all.

The Mac port of Inkscape is my favorite example. Inkscape started as a Linux-only product but quickly gained a Windows port. A lot users were also very interested in seeing a Mac port, but few of the active developers were all that interested. I think maybe someone even offered a $100 bounty for it, although I'm not certain; in any case none of the existing developers took interest in doing the port.

But there was one user that was really interested in getting it, and he sat down and hacked away on it. After a few weeks he talked to me and said it was just too frustrating to get something that worked properly and he was giving up on porting it. (IIRC, he was able to get it to build but not cleanly, and when it ran it didn't work properly.)

I sympathized but encouraged him to write up his notes into the Inkscape Wiki, to explain how far he got and the problems he ran into. "Maybe someone else will know how to sort those issues out some day."

Meanwhile, people continued to clamor for a Mac port. Eventually, another person took interest in just doing it himself, and when he asked me about it, I pointed him at the wiki page the prior person had written. This was useful in getting a leg up, and he was able to sort out the build problems the first person had run into, but he eventually also gave up frustrated with the limited results he saw. I encouraged him to update the wiki page with his findings.

This cycle went on for some time, but eventually enough knowledge had accumulated that someone (JiHo I think) was able to clean it all up into a proper procedure, and to start getting successful builds that more people could use. This enabled people to focus on the next layer up - fixing the Mac-specific bugs.

Now there were also complaints that while it ran on Mac, it looked out of place and was hard to install due to its dependence on libx11. People started clamoring for a "Native Mac Inkscape Port". And so the cycle began again...

In Inkscape I've seen this pattern repeated again and again. And not just in Inkscape. This seems to be a universal mechanism for how open source works. I'm sure there's an aphorism or law or something that describes it.

In any case, the lesson that can be taken from this is that if you want to get some feature or fix into an open source project, rather than offering money, have a go at it yourself. Even if it is well beyond your technical ability or time availability, your efforts may be enough to simulate someone else to eventually have a go at it too. This could be a detailed procedure you followed that got close to working but had a fatal problem. Or a messy patch you made that *should* work but doesn't. Or it might be a list of possible solutions you've ruled out and why.

If you think, "I want a way to just throw money at the problem and make it just work," then remind yourself, "Time is money" and throw time at the problem instead of cash. Spend $100 worth of your time banging your head on the issue, trying out ideas and hacking on code if possible, and posting the results even if they turned up negative. They may give someone enough of a clue to stand on your shoulders and reach the goal.

Alexandre Prokoudine: Selfquoting

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 10:41:32 +0000

Sins are like shareware — first you enjoy, but in the end you always pay

MenTaLguY: A Harley Pedal Stop for Aeolus

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 02:39:05 +0000

Harley Davidson supposedly puts a lot of care into the sound of their motorcycle exhaust systems. What if a Harley exhaust system or three were rigged to a pipe organ to supply the nice low notes you can’t normally get?

My brilliant friend Nathan took some time to simulate the result using the Aeolus organ simulator to record a performance of BVW540 (a Bach Toccata and Fugue in F Major) using the “Harley stop”.

MenTaLguY: The Future of the Omnibus

Sat, 31 May 2008 23:46:14 +0000

After Andrea O. K. Wright’s wildly popular (popular as in she had to schedule a second session after the first one literally overflowed with people) RailsConf talk it seems like now is a good time to give an update on my plans for the Omnibus Concurrency Library, especially after I’ve neglected it for so long.

At this point, the next version of the library is likely to be a complete rewrite, licensed under an MIT-style license similar to Rubinius’. It will aim to support at least the following Ruby implementations, with others following as time and interest permit:

Ruby 1.8
Ruby 1.9
Rubinus
JRuby

Portability

Presently, only JRuby presents opportunities for improved parallel performance with Omnibus’ thread-centric implementation; under Ruby 1.8, 1.9, and Rubinius, performance will necessarily be equal to or less than single-threaded performance. Why support them at all? There are two main reasons:

The first reason to support green-threaded Ruby implementations is for the sake of portability, allowing the same program that runs under JRuby on a multi-core behemoth from Sun to scale all the way down to a single-CPU machine running Ruby 1.8 with its green threads.

Secondly, concurrent programming abstractions are often convenient ways to structure programs even on single-processor systems. (If they weren’t, nobody would ever bother with Ruby 1.8’s green threads.)

Additionally, the concurrency picture for some of these Ruby implementations is not necessarily bleak in the long-term: Rubinius already permits taking advantage of multiple threads per process in separate VMs. A future version of Rubinius may offer more fine-grained multicore support, and a future version of Omnibus may find ways to exploit things like the existing per-VM multicore support, or even include support for fork-based parallelism for some purposes.

Organization

Rather than Omnibus remaining a monolithic library, I’m also going to be breaking things up in order to enable individual components to be released as separate gems (and hopefully in a more timely fashion):

concurrent – “omnibus” gem which pulls in the others as dependencies
concurrent-actors – Actors for Ruby
concurrent-futures – Futures for Ruby
concurrent-joins – Join calculus for Ruby
concurrent-parallel – Parallel algorithms and parallel extensions to core/stdlib classes (corresponding roughly to TBB parallel algorithms)
concurrent-primitives – Grab-bag of simple primitives like channels
concurrent-selectable – Semaphore and a few other primitives which can be waited on using existing event-based IO libraries, or just IO.select (DONE)
concurrent-sequential – Force strict sequential execution of asynchronous tasks, even in the face of multiple threads or reentrancy. Don’t laugh, it’s useful.
concurrent-tasks – Task-oriented parallelism (similar to TBB tasks)

Major Changes and Incompatibilities

One of the major changes coming is that the library will handle asynchronous tasks (e.g. from futures, or joins) by dispatching them to a TBB-like task scheduler instead of simply spawning a new thread for each task. In most cases this means that the creation of continuation tasks is the preferred alternative to blocking, although there will still be provisions to support blocking tasks. The largest effect of this change will be the elimination of transparent futures from the core library, since they have the effect of causing arbitrary tasks to block, and have consistently been the most difficult feature of the library to implement portably anyway.

There will also be some less drastic, but incompatible, changes to the rest of the existing APIs. In particular, parallel algorithms will take grain sizes rather than a count of threads to spawn, and the actor API will be modified to match the current Rubinius API more closely.

Timeline

Especially since Omnibus is a spare time project for me at the moment, I can’t commit to a timetable for the new release, but at the moment I’m aiming to have the new release out in 2-3 months. Watch this space.

(Incidentally, feel free to contact me if you’re interested in funding some aspect of Omnibus development. I am committed to finishing Omnibus regardless, but obviously paid projects have to take precedence.)

Boudewijn Rempt - Krita: And now Boon follows suit

Sat, 31 May 2008 14:15:28 +0000

About four years ago we discovered that Lindemans puts artificial sweetener in their Gueuze beer. Which means it tastes awful. Today Irina came home with Boon Gueuze and Faro. The Gueuze is still kosher, but Boon puts artificial sweetener in their Faro. Faro should be sweet of course, but it should be sweetened with sugar, not filthy, nasty tasting artificial sweeteners. And yes, we both can taste all existing artificial sweeteners -- there's not one that doesn't leave a foul film of ickiness clinging to our mouths.

Correction: either my taste faculties have gotten better over the years or my memory is playing tricks with me, but in any case I was wrong about Faro. I got the following very nice message from Frank Boon:

Geachte heer,

Faro was een vers bereid bier, gezoet met kandijsuiker. Elke dag werd het door de kasteleins aangezoet met kandij voor directe consumptie. Sinds +/- 1880 wordt het ook aangeboden in flessen. Omdat kandij in flessen gaat gisten, liet men de kandij eerst meegisten met de lambiek. Daarna werd de faro aangezoet met zoetstof. In 1880 was dat saccharine, nu is dat sucralose. Faro wordt vooral verkocht aan wie graag heel zoet bier drinkt. Bij Brij Boon maakt het +/- 0,7 % uit van de verkoop.

Wil u graag proeven hoe vers gereed gemaakte faro smaakt, doe dan als volgt: Vul een kruik met 1/3 water, voeg er 2/3 Oude Geuze aan toe en zoet naar believen met kandijsuiker (in grote kristallen, langzaam laten smelten).

Met vriendelijke groeten,
Sincères Salutations,
Kind Regards,
Frank BOON
Gedelegeerd Bestuurder

I have immediately bought new (and excellent) Gueuze Boon to give mr. Boon's recipe a try!