Free Software :: Planet Free Software

Over the last few month I though a lot about the future of desktop operation systems and how a perfect desktop operation should look like in my opinion.

After discussing this stuff with friends I decided to blog about the ideas. Please post your comments and ideas.

This is strictly from a user point of view. So this is not about technologies but about user experience.

Lots of this stuff is already possible in recent linux distributions. But it is not enabled by default, requires a lot of technical understanding or even custom scripting. I think all this functionality should be available and enabled by default so that an average user can use this without much learning. No difficult system administration should be needed.


Part 1 - Documents


Document and file handling is more or less the same as 25 years ago.

I store my personal documents and files on my pc in a document folder. Organized in subfolders.

What I expect from a 2008 desktop operating system is:

• document folder in my home directory. Not readable for other users.
  

• fulltext search on all documents
  

• tagging, rating, commenting of the documents
  

• different semantic views on the file. For example show all files of project X
  

• export. It should be possible to export and archive specific tagged files to a dvd with on click. for example all holiday pictures.
  

• encrypted. the document folder should be encrypted by default
  

• very sensible files should additionally encrypt-able. This should work easy without complicated key management.
  

• compression. rarely used files should be compressed automatically to safe storage. decompress should work transparently. The user don´t have to care. 
  

• accessible from remote. If I have only my mobile phone with me I still want to access all my documents. Access should also be possible from an internet cafe from the other side of the world. Strong encryption and authentication, of course.

•  backup. automatic backups to a different harddisk, fileserver or webservice. No setup or configuration of backup software should be needed. Old backups are automatically deleted if the harddisc gets full.
  

• versioned - all files are revision controlled. I can always go back to an older version of a document. Old revisions are automatically deleted if the harddisc gets full. So no system administration is needed. Accessible view a user friendly GUI and the filedialog. So now svn commands please.
  

• sync with other computers - I want to sync all files or a part of the files to a second pc or a notebook. The files a synchronized automatically later if the pc are in the same network again.
  

• share with other people - I can mark files or folders and share them with specific friends. This should be easy. Without knowledge of network infrastructure.
  

• extensible - if the harddisk is full you can buy an additional one and have a more space without much configuration.
  

Enough daydreaming for now. :-)
What do you think?

November 20, 2008 03:46 PM

I’ve always been quietly impressed with GStreamer — in a world of multimedia where everything is so complicated, applications using GStreamer pretty much “just work” without any problems.

This was until today. I subscribe to a Polish TV archive, that has archived versions of soaps my girlfriend enjoys (M jak miłość). Windows Media Player 11 plays the mms stream perfectly, with no visual artifects or sound skipping, but in totem the video is unwatchable. As a further point, mplayer seems to play this mms stream with no video glitches, and only an occasional audio blip.

On gstreamer-0.10.21-2.fc10.i386, using playbin and debug level 2, I get:

…

0:00:11.977812682 15562  0x8ab4e50 WARN              asfdemux asfpacket.c:104:asf_payload_find_previous_fragment: Previous fragment does not match continued fragment

...

0:00:19.046052292 15562  0x8ab4e50 WARN              asfdemux asfpacket.c:336:gst_asf_demux_parse_payload:<asfdemux0> Offset doesn't match previous data?!

0:00:19.046086304 15562  0x8ab4e50 WARN              asfdemux asfpacket.c:104:asf_payload_find_previous_fragment: Previous fragment does not match continued fragment

…
Which I guess means the payload timestamps are wrong, then then I get about a bazillion of:

0:00:31.263371321 15562  0x8e0b408 WARN              GST_PADS gstpad.c:2992:gst_pad_iterate_internal_links_default:<selector_video_src1:src> Making unsafe iterator
...

and then when it skips:

…

0:00:36.949382321 15644  0x9d0c538 WARN         baseaudiosink gstbaseaudiosink.c:1395:gst_base_audio_sink_render:<audiosink-actual-sink-pulse> warning: Compensating for audio synchronisation problems

0:00:36.949410537 15644  0x9d0c538 WARN         baseaudiosink gstbaseaudiosink.c:1395:gst_base_audio_sink_render:<audiosink-actual-sink-pulse> warning: Unexpected discontinuity in audio timestamps of more than half a second (0:00:00.649705215), resyncing

WARNING: from element /GstPlayBin:playbin0/GstBin:abin/GstAutoAudioSink:audiosink/GstPulseSink:audiosink-actual-sink-pulse: Compensating for audio synchronisation problems

Additional debug info:

gstbaseaudiosink.c(1395): gst_base_audio_sink_render (): /GstPlayBin:playbin0/GstBin:abin/GstAutoAudioSink:audiosink/GstPulseSink:audiosink-actual-sink-pulse:

Unexpected discontinuity in audio timestamps of more than half a second (0:00:00.649705215), resyncing
...

This makes the video unwatchable. I’m guessing the server is somehow broken, but it works in Windows Media Player perfectly and 99% okay on mplayer.
Any help on how to debug this or report a proper bug gratefully received. Thanks.

November 20, 2008 03:44 PM

This year’s Eclipse Summit is nearly over and I managed to upload all my slides to this new slideshare service. The good thing about this service is that your slides show up on your talk page, e.g. the slides of the EPP talk are available on this page.

Speaking of this talk: It covered two topics - we started with the new EPP Dynamic Download Wizard that is currently only available for Friends-of-Eclipse, but (a) it will be available for everybody soon [promised!] and (b) it is just another reason to join the Friends-of-Eclipse program.

The second topic of this talk was the ‘RAPification’ of the UDC and how we are analyzing the usage data that we are collecting with that. Imagine you have your own RAP application (btw, it works with an RCP application as well) and you want to find out how people are using your RAP application, or you want to analyze the usability of this application. Our solution is based on a slightly modified version of the UDC that enables us to collect the usage data and write it to a central database.

And now comes the cool part: How to analyze the data. This is done in a way similar to Google Analytics, because we allow the user to interactively explore the data that is visible as an overlay in the application. This works in a RCP application, but also in your browser window if it is a RAP application.

All of this has been created as a Google Summer of Code project, but I think this kind of tooling could be helpful and interesting to many of us.

November 20, 2008 03:39 PM

Jono recently unveiled the Ubuntu Hall of Fame.

To sum it up: the community is full of great contributors from all around the world, and we want to showcase that, so check it out and thank someone.

Each box has a little (i) icon in it, which will take you to information about that part of Ubuntu if you want to get started and start your path to greatness. People have pointed out that it is missing some parts - I assure you that we are aware that things like the forums and Answers on lp are missing and they are on the TODO list.

The "Upstream Bug Rockstars" box is related to our upstream report, showing which projects have great bug linkages to upstream projects, so if you've been forwarding and linking bugs, thanks!

November 20, 2008 03:39 PM

This week, the OCL 2.1 RTF has had to re-launch the voting on its first ballot, because it failed to reach a quorum.  With a 10-member voting list, 2 votes just didn't cut it.  And these were the two companies that put some effort into resurrecting this specification by addressing a substantial number of issues.
It's disappointing to see that there is so little interest from the OMG membership in the health of this specification that should, and I think was intended to be, a cornerstone of the the MOF architecture.  There is still interest in the user community, judging by the continued influx of issue reports.
No metamodel is complete without constraints that specify the well-formedness of instance models.  And OCL could be a key tool in that department, if it can keep up with the evolution of MOF and UML.  Indeed, it already seems to be an important part of several Eclipse modeling technologies, as I hope to demonstrate at EclipseCon 2009.  However, the current state of the specification makes the implementation of conformant tools difficult and interchange of OCL models impossible, because the language is imprecisely and inconsistently specified (some bits aren't really specified at all).
A few of us are working hard to reinvigorate and reform this specification, but we need help.  With just two OMG members involved at this point, it is difficult even to get through a vote, and I worry about how relevant the product will be that results from such a small collaboration.  So, pitch in with your time (it doesn't take much) and elbow-grease to make OCL succeed!  Let's not let this thing go the way of the dodo.

November 20, 2008 03:38 PM

Well, the closing session is about to start and the vendors are packing up their displays. Another successful Eclipse Summit Europe is about to go off into the sunset. For me, it was proof again why I love coming to this show. The CDT community in Europe is strong and a lot of them are doing and want to do interesting things with the CDT.

The talk I gave was on the code analysis capabilities of the CDT introducing the things you can do with the CDT's parsers and indexing framework. I also introduced the new refactoring engine that we have which really opens up a lot of cool automations you can do to analyze and refactor your code. The best part is that I had a few guys come up to me after to ask about certain analysis things they wanted to do. I'm glad I gave that talk and I hope more people take a look at what the CDT has to offer in this area.

I also had a number of people ask about the CDT managed build system. This is an area in a bit of trouble right now with the CDT. One of the key developers has left and we're struggling understanding the code that he left behind. Hopefully these vendors who have concerns about the build system will join us and get us rolling again. The CDT build model can do some pretty cool things and I look forward to seeing the different build integrations people are thinking of working.

I had a discussion with someone interested in working on the Windows debug integration I have on my wish list. I've given it a couple of tries and there is a start of one in the Target Communication Framework (TCF) agent. Hopefully we can finally get this together and have full support for the Visual C++ compiler with the CDT.

Speaking of TCF, there was a lot of interest in it from various embedded system vendors. It's a really good technology for building target agents with a clean communication protocol back to Eclipse and a services oriented architecture. I've been interested in component models for C/C++ applications and I can see how this agent could use something like that. I'll have to give it some thought and see if others are interested in getting involved in that.

It's been a fun and interesting week. Hopefully I talked to everyone who wanted to talk CDT with me. And hopefully we can get some momentum off of that to continue the growth of the CDT community. Those late nights in the hotel bar with the Eclipse gang was part of that community building and I'm going to sleep well on the flight home but it was worth it.

November 20, 2008 03:24 PM

Yesterday I ran into a file format I had not seen before.  Microsoft .chm (Compiled HTML).  Turns out there are plenty of solutions for Linux.  I have to admit I really wondered why the publications I found were in .chm and not in a more standard .pdf format.  Really makes me appreciate common standards.  I’ll outline some of the solutions I found here.

.chm Viewers

I ran into a number of .chm viewers for Linux, all available within the Ubuntu repositories.

If you are a Gnome user you may like gnochm:

sudo aptitude install gnochm

If you are a KDE user you may prefer kchmviewer:

sudo aptitude install kchmviewer

There are also some conversion tools, which I’ve had varying success with:

sudo aptitude install chm2pdf

There are more solutions listed on the link at the top of this article.  You may check that out for more information.

Other Points of Interest

• No Related Post

November 20, 2008 03:21 PM

Saturday 15th November took place the third edition of Mediterranean Day of Libre Software in Sophia Antipolis, in the South of France, near Nice.

This event was organized by Linux Azur, a local association and kindly hosted by Polytech'Nice Sophia an engineer school.

I was invited there, on behalf of the French Mozilla community, to hold a conference about Mozilla and a booth.

This event is targeted to a large audience with general level conferences and more technical ones, but also workshops (for instance: "GNU/Linux like for my mother" ) and association boothes.

The Mozilla booth was rather popular with many people interested in Mozilla plans and products, even with technical questions about Mozilla localization and accessibility, and also the goodies (by the way, we definitely need some kind of "Mozilla Goodies Bundle Pack" for local LUGs and associations).

The attendance was quite satisfactory for this kind of event with around two hundreds visitors, despite the fact that the event took place rather far away from the nearest town.

To sum up, it was a positive and nice event to which I will attend with great pleasure again next year.

Here are very few photos (I was stuck at the booth almost the time).

November 20, 2008 03:03 PM

I read an interesting Gartner talk summary by Ross Dawson about the distributed social web, via another blog post by Chris Saad. Building blocks like OpenID, oAuth and microformats are mentioned in both posts, and I wanted to pipe up on behalf of the Semantic Web (if I may)…

A distributed social web is one of the ultimate goals of projects like FOAF and SIOC. Both FOAF (personal profiles and social networks) and SIOC (blogs, discussion forums, Q&A sites) have recently been listed by Yahoo! SearchMonkey as recommended vocabularies. Ross, if you like this topic, then you’ll probably love ideas like SMOB (Semantic Microblogging), where people can keep their microblog entries in their own space and then push them to as many Twitter-like aggregation services as they want. See my post on this here.

Also, here’s a slidedeck about SIOC for the uninitiated:

See also:

• Tales from the SIOC-o-sphere #8 (the latest news from the world of SIOC)
• The web-wide social network (Chris Saad)
• Gartner on the distributed social web (Ross Dawson)

November 20, 2008 02:59 PM

The dynamic languages team at Microsoft are relatively small, but have an extremely high proportion of bloggers! (The obvious conclusion is that dynamic language enthusiasts tend to be better communicators...)

Oleg Tkachenko lists them on his blog:

• The Microsoft Dynamic Languages Team Blogroll

For the record, they are:

• John Lam – IronRuby PM
• Harry Pierson – IronPython PM
• Jimmy Schementi – PM for Silverlight integration
• Shri Borde – dev lead for the team
• Dave Remy – PM lead fro the team
• Oleg Tkachenko – Visual Studio integration
• Dave Fugate – IronPython tester
• Curt Hagenlocher - IronPython/IronRuby dev
• Jim Hugunin – architect for the team, DLR and Visual Studio languages
• Tomas Matousek – IronRuby dev
• Srivatsn Narayanan – IronPython/IronRuby tester
• Jim Deville – IronRuby tester
• Dino Viehland – IronPython dev

We're trying to keep track of them on the People in IronPython page of the IronPython Cookbook.

November 20, 2008 02:51 PM

A little while ago, Gerv asked for a bugmail extension to Thunderbird. Just posted about in mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird is a new bugmail extension by Fabrice Desré. Its still in the experimental state, so you have to log in to amo to get it.

I’ve taken a quick five-minute look at it, and I like it already. It makes a good job of presenting the status of each bug and seems to have some caching in there and doesn’t mind if you switch emails quickly.

I’m told one version should linkify all “bug xxx” in emails, but either that’s not working fully, or it hasn’t made it onto the add-ons site yet.

It should certainly make some of my bugmail processing easier, especially in cases when I see mis-filed bugs and then go into the browser and find they’ve already been moved. Thanks Fabrice!

November 20, 2008 02:45 PM

Continuing the last ‘People of openSUSE” interviews with people involved in the openSUSE Board Elections Committee, today we introduce you another member - Vincent Untz. Vincent is a Novell employee working 101% of his time for the openSUSE and GNOME projects, non-stop!

Nickname:	vuntz
Homepage:	http://www.vuntz.net/
Blog:	http://www.vuntz.net/journal/
Favorite season:	All of them, depending on my mood I might have a slight preference for spring and autumn, though.
Motto:	Les gens heureux ne sont pas presssés.

(hard to translate this right in english; maybe something like: happy people are not hurried)

 

Please introduce yourself!

I’m a 28 years old french (28 since a few weeks only, and it’ll take time to get used to this — probably 11 months). I live in Grenoble in France and work remotely from there.

I started playing with free software during my studies, and I got involved in GNOME in 2002. But don’t ask me "why did you choose this project", since I don’t really know why, except that I loved following the GNOME 2.0 development. I’m now heavily involved in various areas of the GNOME project — code, GNOME Foundation, release management, etc.

I’ve finished my studies last December, and I’m now working at Novell, on GNOME and on openSUSE.

 

Tell us about the background to your computer use.

I wouldn’t say I was always interested in computers that much, except for games. But 10-12 years ago, I got more curious to learn how computers and the OS work, and started tweaking stuff.

Then, I discovered that I could write applications and I’m still fascinated about how applications work: even though I know many technical details about how the software works, I still have this feeling that this is all some black magic. Especially when it’s a graphical application. I mean, seriously, if you think about it, how is it possible that writing some letters can produce something that works and that is interactive?

This is this fascination, and the intellectual challenge that you face when creating software (not just code, but in general), that got me hooked.

 

When and why did you start using openSUSE/SUSE Linux?

I started using openSUSE last February, when I joined Novell. I was using Ubuntu on my desktop before this switch, and I’ve also used Fedora for quite some time. Oh, and I’m also Debian-friendly

I must admit I have no strong feelings for/against distributions: as long as I can use GNOME, I’m happy! Of course, this has changed a bit since I got involved in the openSUSE development — I tend to have stronger opinions for openSUSE now (about things I love or things I dislike), and I try to push things the way I’d like them to be.

 

When did you join the openSUSE community and what made you do that?

It didn’t make any sense to me to work on openSUSE without being part of the community: the openSUSE project wouldn’t work well without its community. So I joined the community when I started working on openSUSE; it was — and it’s still the case — important for me to do most (if not all) stuff within the community, and not as part of Novell.

And after a few months, I applied for openSUSE membership, and I’m now a happy openSUSE member!

 

In what way do you participate in the openSUSE project?

I do random things in the GNOME team. Packaging, fixing bugs, triaging bugs, some infrastructure work, etc. The thing I’m most proud of is the "osc gnome" plugin. I still need to push for the integration of some of the features in osc itself, but it’s a plugin which is really wonderful and helped us a lot in the GNOME team.

I happened to be part of the Election Committee, where I’m actually not doing anything (all the credit should go to Andrew, Claes and Marko). I’m just there to give my opinion since I’ve been involved for a long time in a similar committee for GNOME.

I’m also indirectly contributing to openSUSE by contributing to various upstream projects (mainly GNOME and some freedesktop.org things), but that’s another story, I guess.

 

What especially motivates you to participate in the openSUSE project?

Heh, I guess I could say that I want to be able to use my desktop
There’s also the pride of seeing your work being used by other people. And of course, the community. The community is probably one of the most important factors: if you join #opensuse-gnome on Freenode, you’ll meet a bunch of friendly people, and that’s really what makes a difference.

 

What do you think was your most important contribution to the openSUSE project/community or what is the contribution that you’re most proud of?

Oh, I cheated and already replied. Oh, well, I guess I can do some shameless plug again: http://en.opensuse.org/GNOME/OscGnome. Try it. I’m in love with it. Let me give a few more details about this plugin. There are a few cool features:

• it lets you easily know when there’s a new upstream version for a package
• it automatically does most of the steps to update a package to a new upstream version
• it makes it easy to setup a branch for a package
• there’s a simple command to commit your changes, wait for the remote build to finish and, if the build was successful, to submit your changes

Right now, it only works with a few Build Service projects (GNOME:Factory, X11:common:Factory, X11:Compiz, I belive). It’s possible to add more projects if people want — the only reason there’s only a limited list of projects is that it depends on an external server which has to periodically check out packages from the build service.

Did I say I love it?

 

When do you usually spend time on the openSUSE project?

That’s part of my day job, so, err, nearly every day

 

Three words to describe openSUSE? Or make up a proper slogan!

Green. Lizard. Rising.

 

What do you think is missing or underrated in the distribution or the project?

I think we need some better promotion, so we can reach more people and get more users. And this will indirectly lead to having more contributors. The good thing with more contributors is that we’ll be able to fix most of our issues

 

What do you think the future holds for the openSUSE project?

I’ve never been good at predicting the future… So, err, joker

 

A person asks you why he/she should choose openSUSE instead of other distribution/OS. What would be your arguments to convince him/her to pick up openSUSE?

I would make this person try it. There’s no one-fit-all solution, and it can happen that someone doesn’t feel comfortable with it.

Then, I’d talk about the freedom and the community, and reply to questions. In the end, I think that most people don’t care that much about the technical details, so I wouldn’t argue much about them.

 

Which members of the openSUSE community have you met in person?

It’d be hard to name everybody, but I think I mostly met some Novell employees: the GNOME and KDE teams, and also some SUSE people from Nürnberg and Prague. The best opportunity to meet a lot of people from the community is certainly FOSDEM, but this year, I was too busy with the GNOME stand and devroom…

 

How many icons are currently on your desktop?

23, way too many. Some are there since a very long time and I just got used to them, so I don’t remove them

 

What is the application you can’t live without? And why?

Hard question. I think it’s the ssh+screen+irssi+mutt combo. With that, I can feel at home from everywhere. I especially love mutt: I tried many mail clients (desktop apps, or webmails), but I always come back to mutt in the end. See also my preferred text editor below!

 

Which application or feature should be invented as soon as possible?

Either some mind-reading applications that would automatically write mails, blog posts, code, etc. or some technology that makes days last longer…

 

Which is your preferred text editor? And why?

Heh, it’s vim, of course: you know you are addicted to it when you start pressing Escape in other editors… I’m just used to it, with all the keybindings that sounded so insane at the beginning and that are so natural now.

 

Which famous person would you want to join the openSUSE community?

Don’t know. As much as having someone famous join the community would help boost the project, I think I prefer having non-famous people join. Like my friends or my family.

 

Which computer related skills would you like to have?

Not that I’m perfect with computers (far from it), but I’d prefer to have new non-computer related skills. Like being able to play music as if it were a second language for me.

 

The Internet crashes for a whole week — how would you feel, what would you do?

I guess I would start feeling bad the first day, because of many things I wouldn’t be able to do, and because I wouldn’t be able to communicate with many of my friends. And then, starting the second or third day, I’d probably take the opportunity to leave the computer and party with friends and have fun playing with them

 

Which is your favorite movie scene?

I don’t really have one. I think I love the scene in Being John Malkovich where all the people have a John Malkovich face.

 

Star Trek or Star Wars?

Lord of the Rings? Okay, without cheating, that’d be Star Wars.

 

What is your favorite food and drink?

Drink: fruit juice. But a different one each time, if possible

Food: hmm, don’t know. Let’s just say "Salade lyonnaise" or maybe poutine

 

Favorite game or console (in your childhood and nowadays)?

I’m a big Nintendo fan. And the favorite game would be Super Mario 64: it was just amazing when it went out. And I still enjoy it: you know, making Mario jump everywhere, with so much freedom.

 

Which city would you like to visit?

Lhasa.

 

What is your preferred way to spend your vacation?

Doing nothing, in the (not so) wild life, with people I love.

 

Someone gives you $1.000.000 — what would you do with the money?

I’d ask people around me what I should do.

 

If traveling through time was possible — when would we be most likely to meet you?

I’ll try to go back to before the big bang, if there’s a before If it turns out to be impossible, I’ll go in the other direction and try to see if there’s some end of time. Then I’ll go back to today.

 

There’s a thunderstorm outside — do you turn off your computer?

Nah. But I stop to watch the storm — that’s beautiful.

 

Have your ever missed an appointment because you forgot about it while sitting at your computer?

I don’t think it ever happened — or I’m still forgetting about it.

 

Show us a picture of something, you have always wanted to share!

I always like how people react when they see poutine for the first time:

 

You couldn’t live without…

Air, water, food. Friends.

 

Which question was the hardest to answer?

This one.

 

What other question would you like to answer? And what would you answer?

In which language should the next interview occur? French!

 

November 20, 2008 02:30 PM

In the ongoing effort to speed up the automated tests i had a look at the global filters which are loaded during each test initialization. These filters are defined in gvariabl.inc, called from master.inc and filled in t_filters.inc.

Some time ago we switched from UI filternames to API filternames which resulted in using the API calls FileSaveAs() and FileOpen() instead of opening the file dialogs each time. The result was a considerable speed gain. You might want to read my prior blogs about this subject:

• Faster File Operations
• Filternames For All Locales And Brands

Thorsten Bosbach reworked large parts of the initialization code switching as much as possible to API calls instead of accessing the controls/settings via UI. While doing so we noticed that establishing a UNO connection to the office can be a quite time consuming process as well (though still much faster than UI actions).

So I started profiling and noticed that retrieving the filter names via GetDefaultFilterNames() took somewhere near 15 seconds because the filters were retrieved with API calls one by one.

The first optimization i did was to get the whole bunch of filters in one go from the API reducing the time to some 6 to 12 seconds - still a lot (about 20% of the test case initialization time).

I discussed the matter with my fellow QA colleagues and we decided to further pursue the matter.

The result was: Only one test really needs all filters (f_first.bas) and some filters were used in a grand total of 11 .inc files.

So i suggested removing the call to GetDefaultFilterNames() from master.inc. The details of the modification is fully documented in issue 96341 which is resolved in CWS qascripts02 to be integrated into DEV300m36.

The speed gain is at least 6 seconds per test file of which we have 225 for the time being. Additionally i was able to trash on unused function, moved two functions to the /includes/optional/, a nice little cleanup benefit. If you need the current UI filter names you just have to include the file in your .bas file:

sub LoadIncludeFiles
[...] 

use "global/tools/includes/optional/t_ui_filters.inc"
call GetUseFiles()

end sub

November 20, 2008 02:26 PM

How do you know you've won? When a Linux-based machine, easy enough to be be used by children all around the world, shows up on a kitchen counter next to blenders, mixers and washing machines as a recipe book, you know you've won

 

 

 

November 20, 2008 02:23 PM

As many of you probably know FOSDEM is up once again in February 2009, once again with a Mozilla developer room. I'm planning on being there and probably also to give a talk, but I don't have a good topic for it yet, and I wonder what the audience would most be interested in. What SeaMonkey 2 brings functionality-wise? What our concepts for the future of SeaMonkey are? How the SeaMonkey project is working together with other parts of the community? Statistics on SeaMonkey popularity and usage?

Additionally, I have received a first call for papers (CfP) for the "Linuxwochen 2009" event here in Vienna, which will be in April. There's even more time for planning something there, the deadline for that CfP is in February, but I'm thinking hard about possibly giving a talk there this time, which would be my first time doing this at an event around here. The talk could be 45, 20, or 10 minutes, and I'm also wondering what the more general audience there would be most interested in. SeaMonkey 2 functionality? What the SeaMonkey project is? Organizing and coordinating a volunteer open source project? The Mozilla vision? The wonderful choice of different products from Mozilla? Mozilla-based software development?
What I'm pretty sure I won't be doing is Firefox tricks or such, I'll leave that to people using that browser in their daily lives - though it would be really nice to have someone from Mozilla at this event, as we've never been present at an Austrian event before.

Any ideas for those talks from you, dear blog/planet reader, would be highly appreciated!

November 20, 2008 02:17 PM

I’d like to second Davyd’s post about the 10th Day of Remembrance. It pains me to know that even today with all the technological and intellectual progress we’ve made, there are people out there who just cannot accept and/or respect other people’s choices.

For those hiding behind a bible to defend their actions, maybe your god should teach you more tolerance…

Yeah, comments will be turned off. I don’t plan to spend my day fending off any comment that will tell me that their rights are more important that somebody else’s.

November 20, 2008 02:11 PM

This tutorial is dedicated to guide users who want to compile current digiKam implementation from KDE subversion repository under Microsoft Windows. I will use Windows XP Service Pack2 and KDE 4.1.2.

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November 20, 2008 02:01 PM

Boto is a Python library for interacting with Amazon’s web services. I’ve used it in the past, and am currently using it for an ’s3get’ implementation based on a simple example I found buried in a post on Patrick Altman’s blog.

While testing my code, I noticed I was getting import errors from boto/connection.py, because I didn’t have a module on my system named ‘hashlib’. Then I found an svn trunk commit that clued me in to the fact that I wasn’t supposed to have hashlib, because I was running a pre-2.5 version of Python. They had put in a fix for pre-2.5 users, but somehow it wasn’t being obeyed.

Then I noticed that the import errors weren’t from utils.py, where the fix was committed, but from connection.py, which was explicitly importing the module itself. Closer inspection revealed that it was also importing utils.py, which itself imports hashlib. I commented out the explicit import in connection.py (and, later, in boto/s3/key.py), and stopped getting import errors.

If you’re still having issues with Patrick’s s3get.py code, it’s probably because you need to change this line:

if name == 'main':
       main()

To this:

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

November 20, 2008 02:00 PM

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...

November 20, 2008 02:00 PM

After a month of being about a week away from release, Resolver One 1.3 is finally out! Most of the delay was in sorting out the documentation and the way the installers are built, because of the major new feature in 1.3 - the web server is now in all versions of Resolver One, including the free Open-Source and non-commercial version. ... [656 words]

November 20, 2008 01:52 PM

Ed Merks already gave a summary of Dave Thomas' keynote yesterday morning here at Eclipse Summit Europe. It was the first time I saw Dave speak and I was warned he tended to say things that offended the audience. And to Dave's point, that is kind of what a keynote speaker should do. Spark thought. Break through the assumptions that we tend to fall into when we get comfortable in our skin. And I think he raised some serious points that are making me wonder about what's really happening in our industry.

I guess his main point is that Java for embedded has missed the boat. If you haven't gone through the pain of doing Java for embedded devices, don't worry, you didn't miss anything. I've been waiting to see when I need to care about Java in this space and I've talked to some of the people here at Eclipse Summit Europe about this. I think they quietly agree with Dave. Those that have figured out how to do Java on embedded are doing OK with it. But there are a lot of issues to face. The worst of them is the bloat that the Java VM continues to grow from release to release. The embedded VMs are horribly crippled, and if you want to use the Sun VM, you are crippled from paring down that bloat. The discussion is interesting, and we may still be proven wrong, but for now, I can ignore Java for embedded and I can sleep at night.

There were some other messages from Dave that hit home as well. Programming is horribly complicated. Normal people will never be able to figure it out. Which means if you have figured it out, you're not normal, and I guess that includes me. But it is true. I've blogged a lot about this in the past. We can barely get our programs to work as it is. Wait until you're trying to program 100 threads running through your mess all at the same time. We're doomed.

But there are some things we can do to give us a chance to survive. Dave talked a bit about how the lack of a software component model is making us look like fools in the eyes of the engineering community. Can you imagine if automakers had to custom build all the components that make up a car? Imagine now if we could go to a shop and pick up high quality software components and tie them together will few lines in a script.

Now Dave was be extreme in his position. There are a number of areas where component models are being used, OSGi is an obvious one, all these "Mash-ups" are doing things like this. But coming back to embedded, we can't rely on Java to provide the solution. Dave's answer was C++ with JavaScript. And I think that's a great idea. Build components in C++ and tie them together with a scripting engine. Dave picked JavaScript, which is OK but he did mention he's working with Google on their V8 JavaScript engine. Lua is another good choice. And actually Domain Specific Languages offer solutions as well (and I'm not just saying that because I'm sitting in Rich Gronback's DSL talk right now ;).

It was really interesting to spend time with Dave Thomas in his keynote and with a group of us at the hotel bar. I could learn a lot from him. This week it was to open up my mind and challenge the assumptions. If you read this blog regularly you find that I tend to do that anyway, but it's an important reminder to keep doing that and make sure we don't make the same mistakes over and over again.

November 20, 2008 01:26 PM

Want to install a Rails development environment on a bare-bones Ubuntu server setup? It's not that hard.

November 20, 2008 01:19 PM

PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT:   $(window).load(function() {   $("#example").liquidCanvas(     "[shadow border gradient] => roundedRect{radius:50}"); });   This is an example of Liquid Canvas, a new library from Steffen Rusitschka who created ShadedBorder and RUZEE.Borders. Liquid Canvas is a JavaScript library which allows you to draw inside an HTML canvas element with an easy yet powerful description language. Automatic generation of HTML canvas elements [...]

November 20, 2008 01:11 PM

OpenOffice.org NL/L10N people are many all over the world. Native Language (NL) Confederation includes more than 80 language projects. Localization (L10N) status lists nearly 100 languages. We are really diverse.

The "Meet NL/L10N People" Poster Part I visually demonstrates the diversity. But we are so much more diverse that we have to do Part II.

See two issues:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=96369
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=96373

The Part II has started!

November 20, 2008 01:07 PM

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.

November 20, 2008 12:59 PM

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.

November 20, 2008 12:49 PM

¶   A new Wallace & Gromit, at last!

¶   Splitter, yet another fun physics-based game.

¶  Typealyzer, an automatic Myers-Briggs analyzer for blog content. Also, GenderAnalyzer to determine if the author is male or female.

November 20, 2008 12:47 PM

Over on his blog, Jim has been offering ongoing comment on what he and others seem to view as the death throes of traditional/mainstream/dinosaur media. This piece on PC Magazine being a representative sample.

While on my recent vacation, I spotted a piece in the WSJ about the End of Tangible Media. I saved the article in my Blackberry reader and it's queued up to read, but I believe it's just a link and/or extract of the Steve Rubel piece I linked to here.

The core arguments for the end of media-as-we-know-it seem to be speed of publication, relevance of content, and change in advertising models--your local paper never really counted on your subscription to really pay for the paper.

I think the phrase tangible media sums up the problem with older media outlets well. Rightly or wrongly, the market wants immediacy. Some segment of the market also cares about greenness of their news.

I don't expect magazines and newspapers to die out completely, but the market changes will force them to adapt. Earlier in the last century magazines and radio were left for dead, but they found ways to target their content for specific audiences and survived quite nicely.

The interesting change to watch for is how content authors react to this so-called new world. Short stories came into vogue as American authors discovered they couldn't sell novels in the 19th century--publishers were doing just fine stealing novel length works from Europe--and they needed some other way to get their works out and feed themselves. What changes will we see over the next 20 years?

Technorati Tags: news, media, print

November 20, 2008 12:43 PM

In my last blog entry I talked a bit about how cool it is to have such a strong lineup of services ready for the launch of Amarok 2.0.0.

Since then, something else has started happening in a big way. Scripts containing localized content has started to appear. Peter was first with his Chinese Radio Service, and then all of a sudden yesterday, things started to move fast. In quick succession we got service scripts for Radio France and Bulgarian Radio Stations and this inspired me to put together a Danish Radio Streams script that was released a few hours ago.

While each of these service scripts are very simple and have an audience that is limited by language or region, I think that together they represent a very powerful aspect of Amarok 2 as they make Amarok feel 'native' to people who do not have English as their first language. I know that personally, for me to be able to present a nice list of readily available Danish radio stations, will be a huge plus when showing Amarok 2 to friends and family who are not overly technically inclined (read: non geeks).

I hope (and fully expect) to see a virtual flood of scripts of this type, and while I an most others will each only use a few of them, I am very exited that they are appearing!

November 20, 2008 12:22 PM

I just read the news that PC Magazine is being canceled. It’s not exactly a shock, given the state of technical magazines right now. I haven’t read one of those in years, since they turned to be more of a consumer than a technical publication.

But I hope I am not the only one out there that remembers PC Magazine from the mid to late 1980s. I had two favorite parts in each issue: the programming example, and the “Abort, Retry, Fail” page at the back of the magazine.

The programming example was usually some sort of DOS (or, on occasion, OS/2) utility. It was usually written in assembly, and would be accompanied by a BASIC program you could type in to get the resulting binary, as assemblers weren’t readily available. The BASIC program was line after line of decimal numbers that would decode them and write out the resulting binary — sort of a primitive uuencode for paper. Trying to type those in gave me some serious eyestrain on more than one occasion. By now, I forget what most of those utilities did, but I remember one: BatchMan. It was a collection of tools for use in DOS batch files, and could do things like display output in color or even — yes — play monophonic music. It came with an example that displayed some lyrics about batch programming on-screen, set to what I later realized was the Batman theme. Geek nirvana, right?

But Batchman was too big to publish the source code, or the BASIC decoder, in print. It might have been one of those things that eventually led me to a CompuServe account. PC Magazine had some deal with CompuServe that you could get their utilities for free, or reduced cost — I forget. CompuServe was probably where I sent my first email, from my account which was 71510,1421 — comma and all. In later years, you could pay a small fee to send email to the Internet, and I had the amazingly attractive email address of 71510.1421@cis.compuserve.com. Take that, gmail.

PC Magazine eventually stopped running utilities that taught people about assembly or batch programming and shifted more to the genre of Windows screensavers. They stopped their articles about how hard disks work and what SCSI is all about, and instead have cover stories like “Vista made easy!” I am, sadly, not making this up. Gone are the days of investigating alternative operating systems like OS/2.

It appears that “Abort, Retry, Fail” is gone, too. It was a one-page thing at the back of each magazine that featured braindead error messages and funny stories about people that did things like FAX an image of a floppy disk to a remote office — before such stories were cliche. Sort of like DailyWTF these days. The sad truth is that the people that would FAX an image of a floppy are probably the ones that are reading PC Magazine today.

I still have a bunch of PC Magazine issues — the good ones — in my parents’ basement. I also still have my floppies with the utilities on them somewhere. One day, when I get some time — I’m estimating this will be about when Jacob goes to college — I’ll go back and take another look at them.

November 20, 2008 12:11 PM

“for 3 years, you youtubers have been ripping us off, taking tens of thousands of our videos and putting them up on youtube...” amazing comedy group monty python now have their own official youtube channel. the channel aims to collect better organized, higher quality videos – like of the hilarious bicycle repairman – than what was previously posted to the site.

it is great that the genius monty python (visionary as always) embrace and not fear the new media technology. they drove comedy to where it is, let's hope they drive comedy media to where it should be.

November 20, 2008 12:02 PM

Via Myk Melez comes word that Firefox 3 supports HTML 5 web protocol handlers, which I had not realized before. These are really nifty: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto",                                   "https://www.example.com/?uri=%s",                             [...]

November 20, 2008 12:00 PM

Mark Pilgrim is back telling us what is new in the world of HTML 5 and focuses on changes with the video tag and API: The big news this week is a major revamping of how browsers should process multimedia in the <audio> and <video> elements. r2404 makes a number of important changes. First, the canPlayType() [...]

November 20, 2008 11:58 AM

It’s been a long time since I’ve really put out a libnotify or notification-daemon release. Review Board and VMware have taken up a lot of time the past year, so development has been slow, but I think these releases are worth it.

libnotify 0.4.5 [Release Notes] [Downloads]

This is mostly a small bug fix release, but introduces support for associating a notification with a GtkStatusIcon. This allows for better position tracking when notification icons are jumping around.

notification-daemon 0.4.0 [Release Notes] [Downloads]

This is a large feature and bug fix release. The major two features are multi-head support and a new control panel applet for specifying the notification theme and corner origin.

The multi-head support will show standard (non-positioned) notifications on the monitor the mouse is currently on. Previously, they would only appear on the primary head. This helps to notice new notifications, and fixes problems with some people who have a multi-head setup but only have one monitor on or in view. Also, notifications that appear on the edge of a monitor in a multi-head setup will no longer cross the monitor boundary, and will instead just stay on the correct monitor.

The new control panel applet makes it easy to switch notification themes or to specify which corner notifications should appear from. This will be expanded in the future.

As mentioned above with libnotify, notification-daemon can now track when status icons have moved so that the notifications are no longer in the wrong position during startup.

There’s a bunch of other nice little bug fixes that are mentioned in the release notes.

Thanks for the patience, everyone!

November 20, 2008 11:58 AM

Quick assist can do a lot of work for you. This flash shows what kind of manipulation you can perform on 'if's. Please use next/previous button to navigate between slides.

If you need more info, please go to Eclipse Help.

November 20, 2008 11:52 AM

In the context of the Berlin SPARQL Benchmark, I have repeatedly written about emasurement procedures and steady state. The point is that the numbers at larger scales are unreliable due to cache behavior if one is not careful about measurement and does not have adequate warmup. Thus it came to pass that one cut of the BSBM paper had 3 seconds for MySQL and 100 for Virtuoso, basically through ignoring cache effects.

So we decided to do it ourselves.

The score is:

n-clients	Virtuoso	MySQL
1	41161.33	12171.41
4	127918.30	37566.82
8	218162.29	51104.39
16	214763.58	47589.18

The metric is the query mixes per hour from the BSBM test driver output. For the interested, the complete output is here.

The benchmark is pure SQL, nothing to do with SPARQL or RDF.

The hardware is 2xXeon 5345 (2 x quad core, 2.33 GHz), 16 G RAM. The OS is Debian Linux 64 bit.

The benchmark was run at a scale of 200000. Each run had 2000 warm-up query mixes and 500 measured query mixes, which gives steady state, eliminating any effects of OS disk cache and the like. Both databases were configured to use 8G for disk cache. The test effectively runs from memory. We ran an analyze table on each MySQL table but noticed that this had no effect. Virtuoso does the stats sampling on the go, possibly MySQL also since the explicit stats did not make any difference. The MySQL tables were served by the Innodb engine. MySQL appears to cache results of queries in some cases. This was not apparent in the tests.

The versions are 5.09 for Virtuoso and 5.1.29 for MySQL. The config files are the following: Virtuoso, MySQL .
The table layouts and indices are:

• Table definitions & RDF views