Ubuntu Malaysia

Qt 5 Coming...

bizkut — Mon, 09 May 2011 18:30:11 +0000

Several hundered Ubuntu and related people at UDS in Budapest. Qt talk going on now. Just announced is Qt 5 is going to be released expected next year. It'll focus on Qt Quick 2 and use Lighthouse and we saw some fun effects happening in the demo. See the Qt 5 Labs blog post.

Banishing the demons of distraction

bizkut — Sun, 08 May 2011 16:30:05 +0000

For a little while now I’ve been getting quite annoyed with myself for being very easily distracted (be it with llamas, badgers, narwhals or whatever). This has meant that my general level of productivity has been somewhat…… low. I have a list of running projects as long as my arm, none of which get enough attention because I flit form one to the other almost hourly. The situation as is obviously needs addressing.

From what little intelligence I can bring to bear on the problem, this should be able to be broken down into a few different variables:

Environmental
Physical
Grey-mushial (?)

Environmental

Fixing environmental problems is relativley easy. If I want to concentrate on a task now I use my Mac Mini. Not because OSX is any more productive than Ubuntu I hasn’t to add, but because it is in a room on a desk with a comfortable chair in a comfortable working position. There is no television, no games consoles or anything else around to take my attention away from what I’m attempting to do.

In the office at work, I try and keep my desk clear of clutter. When there is a lot going on, or a lot of noise around, the twin help of Spotify and a decent pair of headphones can help keep me inside my own head and in my comfortable work zone. Anything I would sit and watch constantly for updates or results is now being reworked to email me or notify my some other way so that I can carry on concentrating on the more important tasks rather than waiting for something else to finish.

Physical

With this I refer to my general physical fitness and general wellbeing. I am quite aware that I don’t get enough exercise, but have yet to generate a plan to resolve this. Until recently I had no idea how well I ate. Throwing together a nasty hackey database in Django (code), I actually discovered I don’t eat too badly… but can binge on chocolate when things get a bit stressful! This is quite easy to rectify by stopping buying lunch and making it in advance. I still crave the chocolate quite a lot during the day, but hopefully this will fade away given some time!

Grey-mushial

This is what’s going on in my head and possibly the hardest part of the whole cycle to change. When I get frustrated with something I lose the will to carry on with something. This is normally the major factor in why I jump from project to project, task to task without completing things. I get frustrated and annoyed that I can’t do something so move onto something else I can do. This has a lot of negative impact as it means that sometimes I struggleto learn something new and overcome certain issues. This is quite hard to change, but I’m attempting to bring some positive re-inforcement to bear on the problem. Craving chocolate when being frustrated isn’t helping things, however, if I now manage to solve a problem that’s frustrating me then I can have some chocolate. This helps me motivate myself to push through the problems that keep me stumped, frustrated and annoyed.

Actually keeping my mind on task is another seperate problem. This, at the moment, I have no idea how to solve. I’ve started reading around this and started reading up on Zen as a lot of Zen practice seems to be based on either keeping your mind on a single thing or emptying your mind of all things completley. This may help, this may not help! Anything I struggle to concentrate on I make a note of what it is, hopefully some kind of pattern will emerge from the mess over time. For some reason, one thing I really can concentrate on without being distracted is painting my 40k models. I have no idea at all why this specifically is so easy to concentrate on, but an interesting observation none the less.

Why bring all this up on here? Well, for a start this place is one of my projects that gets overlooked quite frequently, and secondly so that if anyone does have any dealings with myself where I start something and don’t necessarily stick to it for a period of time….. let me know in case I haven’t noticed. There is a lot of Ubuntu stuff I’d love to do if I could just get over these daft concentration issues!

Tweaking Ubuntu with Ubuntu Tweak!

bizkut — Sun, 08 May 2011 09:52:52 +0000

Ubuntu Tweak is an application that makes it easier for user to configure their Ubuntu computer.

Among the features of Ubuntu Tweak are :

Display Basic System Information
Tweaks GNOME Session Control
Edit Application Auto Start setting
Clean cache and temporary files
Change Default Splash Screen (or hides them!)
Easy to configure System Security Settings
Panel Tweaking
Tweaks Power Management Settings (useful for netbook!)
And many more

Visit Ubuntu Tweak website for more information!

KOSTEM : Mengkoperasikan Sumber Terbuka di Malaysia

bizkut — Sun, 08 May 2011 07:30:19 +0000

Akkana Peck: Overview of MeeGo Development Tools

bizkut — Sat, 07 May 2011 18:33:00 +0000

Over the past week I've been playing with the MeeGo ExoPC tablet,
experimenting with the various options for building programs.

One advantage MeeGo has over Android or iOS is that there are quite
a lot of language and toolkit options. If you have an existing program,
especially if it runs on Linux, you can probably
find a way to port it to MeeGo fairly without much extra coding.

But since MeeGo is still quite new, not all of the options work quite
as well as you might hope -- yet. I'm sure they'll get better, but
here's what the development climate looks like now.

C++, Qt and Meego SDK

C++ and Qt are the primary supported environment on MeeGo, via the
MeeGo SDK, run in an IDE called QtCreator.

The documentation turns out to be somewhat incomplete; I'll write
up a howto as a separate article.
But once you get it installed (much easier than installing,
say, Eclipse for Android), it runs nicely. You can use normal Qt, not
a specialized environment, so existing Qt programs should be quick
to port, and the IDE takes care of packaging, copying the app to your
remote device and starting it running. Very painless.

Testing apps locally isn't so easy. They're set up to use QEMU,
which only works if your development machine has hardware virtualization.
Supposedly there's a way to make this work in virtualbox (which doesn't
require hardware virtualization), but the docs don't address how.

Still, testing on the target device is easy.
Unfortunately, not many of my existing programs are C++ and Qt.
I mostly write Python, C, and Javascript/HTML web apps.

Web Apps under C++ and QWebView

So what about those web apps?
Since the C++ SDK was so well supported, I figured, why not use a
QWebView so I can run my HTML and Javascript code?

Unfortunately QWebView turns out to be tricky to use, has very
few sample apps available, and so far I've been unable to get it to
work under MeeGo at all.

Nokia Web RunTime

And anyway, for pure web apps, there's a kit explicitly for that:
WRT, the Nokia Web RunTime. But it's pretty heavyweight: the official
download and documentation is all based around Eclipse (for HTML/Javascript
apps? Seriously?) and a required set of Nokia libraries that I had
trouble installing.

But WRT apps are packaged according to the
W3C Widget Packaging and
Configuration specification -- so it's probably possible to
roll your own without the big Nokia WRT package.
More research required.

Python, Qt and PySide

I have a lot of Python apps, so I was very happy to see that
Python comes already
installed on MeeGo. (Perl is also supported; Ruby theoretically
is but it's not installed by default.)

Since Qt is the officially blessed user interface,
Python-Qt seems like the way to go.
Except -- Python in MeeGo has no Qt bindings installed.
The package that provides them is called
PySide, but depending on
where you look you'll either be steered toward a lengthy source
compile on the MeeGo device, or a zypper install from someone's
personal repository.

None of that is difficult for developers, but you can't expect users
to enable experimental repositories or compile from source. Is PySide going to
be a standard part of MeeGo by the time it ships to users? Nobody's saying.
It makes me leery of putting much energy into Python-Qt development
until I hear more.

Python-GTK

A little frustrated with the options so far,
I was idly poking around an interactive Python session and typed

>>> import gtk

And it worked! Even though Qt is the supported UI toolkit and nobody talks
about GTK, it's installed on MeeGo -- complete with Python bindings.
It gave two deprecation warnings, but what's a little deprecation
among friends?

A simple test program ran just fine.
So I whipped up a starter page for
PyTopo,
made a .desktop file and icon for it, copied the three files over
with scp -- and everything worked great.

There's no standard way yet to make a MeeGo RPM from a Python program,
so that will require a little hand-fiddling, but only a little.
And sadly, python-webkit-gtk isn't included,
so this isn't a good solution for porting web apps.

I'll be keeping an eye on PySide and continuing to experiment
with PySide, WRT and C++.
But in the meantime, it's great that it's so easy to port all
my existing Python-GTK programs to MeeGo.

Diana Jayne C. Gonzales: Bridge over troubled water ;): Taken with picplz at Bilik...

bizkut — Sat, 07 May 2011 13:19:41 +0000

Bridge over troubled water ;):

Taken with picplz at Bilik Garcinia in Batu, Malaysia.

Valorie Zimmerman: Regression Testing, Please!

bizkut — Fri, 06 May 2011 19:51:34 +0000

I've recently written a bit about my difficulties using UbuntuOne in Kubuntu Maverick and now again in Natty. The sad part is that a bit of regression testing, and working with our Kubuntu developer could have solved this situation long ago. APIs are supposed to give application developers access, not make that access more difficult. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntuone-client/+bug/369230

Now a related incident has happened: a Canonical uTouch patch to Qt which breaks Wacom tablets. For more on this, see: http://www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi/software/krita/no_pressure_in_krita.html.

Thank you to the Koffice people for blogging about this.

ScottK assures me that a fixed package can be found in his PPA: https://launchpad.net/~kitterman/+archive/ppa/ while we try to get the fix properly sorted: https://bugs.launchpad.net/koffice/+bug/762938.

Canonical developers, please do some regression testing against Kubuntu before committing changes.

Sabily 11.04 Al-Badr Dilepaskan

bizkut — Fri, 06 May 2011 12:17:37 +0000

Future plans for this blog

bizkut — Thu, 05 May 2011 20:30:26 +0000

If anyone reads this blog, you will realise that I haven’t actually posted much recently. This is mainly cause it has been the busiest part of my year, and partly because I have been thinking about the future of the site and what I’m going to be doing with it.

I have come to the decision that I am going to be splitting up the site into various parts. This domain (http://www.10people.co.uk) will continue to be my technology blog, but this it will only be. All the “about me” stuff will move to http://www.yamanickill.co.uk. I hope this will make it simpler and quicker to get the stuff that I actually want to get out on this blog. I hope to focus more on reviews of things rather than moans and rants like I used to in the first few years of the blog, which I feel I have lost quite a bit.

Like I said, I will set up a new static page at http://www.yamanickill.co.uk which will contain all the information about my computers, and links to all my other sites and social networks etc.

Finally, I have been having a few thoughts about posts that I want to write on a more religious or philosophical topics. Now, I don’t want to put them on this blog as that is not what you signed up for when you follow me. So, I am going to create a new blog (http://www.alistotle.co.uk) which will contain these blog posts.

This should take me a few weeks, and will hopefully be completed by the end of the month at the latest when I leave for my summer trip to the Isle of Arran. I will keep you posted, but if anything is wonky with this site until then, that will be why

Valorie Zimmerman: OpenWeek session: Introducing Kubuntu

bizkut — Thu, 05 May 2011 17:26:11 +0000

Just finished a class in #ubuntu-classroom, Introducting Kubuntu for Ubuntu Open Week: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpenWeek. What a great experience! Find logs here: http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2011/05/05/%23ubuntu-classroom.html

It runs in the usual Ubuntu way, mostly on wikis and multiple IRC channels. It seems complicated at first, so I'll explain what is involved if you want to speak, and then if you just would like to attend and ask questions.

Speakers: Visit https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpenWeek/Prep. Enter your information into the grid, and email Amber (or whomever is listed as the contact person on that page). You'll notice that I didn't do this, which made people scramble a bit to get the necessary info. Make everyone's life easier by filling out this page. Then you'll be listed here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpenWeek. Click on the time link, and you'll be taken to TimeAndDate.com, scroll down to the largest city in your time zone, and mark your calendar.

Create some introductory sentences with information links and such, which you can easily copy/paste into IRC. That will keep your talk moving along when you have no questions. Remember, you only have an hour for both your text, and answering questions. So prepare, but not too much.

Before your session, read up on ClassBot here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Classroom/ClassBot. It isn't complicated, but remember to /msg ClassBot before your session starts. Also, join #ubuntu-classroom, #ubuntu-classroom-chat, and #ubuntu-classroom-backstage. Backstage is where you interact with the Classroom folks, who make sure everything is set up for you. #ubuntu-classroom will be moderated, so people can only ask questions in #ubuntu-classroom-chat, and when you query ClassBot and say !yes, the question will appear in #ubuntu-classroom where you can answer it.

The ClassBot will announce your talk, voice you, give you the questions when you are ready for those, and announce when there are 10 minutes left, 5 minutes left, and when your session is done. Also, the log link will be announced, and you'll be de-voiced.

Attendees: Join #ubuntu-classroom and #ubuntu-classroom-chat. When you have a question, ask in -chat, like this: QUESTION: Your question. The speaker may or may not have time to talk to you personally, or address your question in the hour. I was happy to be able to get to all of my questions, although I didn't know all the answers.

In -chat, there were some answers which I wasn't quick enough to get into the main classroom channel, so I'll add them here:

[09:19] <himcesjf> QUESTION: Hi valorie. Great information #ubuntu-classroom! Could you introduce me about graphics which Kubuntu uses? Like the compositing types openGL and XRender, etc ...
[09:22] <ScottK> himcesjf: Defaults to OpenGL, but supports Xrender. GLES support coming soon.

[09:22] <doctormo> QUESTION: Has there been any update on Akonadi and what do you feel about further chaos with the new elementary postler backend? Is the KDE community concerned at all about fragmentation of data standards?
[09:23] <shadeslayer> okay i can answer a part of that ^^
[09:23] <shadeslayer> doctormo: Yes, the new KDE PIM 4.6 oozes of akonadi integration, infact, i'm using it right now! and everything pretty much works for me except IMAP, which i was told has been fixed in a new upstream release
[09:24] <ScottK> doctormo: What standards in particular?
[09:25] <doctormo> ScottK: mail, contacts, calendars, notes, bookmarks, clipboards, file-path-and-io... etc.
[09:25] <doctormo> Everything that makes you want to pull your hair out about gtk ;-)
[09:26] <ScottK> doctormo: I don't think Akonadi is responsible for any fragmentation of these standards.
[09:27] <ScottK> Akonadi was originally proposed to be hosted on FDO, but got refused for reasons that didn't seem to make any sense.
[09:28] <doctormo> ScottK: I don't think it is either, but the situation continues.
[09:28] <apachelogger> shadeslayer: works for me
[09:28] <doctormo> And much the same with new apps being developed that reinvent their own backends too.
[09:31] <ScottK> doctormo: Akonadi is intended to be broadly useful for PIM type data and hopfeully will see broader adoption. A prototype Evolution package that used Akonadi was demonstrated at the combined desktop summit in Gran Canraria.
[09:34] <shadeslayer> ^^ Adding to that, i'll be working on a GUI for a tool called syncevolution which can identify multiple PIM Data sources and do a 3 way sync between your PC/Phone/A Server like Nokia's Ovi Store
[09:34] <shadeslayer> so hopefully that should reduce data fragmentation ....

[09:36] <himcesjf> QUESTION: Would you introduce me on application framework/toolkits Qt/GTK+ with reference to Kubuntu/KDE?
[09:36] <eagles0513875> himcesjf: for QT there is kdevelop for qt based apps
[09:36] <shadeslayer> himcesjf: QtCreator as well
[09:36] <eagles0513875> not sure what programs are available for gtk though

Valorie Zimmerman: Linuxfest Northwest and Happy Memories

bizkut — Thu, 05 May 2011 16:32:27 +0000

Bellingham again showed us the beauty of the coastal northwest, and the Bellingham Linux User Group topped themselves with LFNW 2011. While it's difficult to gauge attendance to a free conference, it seemed we had roughly the same number stop by our booth this year, although we gave out fewer free CDs. We had no large pile of packaged free CDs from Canonical, so made do with giving out the last of our old ones, and burning CDs for those who needed them. Thank you to Michael (MJEvans) for donating the blank CDs. Also thanks to our anonymous donor, who insisted on giving us $5 for his FREE cd!

Also new this year, was burning to thumb drives. Not only did I lend out my MultiSystem drive a few times, I also created a couple of them for people, and burned ISOs onto four or five drives as well. Yay for Ktorrent getting me all those ISOs, so they were available for people! Next year, I'll do even more. We had a request for Xubuntu, but I didn't have one, and the bandwidth was not sufficient to download it.

Saturday was a crush, and we were demonstrating Unity and Kubuntu, burning CDs, and talking about Ubuntu-Women and Linuxchix, and the issues surrounding women in Linux, FOSS, and even attending conferences. I enjoyed showing off Kubuntu and KDE and explaining the difference to lots and lots of people.

Also, once Zareason fixed the wireless on my Terra, Thomas put 11.04 32-bit on it, and I set it to the netbook interface. So people could really see the difference between Kubuntu and the new Ubuntu Unity interface. I saw the new Teo netbook at the Zareason booth -- it looks snazzy! We might have sold them a few netbooks, so I hope their good service to me pays off in the long run. :-)

One new feature at LFNW this year: http://linuxfestnorthwest.org/lfnw-principles. Not that the principles themselves are new; this group has always been friendly and welcoming. But now they are codified for all to see. Kudos to BLUG for this important step!

They know how to throw a party, too! The party Saturday night was lower-key than last year, and more fun, in my opinion. The beer was, if possible, even better too. :-)

The food was nothing special, but after the food, the games came out! Not only Guitar Hero and some Wii games, but also table games for those who wanted them. I think that created a really friendly atmosphere before the beer was poured. Also, the beer cups were smaller. I know I drank less, and felt good Sunday morning. Yay!

Sunday is a quiet day, with fewer sessions, and fewer visitors. However, I think quite a few visitors to our table were new. I was surprised at how many CDs went out. I was having trouble keeping up! I did have time to do two sit-downs with women who wanted to know more about the community, how to use IRC, etc. That was really enjoyable.

All in all, and excellent weekend! Again, the Hampton was affordable, clean, and convenient. The free breakfast also furnished a yogurt, apple and bagel for my lunch too. I look forward to 2012, and plan to speak.

LoCo Directory: Next Steps

bizkut — Thu, 05 May 2011 11:30:05 +0000

I love the LoCo Directory. The site provides a fantastic way to browse the global list of Ubuntu LoCo Teams, organize events and more. What is more, it is almost entirely a community-driven project; the site has a series of developers who actively work to improve and refine it.

Next week at UDS we have some sessions to discuss the next steps for the LoCo Directory and I just wanted to share some elements that I think would bring huge value to the site and the wider Ubuntu LoCo community:

Integrated Help – the goal with the LD has always been for it to be a central hub of information and content about LoCo Teams and how to empower them to be successful. From the dynamic content perspective, this has been really successful, but I would love to see the documentation and resources about what LoCo teams are, how they work, how to run a team, what the LD does etc, all come to the LD and be built in. I would love to see a ‘Help’ tab that takes me to a knowledge base of content. I think a great approach could be a built-in wiki; this would provide a low barrier for everyone to participate.
Make the LD tab-worthy – I would love to see the LD become interesting enough that I always have it open in a browser tab. Today I only go to the LD when I need to look something up. I would instead love to see the front page of the LD be a constantly updating portal of content that summarizes what is going on in the LoCo community that day. The #locoteams stream is a great first step, but I would love it to also show Planet-like content of LoCo related blog posts, a flickr stream of recent pictures etc. This would get me into the mindset of waking up every morning, going to the LD and seeing what is going on in LoCo teams across the world. That would 1.21 Megatonne of awesome.
Visually depict the people part of LoCos – LoCo’s are all about awesome people getting together to do awesome things. On the front page of the Ubuntu Developer Summit website we have a scrolling pane of pictures from UDS that depict the social and personality driven environment of UDS. I think it could be fantastic to have the same kind of slider on the front page of the LD with the latest most interesting pictures from LoCo teams (possibly determined by some open voting system that shows the most popular pics). This could great photos of meetings, group shots and other inspirational content.

Just some ideas, and I look forward to discussing them at UDS.

What other ideas do you think could be interesting for the site?

Speak to me!

bizkut — Thu, 05 May 2011 00:30:16 +0000

Ubuntu comes with a built in speech synthesizer and an application called Orca which acts as a screen reader. Orca “looks” at what is on the page, decides what to say, then passes what it has to say to an intermediate service called speech dispatcher. Speech dispatcher then decides which voice synthesizer to use and gets the text read out. It is designed so that it could use different synthesizers for different languages, or different voices. So the chain is like this:

Application that wants to speak “hello world” -> speech dispatcher -> speech synthesizer -> audio output

By default the speech synthesizer is one called espeak which has a number of synthetic voices (they sound like a robot should sound). You can try this now, go to a terminal window and enter the following:

spd-say "hello world"

If all is working you should hear your computer talking. So this is the default voice that is included on the size restricted Ubuntu CD. Whilst espeak is pretty good and synthetic voices perform well when speeded up (some blind people listen very very fast) there are more realistic voices and more sophisticated speech synthesizers available. The one I think is probably the most promising is called OpenMARY. This has a range of voices available including a number based on the rather good Hidden Markov Model technique. OpenMARY runs as a web server with a REST API, you go to the right URL and you get back a .wav file with the sound you asked for. Feel free to have a play with an OpenMARY server I installed on one of our servers, I have installed a bunch of decent hmm voices, try saying different things with them. So this is all rather fun and you can hear the difference in quality between the rather robotic espeak and the nearly human sounding OpenMARY, the next step is to get it working through speech dispatcher.

To do this I am using the speech dispatcher generic module which is a simple way of getting them to play together. Writing a proper module specific to OpenMary would allow a few more features to be used. To try this out we will be installing just a configuration file on your machine which tells speech dispatcher to pass the text it wants to say out to our OpenMARY server on the internet, you get back a wav file and it plays it. This is just meant for playing about really, don’t rely on our server to be there all the time and this also means that if I felt like it I could look at a log file on the server and see what you are saying (I can’t be bothered, and I don’t care what you say).

Check that spd-say “hello world” actually works. If it doesn’t then go fix that first.
Download the config file from http://people.ubuntu.com/~alanbell/openmary.conf
```
wget http://people.ubuntu.com/~alanbell/openmary.conf
```
Copy the config file to /etc/speech-dispatcher/modules/
```
sudo cp openmary.conf /etc/speech-dispatcher/modules/
```
edit the speech dispatcher config to load your new module configuration file
```
sudo nano /etc/speech-dispatcher/speechd.conf
```
Find the bit with all the AddModule lines (most are commented out with a #) and add a line containing:
```
AddModule "openmary" "sd_generic" "openmary.conf"
```
Save and exit
```
Ctrl+x, y
```
stop the speech dispatcher service if it is running
```
sudo killall speech-dispatcher
```
Try it out
```
spd-say -o openmary "hello world"
```

If you want to run your own openmary server locally (possibly better performance, works offline, more privacy) then edit the openmary.conf file and change the mumble.libertus.co.uk bits to localhost (or whatever server you want to point it at). To use your new voice in Orca go to the preferences window and select speech dispatcher and openmary as the synthesizer. The generic module only seems to allow you to use the default voice (it doesn’t report the list of voices available back to Orca). A proper module would do that and get other features available for Orca to control. If anyone wants to help with that it would be great.

Tell Someone Else!

Taking Notes at UDS

bizkut — Wed, 04 May 2011 22:30:10 +0000

The Ubuntu Developer Summit is coming up real soon now, starting Monday 9th May. For those not familiar with it this is a week long summit where developers and contributors to the Ubuntu project figure out what they are going to work on over the course of the next 6 month release cycle leading up to the Oneiric Ocelot release in October this year (10.10). I am not going to this UDS, it is over in Budapest and I just haven’t got the time available because we are just too busy doing OpenERP implementations for our customers. I may have a bit of time here and there to join in the live audio sessions and collaborative notetaking and action planning that goes on. Historically this has been done using the collaborative text editor “Gobby” which has been a source of frustration and lost data for several UDS events

This year we have a new plan, the Gobby server is still available as a fallback, but we also have an etherpad server which I have been helping to get integrated into the main summit schedule. So the way this works is the summit website is a series of pages like this one: http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-o/2011-05-09/ which list all the sessions going on. Each one has a little pen and pad icon on it, click that and you get to a page providing all the information about that one session, the time, room etc at the top, and the list of attendees and links to blueprints and wiki pages at the bottom. In the middle is the pad, where you can type stuff. There is no save button, everything is saved all the time.

For example have a look at http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-o/meeting/community-o-unity-developer-participation/ you can see at the top I have put some hashtags (they will become clickable links when that bit gets turned on) and you can just type freeform text. If you are the first person to open a particular notes page there is a big button to click on to create the pad. We might jiggle the theme about in the next few days to add a panel at the side where you can see the names of the people typing in the pad. This approach means that the schedule itself is the index to the notes pages, the notes just work in a browser, on any platform and through firewalls and proxies with no special configuration. I hope (and I am pretty confident) that this will enhance the work done at UDS by people there in person and following on remotely.

Tell Someone Else!

Alan Lord: Taking Notes at UDS

bizkut — Wed, 04 May 2011 20:28:59 +0000

The Ubuntu Developer Summit is coming up real soon now, starting Monday 9th May. For those not familiar with it this is a week long summit where developers and contributors to the Ubuntu project figure out what they are going to work on over the course of the next 6 month release cycle leading up to the Oneiric Ocelot release in October this year (11.10). I am not going to this UDS, it is over in Budapest and I just haven’t got the time available because we are just too busy doing OpenERP implementations for our customers. I may have a bit of time here and there to join in the live audio sessions and collaborative notetaking and action planning that goes on. Historically this has been done using the collaborative text editor “Gobby” which has been a source of frustration and lost data for several UDS events

Tell Someone Else!

Upgrade Android Nexus S Ke Versi 2.3.4 Secara Manual : Tutorial & Pengalaman Saya

bizkut — Wed, 04 May 2011 15:55:49 +0000

Cosmology Meets Machine Learning

bizkut — Wed, 04 May 2011 10:30:12 +0000

Guess who's live Tweeting the Cosmology Meets Machine Learning workshop at UCL? Yes, yes, it's me. (And Phil Marshall, and Joe Zuntz.) Follow the #cmml hashtag if you're interested in Bayesian inference, statistics, machine learning and/or cosmology.

What are Perlis students going to do with Netbooks?

bizkut — Wed, 04 May 2011 02:19:00 +0000

Its in NST that 700 students will receive netbooks.

Not reported how it will be usable to the students. Or if they have internet access.

Schools should prepare wifi so that these students can access education freely in school.

Tutorial: Stop-Motion in Linux

bizkut — Tue, 03 May 2011 19:30:18 +0000

EDIT: Just been told there’s another way to do this using ffmpeg, I might add this in once I’ve had a play with it. Show ▼

Command I shall have to test: ffmpeg -f image2 -i foo-%d.jpg -r FRAMERATE -s XxY -vcodec libx264 -vpre slow -b BIT_RATE -threads 0 foo.mp4

This is just a quick post. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but never got round to it and minecraft was the best excuse to do it with. Video I made is embedded at the very end (or you can click here to watch it now: http://youtu.be/JdQxXj5czrU).

How I Made The “Frames”

Basically I took many screenshots in minecraft, roughly about 3-6 screenshots per section I wanted to show in the video, using the F2 key. I did this on my laptop using the “Play Offline” feature, and setting my server to allow anyone. So I showed up in game as “Player” and set him where I wanted the “camera”. I then logged into Minecraft on my workstation using my normal account. Then I began building, every so often taking 3-6 screenshots with the laptop.

How I Rendered The Images

Now obviously I’m going to assume before you started taking screenshots that you cleared out your previous minecraft screenshots folder (or webcam stills, whatever), and that your folder is full of images that you want to make into a video only. The screenshots folder is found at “/home/your_user/.minecraft/screenshots/” without quotes. Since these are terminal commands, you’ll need to “cd” to that folder when you want to render.

Step 1: Installing “mencoder”.

First you’ll need to install “mencoder” since this is what makes the initial video. This is found in most distros repos. I’m using Ubuntu 10.10, but should work for all. Do this with the following (you should be able to find it in the software centre too):

sudo apt-get install mencoder

Step 2: Creating a file with list of images.

Now we’re going to cd to the screenshots folder, and we’re going to make a file with a list of all the images in the correct order as stated by modified date/time. This is going to be used by mencoder so that it creates the stop-motion video. To make this file we’re going to do this:

ls -1tr > files.txt

You can name the file anything you want, in this example I’m using “files.txt”, however make sure you remember what file name you give it, and please note that’s a one (1) not a lower-case L. The -1 is so that each file is on its own line, t is to list by the modified time/date, and r is for reversing the order. Please check the man pages (command: man ls) if you want to use other options. I find this the best way to do it however.

Step 3: Render the video! \o/

Now that we have our file full of all the images we’re going to be using on each line (and in the correct order), we now need to finally render it into a video. Now I’m not going to go into details about the options I have picked, but it basically outputs into a raw video file (~200MB for a 1 minute long video) and is great for editing should you wish to do so. Anyways, on with the command line stuff!

mencoder -nosound -ovc copy -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -mf fps=6 mf://@files.txt -o video.avi

The important thing to note by the way, is the -o option – this is to set the filename of the output. You can call this whatever you like, I just chose “video.avi”. Also note that

vcodec is which codec we’re going to be using (in this case mpeg4), the -ovc copy is how I’m making this video output as raw video (basically a direct copy of the images), and one last thing I should mention is you’ll notice fps=6 – This basically defines what the framerate is, I set this to 6 because I was using ~6 images each time. However have a play with that number until you get the right results your after. Doing it this way takes less time, since it doesn’t have to process very much. Plus you get quality as good as the images your working with, which is perfect.

Step 4 (optional): Edit video, add sound.

You don’t have to do this, but well ~200MB is a bit much to upload to things like YouTube (plus it has no sound!). So I used PiTiVi Video Editing software that comes with ubuntu to import the video and song of my choice. And then rendered it how I liked it. I use MP4 Muxer with default options, because the size is decent at the end, and looks reasonable for the end quality (and works in YouTube).

That’s everything! We’ve just made a stop-motion video file! With that, I shall now present my first ever stop-motion video, using the medium of Minecraft! The song used is released under the Creative Commons licence (info in the video description), the pictures were designed by me (using popular ideas as a base), and the game used is Minecraft which is owned by Mojang. Enjoy!

Florida: Melbourne/Viera Natty Release Party

bizkut — Tue, 03 May 2011 12:50:53 +0000

The Florida Team held our second Natty Release Party at the Pizza Gallery in The Avenue at Viera shopping area. We had been here for a previous release party, and we really enjoyed this venue. Lupine had made the arrangements, and everything was ready to roll when we arrived. They had the tables all set [...]

Florida: Orlando Natty Release Party

bizkut — Tue, 03 May 2011 12:07:50 +0000

On Saturday, April 30, our team held an excellent release party at Panera Bread located off of Vineland Ave. in Orlando. We had 14 total attendees, and enjoyed good food and fellowship while we discussed the new features found in Natty. Munz (Chris) and Bluebomber brought a long a couple of friends and everyone [...]

Vid Ayer: building packages from source tutorial by debian women

bizkut — Tue, 03 May 2011 04:15:00 +0000

DW is conducting a packaging tutorial. Do note, this is not a tutorial for
upstream package building from source, but still, its worth listening to. Here
is Marga's announcement::

Are you enthusiastic about Debian and thinking about contributing? We want
to guide you with the basics.

We are convinced that there are a lot of people out there that want to get
involved with Free Software but don't know where to start. For Debian,
the most common task you'll do as a contributor is rebuilding a package.

The Debian Women project, in collaboration with the OpenHatch project, will be
holding an IRC event to help people that want to compile their first Debian
package from source, and apply their first patch.

The event

On Saturday May 7th, two tutorial sessions will be held on #debian-women on
irc.debian.org to help
people rebuild a package for the first time.
The earlier session, suggested for those that live in Oceania, Asia, Africa and
Europe, will be held at 11:00 UTC.

The later session, suggested for those that live in the Americas, will be
held at 22:00 UTC. You can find out the exact time in your timezone by using
the timezone converter: http://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/tzc.tzc

There will be people available to answer questions and generally help out with
any difficulties that might arise all along the day.

More info at http://wiki.debian.org/DebianWomen/BuildItEvent

Intended audience

This event is aimed to anyone who wants to rebuild a Debian package for the
first time, it's a simple task that doesn't require any previous knowledge,
only a working installation of Debian (or Ubuntu, or other Debian-derived
system). We want to particularly encourage women who want to get
involved, to take their first steps in
contributing to Free Software, but everybody is welcome.

More about IRC

IRC is a real-time chat system you can use to get in touch with members of the
Debian community. You can connect to IRC through lots of different clients,
including xchat, pidgin and konversation.

About Debian Women

The Debian Women project seeks to balance and diversify the Debian Project by
actively engaging with interested women and encouraging them to become more
involved with Debian. http://women.debian.org

About OpenHatch

OpenHatch is an open source community aiming to help newcomers find their way
into free software projects. It works towards this goal through on-line and
outreach events. This event is a reappropriation of the OpenHatch "Build it"
events.

--
Besos,
Marga

Elizabeth Krumbach: Keynoting at Fosscon in July

bizkut — Tue, 03 May 2011 00:08:55 +0000

Last month I was approached by the organizers of Fosscon, taking place in Philadelphia this year, and asked if I would be interested in doing the keynote. It requires a flight across the country, but Philadelphia is my old home and I was delighted by the opportunity!

So on Saturday July 23rd I’ll be giving the Keynote at Fosscon with a FOSS involvement talk I’m calling “Making a Difference for Millions: Getting Involved with FOSS”

The title of the talk is inspired by work I see every day where individuals in the FOSS community submit a patch that changes default behavior for an application and literally makes a difference for millions of users. In addition to the framework of the talk, which will discuss the plethora of places one can get involved, I’m really going to focus on some of the may ways that contributing is satisfying and beneficial, even if the contributions are made sheerly on a volunteer basis.

Registration to Fosscon is free, but there is also a $25 “Fosscon supporter” ticket that includes a gift bag. More details about the conference and registration information can be found at fosscon.org.

Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal Tutorial Video

bizkut — Mon, 02 May 2011 23:01:54 +0000

The tutorial video is largely aimed for those who are new to Ubuntu. It covers topic ranging from:

Installation (Dual boot & Slideshow)
Pre-Installed Software (LibreOffice 3.3, Firefox 4, Banshee Media Player, Ubuntu One, Software Centre, Puzzle Games, and a 3D shooter)
Desktop & Unity Features (inc Compiz)
Installing Software (few apps to try)
Conclusion

The video is easy to follow and comprehensive. Moreover, its Youtube page contains Chapter Timing bookmarks, which enables user to skip to appropriate chapter without going through the video serially.

Mark A. Hershberger: How good are our bugs?

bizkut — Mon, 02 May 2011 17:27:48 +0000

Sumana Harihareswara, our Community Development Coordinator, is a very valuable person to have around. She’s helped me incredibly during the weekly bug triage and uses her experience and insights from the Gnome project to great effect.

On my philosophy of bugs post, she asked a couple of great questions and made some really useful suggestions:

How high-quality is the bug database overall? That is, what proportion of open bugs contain adequate reproducibility steps, and are currently reproducible?Sumana follows this up with a helpful anecdote of her experience from triaging Empathy bugs: I was able to clear out a big backlog by testing the repro steps in old open bugs and sending the reporter a kind boilerplate notice basically saying: “not reproducible in the current stable version; have you upgraded?” Given the number of open bugs on this project 1620 (70% of which were opened before 1.16 came out) this sounds like a good thing for me to do, to weed out the unreproducible bugs. Guess I have my work cut out for this week!
What are the strategic priorities of our community and our product? The WMF product whitepaper is probably useful here. We have the ability to think of priority in a more sophisticated way than simply predicting numbers of admins and users affected; we can also weight the importance of the feature.She’s right again, of course. I’ve had reading the white paper on my TODO list for a bit. Looks like it is time to get it done.

Rant: About Computer Sciences/IT Classroom Assignments

bizkut — Mon, 02 May 2011 16:49:37 +0000

When I was an undergraduate (i took Computer System & data communication major), one of the assignment requirement was to design an SIC/XE (link: http://tinyurl.com/3fyxjc8) simulator machine. Basically I’ve to understand how a microcomputer works by studying the SIC machine architecture, implementing the register understanding its opcode, etc.

The final outcome was the SIC/XE simulator written in C language which I was able to come out in a few days of spending time in front of computer. I compiled it with gcc, and it happily runs all of my opcodes and instructions.

In another assignment, I (and the rest of the class) are required to study BNF about a quarter of the semester, and we had to come up with an assembler for that particular simulator. Basically we have to create a fully working/executable assembler that spits out object code to be executed with the SIC/XE Simulator.

In short, we have to built a working computer simulator, and an assembler to enables programmer to write a program and executes it on that particular simulator in a course of one semester, and to me.. it is still a lightweight.

oh yeah, in another assignment I was tasked to write my own substitution/transposition cipher and integrates it with Java JCE and its cracker based on differential analysis. of course it only represent only 10% of the whole marks of the course.

And when we spoke about multimedia, we really mean about drawing a straight line in 3-d space by using spatial drawing algorithm and how to use OpenGL (in C) effectively to generate a computer representation of whatever object that the lecturer had just shown us. and the object must be interactive and must be accompanied with sound effect (thanks to libSDL - http://libsdl.org/ ).

Knowledge of actual physics and linear algebra, advanced calculus and numerical methods are a must, because you won’t be able to create a body in 3D space without those math shits. advance calculus helps you with handling the volume of the model. linear algebra, well.. helps you to get the model aligned within 3d space, vector and physics helps you to get around the environment within opengl without looking like a complete idiot.because you need to code stuffs in lines of C first without the benefits of seeing the output in a WYSIWYG environment until the point of compilation and running the actual code.

Kids nowadays grumble when they got an assignment that *only* requires them to use Java/PHP language to create a part of login system which implements basic (built-in!) hashing, which to me is completely doable under 15minutes with the benefit of the internet and free codes lying around.

Moreover there are several cases of Final Year Degree Project (FYP) that only requires a student to put together a mobile based web registration system using XHTML (and probably with PHP as the back-end) — they complained that the task was damn “too hard”….. which in my opinion is not suiteable at all to be a degree-level FYP (and it can be completely done under one week!)

Well, back in my days, those FYP examples aren’t even qualified for a class project that worth more than 5% of the semesters’ grade and those who aren’t capable in interpreting TCP/UDP packets or those who are not been able to do network programming will be having hard time graduating from the degree program (duh, its about Data Communication!)

Is the standards going down?

Mark A. Hershberger: Spring Evening

bizkut — Mon, 02 May 2011 14:19:14 +0000

Reading Terry Pratchett’s Feet of Clay to the kids after dinner.

Mark A. Hershberger: Pascha!

bizkut — Mon, 02 May 2011 14:18:09 +0000

For the first time in quite a while, we’re early for Pascha!

Mark A. Hershberger: Proof that I do leave the house

bizkut — Mon, 02 May 2011 14:17:43 +0000

Sometimes

Diana Jayne C. Gonzales: Look, I Had A WorkLife Schedule Before!

bizkut — Mon, 02 May 2011 03:30:04 +0000

LifeWork Schedule:

Monday
05:00-07:00 | PhilNits Review
07:00-08:30 | Breakfast, Work...