Ubuntu Linux Tips & Tricks

User Experience Survey

2011-05-24T20:38:00.002-04:00

Note: this is not about the Advertising team survey, which has a very different focus but was inspirational.

When your interaction with other Ubuntu users is entirely made up of developers talking about bugs they need to fix and users seeking support (IRC, forums, bug reports), your perspective changes. It's hard to get a good idea of the big picture. What portion of users are hitting problems in what areas? How do users who've reported bugs feel about the experience? How are the local community teams doing? That kind of stuff is hard to wrap your head around without metrics. Sometimes people get the impression Ubuntu Developers don't care what users think, but it's actually really hard to get a balanced view of things with just bug reports or to tell whether an upset group is a vocal minority or a vocal majority. And unfortunately, massive-scale mind-reading has not yet been perfected.

To that end, I've worked with a bunch of other members of the Ubuntu community (Alan Bell, Lyz Krumbach, Valorie Zimmerman, Joseph Price, and others) to create a survey that'll help those of us working on various parts of Ubuntu understand where we need to improve and how we can do better.

If you have an opinion on Ubuntu, please take 5 minutes to fill out the Ubuntu User-Experience survey.

I would like to repeat the survey in other languages as well, but I don't know any other languages fluently enough. If you would like to translate the survey into your language, email me translations at: maco [DOT] m [AT] ubuntu [DOT] com -- I suggest sending it as an attachment with a message like "here are the translations for $language" so GMail doesn't go "non-English text! Must be spam!"

PS: go here for translations and eventual results

Why I'm not speaking

2011-05-20T09:49:00.000-04:00

I decided not to submit to the CFP for any LnuxFests this year. Bethlynn from Ohio LinuxFest was surprised to not see me on Southeast LinuxFest's speaker list and asked why. I told her I didn't submit anything to SELF and would not be submitting to OLF either. I'm not doing public speaking this year.

On the one hand, I'm taking a break. Coming up with new topics that I feel comfortable with is hard. Plus, I know I end up working on slides the night before and therefore missing out on the Friday night party.

On the other hand, I've spoken three times at Ohio and once at Southeast now. LinuxFests are a great environment for new speakers to get their first experience speaking in front of a few hundred people. It would get boring to end up with an "old guard" taking up a chunk of the speaking slots every year. I wanted to step back and make way for some new blood. I don't have a list of everyone who's spoken at Ohio LinuxFest and what years they did that (though that might be interesting), but I do have a list of all the women who spoke at OLF. Catherine Devlin, Dru Lavigne, and I all spoke at OLF the last two years. Dru was at SELF last year and will be speaking there again this year. I'm sure if I had a list of all the men who'd spoken there, I'd find a similar group who'd spoken repeatedly at the Eastern-US fests.

I'd really like to see some new faces applying to speak at these fests. Ohio extended their call for proposals to 1 June, so if you think you've got something to say, please submit a proposal. If you know someone who doesn't yet know they have something to say, please inform them and get them to submit a proposal. The first time I spoke at OLF I was insistent that I couldn't possibly have anything to talk about that everyone there didn't already know better. Remember: everyone is someone else's guru.

Blogging Against Disablism Day - ASL

2011-05-01T15:13:00.000-04:00

Penelope Stowe of the Ubuntu Accessibility Team told me about Blogging Against Disablism Day. Disablism and ableism have the same meaning and are more regional than anything else. They refer to the underlying assumptions about what "everyone" can do. I live not far from Gallaudet University, the only accredited liberal arts university for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, so I actually come across people signing with some frequency.

When I first started signing, the friend who was teaching me (whom I met through the LoCo even!) would simcomm, and I learned from that. Now she usually doesn't speak at all when I'm around. She can safely assume I'll get enough context clues to learn whatever signs she uses that I didn't already know. I'm really happy about having achieved that level of fluency.

Last year, I used simcomm to give my presentation at Ohio LinuxFest. Mel Chua (Red Hat) and Bryen Yunashko (openSUSE) were both there. One is Hard of Hearing; the other is Deaf. I used a lot of ASL that weekend, not just for my own communication, but also as an interpreter for those giving directions. A few other hearing people even came up to me and started signing, since they saw me signing with Mel.

Maybe some day I'll be a certified interpreter. Right now, I can interpret in a pinch, but it's not pretty and doesn't have very good grammar. The trouble with simcomming so much is I have very little practice with using ASL-word-order. I intend to take an actual class to try to fix that.

I'm happy to see OLF has welcomed requests for assistance from disabled* attendees and speakers. I suspect I don't see many Hard of Hearing or Deaf people at conferences because they can usually safely assume there will be no accommodations, meanwhile there are no accommodations because organisers can usually safely assume there will be no HoH/Deaf people.

I don't know much about technological accessibility for those with hearing impairments. I do know Mel has complained that she has no way of knowing her system bell is on until her coworkers get upset at how loud it is. I know another friend complained that media players often now have the volume capped so that they are less likely to induce hearing loss but are unusable if you already have hearing loss. A Cowon D2 turned out to be loud enough for her to hear. I know videos without captions or podcasts without transcripts are a problem. I don't know what else though.

* Vocab note: A person has an impairment. Society's treatment of that impairment is what disables the person.

Key transition

2011-04-27T23:39:00.001-04:00

I started a key transition around DebConf last year upgrading from my 1024-bit GPG key I've had about as long as I've had this blog. At the time, Debian's requirements for new maintainers was 2048 bits, so that's what I used. It's now 4096 bits. I learned this as I was preparing to send an email to newmaint asking to become a DM. So that's a bit of a waste. I have signatures on both the old ones, so below I will include a blurb signed by each of the old keys in case one of the previous signers is willing to take that as proof enough to sign the new one. Yes, the new key is signed by both of the old ones.

Old keyID: BC8D3269 - blurb signed by old key
Old new keyID: 340950E8 - blurb signed by old new key
New new keyID: 36535A82 - blurb signed by new key

I'll be revoking the old 1024-bit key by my birthday (1 September). The 2048 one will probably stick around at least until after the next thing I go to with lots of Debian & Ubuntu folks, to allow the new one time to get more signatures, since I hear weakening your spot in the web of trust is a bad thing.

Future uploaders

2011-04-26T09:49:00.004-04:00

After seeing someone say on the Debian Women mailing list that she maintains 4 packages but isn't sure she's good enough for upload rights in Debian, I was had a thought again that I've had before but don't think I've ever said here. If you're a sponsor, and you think you're sponsee is ready, tell them!
Rich Johnson once told me he was uploading through sponsors for years before his sponsors finally got annoyed enough to scold him into applying for MOTU. I've also been told that Sarah Hobbse's application for core-dev was submitted by a sponsor with a note to be on IRC at a certain time for the meeting, when the sponsors decided the person was taking too long to apply. ~~Possibly true, given the person who told me that used to be on the MOTU Council (the council that used to approve new MOTU before the Developer Membership Board came along)~~. ScottK has corroborated that story.

Embarrassing Advertising

2011-04-07T21:08:00.002-04:00

Want to see a prime example of advertising that is in no way going to help the goal of getting members of the other half of the population interested in Ubuntu? It's right here!

Thanks, OMGUbuntu!, for being an embarrassment. Oh, and responding to complaints about it with "Funny how companies can get away with using massive sex appeal in advertising but as soon as we try it, it's apparently 'not okay.'" takes a lot of ignorance. As if nobody complains about sexism in other advertising? Yeah, right!

The response to another complaint was "How is driving away FOSS-promoting companies that use fairly mundane sexual marketing encouraging Ubuntu's mainstream adoption?" Guess what? Driving away half the potential users doesn't exactly count as good promotion or promoting mainstream adoption.

And you know what? No, this isn't the first time that tabloid has used sexualisation and objectification to get their precious page views.

I know, most of my posts lately have been political. I'm sorry about that. Having been busy with finals, graduating, moving (twice), and starting a new job, I've not had much time to spend on thinking of topics. Sometimes, topics just throw themselves in my lap, though.

Women in Open & Collaborative Software & Technology Survey

2011-03-29T01:35:00.000-04:00

The Ada Initiative is a new project working on the women in open source & open culture thing. It's been a number of years since FLOSSPOLS surveyed the Free Software community to see the status of women in the community at the time, so the Ada Initiative has a new survey up for men, women, and anyone in between to fill out giving their perspective on the status of women in their community, whether it be a Free Software community, hackerspace, Open Culture group, wiki, open education, barcamps, or what-have-you. It closes today, and it'll take less than 5 minutes, so go have a visit.

"Sexy" software

2010-11-16T01:25:00.001-05:00

It has always rubbed me the wrong way when software is described as "sexy." There is something about the context that just seems off. Well, I just got around to reading a book I've been intending to read since 2006, "Female Chauvinist Pigs" by Ariel Levy. It's about how pop-culture & the media have managed to convince much of society that it is "empowering" for a woman to um…objectify herself quickly, before a man does (you can probably guess by my phrasing that I do not agree with the women who buy into this, and neither does the author). Anyway, there's a paragraph in there that sums up nicely my discomfort with the use of the word "sexy" to describe, well, things that have nothing to do with, you know, sex:

Sex appeal has become a synecdoche for all appeal: People refer to a new restaurant or job as “sexy” when they mean hip or powerful. A U.S. Army general was quoted in The New Yorker regarding an air raid on the Taliban as saying “it was sexy stuff,” for instance; the New York Times ran a piece on the energy industry subheadlined “After Enron, Deregulation Is Looking Less Sexy.” For something to be noteworthy it must be “sexy.” Sexiness is no longer just about being arousing or alluring, it’s about being worthwhile.

OK, so your software is "worthwhile" then. Got it. Congratulations, I guess? But…why??? Is it faster than the alternative? Does it have a more intuitive UI? Does it colour-coordinate better than the garish purple, green, and red interface full of <blink> tags of the alternative? Does it take what is normally a complicated 15-step manual process and distill it into a simple 3-step process wherein the computer intuits many of the steps itself? If so, say that! That'd be an actual useful description!

Feminist aside: the flipside of this is the implication that if a thing or person isn't "sexy," it's worthless.

Please chip in

2010-10-29T17:02:00.000-04:00

Amber and Pete Graner house was struck by lightning while they were at UDS. Their kids and dog are fine, but their stuff is all burnt up. It'll be a while before insurance gets all worked out, and in the meantime, they need to be able to get things like clothes, shoes, etc. Rikki Kite setup a Chip In for the Graners for anyone who wants to give them a bit of money to get back on their feet. Consider it an early Christmas/Hanukkah/Yule/Wintereenmas gift.

This is the third one of these events where the community came together to help out after a disaster, and I find it really amazing. It's reminding me a bit of what I read about the Amish recently.

Help Bryen out

2010-10-04T14:10:00.002-04:00

Bryen Yunashko of GNOME Accessibility had his equipment stolen. He's in Spain for the GNOME-A11y Hackfest, and on his way from Barcelona to Sevilla (where the hackfest is going on), his bags with his 17" laptop, Kindle, 1TB hard disk, and camera were stolen. He's visually impaired and deaf (so screen-readers are out), so those items were bought with that in mind. 17" so he can see the screen, Kindle because it zooms unlike paper, and a camera with many lenses because it helps him see. He picked up a cheap netbook so he can still hack while at the hackfest, but the tiny screen makes it hard to use with his vision.

A collection is being taken to replace the stolen equipment.

Introducing Gally

2010-10-04T13:55:00.003-04:00

For my senior design project in school, I decided to design and write a program for teaching sign languages on Linux. It was in a "working prototype" stage when I presented it in school in April. I had a few more things I wanted to get right before announcing it to the whole FOSS world, but I just got confirmation from Nigel Babu that the last known bug in RC3 is fixed, so it's time to release!

Here's what it looks like (though that "France" sign video is removed since I did the sign backwards…should probably correct the text under it…oops):

Packages for version 0.5 (what I'm calling the first stable release) are in the Gally stable release PPA for Lucid, and in Universe for Maverick. It'll be uploaded to Debian Unstable soon.

This release only supports American Sign Language, but some of the lessons have been translated into French and German. On the roadmap for 1.0 is support for installing multiple sign languages (yes, places have different sign languages), hopefully through KGetHotNewStuff. Quizzing should also be in that version. That means that people who know BSL, LSF, DSL, Auslan, NZSL, or any of the others whose names I don't know are certainly wanted to start preparing lessons for that version!

I suspect a bit of an FAQ is in order:

Why name it "Gally"?
- That is the nickname for Gallaudet, which can refer either to Gallaudet University or Thomas Gallaudet, who started the first deaf school in the US. It was based on French teaching methods.
What licence is it under?
- GPLv3
What's it written in?
- PyKDE
What if I use GNOME?
- Use sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends gally to avoid pulling in half of Kubuntu
Is there an IRC channel?
- Yes, #gally on irc.freenode.net
How can I help?
- Suggest lesson topics
- Write up a lesson plan (list of signs for a suggested lesson or one you thought of)
- Convert a lesson plan into XML
- Submit videos of you signing what's in a lesson plan
- Make or find CC-BY or CC-BY-SA clipart or photos to work as "context" with the lessons (like the French flag in the screenshot)
- Help make the GUI translatable

You will need to download the ASL lesson pack (link is to this month's snapshot) to study ASL. Use your favourite archive manager (Ark, File Roller, tar) to put the contents in either ~/.kde/share/apps/gally/ (if only you will use it) or /usr/share/kde4/apps/gally/ (for all users on the system). That means the lessons.lang ends up in ~/.kde/share/apps/gally/ASL/ or /usr/share/kde4/apps/gally/ASL/

Thanks go to the folks who've been testing and Nigel in particular for helping me roll through RCs, Paul Hummer for writing the original setup.py when I am new enough to Python to have never done this, and Karen Rustad for making a nice icon (which isn't in the screenshot, since it's an old one) based on the ASL sign for "teach."

Algorithms, Reverse Engineering, and Crochet

2010-10-02T02:58:00.002-04:00

Sing along: One of these things is not like the other. One of these things just doesn't belong…

Actually, not really. These things can all go together: algorithms, reverse engineering, and crochet. I've been crocheting since I was so young I don't remember not crocheting. My Mimi (what I call my grandmother) taught me. There exist crochet patterns you can buy on paper or find online, but she doesn't know how to read them. I've read one pattern. It was for a doily I made in high school. So, how did Mimi and I know what to do when crocheting the rest of our lives? Reverse engineering!

Mimi had a big clear plastic bin in her nightstand full of samples of crochet. They were usually about 10x20cm or 5x8in and done in whatever scraps of yarn she had sitting around, so it was a very colourful pile. Each one had a different pattern in it. She was always fond of the seashell patterns though. There were others that looked like little rows of pillars on a Greek building and she had one very complicated one that sort of made a starburst shape within itself. If she wanted a certain effect, she'd just dig up her sample, poke at it a bit and look really close, and then copy how it was done. Maybe she'd add a few extra stitches to make the seashells wider or something, but to her a finished example was better than written instructions. I didn't learn the term until a few years ago, but poking at things to see how they work, then using that knowledge to go make some more? That's reverse engineering.

I've had a few people express surprise at someone being into artsy right-brain things and computery left-brain things. One was in the car on the way to Southeast LinuxFest, as I was sitting in the back crocheting. I responded by reciting the pattern of what I was doing as a bunch of nested for-loops. Hey, it's an algorithm. Here's a picture of me crocheting at the speakers dinner. I was making a pink snood based on the white one I'm wearing in the photo. I figured I'd be asked about being Amish less frequently if I had a pink one.

Dustin wrote a couple weeks ago about teaching his wife to code. She also crochets. I mentioned in his comments that reverse engineering and algorithms are a big part of crochet too. To demonstrate, today I finished crocheting a scarf. Here's the algorithm, in Python:

#!/usr/bin/python
for i in range(20):
    print "ch",

for i in range(6):
    for j in range(2):
        print "ch",
    print "\nnext:  "
    for j in range(20):
        print "s",
    print "ch",
    for j in range(10):
        for k in range(3):
            print "ch",
        print "\nnext:  "
        for k in range(10):
            print "d ch",
    for j in range(2):
        print "ch",
    print "\nnext:  "
    for k in range(20):
        print "s",

Key:

ch: chain
d: double crochet
s: single crochet

Thanks to Kim Kirkland for correcting my long-hand stitch names into the standard abbreviations.

PS: the scarf is aubergine ;-)

Using ODBC with bind

2010-10-01T15:01:00.001-04:00

I ran into this last week, and the Google was failing me, so here's the reason why you sometimes get "Required token $zone$ not found." when debugging why bind won't start with ODBC. The answer is: because the DLZ documentation is slightly wrong. It delimits "zone" and "record" with % instead of $. That is, the directions show:

{select zone from dns_records where zone = '%zone%'}

But really, it should be:

{select zone from dns_records where zone = '$zone$'}

There you go. That's where that error comes from. Now hopefully the next person who hits this will be able to find an actual useful answer when they search for the error.

Horn Tootin': Isabell Long

2010-09-30T14:45:00.000-04:00

Isabell Long, one of the awesome people I know through Ubuntu Women, is currently being featured by the BBC for creating GovSpark, a site to aggregate energy usage statistics from different branches of the UK government and compare them. Way to go, Isabell!

Help fund free culture

2010-09-14T18:42:00.001-04:00

Musopen is a group that's been trying to release classical music that's long been out of copyright back into the public domain. How did it leave the public domain? Each recording is considered a new work, so just because the copyright has expired on the sheet music doesn't help all us lovers of Free Culture. The recordings are still copyrighted themselves. They're using Kickstarter to get money to hire professional orchestras to record classical music for the public domain. They've done this before, and they say that based on their price quotes "every $1000 buys a complete set of Mozart violin sonatas, or all of Chopin's mazurkas, ballades, or nocturnes."

If you want to support the public domain, or just plain if you're into classical music, why not give them some dough? This is a last-minute call. It closes in a few hours.

Takoma Park Folk Festival

2010-09-13T10:53:00.002-04:00

Yesterday the DC LoCo Team was at Takoma Park Folk Festival yet again. This is the fifth year the team has been here. One man came over the table going "ok, that's a word from my part of the world. How are you using it?" Apparently he's from Zambia! He felt obliged to take an Ubuntu CD when we told him that it was started by a South African. We also had a visit from Mike Heney, who is running for office in this area and apparently uses Gentoo (he says because the IT people where he currently works know how to use Red Hat and Ubuntu, and this keeps them from interfering). Donna Edwards, who represents Maryland in Congress came up too, and she asked what we were about. Kevin started talking about open source in government. She said she definitely thought that was a good idea and expressed an affinity for Free Culture! She also lamented a future of walled gardens. I asked her to go against Disney when they start lobbying for more copyright extensions in a few years (Mickey expires in 2023, and government moves slow, so they'll start soon), because the Public Domain needs to be protected. A teacher with a computer lab full of Edubuntu machines in need of administration and nobody to do so visited the booth. Turns out her lab is about a 10 minute walk from the restaurant where we meet up each Saturday. We said to email the mailing list, and one of us would arrange to come by and get things moving smoothly again.

Lots of existing Ubuntu users came up with questions, and thanks to the magic of 3G I was able to find answers to the harder questions. There were also lots of "oh I love Ubuntu!" "Did you know there was a local group?" "I had no idea." "Here's a list of a bunch of local Linux groups." We had lots of handouts "for students", "for educators", "for businesses", "for designers", "for publishers", etc. listing Free Software they could use, thanks to the Software Freedom Day folks. This was our 6-days-early celebration.

Someone forgot to bring the little thing you can hold in your hand and click for each visitor, so our count of visitors is based on us attempting to remember to tally on a piece of paper. Of course, the hardest time to remember to tally or to count is when lots of people show up! We ended up counting about 120 visitors to the booth. That's about 30 fewer than in previous years, but given the rain in the early part of the festival and the continuing threat of it from the cloudy skies, no too bad. Someone else (me) forgot to bring the stickers though, so I can't blame too much. I did have copies of Ubuntu User and Linux Pro for people to flip through.

I guess one of the organisers (possibly the one at the Information Booth who looked at my OLF shirt and said "oh, you must be with Ubuntu") knew that Free Software can be a bit of a religion for some, because we were put directly across from the Presbyterians', Quakers', and Jews' tables. There was a lot of back and forth between our table and the Quaker table, due to significant overlap between the local Quaker and Free Software communities. Annalee, the clerk of Takoma Park Friends Meeting, is working on learning Perl to contribute to Dreamwidth. Another fellow at their table, John, is someone I've seen around many LUG meetings and other events. And Arthur David Olson, who dutifully remained at their table the whole day, wrote the software that makes timezones work in UNIX and Linux: tzdata (aka the Olson Database). He also took this picture:

See the rest of the album.

Ohio LinuxFest 2010

2010-09-11T20:39:00.004-04:00

I'm on my way home from Ohio LinuxFest. Why'd I leave so early? Partly because my carpool wanted to, and partly because the DC LoCo is going to be at Takoma Park Folk Festival tomorrow. I told everyone I'd post my slides here, so they'll be below.

Both of the talks I gave were ones I've done before. At the UbuCon, I gave the Ubuntu Development Processes talk that I gave for a local LUG a few months back with updated information. There are now 167 human members of ~ubuntu-dev, up from 147 when I gave the talk in May! Thanks goes to Alan Bell for his lplist.py that let me pull down the full list of members and automatically exclude teams and duplicates.

The talk I gave for the main OLF stuff was the security one from Southeast LinuxFest. It was slightly changed, but this time ran a lot shorter than last time. That's because I have neither the vocabulary nor the brainpower to go off on tangents while simcomming. Simcomm is short for "simultaneous communication." I gave the talk simultaneously in English and American Sign Language (ok, really, it was a bit of an ASL pidgin since I used English word-order—my grammar knowledge is little-to-none). I've never done that for a presentation before, just for conversations. While I did learn a bunch of new signs last week just for this (like "exploit", "vulnerability", "attack", "man in the middle attack", "internet", "infect", etc), I still needed to restrict my English vocabulary to things I could sign or for which I knew a sign that was a reasonable approximation. Because some words just plain don't have sign equivalents (at least not ones which my more-fluent-than-me friends know), I told those in the audience for which sign language is useful what signs I would be substituting, such as "horse" for "trojan" (get it?) and "fishing" for "phishing" (which really is the same concept anyway). By the way, "man in the middle attack" takes forever to sign. First assign a place in space for "you", then on the other side of your body assign a place in space for "computer" (as in the one you're trying to talk to), then sign "man" and motion that it exists somewhere in between those two places in space, then sign "attack."

Because I was signing yesterday with Mel Chua of Red Hat (who I think thanked me two or three times for actually *gasp* accommodating her—she's my friend, I promised I would simcomm if she attended a fest where I was speaking), a few people came up and started signing to me. There were a surprising number of people who at least knew the manual alphabet well enough to do that. One person told me today that seeing the two of us chatting in ASL yesterday had him thinking I was deaf (so I guess I wasn't resorting to fingerspelling too much). I met a woman named Carol who used to teach at Gallaudet University, the only liberal arts university in the US (or world?) that's specifically for deaf and hard of hearing students. She says I did a good job of simcomming, so yay! As you can imagine, using two languages at once is a bit of work. Because I left early, she agreed to interpret for the questions asked of a speaker later this afternoon who is deaf, for whom I was doing a bit of interpreting yesterday. I think he had booked an interpreter of his own who then didn't show up. Mel, Carol, and I tried to convince my dad to take an ASL class since he's getting to be that age (the pitch of my voice has been lost on him for years already). We also discussed the possibility of organising an accessibility/deaf-and-hard-of-hearing track next year.

Yes, my dad was there! He doesn't use Free Software at all, but I got him to sit down and play with my laptop at the KDE booth, and when I explained what Akregator is for and showed him Kontact and OpenOffice.org, he seemed to pick it up pretty easily. He even told a random person that they should give it a try! Yes, he's a salesman. He'll sell anything, even if he doesn't know how it works or exactly what it is :P He was at the party last night and so met a handful of Ubuntu and Fedora folks along with many of the people from the LUG in his city. He said he might take my brother over to a LUG meeting some time, and he got a "I ♥ LINUX" bumper sticker for my brother's car.

Anyway, here are the slides:

Ubuntu Developer Processes (OLF2010)

View more presentations from Mackenzie Morgan.

Linux Security Myth

View more presentations from Mackenzie Morgan.

If you want to download them, you can either download from SlideShare (login required), or you can get them from the handy-dandy Presentations project on Launchpad, complete with LaTeX sources. Yes, I use LaTeX for slides. I ranted on here 2 years ago about how awful OpenOffice.org is for making slides and haven't gone back since.

Finding more women to speak at Ohio LinuxFest: success!

2010-09-02T22:05:00.002-04:00

Cross-posted on Geek Feminism. Co-authored by Moose J. Finklestein, OLF's Content Chair.

Some conference organisers will say "we didn't get any submissions from women" to explain the lack of women on their stages. As of two years ago, the Ohio LinuxFest was in that category. With a little outreach effort, and embracing diversity as a core value, the Ohio LinuxFest has successfully recruited more women to share their experience at OLF.

How'd we do? While last year only five of the speakers at Ohio LinuxFest were women, out of a total of 31, this year 14 of the 38 speakers are women. That's a third of the conference speaking slots! One of the two keynoters is a woman. There were 107 talk proposals for the 27 general speaking slots. Before anyone tries to suggest that we simply took them all, it should be noted that a full 48% of the proposals for talks categorised as not assuming high levels of prior knowledge (making them suitable for the most attendees) were from women.

We believe that much of this success is attributed to community outreach. This year, we contacted Ubuntu Women, Debian Women, LinuxChix, DevChix, and the FSF's Women's Caucus mailing list about the call for presentations, and did it have an effect!

Recognising the various concerns women speakers can face, we tried to specifically address potential issues in the email sent to women-focused mailing lists. Some of these known issues include lack of confidence in new speakers, not being clear what the intended audience is, or the "imposter syndrome," where someone doesn't recognize that they are qualified to speak on a topic. The woman to woman dialog made the difference.

We wanted to make sure people weren't refraining from submitting because they lack confidence in their technical abilities (an excuse we'd heard before), so we explained the attendees' demographics, hoping to get more proposals that would fill the gap we had for user-aimed talks. Ohio LinuxFest has everything from home desktop users who started using Ubuntu a week ago (or even that day!) to seasoned system administrators who love Slackware, Gentoo, or NetBSD. Nevertheless, beginner proposals have tended toward introduction to development topics, not leaving enough for people who want to be users, not developers. We also made sure to mention that it's a great crowd who is very welcoming of first-time speakers.

Women are involved with more than just speaking at the Ohio LinuxFest. Beth Lynn Eicher has been actively involved as a director for 6 years now, and the current staff, all volunteers, is about 35% female.

The Ohio LinuxFest takes pains to create a weekend conference friendly to all people, not just women. The diversity statement includes gender, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, and even operating system -- folks who don't use Linux are just as welcome as those who love it. There are regularly talks about or including BSDs, interoperability in heterogeneous environments, and cross platform free software.

Additionally, all speakers are instructed to keep the content of their presentations clean. The Ohio LinuxFest bills itself as a family friendly conference and aims to keep it that way. As an effort to make a positive effect with the community at large, the Ohio LinuxFest will host the second annual Diveristy in Open Source Workshop on September 12, 2010.

Looking at the growing trend of more female influence on the OhioLinuxFest we'd like to see it be the leader for more women to attend and become more involved with other free software interests.

For those interested in pretty graphs, I've been graphing women speaker proportions at various LinuxFests on the GeekFeminism Wiki.

Sharing a shell and monitoring the other party

2010-09-02T01:42:00.002-04:00

Recently, I had a reason to allow someone else to use a shell on a machine for which I'm the admin, but I wanted a way to track what they're doing. You might think the history command is just fine for this, but it's possible to clear the history, and I wouldn't want that. Screen to the rescue!

I ssh'd into the machine and created a new user for my visitor. Then I switched to that user. Once logged in, I ran screen -L, which logs the shell (both input and output) to ~user/screelog.0). Then I called up the user, gave them the IP address, username, and password. They logged in, and I told them to run screen -ls to see a list of open screen sessions. The output looks like this:

There is a screen on:
 2119.pts-0.marlyn (09/01/2010 06:32:03 PM) (Attached)
1 Socket in /var/run/screen/S-maco.

The next step was for them to type screen -x 2119.pts-0.marlyn Once they did this, we could each see what the other saw in our SSH session, and it was all logged. Great! I could keep track of what they were doing as they were doing it and review the logs later for a double check.

It's not a VCS though. If you know what directory they'll be operating in, you might want to run bzr init ; bzr add ; bzr commit -m "starting point" first, so you can later run bzr diff | less to see what files changed and keep a record of what changed, since while it might all seem perfectly logical while it's happening, recalling the exact changes won't be easy. The point of watching can be to catch them in the act if they try to do something that violates your security policy or to be given a demonstration.

EDIT: After a question in comments about how you keep them from opening another non-screen'd connection, my friend Peter suggested adding screen -xR to the user's ~/.bash_profile, so it forcibly connects to the screen session. Thanks, Peter!

ZaReason Terra HD

2010-08-28T02:32:00.000-04:00

Jono wrote about his new ZaReason Strata, and Rich wrote about his new ZaReason something-else, so I figured I'd let you all know about the ZaReason Terra HD I said I wanted to order, now that I've had it about a month.

Typing has turned out not to be a problem. This makes sense, if you compare the size of the keyboard to the one on my other ZaReason laptop, a 13" they sold in 2008 under the moniker "UltraLap," but which I call Betty. The only diffrence in width is the extra column of home/pgup/pgdn/end keys, which are Fn keys on this keyboard, and I got used to the gaps between keys.

What's confusing me the most is that this has the Ctrl on the far left of the bottom row and Fn to the right of it, while on my old Gateway (Ada) and Betty have Fn on the corner and Ctrl to the right of it. I use Marlyn (the Terra, named after Marlyn Meltzer, another ENIAC programmer) a lot when on the bus to/from work, though, so it's actually on the other laptops that I screw up a lot. Oh, can you guess which thumb I use to type space?

"Why do you use it on the bus to/from work?" you may ask. Well, it has a 3G modem built in! So, within an hour of taking it out of the box, I found myself at the T-Mobile store signing up for a SIM card. Some people say "eww, T-Mobile," but they're charging $40/mo for 5GB bandwidth that when exceeded just gets slower, while AT&T wants $35/mo for 2GB followed by overage fees or $60 for 5GB followed by overage fees. Easy choice there! Oh, and the other night when CopyNight was held at Teaism in Penn Quarter (yummy food, recommended!), I was the only one with reception in the basement. That's where I was when I posted the last blog post, actually. I like being able to IRC from the bus! This will be very handy when I'm at a family reunion next weekend with no wifi and Ohio LinuxFest (where I am speaking) the weekend after that, since the conference center always wants to gouge OLF for Internet access by charging thousands of dollars more than the con can afford to pay to provide access to attendees (resulting in wifi being unavailable).

The one little thing bugging me is the MacBook-like lid. That is, it can't be laid out all the way flat like my other laptops' lids can. MacBooks always make me worry that someone is going to throw a shmooball or other projectile, hit the screen, and either A) snap it off or B) knock the laptop over. I hope B is more likely than A.

I got it with Kubuntu Netbook Edition pre-installed, though I have since upgraded to Maverick which doesn't differentiate between plasma-netbook and plasma-desktop at install-time (meaning I have both interfaces available and can press a button to switch). As far as I know, ZaReason is the only company pre-installing Kubuntu or really any KDE-based distro. When I ordered it, I told Jonathan Riddell (Canonical's Kubuntu hacker), and his first question was "what OS is it coming with?" I said "Kubuntu Netbook," and he boggled and requested confirmation that I was serious.

Not sure what else there is to say about it. With Firefox running and so refusing to let my SSD sleep (for some reason, Firefox writes to disk every few seconds) or give my CPU a break (yeah, don't get that one either), I get about 5 hours of battery life. I really wish Firefox wasn't such a resource hog. I may have mentioned before that they had a suspend/resume bug to fix before release. I actually ordered a red one and told them to send it unfixed, but the timing on red parts being shipped to the ZaReason shop was perfect for Canonical to inform them that some BIOS tweaks needed to be made and for them to get the parts manufacturer to do it before shiipping! So, I can reliably resume from suspend when I click the suspend button in the battery applet. This uncovered a new bug though: the fact that I have to click that button. I don't care, it's how I usually suspend anyway, and the "suspend if left alone and unplugged for >15 minutes" setting still works so it doesn't end up causing problems anyway.

More pretty photos! I don't think my camera did a good job of showing how metallic the lid is or the fact that the wrist area is slightly rubberised you get a good grip when holding it. Oh, and I love that the power cord plugs in on the side instead of in the back. I like to be able to see where I'm plugging things.

Oh yeah, I always see people comment on blogs where Linux-laptop vendors are mentioned that they wish there was a company in their country selling these. Guess what? ZaReason ships internationally!

Is packaging new software hard?

2010-08-24T20:40:00.018-04:00

EDIT 1: Sorry Planet readers. I tried adding a "read more" thing to shorten it, but apparently that doesn't change the RSS feed, just the blog's front page. And yes, I will fix up the Ubuntu Wiki later.

A common answer to my question about why people aren't packaging is that packaging is hard and the wiki is kind of lacking. Debhelper 7 and Source Version 3.0 (the new Debian packaging format) make things a lot easier.

So is it hard? In the common case, no.

EDIT 2:Switched from "native" to "quilt" since as pointed out in comments, it makes for a smaller upload and debuild can deal with directly-applied patches in the case that you don't know how to use quilt.

Assuming the software you want to package uses something like Python distutils ( python setup.py build && sudo python setup.py install) or Autotools (./configure && make && sudo make install), Debhelper 7 makes things really straightforward.

Backing up, there are 4 files necessary in the debian/ directory:

rules
control
copyright
changelog

There are two more files you can include that act as a sort of metadata for what sort of package you're making:

compat
source/format

Assuming you want to make a Source Version 3.0 quilt package with Debhelper 7 (this is pretty normal these days):

Rename the original source tarball to have the form <package name>_<upstream version>.orig.tar.gz
Unpack the source and change into the unpacked directory: tar xf foo_bar.orig.tar.gz && cd foo
Make a debian directory and enter it: mkdir debian && cd debian/
Now it's time for those files

EDIT TO ADD

Generation

Good news: The version of dh-make in Debian SVN appears to support Debhelper 7.

Bad news It doesn't parse command line arguments properly.

In the meantime, you can use the old one to generate everything but the debian/rules file. If only a single deb will be produced, and it's under the GPLv3, that'd be dh_make -c gpl3 -s Then you'll just delete files not listed above and the debian/rules file and instead put in a debian/rules containing what I'm about to tell you below.

PS: I'm told dh_make is a pretty unclean way to do things. It's probably best if you just copy and paste the examples, then modify.

debian/rules

The boilerplate debian/rules file for standard build systems when you don't need to pass special configure options is:

#!/usr/bin/make -f

%:
 dh $@

Note that that is a tab, not a bunch of spaces, before the "dh". This used to be the most difficult file to write, which is why I used to use dh_make to generate it. Debhelper 7 made it so much easier!

debian/control

This one is long, but it's pretty easy to fill in the blanks. It's the only file of the bunch for which you might continue to need a reference. Here's how the control file should look:

Source: foo
Section: bar
Priority: optional
Maintainer: Foo <foo@example.com>
Build-Depends: eeny-dev, meeny-dev, miney, moe, debhelper (>= 7)
Standards-Version: 3.9.1
Homepage: http://foo-project.org

Package: foo
Architecture: all
Depends:  eeny, meeny, miney, moe
Description: does stuff
 Foo does stuff blah blah blah blah to make things easier for users to
 do whatever they need to do. Long description here.

Source package stanza

Source: Put the source package's name. This should be the same as the package name on the orig.tar.gz.
Section: For the list of valid Sections, see the Debian Policy Manual section on this. In Debian, you will put something like "non-free/kde" while in Ubuntu only the subsection (kde) is listed and the archive admins put it into the right section. In Debian, if the section is main, just list the subsection.
Priority: "optional" is what you want for most applications. Again, see the Debian Policy Manual section on Priorities for other options.
Maintainer: your name and email address if you are submitting to Debian, or if you are submitting to Ubuntu, put "Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com>"
Standards Version: current one (as of August 2010) is 3.9.1, and you shouldn't be starting from an out-of-date one
Homepage: the project's homepage

Binary package stanza

Now for the binary packages generated by the source package. For most applications, there will only be one binary package generated, but if there's more than one, just repeat the second stanza of this file once for each one, of course changing the values on each line.

Package: name of the binary package (the deb). Use logical names. If there's only one, feel free to repeat the source package's name.
Architecture:
- all: if it can be built once and run anywhere (common for Python)
- any: if it needs to be built everywhere
- Otherwise, a list of architectures
Description: put a short description after the colon that can fill in the blank at the end of "$PACKAGE_NAME _____" with a short verb phrase (< 80 characters). On the lines below, put the long description with a single space at the beginning of each line. If you want a blank line, put a space and a period.

Build-Depends and Depends

I kept skipping the bit about Build-Depends and Depends. For these, you want to list the names of other binary packages (not source packages!). If a particular version is needed, parentheses and mathematical symbols (like where I put "debhelper (>= 7)") are used.

Usually -dev packages will be in the Build-Depends since that's where header files are in Debian and Ubuntu while non-dev packages will be in the binary package's Depends. You don't need to figure this stuff out completely on your own. The upstream README and INSTALL files should list what libraries are needed. If they're not, complain to upstream about bad documentation!

If you don't know what package provides a certain library, sudo apt-get install apt-file &&apt-file update then use apt-file search to find what package provides it.

Notes

These are the required lines. There are more available in the Debian Policy Manual (I keep referring to that, huh? It's useful!), such as Recommends and Suggests. How do these compare with Depends?

Depends: absolutely must be installed in order for the software to work
Recommends: useful and common to have with the package but not completely necessary.
Suggests: you want apt to notify the user that there's some other software that's kind of useful to use with it

Recommends are installed by default in Debian and Ubuntu nowadays, but some people disable them using sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends foo, so the difference between Depends and Recommends is important. There are more less-commonly-used package relationships too, but you can read the Policy Manual for that.

PS: If you're packaging a Python app, "${python:Depends}" goes in the binary package's Depends line to avoid typing it all out.

I always find writing a good description to be the hardest part.

debian/copyright

The debian/copyright file is a pretty straightforward fill-in-the-blank.

This package was debianized by Your Name <you@example.com> on
Tue, 24 Aug 2010 20:05:25 -0400

It was downloaded from http://example.com

For the timestamp, run date -R and copy that in there. Make sure the copyrights are listed next, something like this (the COPYING or LICENSE file should have this at the top):

Copyright
© 2010, Author Name <author@example.com>

Double check this by running licensecheck -r in the top level code directory.

License:
The code files in this package are under the GNU General Public License
version 3:
    | This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
    | it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    | the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
    | (at your option) any later version.

    | This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    | but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    | MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the 
    | GNU General Public License for more details.

    | You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
    | along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

    The full text of the GNU General Public License version 3 is available on
    Debian systems in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-3.

Depending on licensecheck's output, you may need to list multiple licenses.

debian/changelog

This is the easiest of the files that require you to do any thought. Run dch -i --create, fix your email name and email address to match who you are, and put in an explanation. In future, you'll just run dch -i to add another entry. Explain what you did to the package. In this case, it'll likely just be "Initial release" which is pretty simple. dch should set the right version number. It'll look something like:

foo (0:1.0-0ubuntu1) maverick; urgency=low

  * Initial release

 -- Your Name <you@example.com>  Tue, 24 Aug 2010 20:05:25 -0400

The first bit is the same as the source package name and will automatically be filled in. The part in parentheses is the package version. It is in the form <epoch>:<upstream version>-<debian version>ubuntu<ubuntu version>

If you're doing the initial packaging, the epoch is 0, and the upstream version will be automatically filled in from the .orig.tar.gz.

Debian: Debian version will be 1
Ubuntu: Debian version is 0 and Ubuntu version is 1
PPA: put 0s for both of those and add +ppa1 (or +yournick1 or whatever)

Next comes the version of Debian or Ubuntu for which you are packaging. Leave urgency at low for now. You're packaging an app, not the kernel. It just affects how quickly the build servers get around to it, and abusing this field will make people Not Happy.

Other files

For the debian/source/format and debian/compat files, just run echo "7" > compat and mkdir source && echo "3.0 (quilt)" > source/format

Time to build!

The hard part is done, and that really wasn't very hard given it's pretty much just fill-in-the-blank the whole way. Now to build and test. My preferred way to test builds is to use pbuilder. It uses a minimal chroot, so your build-dependencies get tested too.

Install the build dependencies you listed in debian/control
sudo apt-get install pbuilder ubunt-dev-tools devscripts (If I missed any, tell me in comments)
Generate the source package: debuild -S—a .debian.tar.gz, a .dsc, and a .changes file will show up in the same directory as the .orig.tar.gz
Make a pbuilder to build your package: ln -s /usr/bin/pbuilder-dist ~/pbuilder-maverick && ~/pbuilder-maverick create—substitute in whatever version of Debian/Ubuntu you are building for (same as you listed in changelog)
Build the source package: ~/pbuilder-maverick build ../foo*.dsc—.debs will be output in ~/pbuilder/maverick_result

PS: The "make a pbuilder" step only has to be done once per release on which you intend to ever build. Keep it up to date with ~/pbuilder-maverick update

If it all builds successfully, congrats! If it doesn't, either you forgot a build dependency or it's not a wonderfully straightforward application and you should visit #ubuntu-packaging on Freenode or #debian-mentors on OFTC for help debugging. We're friendly!

Test

Install the debs and test it out.

Upload

You'll need to sign the package before you can upload it anywhere, if it didn't get signed when you ran debuild (the output would have told you if it did). Generate a GPG key and use debsign -k<your key ID> foo*.changes to sign it. If you're working on Ubuntu, add your key to Launchpad or if Debian add it to Debian Mentors. Then run dput mentors foo*.changes for Debian Mentors or dput revu foo*.chanes for Ubuntu's REVU (where new packages are reviewed by MOTU for inclusion in the archive). You'll get feedback from a mentor or a MOTU, improve your package based on that, and then someone will sponsor it. Or you can upload to a PPA with dput ppa:user/ppa foo*.changes

What are the barriers to walking the MOTU/Developer path?

2010-08-24T12:42:00.001-04:00

I asked this on Ubuntu.StackExchange but only got 3 answers so far, so I wanted to put this a bit more publicly too. What keeps you from packaging, patching, etc? If you do those things, what keeps you from applying for upload rights?

About 150 people are members of lp:~ubuntu-dev right now. There are also a handful of people who haven't yet become MOTU or joined another developer team but do good work. More hands are always needed, so what's keeping the rest of you folks away from this area of contribution?

For reference, 150 is a pretty small number given about 30,000 packages. Debian has more like 1000 developers.

Feel free to answer here in the comments or on U.SE.

Kubuntu & Kubuntu Netbook 10.04.1 now available

2010-08-18T11:37:00.000-04:00

The first point-release for Kubuntu and Kubuntu Netbook 10.04 is now available. If you've been putting off installing because of the number of updates you'll have to download, the good news is all updates, bug fixes, and security patches that have been released for these two versions of Kubuntu have been rolled into the new 10.04.1 disc images, saving you from spending hours on updates. Yay! Just visit the Get Kubuntu page on the new Kubuntu website to get yours.

If you're already running 10.04 and have been keeping up with your updates, you don't need to do anything. You're there!

Yes, there's updated Ubuntu ISOs too.

The Next HOPE

2010-07-26T22:22:00.004-04:00

Last weekend was The Next HOPE (following from The Last HOPE) in New York City. HOPE stands for Hackers on Planet Earth and is a biennial conference put on by 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. The Wikileaks guy may or may not have shown up. Some online say he didn't. Someone else told me "oh yeah, he was sitting behind the Tesla stage drinking Club Mate all day Friday," so who knows. Apparently his keynote timeslot resulted in everything being timeshifted by one hour though. The physical security folks said he ran long. Though maybe it was a substitute who did so? I don't know. Kaminsky had another of the keynote slots, talking about SQL injection and the difference between programmer ways of thinking ("I'll just concatenate these strings here…") and programming-language-developer thinking ("We'll parameterize these, so they don't break anything…"). He made the very good point that the reason programmers ignore that parameterization stuff is that it's a pain in the neck to have to jump all around as you try to read the code figuring out "ok now insert first parameter…back up to code…second parameter…wait which one's the seventh parameter?" and outlined some ideas he has to make syntax programmers won't hate that can still fix the problem. And yeah, let's face it. Trying to escape every bad character is total Whack-A-Mole.

A group of librarians were here talking about how to get FOSS into libraries. They had a very important tip: brush your teeth. If you show up looking like a caricature of a hacker, it's a bit hard for the librarians to take you seriously. So, look like you've bathed since last Tuesday and know what a toothbrush is. Yes, they mentioned Evergreen.

Deb "freedeb" Nicholson from the Free Software Foundation spoke about why diversity is important to the growth of Free Software (hint: more diversity = more people!) and how to get there. In a similar vein, Nikki Neulist had a talk called "Hey, Don't Call That Guy A Noob: Toward a More Welcoming Hacker Community." She was talking about how new people provide new perspectives and if you're willing to just be helpful early on, they can end up really useful later. I think this is something we've tried to exemplify in the Ubuntu world, though I do still occasionally see some unwelcoming behaviour on IRC. Unfortunately, during her talk's Q&A, some guy thought it made sense to say tough cookies, this is our hacker culture and if your skin's not thick enough, you don't belong here. C4BL3FL4M3 and I started yelling at him from opposite sides of the room. How on Earth could "if you don't like our bad attitude, GTFO" fit in in a conversation about being welcoming? Why did he even attend if that's his attitude? Troll!

The Vintage Computing talk ended in me dragging a 14 year old I was showing around to the Borders across the street to buy her a copy of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution to give her more context about things like the Altair and the PDP-11.

There were talks on "Color, Light, and Perception" and "Cooking for Geeks." In the former, I learned that magenta does not exist as part of the white light spectrum. You will not find it with a prism. It's not a single wavelength of light but rather a trick in our brains when red and blue wavelengths overlap. I also learned about additive colours, which is what the RGB colour model we use for defining colours on a computer screen is based on. The reason I see white captions on a black background as red/blue-split (like when you look at 3D stuff without the glasses) when seeing it at an angle out of my glasses was also explained. Neat! The latter was about food science, a basic introduction to it, and a reference to there being more in the speaker's new book of the same title. Apparently the temperatures we're taught in food safety courses assume you're not hitting the coldest part of the meat, that your thermometer's wrong, and a bit more, so they're overestimated by a good 15°. Not that I eat meat or am interested in testing that. Time at temperature was brought up as well—the fact that reaching a temperature doesn't matter as much as maintaining that temperature for a decent amount of time. Various enzymes take various times to break down into something tasty. I think he said brussels sprouts were in the category of things that need to spend a good amount of time at high temperature to taste good. Someone should tell my mum this. Hers are too bitter.

I missed much of the "Simpson's Did It" talk, but I caught Mouse's segment where she talked about Mozart. Apparently "Miserere" by Gregorio Allegri was well-loved by the pope of his time. So well-loved, that he had analogue DRM on it! That is, no copies of the sheet music could be made without the pope's permission, period. Only two copies ever were, and they were for princes who had to promptly return them as soon as they finished. Additionally, the song could only be played during Easter week. What did Mozart do, knowing he couldn't get sheet music? Showed up, listened, memorised, and transcribed from memory. DRM broken! Thanks, Mozart!

If you want to write online about controversial topics and you find that your free speech is being harmed by those who do not want you to be heard sending false DMCA notices, you should know about Project DoD, a web host who is willing to send a counter-notice in response (apparently unlike most others). You still have the mandatory 10-day offline period while the counter-notice goes through, but at least it's not a permanent offline period. They're willing to fight for their clients. Lawyer Tiffany Rad (who was my carpool for the trip) and Chris Mooney were talking about this project of theirs.

I mentioned earlier taking a 14 year old around. She's a smart kid named Johannah, so I was introducing her to the other LinuxChix and other assorted cool people. I explained public key cryptography (the practical, not the mathematical theory) to her and showed her how to generate a GPG key. She's an Ubuntu user, so I got her uncle to pick up a copy of How Linux Works for her. It looks like an excellent book for her skill level. It starts out with basic command line stuff and goes on all the way through explaining bootloaders and system internals. Cool!

We attended a LinuxChix Lunch on Saturday, where the women who'd been there in 2002 for H2K2 were expressing surprise at how many women were present, saying LinuxChix would soon be obsolete. They said H2K2 had somewhere between 10 and 30 women total. Improvement was obvious. And by the way, yes, the hacking community does seem to have more women than the Free Software community. There was definitely a higher percentage of women here than even at SELF, which I've already said has more than I remember seeing at any other Linux event (uh, outside of LinuxChix events, obviously). Funny enough, when we got back, I ended up talking to some woman I'd never met who saw my panoramas on my screen and wanted to know how I took them. I told her about Hugin and Free Software and Ubuntu. Anyway, the "funny" bit is that one of the first things she said when asked how she liked the con (she'd never been to a hacker thing before, but her son was a speaker, so she showed up) was (paraphrased) "this is all very interesting, but I notice it's mostly male, and mostly Caucasian." Yeah…still got a ways to go.

I had a duty while I was there too. I was handing out postcards for Ohio LinuxFest to everyone I saw with a Tux, GNU, or distro logo on their shirt, laptop, or tattoo. There were a lot of Ubuntu users. At one point I thought I saw an Ubuntu laptop in front of me, but it was actually OSX.

Ubuntu Women t-shirt design + wallpaper

2010-07-10T01:22:00.003-04:00

Probably a year or so ago, I made this design and submitted it as a possible Ubuntu Women t-shirt:

(download SVG source—you'll need the old Ubuntu Title font to render the SVG properly)

Today I requested SVGs of the new logos popping up around the *buntusphere, and Martin Owens had them all so went and modified my design. I think it's beautiful!

(download the SVG source —you'll need the new beta Ubuntu font to render the SVG properly)

He added flower petals around the logos, now that they're all perfect circles, and he even added a FLOSS flower to it! Love it! Lyz is looking into getting t-shirts made with this on it and how the Ubuntu trademark stuff factors in. Finally, Martin turned this into a really nice wallpaper:

All of the above is CC-BY-SA, but it's still subject to Canonical's Ubuntu trademark rules thanks to the Ubuntu logo in there.

OLF CFP extended!

2010-06-29T14:33:00.002-04:00

If you haven't submitted a proposal to Ohio LinuxFest yet, don't fret. The CFP has been extended to next Wednesday (7/7). Go to the CFP webpage to submit your proposal.

Laptop (er, netbook) Love

2010-06-21T15:47:00.007-04:00

At Southeast LinuxFest, ZaReason (the company that made my laptop Betty two years ago) had a table.

This is Courtney with a few of ZaReason's latest models. From left to right are the Strata 3660, Strata Pro 15, and the Terra HD.

The Terra HD is the one I want to talk about today. Some of you might remember the Terra A20 netbook, which was very popular in "mocha" colour. Apparently one of the big complaints people had about it was battery life. The Terra HD is its successor, and it reportedly (I didn't hog it that long) gets over 6 hours battery with its optional 6-cell battery (4-5 with wireless going). Also, I'm totally in love with this little netbook (don't worry $boyfriend, not that way).

Celeste Lyn Paul and I were hanging out at the ZaReason booth chatting with Courtney and Mark (Terranova, not S, don't get your knickers in a twist) when Celeste started fawning over the Terra HD. It's got an 11.6" screen and, as Mark was quick to point out, a 100% size keyboard, not one of those annoying 93% keyboards. I typed on it a bit, and yeah, the keyboard is the right size. I don't hit the wrong keys or anything. Great! This is a first for me and netbooks. Minor problem for my (very) long nails is slipping off the keycaps into the gap between the keys (like on a MacBook), but I think a day or two of typing on it would see me adjusted.

Then Courtney suggested Celeste pick it up and see how light it is, while Mark informed us that he always has to double check his backpack to be sure it's actually there. Celeste seemed surprised by how light it was, so I asked to hold it. When she handed it to me, my hands went UP! Theoretically, it's 2.9 pounds. It felt more like -5oz. And yes, that's with the 6-cell battery, not with the little 3-cell.

Some women fawn over shoes or purses. For me, it's laptops and laptop bags. This little beauty is available with either a red or a black lid (I guess this is where the obligatory "aww, no pink?" joke comes in), has 802.11n wifi, has options for 1 or 2 GiB of RAM, choice between a normal hard disk or SSD, and even has 3G as an option. And yes, it has ZaReason's signature Ubuntu Circle of Friends super key. Oh, and for the KDE fans, Mark is looking into adding Kubuntu Netbook Remix to the OS dropdown list (though as I understand it, you could just request that in the comments box when ordering, and they'd do it).

I've said before that I'm not getting a netbook til I can get an ARM one, but there's a netbook with a perfectly-sized keyboard that's light as a feather. I don't think I can pass that up. It's out of stock right now, so that gives me time to save up some dough and buy one ;-) Oh, and since no super-quick played-with-it-and-fell-in-love hardware review is complete without the pricetag: it starts at $449.

"Is Linux Secure?" at Southeast LinuxFest

2010-06-12T16:19:00.003-04:00

I'm at Southeast LinuxFest right now, listening to Daniel Chen's Linux audio talk. A bit over an hour ago, I finished my presentation on the Linux security myth. It's meant to be accessible to normal users or to geeks needing to explain to normal users. I was asked afterward why I didn't talk about buffer overflows. That's easy: normal users can't do anything about them.

Is Linux Secure?

View more presentations from Mackenzie Morgan.

Slide 31 shows what happens when a .desktop is not executable and is in a home directory. Notably, that Fedora and openSUSE make it easy to run anyway, while Ubuntu policy says those buttons aren't OK (thanks James Tatum for the link pointer). I can understand that reasoning, but I don't expect normal people to know how to mark it as trusted or geeks to know that that's a euphemism for "set the executable bit."

Where did my favourite package go?

2010-05-17T19:05:00.004-04:00

Did you upgrade to Lucid and find that some package you like is no longer available? There are a number of binary packages that were removed in Lucid as a cleanup of the archive, though for the most part the source packages are still in there. Most of these were removed because the source package was no longer buildable—meaning patches could not be applied to fix bugs since the patched source would not compile (unless, of course, the patch fixed that build issue). Some were removed because Python 2.5 was removed. To find out what happened to the package you're looking for, try this:

apt-cache showsrc $PACKAGE

This'll tell you the name of the source package (on the "Package: " line). Then go to http://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/SRCPKG/+publishinghistory for a full listing of all versions of the package in Ubuntu. If you click the triangle on the left, it'll unfold revealing changelog info for that published version. For example, Sage Math's publishing history shows that it was deleted for the depends-on-Python2.5 reason.

And there's today's lesson on how to find data in Launchpad.

Ubuntu Developer Processes presentation from CALUG

2010-05-13T22:20:00.004-04:00

Last night I did a presentation on Ubuntu Developer Processes for Columbia (MD) Area Linux User Group. You can find the slides on SlideShare.

EDIT: Ohhh I can embed it! Neat!

Ubuntu Development Processes

Please learn to follow directions

2010-05-01T05:22:00.004-04:00

This is the second time I've seen someone in #ubuntu do this.

When you install sun-java6-jre, it will instruct you to go download something and drop it in /tmp and hit enter (something like that). For some reason I do not understand, some users just hit enter without downloading the file they were supposed to and putting it where they were supposed to. Of course, computers don't like it when users don't follow directions. The result is that apt sits there waiting…and waiting…and waiting. Eventually the user assumes everything is done and shuts down. Or maybe they try to install something else and find the dpkg lock in place and try to forcibly kill it or force shut down. Since Java is half-configured, dpkg ends up in an inconsistent state that lasts across reboots and is a pain to try to sort out.

All because somebody can't follow directions.

EDIT: So someone's said in comments that you only get prompted if you install on the command line. Synaptic just hangs waiting for an answer to a question it hasn't even asked. Yikes!

iPod Touch on Lucid

2010-04-23T17:08:00.006-04:00

Plenty of folks have reported so far that their iPod Touches work with Lucid. Well, my brother has one he got for Christmas, and he says it's not working for him. He came up with a (very plausible) hypothesis though. Maybe it has to be used with Windows or OSX once (as some sort of activation mechanism?) before it'll talk to a Linux machine.

So, I'm asking: have any of you have an iPod Touch and used it on Ubuntu 10.04 without first using it on a proprietary OS and had it work?

EDIT: That was quick! Matthew Garrett says that one sync with iTunes is needed before it can be used with Linux.

EDIT2: Paul Sladen adds: I don't think we can generate the initial databases first time

Ada Lovelace Day 2010: Dianne Martin & Sue McKnight

2010-03-24T00:17:00.008-04:00

I'm going to write about two people today. I couldn't pick.

Dianne Martin

Dianne Martin was one of my professors at The George Washington University. No, she's not teaching any of my classes this semester or going forward! I decided to write about her because she has done some pretty cool stuff.

She taught the Team Project Development & Professional Ethics class I took two years ago. It was a class where we were learning how to work in a team for a client (another department of the school) and be ethical about our decisions regarding the project. Lots of those "is it wrong to…" questions regarding things like testing thoroughly, grey hat hacking, deadlines, copyright and licenses (yes, including open source licenses), etc. When explaining reliability issues, she told us about her work writing the FORTRAN code that potentially made the Apollo space ships, well, work. I say "potentially" because she explained to us that they had two separate teams write code meant to do the same thing and rigorously tested. If the testing missed a bug and something bad happened, the other team's code could be loaded up on the fly (failover). Which team's code went into production was not released.

Fast forward a bit, and she ran my school's Cyber Security Policy & Research Institute for a few years. Appropriate, since aside from the security and policy issues she covered in that class, she also taught the Information Policy class I took last year.

In 2005, she became a Dean at Zayed University, which it appears was a school for women at the time, though they've since built a new campus where men are allowed. She wrote Removing the veil: personal reflections on educating women in Dubai about her experiences there (ACM Digital Library access required).

In 2007, she returned to DC, and that's when I met her. She is now the Associate Vice President for Graduate Affairs in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She was very helpful when there was a problem with another student who made frequent comments about women's abilities as regards computer science.

She's also notable for having been one of the authors of the ACM Code of Ethics and for quite a lot of research into computer science education and computer-aided education. One of the interesting things I recall reading about her teaching experience was that she used to ask students to draw what they think of when they hear "computer scientist." The results was a lot of drawings of guys, even coming from girls and young women. She also received the Ada Lovelace Award from the Association for Women in Computing in 2005.

Sue McKnight

Sue is one of my dad's closest friends. She's also the first female programmer I ever knew. I can't give some long list of academic things like I can with the professor above, but I remember visiting Sue each summer since I was really small. She's always been proof that geeks can be cool and have lots of fun.

She and her husband Linus have been very encouraging of my open source activities and general geekiness. I remember a couple years ago, she expressed surprise at my being so technical when my parents are both…um, well they can send email and type things into word processors and spreadsheets… Silly, Sue, I had you!

I remember her saying she was "Code Mom" to the guys she worked with, before she moved into management. She'd have to convince her coworkers that usability mattered, and that even if it'd mean an algorithm was O(10n) instead of O(n), if it was better for the user, that small performance hit was worth it.

For some reason, some Planets bumped last year's posts to the top when I edited their tags, even though they haven't changed spots in the RSS feed. Weird.

Favourite Ubuntu wallpapers?

2010-03-03T18:42:00.008-05:00

With all the talk of the new theme I was thinking I'd make a blog post of all the Ubuntu wallpapers over time, then as I was looking for them, I found a website doing just that ~~(at least up to 8.10)~~. I praised Hardy's wallpaper when it was first revealed (but erm, not the final version…). That was the last Ubuntu wallpaper I liked though (just as well I guess—I switched to Kubuntu for Jaunty without bothering with Intrepid).

Leading up to that, Gutsy had a lovely wallpaper that looked to me like chocolate-coloured silk draped gracefully across the screen. One of my cousins said it looked to her like delicious chocolate mousse (and asked for a spoon) when I replaced her Mac's wallpaper with it.

And before that, Feisty and Edgy…well, I didn't like their default wallpapers, but they had the same alternate wallpaper which I'd forgotten about until now, and which I really liked at the time (and still do).

This one looks like melted dark chocolate to me. Anyone got a strawberry? Hmm, maybe it's good that the new wallpaper looks like a bruise. I wouldn't be wanting to eat my desktop…

Which release had your favourite wallpaper?

The "dist-upgrade" misnomer & confusion

2010-02-06T12:38:00.007-05:00

Yesterday in #ubuntu, someone asked, "I am still confused about this. Everything claims that dist-upgrade actually *upgrades* distributions...can someone please clear this up for me"

So I told them:

<maco> apt-get dist-upgrade differs from apt-get upgrade in that it will remove obsolete packages and add new dependencies, while apt-get upgrade will not. this is necessary when upgrading from one distro release to another, but it is not the *only* time it is necessary. thus, in aptitude, dist-upgrade has been renamed to full-upgrade
<maco> apt-get dist-upgrade will only change you from one release to another if you've modified /etc/apt/sources.list to point to a newer release, but this method of upgrading is not recommended

They also asked "and if i do want to upgrade the distribution (not that i do), how do i go about that?" to which I responded:

<maco> the recommended way to change distro releases is sudo do-release-upgrade

They said it was the best explanation in the shortest amount of text, so I'm posting it here, hoping it'll make it easier for people to find. By the way, man apt-get does explain all this…just in slightly more technical terms.

Don't email me…

2010-01-15T18:20:00.005-05:00

…if this is the sort of email you're intending to send:

Subject: I had no idea that hot girls liked linux
Body: Are there more of you? I mean how does that happen? How does a good looking female put off their social life to the point where they can actually use ubuntu without ripping their eyes out?

Seriously, I don't want to hear it. Just think about it for one minute. What does appearance have to do with technical ability? Why do all the good looking men involved in K/X/Ubuntu put time into their favourite distro that could otherwise be spent on their social life? My answer's not going to be any different than theirs! And for that matter, why should it be social life or Ubuntu? Consider that many of the developers are friends with each other.

Also, isn't that being a little mean to Ubuntu? I mean, yeah, it's not as awesome as Kubuntu, but.…still… (joking!)

And yes, that's an actual email I received today. Ugh. Including his name and email address here is /very/ tempting, but it'd also be unethical, so I won't.

Links

2009-11-25T02:25:00.003-05:00

I just gave an impromptu lesson on symbolic links (symlinks) and hard links, complete with ASCII art, in #ubuntu-offtopic, and Topyli commented that simple explanations of this for beginners are hard to find, so here's a summary.

The purpose of a link is to allow you to have two (or more) paths to access the same data without having the data exist on disk multiple times, thus giving convenience without sacrificing disk space. So why are there two kinds of links and how do they work?

Symlinks (ln -s REALPATH LINK) work like this:

LINK --> REALPATH --> DATA

While hard links (ln PATH1 PATH2) work like this:

PATH1 --> DATA <-- PATH2

See what's happening here? In the symlink case, your link points to another path, which points to the data. In the hard link case, two paths point to the same data directly. I think I could get a lesson on pointers in C out of this ASCII art if I wanted to. If you want a bit more background, your hard disk's filesystem contains a table of inode numbers, which is just like the Index at the back of a book. Symlinks are when you get "(see also: rubber ducky)" and hard links are when you get "Rubber ducky: 5" and "Sesame Street: 5" both showing up in the Index. Since we can have multiple filesystems mounted on one machine (for example my /home is on a separate partition), it is important to note that while a symlink can point to something located on another disk (or in a book "Further reading: Little Red Riding Hood"), a hard link only knows about data on its own filesystem (ie same partition). So, if you want to link from your hard disk to a flash drive, you need to use a symlink. This makes sense since your hard disk can't know if your flash drive rearranges things while it's plugged into another computer.

How do these show up in ls? Hard links look like normal files. For symlinks ls -l --color will show LINK -> REALPATH. If REALPATH is deleted, this will be highlighted as red text on a black background.

Speaking of deletion, how does that work? Well, if you remove LINK, REALPATH and DATA will still exist. If you remove REALPATH, DATA goes away too and LINK just points at nothing (though if you add REALPATH back, LINK will start working again, as it only goes by filename). As for hard links, DATA goes away once no more inode numbers point to it. As mentioned before, hard links point directly to the data, so this means removing all links and the original filename. So if I remove the original filename (PATH1), PATH2 will still point to DATA.

I hope that's a straightforward enough explanation of how it works.

Karmic FAQ

2009-10-29T16:08:00.006-04:00

(Planet people: sorry if this pops up >1 time...when I add another question, Blogger thinks it has to bump it up in the RSS feed)

Following tradition, here's my Karmic FAQ:

How should I download?
- Torrents, to keep the strain off the servers. There are IPv6 torrent files available as well, as a test so Canonical can see how many Ubuntu users are on IPv6 and thus how much support to give it. They don't list KTorrent as one of the clients that can do the IPv6 torrents, but I'm using it right now.
- Or if you have a Beta or RC .iso sitting around zsync to the final
I have a netbook. What are my options?
- Ubuntu Netbook Remix is still around, but it's now joined by Kubuntu Netbook Edition
How's audio?
- Well, it's working fine for me, but Daniel has a "caveats" blog post (updated link). There is now a linux-backports-modules-alsa-karmic-generic package so you can get ALSA updates
Where'd Add/Remove go?
- It has been replaced by the new Ubuntu Software Center
Does Ubuntu Software Center sell proprietary software? I heard it did.
- Not yet. There are plans in about a year to allow those commercial developers who are willing to support Linux to sell apps through it.
Can I use Ubuntu One with Kubuntu?
- Yes, just install the ubuntu-one-client-gnome package.
Why Empathy? I like Pidgin!
- You're welcome to keep using Pidgin, but here are a few things Empathy has going for it:
  - It's the GNOME default
  - It can do audio/video chat
  - The Telepathy framework lets it integrate better into the rest of the desktop
  - As Jono mentioned you can do desktop sharing through it
What happened to GDM theming?
- The new GDM uses the GTK theme for the gdm user. To change it, you'll need to run gksudo -u gdm gnome-appearance-properties and select a new theme
Wasn't Gwibber supposed to be included?
- Gwibber 2.0 was not ready in time. It is available in Universe.
New theme yet?
- Yes! Softer icons, chocolate highlights, and orange wallpaper
Can Amarok play CDs yet?
- Yes
Do Intel graphics not-suck this time?
- Yes, they're very nice actually! Thanks to KMS, Intel graphics users can expect instantaneous resume from suspend!
How's Kubuntu's network manager?
- It works this time
I upgraded from Jaunty and now have no sound. What do I do?
- Run uname -r. Does it say "2.6.31-14-generic"? If it still says 2.6.28-16-generic, you're not running Karmic's kernel. Some people are having trouble with GRUB not showing new kernels. Try running sudo update-grub and then rebooting.

Additionally, I wrote an overview of Ubuntu and Kubuntu for another blog, if you'd like to check that out.

PS: Let me know in the comments if there's anything you think I should add!

Care Bears

2009-10-21T19:20:00.007-04:00

Americans between ages 20 and 30 probably remember the Care Bears, a TV show where the Care Bears (which look like teddy bears), who are from Care-a-Lot fight off mean characters with the power of caring. Their attack is called the Care Bear Stare and their tummies have little icons that light up and shoot whatever their power is at the enemy. I'm not sure why, but one was Grumpy Bear. There was also Funshine Bear, Friend Bear, and a few others, including Cheer Bear. Cheer Bear's motto was "when in doubt, SMILE!" and had the power to make others happy.

Where am I going with this? Yesterday, Amber commented that Daniel Holbach* has a contagious smile, and somehow I immediately thought of Cheer Bear. James Westby agreed that putting the two together kinda made sense. So, I did:

It does make sense, right? I mean, you just can't hang around the guy without getting at least 1 hug (more likely: a half dozen) and a huge grin.

Yeah yeah, off topic for this blog (again), but Jorge Castro said I had to blog the picture of his Care Bear coworker.

* To those who don't follow Ubuntu development and thus going "uh…who's Daniel Holbach?" He's one of Ubuntu's Community Council members, and a developer, and…ya know the list's too long.

HowTo: Gather Full Mail Headers

2009-10-09T00:29:00.004-04:00

Say you want to find out where an email came from. Maybe it was threatening or phishing or spam. How do you gather evidence of what servers passed it to you to give to the authorities? You need the full headers. They contain all the routing information. Keep in mind, though, that it is possible the sender was making use of an open relay instead of their own mailserver.

KMail: View -> Headers -> All Headers
Evolution: View -> Message Source (or Ctrl+U)
Thunderbird: View -> Headers -> All
GMail: Hit the down arrow next to "Reply" on the message, then choose "Show Original"

Now just copy and paste this into a file and hand over to whomever is dealing with the sender.

Attention Folks

2009-10-06T02:26:00.007-04:00

TRIGGER WARNING: Victims of violence or sexual assault may want to stop reading.

With all the discussion of sexism in FOSS this year, a certain individual calling himself MikeeUSA is back. I realize many people are not aware of this individual. He is notorious in certain circles for very good reasons. 2005 is the earliest record I know of him harassing women involved with Debian and LinuxChix. And last year, he sent death threats to many women involved in Debian development.

He's back, pasting the same comment to many blogs repeatedly. Not everyone has removed the disgusting comment, so I'm sure you can find it if you want. But, here's a summary of his beliefs:

Hans Reiser was justified in murdering his ex-wife since she divorced him; the only down-side is that he can't code while in prison
Men have the right to rape women, and rape laws are stealing that right
Pretty much all laws that require treating women as well as you treat your dog require stealing men's rights
etc.

I hope you can see where this is going. Obviously nowhere good.

My advice? Do not engage; he is not receptive. Delete with impunity. Note also that he uses Tor, so an IP address block on your blog comments won't work; email address block should work for a while. Also, warn the others, and tell women you know involved in Free Software that if this guy comes after them in any way, they NEED to speak up.

Yes, I know, this blog has been very offtopic for a while now. I'm sorry. The software I'm most impressed by at the moment isn't packaged in Ubuntu though! I know, I need to go file a FFe to get it synced from Debian so I can write about it.

I am a Technical Woman

2009-10-03T16:32:00.002-04:00

This video was released at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing on Thursday. It's very simple, made up of footage from last year's event. Also very cool. Have a look.

Some day, I will get myself to Tuscon to attend this event.

OLF Follow-up

2009-10-01T13:30:00.003-04:00

Ohio LinuxFest was fun as usual. Others have already written about it on their blogs, so I'll save some of the repetition. Three of the guys from Southeast LinuxFest approached me about talking there next year. ZaReason had a table showing off their Terra A20 netbook and a couple machines that are not yet available for sale (yay! previews!). Earl asked me about an audio problem they were having with one of the preview machines, so I got out a Karmic UNR stick and booted from it. Turns out it works fine in Karmic. Go ALSA people!

I've got photos from the wedding, pre-party, event, and after-party on my Flickr. There are three videos of Greg Grossmeier dancing like Carlton from Fresh Prince. I've also got a video of a MacBook failing to properly detect a projector when we (the speakers) were testing our laptops with the projectors on Friday. For the record, xrandr --output VGA1 --same-as LVDS1 --mode 1024x768 ; xrandr --output LVDS1 --mode 1024x768 was all I needed (note: too lazy to learn to use the GUI).

I told everybody I'd post my slides on my blog so here's the Slideshare link.

Going to Ohio

2009-09-25T00:39:00.005-04:00

I've mentioned Ohio LinuxFest here before, but hey…it's almost time! I'm currently at the "checkpoint" on the trip to Columbus. By that I mean, a coworker and I are crashing at our bosses' house. We're leaving in about 4 hours.

I'm working on my slides. My talk is called "Sysadmins' Rosetta Stone" and is about all those little things that trip you up when you switch from Debian or Ubuntu to Red Hat or Fedora…or vice-versa. It's aimed at system administrators, though, so fair warning. I just took a second look at the schedule, and it appears I am scheduled to speak at the same time as my coworker and boss, Scott Courtney and David Boyes. They're talking about IBM VM. I wonder if the opening line will be "back in my day…" ;-)

I'm thinking I'll also go to Cat Allman's "Getting Started in Free and Open Source" to get ideas for sharing with beginners and Dru Lavigne's "BSD for Linux Users," since I have a friend that's always trying to switch me to FreeBSD and every time I use OSX I have to relearn the flags for various commands (ex: ls --color is ls -G on BSD…I think). Elizabeth Garbee is an excellent speaker, so I think I'll attend her "How to Use Open Source to Pay for a College Education." After her…well, I'm not so sure. Maybe Mike Badger's "Programming for the Young and Young at Heart" to get tips on teaching kids, or maybe Tom Callaway's "Legalities of FOSS from a Hacker's Perspective." After that, Jorge is doing "Building a Community Around Your Project." For the last time slot with choices, I'm still unsure about Patrick Wagstrom's "Be a Wonk! Open Source, Government Policy, and You" or Catherine Devlin's "reStructured Text: Plain Text Gets Superpowers."

PS: New blog theme

Takoma Park Folk Festival: Great Success!

2009-09-14T00:23:00.007-04:00

This is the 4th year the DC LoCo Team has had a table at the Takoma Park Folk Festival. In 2006, Kevin (the LoCo leader) says the table was well off the beaten path. Very few visitors. 2007 was my first year participating. That year we got a better spot, just around the corner from the lawn area where the main stage is. Anybody wanting to reach the main stage from that side of the building had to go past us. We got about 120-150 visitors. In 2008, we had the same spot, and this time the OLPC Learning Club folks got a table to our right and the hackerspace, HacDC was to our left. Again, we got about 150 visitors.

This year, though? We were on the edge of the lawn. Hard to get from the food to the main stage without passing us. Well, we lost track of pressing the button on the counter for large swaths of time because we were so swamped, but of the times that we remembered…362 visitors. Yeah, WOW!

We find that having OLPC XO laptops seems to attract folks. "Is that the laptop from the news?" and then we get to explain Free Software and oh hey look, we have CDs for another Linux distro here called Ubuntu… Mel Chua was there in the morning. She used to work on OLPC, and I heard the reason she had to leave early was to fly down to NC to Red Hat headquarters for new employee orientation. Woot for Mel! Mike Lee came in the afternoon to take her place as Resident OLPC Expert. He runs the OLPC Learning Club.

I'd say about ½ the people who came to the table last year said they either already used it or someone in their family used it or they remembered us from the year before. That's about 75 people. This year, probably 100 said that sort of thing, maybe 100 more said they'd heard of Linux in general but not Ubuntu and isn't it hard to use? That means we had at least 160 people who'd never heard of this before but know now and another 100 who got some more information. Yay! Hundreds more than last year! This is what I like about being at a folk festival instead of at a tech conference. We're not preaching to the choir, to the techies who already know all about Linux and have made up their minds about it already. We're talking to the "human beings" mentioned in Ubuntu's tagline. Several people also asked for lists of netbooks that come with Ubuntu pre-installed.

I think we went through 3 boxes of Ubuntu CDs. Unfortunately, we only got to give out 5 Kubuntu CDs because that was all Kevin happened to have lying around. It seems our Jaunty ShipIt pack didn't include any, and he didn't open up all of the boxes in advance to count.

Taking care of the booth this year, aside from Mel and Mike on OLPC duty, were Kevin Cole (runs the DC LoCo), Other Chuck (I don't know his last name, but he's known as "Other Chuck" since Chuck Frain runs the Maryland LoCo and that's not him), Daniel Chen (y'all know him by now, right?), and me (oh come on). And as in years past, Barry Warsaw (Canonical, maintains Mailman & Python) stopped by the table. He has his son trained to give double-thumbs-down to Windows, hehe!

For photos of all the fun, check out my Takoma Park Folk Festival 2009 album on Flickr. It, er, appears I need to learn about a better color setting for my camera in really bright sunlight because everything's blue-ish, except for people's brightly-colored shirts. Excuse: it's a week old, I haven't gotten used to it yet! Though I did find the setting for brightly-colored flowers. Lots of photos that'd make nice wallpapers in my Flickr now.

The Root Password Rumour

2009-08-14T10:14:00.002-04:00

Every now and then, I see people make the following claim:

Ubuntu has a root password; they just don't tell the user what it is.

Rubbish. Some versions claim it is a randomly generated one. Rubbish. There is no root password, and this statement mustn't be confused with "the password is carriage return" (a usage RMS tried to popularize at MIT). Take a look at /etc/shadow, if you will (sudo less /etc/shadow). On a default install, the first few lines will look something like this:

root:*:14438:0:99999:7:::
daemon:*:14438:0:99999:7:::
bin:*:14438:0:99999:7:::
sys:*:14438:0:99999:7:::
sync:*:14438:0:99999:7:::

Contrast this with the line containing your user's name.

test:$6$.XQFA5P3$JYH9CpZS00DUAPDXcxc5qzP2vaNLrGj2TB5dlLj6rEVCOMpTt5XmFH7eL2TiDtXGApTknWhO6phpGyuac3DCU.:14470:0:99999:7:::

What is different? The second field (the part after the first ":") is a "*" for those system users and a long jumble of numbers and letters for the human users. The "*" means that the user cannot login using a password. The long jumble of numbers and letters? That is a hash of the user's password. In this test user's case, that is a hash of the string "password". If you're interested in the other fields, see man 5 shadow. This password has been encrypted with SHA-512, as evidenced by the $6$ at the start of the hash. See man crypt for a list of other possible prefixes. Note that $1$ means MD5, a hash which has been rather thoroughly broken. Since 8.10, SHA-256 and SHA-512 are available and will be used if you reset your password. If you've still got an MD5 hash in there, it's likely a good idea to do so, if only because it means you haven't changed your password recently enough.

This rumour usually comes up in the context of someone pointing out that if you are a remote attacker, you can guess that root has all the power and so all that is needed is to brute force root's password. In Ubuntu's default setup, this won't work because there is no password that would succeed, regardless how long you spent generating new passwords to try. Instead, the attacker would need to guess the correct combination of user-who-has-sudo-access and password—something exponentially harder. Well-meaning but misguided folks, attempting to protect us Ubuntu users from a false sense of security, then warn us that no, we're wrong, Ubuntu does have a root password. Well, the evidence is in /etc/shadow for all to see. Ubuntu has a locked root account, just the same as if one were to run sudo passwd -l (see man passwd).

What Will We Use?

2009-07-21T22:02:00.003-04:00

I mentioned Bethlynn's bet that Bug 1 would be fixed by the end of June 2011 before. She was blogging over on her LiveJournal, but since a lot of comments seemed to go missing before even hitting her moderation queue, she now has a new blog to track bug 1, called What Will We Use? She has asked me to help her with the site, so I've got an article up there now, talking about the Hundred Papercuts project and the work being done to make our desktops more usable.

I think Amber will also be writing there. At least, she seemed interested when I asked her (this would be after I asked Bethlynn if I could ask her, and Bethlynn replied "the 'why not you?' lady from SELF? YES!"). Hmmm...it looks like this blog is all folks from Ubuntu Women so far. Of course, some non-Ubuntu folks would be nice, and being a woman isn't a requirement either. If you want to write there, leave a comment on her the 'write for us' page.

Male Feminists

2009-07-09T15:36:00.003-04:00

I notice in the comments on David Schlesinger's blog posts about RMS's "EMACS virgin" tangent at Guadec/Akademy a lot of folks telling him to stop being a "pseudo-feminist" or implying that he thinks women are defenseless and need a big strong man to protect us, or whatever.

We don't need knights in shining armor, but we do need allies. For example, if someone has demonstrated that they are a misogynist, do you really think they will listen to a woman when she says that was offensive? Um, no. They'll call her oversensitive and try to blame it on PMS or tell her she just doesn't belong in that group and should go back to her knitting circle. This is where the male feminists come in. Being male, they have a chance of actually being listened to. That is, if they aren't dismissed as gender traitors first. The traitors have to be discredited. And that's why one of the first things you'll see in a comment or hear is that the male feminist needs to stop treating women like delicate flowers who can't defend themselves.

And this isn't the first time I've seen these sort of comments. Oh, and Matt just sent me a link for guys wondering about how to behave in feminist discussions.

Bold Prediction: "Bug 1 will be closed in the next 24 months"

2009-07-07T12:00:00.006-04:00

At SELF, Bethlynn Eicher made a bold prediction: Bug 1: Microsoft has a majority market share will be closed in the next 24 months. The date she named on her blog is 30 June 2011. She keeps pointing out in her blog that we're at GhandiCon 3. "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."

I'm listening to Season 1 Episode 20 of the Ubuntu UK Podcast, and they had Matt Zimmerman on there. Someone asked Matt if he thought Bug 1 would be closed in the next 4 years, and he said that sounded a little ambitious.

I'm just amused by the wildly differing expectations. I am reminded of Martin Owens's blog post Ignition Advertising in Ubuntu where he points out that people like to use things that are popular. If we don't say that "like nobody uses it" they'll be more likely to try it. In computers, this makes total sense. If you need help with a little question, do you call the help desk, or do you ask the person at the next desk over "hey, how do I add a printer?" Likely the latter. Historically, Linux has kind of lost on this front. It's why we have LUGs and LoCo Teams. I think that as we get more users, the momentum to gain more users will grow because being kind of popular makes it easier to become more popular. There's a point we need to hit where it'll become really easy to get new folks interested. How quickly we reach that point determines whether Bethlynn or Matt will be right.

Two polls below. Is Bethlynn right? What's your prediction?

Ohio Linuxfest Call for Presentations is Open

2009-07-02T21:36:00.005-04:00

Ohio Linuxfest is now in its 7th year, but that's nothing compared to the 40 years that UNIX has been around. The theme this year is the Past, Present, and Future of UNIX & Linux.

Doug McIlroy will be keynoting. If you haven't heard of him yet, he was Kernighan, Thomson, & Richie's boss back at AT&T Bell Labs when they were creating UNIX and C. He's credited with creating the UNIX pipe ("|") as well. Peter Salus, known for his books "A Quarter Century of UNIX" and "The Daemon, the Gnu and the Penguin" will be keynoting as well. And finally, Shawn Powers of Linux Journal fame will be giving a keynote on "Fixing the Economy with Linux."

As with last year, Bdale and his daughter Elizabeth Garbee are expected to speak. Jono has also agreed to speak.

But these six people can't be it. If you've got something to say, why not submit a proposal? The call for presentations is only open a few more days—it closes on the 8th. Get your proposal in!

If you're not that interested in speaking in front of a large crowd, registration is open too. There's free admission, or for $65 you can support the fest, get a T-shirt, and have lunch. There's also a professional package that includes a day of training in addition to what's in the supporter package. That one is $350. There's more to that, but the details aren't fixed yet, so I won't post them yet. There are going to be BoFs and parties of course. LPI certification level 1 testing is expected to be available again as well.

And as I've mentioned before, there is going to be a Diversity in Open Source workshop day. Proposals are being accepted for that as well. Details on the linked page.

Finally, Ohio Linuxfest is now on Identi.ca and has a group there as well. This is in addition to the Twitter account that already existed.

Shedding some light on a recent trend

2009-06-25T22:05:00.007-04:00

I learned that apparently the recent cases of adult images in conference talks hasn't received as much attention as I thought it had. Given that I heard about Matt Aimonetti's CouchDB talk at the Golden Gate Ruby Con in April from an old coworker, Sarah Mei of DevChix, and hypa7ia on #ubuntu-women all in the span of one day, I was under the impression it was something anyone who reads blogs or tweets or dents and is interested in software development had heard about it. My boyfriend is sitting here going "um, wasn't that horse beaten to death?" Apparently not. It seems not to have penetrated the open source blogosphere. Check out links from that Geek Feminism Wiki article on Aimonetti's talk for blog reactions to it, or just Google for "CouchDB", "Aimonetti", and "GoGaRuCo" (some combination thereof should work). And by the way, a thong doesn't make a woman's rear any less naked. Really. It doesn't exactly cover anything.

Noting that I said "cases," I should point out the one that happened just a couple weeks ago at FlashBelt. This one was even more NSFW. If you want the full account, check out the email the Geek Girls Guide received describing it. It's mind-boggling.

I really thought these events needed to be brought to the attention of those who had not yet heard about them. Hopefully, more repeats can be avoided if conference organizers are aware of the need to watch for such things. I've already suggested having a look through slides at OLF to Bethlynn.

Southeast Linuxfest Post

2009-06-13T15:02:00.005-04:00

I'm sitting here with Amber Graner, Lyz Krumbach, Andrew from the Ubuntu Pennsylvania LoCo, Jimmy from the Florida LoCo, and a few others. We're in a BoF chatting about how LoCo Teams can reach out. I think Amber will be posting notes later.

Amber led another BoF earlier today called "Why Not You?" about trying to get the folks we recruit involved. She was saying how for years people would talk about Linux and give Linux stuff to her husband Pete, but nobody would ever ask if she wanted to get involved. It wasn't until Pete gave her a CD and told her to have at that she started doing anything. One thing mentioned by Daniel Chen was that after an installfest, give everybody a live cd. They've got their system installed, now they can show it off and pass on the live cd to a friend.

I mentioned how after I'd shown Ubuntu to my mom and wow'd her with "it doesn't need it" being my response to her anti-virus question and "you can figure it out" being my response to her "how do I type stuff?" question, she went off and started telling her friends how fast and easy Linux is and how great it is that it doesn't get viruses. Based on that, I think the very first experience someone has is the most important. If they have any trouble at first, they're not going to want to recommend it. That's why I think things like hardware support are so important for working out of the box. When they can plug in their printer and have it work without needing a driver cd or anything, that'll impress them.

Amber said that when she's got someone who's nervous about showing up to a LUG or a LoCo because they don't think they'll fit in, her recommendation is: bring cookies. If you bring cookies, suddenly you're the most important person in the room, everybody wants to talk to you. It becomes an ice breaker to introduce you to the group.

Earlier today, I was in Starbucks with my boyfriend picking up a bunch of coffee for the event. We started chatting with this guy who said he's heard of Linux from his computer-science-professor wife, but don't people have trouble with it because it's not very good or easy? I told him "there are 400 people in the Hendrix Center." "You got 400 people down to Clemson for Linux?" "This is small because it's the first year. Last year in Ohio they had 1200." He was floored. He came over and was looking around, then he found me and said, "I was expecting a bunch of students, but this here is middle America. Who are all these people?" I said, "well, that's a Red Hat table, they sell support for servers. OpenSUSE is like Novell's SUSE and popular on desktops…" "But what does everyone here do?" "There are students, system administrators, developers, everything. That woman over there's a housewife." (That's when I pointed at Amber). He went and fetched a bag with information about SELF because he didn't have time to stay but wanted a way to be able to find people from here and find out about next year's.

Now one thing that impresses me is the sheer number of women here. Like I said in the last paragraph, there are about 400 people here. OLF had 1200. There have to be 3x the number of women here as were at OLF. I asked how they managed this. I was told they didn't consciously try to get female attendees, but they think the fact that they asked a lot of women to speak early on resulted in those women (even the ones who aren't speaking here) promoting it in their arenas. For example, Rikki Kite was asked to speak. Though she's not here, she promoted it. She's on LinuxChix Live, so plenty of women would've seen her blog about it. OLF is having a "Diversity in Open Source Day" on Sunday, so I really hope we'll be seeing more diversity this year.

Jaunty FAQ

2009-04-23T11:29:00.008-04:00

In the tradition of the FAQs I did the last few releases...

Where can I get the Jaunty torrent?
- Ubuntu Tutorials has compiled a list of all of them together.
Why should I use a torrent?
- It takes a load off of the servers so you'll get your ISO faster
Anything Kubuntu users should know?
- If you upgrade or use the DVD, you'll get PulseAudio. Don't worry, just sudo aptitude purge pulseaudio if you don't want it. I use it with Kubuntu because I've got Ubuntu too, and PulseAudio can do neat things, but anyway…
- Quassel is the new default IRC client
- Amarok 2 doesn't do CDs, iPod Touch, or iPhone
I don't like these new black bubbles. How do I get rid of them?
- Install sudo aptitude install gnome-stracciatella-session (or click on the package name). Log out, and on GDM, open the Options menu and go to Session (menu names may vary by theme) choose the Stracciatella option instead of just choosing GNOME. Log back in.
What happened to the little orange update notifier icon?
- The update manager window will open on its own within a day of when security updates become available. As for regular updates, the update manager will open a week after the last time you updated.
- If you want the old way back, run this: gconftool -s --type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false
How do I re-enable Ctrl+Alt+Backspace?
- Check out Alberto Milone's instructions
Anything I can experiment with?
- If you've got Intel graphics, there's a disabled-by-default acceleration method called UXA that uses DRI2. I think this means it's supposed to be all whiz-bang like higher-end graphics cards. It certainly gives me smoother animations. Warning: it's disabled by default because there are some graphics cards that misbehave horribly when it's enabled. For example, with i965, X will crash if you suspend while compositing is enabled and you're using UXA. The workaround would be to drop out of Compiz to Metacity or disabled Kwin's compositing before suspending. Instructions and card-specific warnings are on the wiki. By the way, if you have a totally blank xorg.conf and can't figure out how to fill it out, run sudo dexconf -o /etc/X11/xorg.conf
What changed in PulseAudio?
- It's now using autospawn, which means that if it crashes at some point, you're not left with silence. It'll start back up next time you try to play music or listen to a podcast or whatever it is you're doing that requires sound.
How do I get rid of PulseAudio?
- This has changed, since it's using autospawn. You need to disable that by editing /etc/pulse/client.conf and changing "autospawn = yes" on line 26 to "autospawn = no". Additionally, if this is a clean install, not an upgrade, you'll need to add your user to the audio group with sudo adduser USER audio replacing USER with your username.
Where are the release notes?
- Glad you asked! Release notes are right here This blog post is just the highlights of things I see asked a lot.

I can't think of anything else. If you've got another question to add, post it in the comments.

I'm also pleased to say that the Intel 965 wireless and graphics are working extremely well in Jaunty. Yay! My computer's happy. X doesn't lock, VT switching works, no more kernel panics (I attribute the panics I had to Intel 965 wireless since my brother and I have matching laptops, except for that wireless card, and his doesn't crash, and mine did). So, thank you to the people who work on making Intel drivers be lovely.

ext3 & 4 and data=guarded

2009-04-17T12:03:00.002-04:00

Valerie Aurora over at Red Hat has just posted on her blog about ext3 and ext4 and fsync() issues we've all heard so much about. As she says there, rename in ext4 now implies fsync() so that issue should calm down.

However, 2.6.30 is defaulting to data=writeback, which means it only writes the metadata to the journal—not the actual data. This is how XFS, ReiserFS, and a few others work, and it's much faster than ext3's default data=ordered. It's also somewhat less awesome at ensuring your data doesn't get lost. She's asking that people test patches (linked from her blog) for a new journal mode called "guarded" (created by Chris Mason) which she says will be faster than "ordered" but still have its data consistency guarantees.

Ada Lovelace Day Addition

2009-03-26T01:43:00.003-04:00

So on actual Ada Lovelace Day, I was a little :( at being the only person on Planet Ubuntu that blogged for it. Plenty on Planet Ubuntu Women, but Planet Ubuntu was empty. And none of the guys involved posted anything.

But yay! They were just a little late. James Westby and Matt Zimmerman both joined in. Matt wrote about his mom, which I thought was pretty cool. And Miia Ranta joined in as well.

I did just realize that there are two women I should have given a little shout-out.

One is Cathy Malmrose, the CEO of ZaReason, the company that made my computer. She's a hardware geek, so it's only natural, right? She said they're considering expanding into the "make their own components" direction so they won't be constrained by what barebones brands offer. Neat! They sell t-shirts too. There used to be Little LinuxChick shirts, but now there's this cute one that says "friends help friends use Linux" with a silhouette of two teenage girls on laptops. Also, she's raising a few FOSS munchkins. Her 5 year old installed Ubuntu (the 7 year old helped by reading the words for her) to prove the neighbor wrong about Linux being hard to install. And the 7 year old is already programming. I think the fact that there's a photo of him on Flickr using 3 laptops titled "Mom, what's the kernel? Where is it? Can I mess with it? Why not? Just tell me where it is so I can play?" is hilarious and wonderful. She's obviously a great influence on her kids.

The other is Amber Graner, the "average user mom" who's been blogging her adventures learning to use Ubuntu (and trying Fedora and OpenSUSE), and making everyone go "oh…oh yeah…I guess we could make that easier…that's a good point…." She's providing great constructive feedback, and she's just so excited to learn. I ♥ people that love to learn. I hope her love of learning is something her kids pick up. In my mind, she's the perfect person to have promoting Ubuntu (which she does!) because she proves that anyone that's willing to give learning an honest try can use it—it's not a geek OS.

Ada Lovelace Day heroine: Valerie Aurora

2009-03-24T11:31:00.009-04:00

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, named for the world's first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace. It's interesting to me that while the first programmer was a woman, and all of the ENIAC programmers were women, there are so many more men than women in technology fields nowadays. Ada Lovelace Day is a day to highlight women who rock in the tech world. Since here in FOSS-land, the FLOSSPOLS survey reports that only 2% of developers are women, compared to 28% in the commercial sector, I decided to write about a Linux kernel hacker: Valerie Aurora.

By default, Ubuntu uses the "relatime" mount option. It decreases the number of metadata writes on ext3. It turns out, Valerie created relatime because one of our friends discovered that Mutt couldn't tell which mailboxes had new mail when using noatime.

I think she really loves (or hates?) fsck. I can't tell which. She's responsible for some patches that shorten the amount of time needed to fsck an ext2 partition, along one that gets a 50% improvement on RAID 5 systems with ext3 and ext4. She also worked on a new filesystem architecture called ChunkFS. The goal of ChunkFS is to deal with the fact that as hard drives get bigger, fsck times get longer. She wants to be able to fsck smaller parts of the filesystem at different times, to avoid day-long fscks in the future. The white paper is interesting. And yes, she wrote a working prototype. Oh, and you know ZFS? The filesystem from Sun? She worked on that too, back during the architecture phase.

It's not all filesystems though. She's got patches in libc to make malloc() more efficient. She worked on the TCP/IP stack. She was the maintainer for SMP PowerPC support in Linux. Device drivers? Done that too. She's done it all.

She's not keeping that knowledge locked up though. Not by a long stretch. She's spent countless hours mentoring. She taught Linux kernel development classes at IBM, and she was even kind enough to teach kernel hacking classes for LinuxChix (on the old site). One time, she held a real-time kernel development Q&A session on the LinuxChix IRC server. She also ~~used to~~ writes "Kernel Hackers' Bookshelf" for Linux Weekly News

Valerie was one of the first people I met in LinuxChix. Immediate first impression? Wow, she's smart. Second impression? Don't mess with her. She's tough. You may have seen her HowTo Encourage Women in Linux write-up. If not, check it out. Possibly, you said something that offended someone and were directed to it. If that did happen, I hope you read it. It's the link everyone uses for those situations.

Valerie Anita Aurora was once known as Val Henson, but she recently changed her name. She chose the middle name "Anita" after Anita Borg, a computer scientist that strove to encourage women in technology fields. Pretty cool name change, eh? Just bringing this up in case "wait, that sounds like Val Henson..." was on your mind.

Ubuntu Developers Aren't Scary

2009-03-20T14:41:00.006-04:00

Seriously, they're not. At least, I don't think they are anymore. They used to scare the crap out of me.

The first time I joined the #ubuntu-devel channel (slightly under a year ago) and said "hi, um, I have a patch. What do I do?" I was all scared. Jordan Mantha (LaserJock) popped up and offered to make it into a debdiff since I said I didn't know anything about packaging. The patch ended up not being usable because um, oops, memory leak. Wait, what? No teasing about making a newbie mistake like that? And I actually got credit in the changelog for figuring out what's wrong and how to fix it? Wow. Hmm, helpful people, not arrogant about what they know that I don't? Maybe being developers doesn't have to automatically make them scary. Maybe.

Soon after that I became friends with Jordan and with Daniel Chen, who lives nearby. Daniel showed up to our LoCo's Gutsy and Hardy installfests, and at the Hardy one I convinced him to start mentoring me on how audio works. They're both nice guys, just know that mentioning brokenness in QA to Jordan or in audio to Daniel will very likely result in a long, drawn-out analysis of the situation. You've been warned.

OK so at that point, those two stopped being scary, and the rest stayed frightening. Skip to last October, when I went to the Ohio Linux Fest (be there! we're having a Women in Open Source event on Sunday, so let's get that female:male ratio up, alright?). Wow, a whole bunch of Ubuntu and Kubuntu folks showed up. Rich Johnson, Jorge Castro, Jono Bacon, Greg Grossmeier, Steve Stalcup, Jacob Peddicord, and more that I forget. Guess what? It turns out they're all really nice people too! Well, Rich has his moments. Better without the beer...or tequila. Oh, and don't drunkenly moon Jono unless you want to relive the experience, sober, in front of 1200 people. Moving on…

So I think by that point I was probably subscribed to ubuntu-devel-discuss. That's a mailing list I recommend you join if you want to contribute. That's where discussion between users and developers happens. If you've got an idea and want to flesh it out enough to put up on Brainstorm, or are taking a Brainstorm idea and trying to figure out the technical details to write a specification, get opinions on how possible it sounds, etc. go there. It's a more relaxed atmosphere than either the ubuntu-devel mailing list or #ubuntu-devel. It tries to bridge the gap Amber noted in her 'Community v. "Community"' post.

About a month ago, I started setting my IRC client to join #ubuntu-devel by default, and I subscribed to the ubuntu-devel mailing list. On the mailing list, I'm much more talkative than on the IRC channel. It's more discussion-oriented than the channel, it seems. The channel seems to be more full of terse "<Y>X: did you upload $package? <X>Y: no, not yet, writing changelog now" sort of stuff. At that point, I still felt like ducking behind a couch every time I spoke in there, in case anyone cyber-threw something at my head. I don't feel like that anymore. Just lurking and seeing how interaction works there has made it less scary. It's not that they're trying to be scary. They're just trying to be somewhat professional. Sometimes I'll look into the channel and see someone make a joke. And every morning, without fail, Daniel Holbach says "good morning" to the channel when he wakes up. And then it's a reminder that "oh yeah, they're normal people too."

Oh, I also started joining #ubuntu-women and #kubuntu-devel around that time. Lydia is a KDE developer that's almost always in #u-w. She's really nice and helpful. And of course, everybody (except IRC spammers) loves Sarah Hobbs, AKA Hobbsee. I know, it's sad that I can't think of other women developers. Where are you, ladies? Why aren't you in #ubuntu-women? Women who aren't involved: why not? We in #ubuntu-women will show you how. Why do you think that channel exists?

Why am I writing this? Well, the point is: the Ubuntu Developers aren't scary people. They're actually really nice people. So if you're intimidated by the prospect of speaking up in development related areas when you've just started out and can't point to a list of things you've done, remember: they're not scary, they're unfamiliar. There's a difference. The image of developers being way up high, far from users, knowing how everything works, and not making mistakes? All in your head. Why do you think there are so many bugs? ;) Please don't be afraid to help out because you think you're not good enough. You'll learn. Everybody involved totally sucked at this stuff at one point.

Oh, and Daniel Holbach and Scott Kitterman both agreed that when they started out, they also found the whole thing intimidating. To lower the intimidation level, read on: Scott doesn't know C. Neither does Jordan. Daniel says pointers are his weakness. Mine too—especially when passing them into functions. I put in one & and get a *? Or do I put in a ** and get a *? What if the function declaration wants a **? And like I said, my first patch attempt in Ubuntu had a memory leak (Steve Langasek caught it, it didn't get to the archive, don't worry). And that doesn't make everybody go "you can't code, go away" when I try now.

Pidgin in Jaunty

2009-03-20T12:41:00.004-04:00

This is just a quick update about how Pidgin interacts with the rest of the Jaunty desktop. Before we had the following problems:

Pidgin icon sits in notification area when not notifying
Pidgin status can be changed in both the FUSA and in the Pidgin icon
Removing icon gets rid of buddy list's hide-ability

The first point extends into "if Pidgin and Evolution and Empathy and Xchat and ... are all trying to show that you have new messages, that's a lot of icons." The solution that's implemented in Jaunty includes the addition of the messaging Indicator Applet. So far it only works for Pidgin and Evolution (first priority as default apps, I'm guessing), but eventually the others should be added. Ryan's working hard on making sure it works for @-replies in Gwibber as well. Then you can have just this one applet, and eventually, all your messaging stuff will go there. The Indicator Applet is not on the panel by default. You can right-click the panel and hit "Add to Panel" to get it.

On new users, the icon defaults to not showing in the notification area.

When I proposed removing the icon by default, there was an uproar of "but we want to hide the buddy list instead of minimizing it!" A few people I talked to on the bug report, blog comments, and elsewhere online agreed that if there was one applet that could work for all the IM clients to show and hide, that might be pretty nice. Someone noticed. The Indicator Applet does this too. Thanks to whomever made that work.

One note: this is like with Rhythmbox. If you click the X, that's still "close," and for a very good reason. If the X doesn't mean close, it is possible for the buddy list to be hidden in KDE (or in a GNOME session where the user hasn't added the Indicator Applet) with no way to bring it back! I don't use the notification area icon, so when Pidgin started being able to hide when it's not there (so the Indicator Applet could control it), I could see "X is now online" notifications and receive IMs but not get my buddy list to stop being invisible. Thank you very much to Ted Gould for fixing it so that the buddy list only hides from either the icon or the Indicator Applet, and not constantly.

Please test Jaunty...soon

2009-03-03T11:46:00.007-05:00

Jaunty's release is less than two months away. Please grab a Jaunty alpha 5 or daily live cd and test! Go through the bugs you've filed and see if they still exist on the live cd. See if any new ones pop up. And do it ASAP.

In every development cycle there's a huge influx of bugs in the last two weeks because a lot of people jump from stable to beta or RC, skipping alpha completely. Great, we've got more testers, but…how many bugs can be fixed in two weeks without risking breaking anything else? Not nearly as many as are filed. That is why we need more people testing early on.

I'm not saying everybody should install the development release on their only computer or the one they use all the time, directly on the hardware. While I've been doing that for the last two years, that's generally not recommended. If you cannot function pretty much entirely from the command line, don't put it on your hardware. Put it in a VM.

VMs aren't terribly useful for testing hardware, but there are plenty of GNOME and KDE bugs you can find using a VM. Try it! Check out Virtualbox. Put Jaunty in there and play with it. Try doing anything that doesn't involve important persistent data in the VM. By that I mean: don't write your thesis in the VM without having it backed up elsewhere. Web browsing? Getting your email over IMAP? Chatting? Why not?

But for hardware, use a live cd. Very often a triager asked "is this still a problem in the current development version?" The end of that sentence is "or would it be a waste of time for us to try to hunt it down when it's already fixed?" though it's not said. Also very often, the bug reporter will reply "I don't know. I'll test it when it releases." Insert whatever development cycle you want in there. It happens in all of them. Guess what happens when the reporter says they'll test after release?

10 The bug gets ignored as "potentially fixed; waiting on feedback" because as I said, trying to fix what's already fixed is a waste of time.
20 The development release becomes a stable release.
30 The reporter complains that it's still not fixed.
40 Work starts on the next development release.
50 The reporter is asked "is it fixed in this one?"
60 The reporter doesn't answer or says again that they'll test after that release.
GOTO 10

Bugs can't be fixed without information. Thus, bugs that have a lot of information are more likely to be fixed. If you're not giving us any information, what do you expect?

Link to a shell escaping tutorial

2009-02-28T14:58:00.004-05:00

A nearby LUG member just posted to the LUG's mailing list an explanation of how bash expands variables containing special characters and how various utilities interpret them. Give it a read. How to handle newlines was something I never thought about.

Ubuntu audio blog

2009-02-25T22:03:00.004-05:00

Once upon a time, Daniel Chen was an Ubuntu core developer and maintained the audio stack. He's no longer a core dev, but he's still doing a ton of work on audio. I can tell you first hand that practically every waking moment that he's not at the office, he's working on trying to make PulseAudio and ALSA work better in Ubuntu. Well, since he's not a core dev anymore and he never went through the Ubuntu Membership process, you won't be seeing his blog on maintaining Ubuntu's audio stack showing up on Planet Ubuntu. But you should take a look anyway. He's got a post up right now explaining why PulseAudio really isn't to blame for all your audio problems. I suggest you check it out, especially if you're running Jaunty.

Scanning multipage documents in XSane

2009-02-20T12:39:00.002-05:00

I have a flatbed scanner (part of my printer). I had no idea it was possible to scan a multipage document in Xsane. For a pull-through, sure, maybe, those can go through a stack of pages on their own. But a flatbed? Every time I've tried this before, I scanned individual pages, saved them as images, put them into an Open Office Writer document with one image per page, then saved that as a PDF. There's a better way!

So here's what you do. In the XSane window where you choose color/greyscale, gamma, brightness, etc, at the top there's a dropdown that defaults to Viewer. Change that to Multipage. A new window will open called "xsane multipage project." Choose the "New Project" button. Back to that first window, hit the Scan button. The scanner will do its part, and a page will be listed in the project window. Swap in a new sheet of paper and hit the Scan button again. Repeat until you've scanned all you need. If you scanned them out of order, use the arrow buttons on the project window to rearrange them. You can also delete any pages you don't need. The Show Image button lets you preview an individual page. The default output format is PDF, so just click the "Save multipage file" button at the bottom of the Project window when you're done.

This makes things so much easier.

That Green Bar in Firefox

2009-02-19T23:56:00.010-05:00

I was just reading Dan Kaminsky's blog and saw something I found shocking. Let me quote it.

Moxie’s putting his energy on the old positive feedback attacks — simply disabling the security, and seeing if anyone notices. And here he shows up with some pretty astonishing data: Nobody noticed. To be specific, absolutely 0% of users presented with missing encryption on important web sites, being asked to provide sensitive financial data to those websites, refused on the basis of missing security.

Wow. 0%. Seriously.

Why don't users "get it"?

My first thought was "how do you not notice the address bar's not green?" Then I realized that a lot of people probably don't know why the address bar changes colours or what the different colours mean. Here's a hint: if it's a financial-anything, and that bar's not turning green, run away. I didn't know how it worked, to be honest. I knew it was more than certificate verification, designed to get around URLs that look like what you want but aren't, and that it involved paperwork. He's got the scoop on Extended Validation. Also, you can click the green bar to get more information about how the site is validated.

And by the way, that thing where phishers get a fake URL with a valid cert: that doesn't work (without a bunch of legal hula hoops to jump through) for the green bar. When a cert is the only valid thing going on, you'll see blue. Blue can still be phishing. Green is the good one.

Now, I know we're Linux users, and we're not likely to get viruses or trojans or things like that, but phishing is OS-agnostic. Phishing is about stupid users. Don't be a stupid user! When Firefox tells you a site is bad, be careful. When Firefox doesn't explicitly tell you a site is good, be careful. When I say be careful, I mean treat it as if its mode was 444 (read-only).

Oh, and use NoScript for Pete's sake!

/* Insert standard "do not click on login links in email" "do not use search engines to replace bookmarks" "do not use the same crappy password on every website" etc. warnings */

Malware Terminology: Trojans, Worms, & Viruses

2009-02-12T02:33:00.010-05:00

Some guy wrote How To Write a Linux Virus in 5 Easy Steps, but he's wrong. What he describes is not a virus; it is a trojan. And he calls himself a geek!

Let me start by saying that "malware" and "badware" are two commonly used umbrella terms for these types of software.

It is a trojan because it relies entirely upon social engineering to install and run. Remember the Trojan Horse? The Greeks claimed the horse was a gift for the Trojans. It turned out to be hiding a bunch of armed men. This is the same thing. The malware claims to be something innocuous which the user might enjoy or believes is necessary. The user is thus tricked into installing it. That trickery? That's the social engineering. It's the same trickery the Greeks used. The user installs and maybe executes the malware. Since there was both trickery and user intervention, it is a trojan.

A worm does not require user intervention. A worm will often (as in the case of Blaster) use a remote exploit to infect the host machine. It will then procreate and attack any other machines it can reach. It thus spreads completely on its own. Worms do not need to piggyback onto other files like trojans and viruses do. They exist in their own right and behave independently of pretty much all else.

And then there's the generic virus. Viruses do usually require user intervention to spread, but they don't involve social engineering like a trojan does. Viruses will often infect innocuous files which are then shared without the sharer knowing that they are handing a virus to the other person. In the case of a trojan, the sender usually knows exactly what they're doing. The file being infected by the virus does not turn into a trojan by virtue of being infected. It is simply an infected file, possibly an infected program.

Drive-by downloads are a bit confusing. Is it a trojan or a virus? It sort of depends on the site. If it's an attack site, you'll usually receive an email or IM with a link. Then there's some social engineering involved, and you did follow directions by going to the site, but the fact that you don't have to manually install something claiming to be safe puts it in the virus category for me. If it's a usually-safe site that happens to have been infected, then there's no grey area. That's a virus.

K? So, let's stop calling every bit of malware we find "a virus," because that's just not right. We have words for the different types of malware. Let's use them.

I'm a traitor

2009-02-04T03:36:00.006-05:00

I've been cheating on my desktop environment.

If you follow Planet Ubuntu, you saw Celeste's post about the KDE 4.2 release party. And yes, I'm in the photos. Scott Kitterman's trying to show me how to set what kind of window switcher I want when I hit Alt+Tab in KDE in one of the photos.

Yeah, I'm a traitor. As of last Friday, about 4 hours before the release party, I'm a KDE user. Scott actually said to me on IRC after that post about Ctrl+Alt+Backspace that I sound like a KDE user, so then I decided to attempt to get KDE working on my machine (deleting my ~/.kde fixed the problem I was having). I'm still using a bunch of GNOME apps, but I'm doing it inside KDE. While KDE still has the ability to overwhelm me with its options, 4.2 is definitely an improvement over 3.5, presenting many options in ways that are at least easier for me to parse.

I'm sticking to the same apps I use in GNOME for a couple reasons. They're the Devils I Know, and some I have a sort of investment in (transferring data would be annoying). Besides, if I switch back to GNOME, I'd prefer not to have to re-transfer the data.

I know Evolution doesn't let me choose which IMAP folder to use for Trash on each account like KMail does, but KMail crashes a lot in Jaunty (understandable, but annoying) and blocks all open tabs when loading a new view in only one of them. Evolution lets me have a bunch of signatures. Plus, all my data's in Evolution Data Server right now. Oh, the integration between EDS and the panel applets is something I'm missing. Celeste says it should be fairly straight-forward to implement a Plasmoid to handle it through Akonadi, just nobody's done it yet. I'd kind of like to figure out a way to let Akonadi and EDS talk to each other so I can switch mail clients, address books, and calendars without having to export and import a bunch of data. I do really like that KMail, KOrganizer, and KAddressBook are all separate apps with a unified backend, though. Evolution's monolithic UI annoys me.

Kopete, like Empathy, forces groups in the buddy list to be arranged alphabetically, something I do not want, so I'm sticking to Pidgin. Yes, I'm still using Firefox and Terminator.

I did try Amarok. I'm still not a fan of that sideways row of tabs, but I like the way queued songs are displayed on the Collection view. Maybe I can get used to that row of tabs just for that. If it lets me shuffle the queue (haven't tried yet), I'm sold. GNOME's refusal to let Rhythmbox shuffle the queue is really annoying. I'll have to see how it handles copying to my iAudio as well, but really, Dolphin's enough for that.

I really like the new KMenu and KRunnner. The filter search list is nice. I'm not as impressed with the panel. It'd be nice to be able to have a gap between plasmoids, an expanding separator. I can't figure out how to change the panel's background either.

Oh, and does anyone know what the difference between "Focus Follows Mouse" and "Focus Under Mouse" is? I know I don't want "Click to Focus," and we figured out at the party that "Focus Strictly Under Mouse" means that moving the mouse to the desktop makes the app lose focus. Those other two seem to be the same though. That'd be one of those "oh no, KDE is asking me questions with options that I don't understand" things. I don't mind having lots of options, just as long as I know what the heck they do.

Jaunty: No sound outputs?

2009-01-30T17:11:00.003-05:00

If you're running Jaunty, and since 28 Jan when you right-click the GNOME Volume Mixer applet and click Open Volume Control you see no sound outputs listed, it's a known bug believed to be a race condition with PulseAudio. It's being worked on, but in the meantime, you can restart PulseAudio using pulseaudio -k ; start-pulseaudio-x11

Since we ALL know X is nowhere near stable...

2009-01-29T13:37:00.005-05:00

Backstory

Some X developers decided that it's too easy to accidentally press 3 keys that are spread far apart on the keyboard and require 2 hands to press simultaneously (???), so they ~~got rid of~~ disabled by default Ctrl+Alt+Backspace (also known as "zapping").

Some people within Ubuntu realized that this makes no sense since X really likes to lockup. ~~At UDS, they decided to keep zapping available, but they would disable it by default.~~ Having a way to re-enable (from a GUI) zapping was ~~also~~ agreed on at UDS.

What's Happening

Alberto Milone has provided us with a way to re-enable zapping from the command line and from KDE. But where's GNOME? Well, he did add a checkbox for it to the Screen Resolution tool, but it seems it won't be accepted into Ubuntu, since it's an "expert" option (according to Mark). EDIT: The discussion is on-going.

My Opinion

I'm with Alberto and Jordan. There are plenty of people who use ctrl+Alt+Backspace who are not experts. They use it because that's what we've recommended for years when X (inevitably) locks up. They are not going to want to muck about with xorg.conf or installing extra command line apps for it.

It wouldn't be so bad if X was actually stable. It wouldn't be so bad if our TTYs worked reliably. As it is, you have to try to switch to the TTY twice before it works, if it works. Sometimes I seem to just not have any TTYs at all. Alt+SysRq+T usually does not take me to a TTY like it should. Until Alberto posted how to fix this from the command line, the only thing I could do when X locked up (multiple times a day!) was Alt+SysRq+B: reboot the system. Things I could've fixed by just Ctrl+Alt+Backspace and waiting 5 seconds now require waiting a full reboot cycle (about 45 seconds til the desktop's usable, if I type my password really fast). Even the smallest X lockup is just as disastrous as a kernel panic now. It's like Windows.

I liked how Jordan summed it up when we were chatting: "apparently X is perfect, we have ttys all the time, and a checkbox is too complicate for users to think about."

What do you guys think? Are the TTYs reliable enough that we can count on non-experts to be able to go to TTY1 and "sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart"? Can we even count on non-experts knowing how to do that? Or do you think X is stable enough that nobody ever needs to do that?

Washington, DC Events/News

2009-01-29T13:23:00.004-05:00

We've got two events coming up in the Washington, DC area. Anyone's invited.

KDE 4.2 Release Party

Where: Piratz Tavern, Georgia Ave, Silver Spring, MD
When: Jan 30 (tomorrow), 7pm
Contact (RSVP): Celeste Lyn Paul

LinuxChix Meetup

OK, this one's for ubuntu-women. Shmoocon's coming up again, so once again DC LinuxChix and other LinuxChix that happen to be in town will be meeting up. More info later as we decide which lunch/dinner break of the conference will be our meetup time. All that's clear so far is that it'll be between Feb 6—8 and we'll be going to a restaurant.

Bug Jam

We will be participating in the next Global Bug Jam.

Where: Gallaudet University, Student Academic Center / Student Union Building (SAC/SUB), Lower Level, Flex Rooms A and B
When: Feb 20, 1:30-6pm
Announcement: see mailing list posting

Other news

Finally, after a year and a half, we have access to the DC LoCo Team website again! Yay!

Holiday Hacking

2008-12-31T02:38:00.006-05:00

I haven't posted in about 2 weeks, so I figure I ought to give a quick update on what's going on. I'm with the family for the holidays, and there's no wireless at my mom's house, and things are nuts what with the whole extended family visiting. Oh, and my mother has not complained at all about Hardy (upgraded her computer from Gutsy in August), so yay. I mentioned before that I wanted to teach my little cousin Python. I gave her an old laptop I salvaged that runs Edubuntu for Christmas. She seems to love KAnagram. She was also really excited when I showed her KTurtle and helped her make the turtle draw a blue triangle. In the Python world, I've only shown her a print "Hello "+name thing so far. She looked back and forth between the line where I set name's value and that line and the output line a few times then went "oh!" so I think she understood variables.

OK so I got Hardy and Edubuntu into that paragraph. See, I wasn't totally off-topic! Anyway, the rest is about my "Holiday Hacking" project.

I like having a gradient on my gnome-panel. Consequently, every time I change my theme, I go into GIMP and make a matching gradient background image. I improved this process slightly by creating an SVG in which I can just change the color values. Blogger won't let me upload an SVG, so here's a png:

Since this gets old after a while, I'm working on adding functionality to gnome-panel so that I can pick a shadow color, a highlight color, and an opacity level for the highlight. I can't be the only one that likes the look of a gradient on a panel, so I'm sure someone else could get some use out of this.

A peek at the addition to the panel-properties-dialog:

I need to look more into how Cairo's gradients work though. One of the things I did to make the gradient on my SVG look balanced and keep the text legible was put the highlight's color stop 1/3 from the top and the top shadow color stop is actually 15% above the edge of the image. I'm not sure I can do that 15%-outside thing with Cairo. Might have to find a midway color value and set that as the top color stop. We'll see.

The status of this project is that I've modified the .glade file so there's some UI already, and I've settled on using GDK's Cairo integration because Cairo can easily paint linear rgba gradients. I think I've gone through all the functions that setup what options there are for background types, and tonight I started tying the functions to the buttons I made in Glade. Still a lot more to go (like actually writing the gradient part), but I need to have a way for the buttons and gconf to communicate before I can have any way to interact with (read: test) the gradient stuff, so I figure I ought to do that first.

I don't know if this'll make it into GNOME 2.26 or if it'll have wait until the Fall release. UI Freeze is next week, and obviously there's a UI change involved. Maybe I can submit the UI change next week and then keep working right up until Feature Freeze (19 Jan) to get it in this release.

Anyone else spending their holidays hacking on FOSS?

Adobe Flash: Avoiding Checksum Errors

2008-12-18T20:21:00.009-05:00

The way flashplugin-nonfree works right now is that it's a fairly empty package that downloads Adobe's Flash installation tarball, untars it, and copies the .so to the necessary directory. There's one more step in the middle though. It does a checksum on the tarball after it downloads and a checksum on the .so. These checksums are to make sure you're getting the right file, as opposed to some trojaned version (say, if Adobe was cracked). These checksums are also a bit of a problem.

See, every time Adobe updates Flash, they keep the same file name. So the package downloads the file, and since it's a new version, the checksum fails, causing the install to fail. A few days later, after some testing, MOTU uploads a new package with the updated checksum.

You can avoid this.

Instead of installing flashplugin-nonfree, enable the Canonical Partner Repository in System -> Administration -> Software Sources -> Third Party Software, or make sure you have

deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu intrepid partner

(substitute in hardy or gutsy if you're using those) in your /etc/apt/sources.list and after sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install adobe-flashplugin, you'll have a working Flash plugin, even if there's been an update. The reason is that Adobe's package includes the full binary. It doesn't try to download from their website, so there's no checksum to fail.

It looks like going forward, this will be the preferred Flash package, especially once Adobe releases the final 64-bit version.

If you want to switch from flashplugin-nonfree to adobe-flashplugin, make sure you purge flashplugin-nonfree first.

Dear Phisher...

2008-12-13T02:20:00.004-05:00

Dear Phisher:

Thank you for contacting me today with your offer to reactivate my email account that I did not know I had. There are just a few problems I see with the request you made regarding reactivating my email address. You see, the link you gave for me to download software to reactivate the account is a Windows executable. First, I'm not quite sure why I need any software other than a web browser to activate an email account. Second, I can't run Windows executables. Third, I really prefer not to run any software which is not Free and Open Source.

If you could, please send me a tarball of the source code, which I hope is suitably licensed. I will inspect the code, and, if I like what I see, I will happily install the software as requested. Don't worry about providing a binary—I am perfectly capable of compiling any software I need from source.

Thank you again.

Jaunty users: Can you test these?

2008-12-02T19:45:00.006-05:00

I've got two patches that I need to have tested on Jaunty. One has a deb. One is just in a branch.

As a new user, test Pidgin from my PPA. For a new user, it should default to only showing the icon in the notification area for new messages. Check in Tools->Preferences. The reason is to keep it from duplicating the icon that's in the Fast User Switch Applet, as noted in Bug 273220. In that bug, it is recommended that Pidgin be changed, so that is Bug 290552.
The last thing to test is the Fast User Switch Icon that I have in bzr. It's for Bug 291846, specifically the part about the lack of tooltips. It's linked in the bug.

Sorry I can't test these myself, but until Jaunty is rebased to 2.6.28 or someone figures out how to make my wireless card play nice (read: not kernel panic) with >2.6.24, I'm stuck on Hardy. Thank you to anyone that helps, though!

Oh, I do have one other question to ask though. To anyone using an ASUS Z37E-based laptop, such as the ZaReason UltraLapSR: after you suspend/resume or hibernate/resume in Intrepid or Jaunty, can you reboot? In Hardy it hangs on reboot. If it's fixed in the newer kernel, I won't bother filing a bug though.

Compiz? Emerald? Metacity? What's the Difference?

2008-12-01T23:36:00.004-05:00

Not for the first time, I found myself the other night explaining on IRC how the window manager and window decorator parts fit together. There seems to be a misconception that Compiz requires Emerald. That is far from true. There also seems to be confusion regarding what different kinds of themes do. So let's start at the basics.

The three most common window managers in the Ubuntu world are Metacity, Compiz, and Kwin. Yes, there are others, such as Enlightenment, Fluxbox, Xmonad, and Ion, but I'm not going to go into why each of them rocks. Metacity is the default GNOME window manager. Kwin is the KDE window manager. And then there's Compiz. Compiz is the compositing window manager that is enabled in Ubuntu by default if your system can handle it. The function of the window manager is to draw the windows in a certain place, with a certain size, and let them be movable and resizable.

Then you have the window decorator. This is where people get tripped up. The window decorator draws the window borders. It is not necessary to move the window, since alt+click&drag will still work even when the window decorator has crashed. I think the confusion comes from the fact that Kwin and Metacity have their decorators built in. Xmonad doesn't decorate windows at all. Compiz is a bit more modular in this regard. It has always been able to use Metacity's themes for the window borders. The window decorator in use when doing this is gtk-window-decorator. It can also use Kwin's themes, in which case you're using kde-window-decorator.

And then there's Emerald. Emerald was the window decorator for Beryl. Beryl merged back with Compiz a bit over a year ago. I remember Quinnstorm telling me she hopes "eventually to totally rewrite emerald," but that hasn't happened. Well, earlier this year, after noticing some glitches with my friend's Nvidia card and Emerald, I asked in #compiz-fusion and they said to stop using Emerald because it's not really being developed anymore and they'd rather everyone just switch to either gtk-window-decorator or kde-window-decorator. They did say that they were considering writing a replacement for Emerald, but that hasn't happened either. MOTU tried removing Emerald, I'm guessing due to its issues, but apparently a lot of people complained because they'd rather have a window decorator that crashes 3 times a day.

And now the last bit about themes. I said before that Compiz can use Kwin and Metacity's themes just fine thanks to kde-window-decorator and gtk-window-decorator. Some people are confused about what exactly comprises a Metacity theme versus a GTK theme, especially since they are installed in the same place. A GTK theme controls how buttons look, the colors of text, the window background, the scrollbars, and the menubar styles. The Metacity theme just controls the window border's style. For KDE, the Qt theme does the buttons, scrollbars, etc., and Kwin has its own themes for window borders, I think.

New Licensing on the Blog

2008-11-30T02:13:00.004-05:00

A while back, I found that someone was copying all of my posts to their own ad-laden site with no linkbacks. I put up some license terms at the time saying quoting and translating with linkbacks were fine, and aggregators are fine, but copying the whole thing without a linkback isn't cool. Well, I'm in the middle of writing a paper for school including a large chunk on licensing, and as I was looking for information on the GPL/CC anti-DRM clause incompatibilities, I realized there was a Creative Commons license I could use to get across what I actually wanted. If you look at the bottom of the page, you'll now see a CC-BY-NC-SA icon (ironically, the same license under which that site was relicensing without permission...though they were kind of breaking the NC part). If you click that link you'll get the official version, but essentially:

BY: Attribution (give me a linkback)
NC: Non-Commercial (don't copy it for the ad revenue)
SA: Share-Alike (derivatives, such as by quoting or translating, are fine with me)

I did make an exception for photos with people in them, though. Since I'd prefer, for privacy's sake, that photos of my family & friends not be spread all over the place (I really don't think my mom wants to become an internet meme), those are staying under plain ol' copyright.

Tis Better to Dup Than to Convolute

2008-11-19T19:37:00.010-05:00

Let's talk about bug reporting.

There's something which occurs very often in bug reports by people who mean well. They find a bug, and to avoid making extra work for triagers, they check for a duplicate first. While that's very thoughtful of them, it often ends up getting in the way. So, let's talk about when you should file a duplicate, and when you should not. This is mostly in regard to hardware bugs, since that's where I see this happening the most. Hardware varies so widely, that this becomes a bit of a problem.

Let's say you install Intrepid and discover that no sound is coming out of your sound card. So, you look on Launchpad and find a bug conveniently titled "No sound in Intrepid." "Perfect!" you think and join in. Seeing a workaround suggested with no response from the reporter, you think you'll be helpful and answer the question for the triager…

Stop right there.

Now, consider the following:

Do you have the exact same hardware?
Are you sure you have the exact same bug?

If, after reading all of the information provided on the bug, you can answer "YES!" to both of those questions, look for what we're calling the "Me Too" feature. At the moment, it's the phrase "This bug doesn't affect me" followed by a "Change" link just under where the bug's Importance is listed. Click "Change" and mark that you are affected. It is not necessary (or recommended) to post a comment saying that you are affected. This just clutters the bug reports.

If your answer is "maybe" or "no," file your own bug. If your answer is "I don't know how to answer those questions," read on.

How do you see if you have the exact same hardware? In the case of sound, video, and networking hardware, check the lspci -nv output. The first line of each section tells you what basic model of that hardware you have. The next line lists the subsystem information, or SSID. The SSID has to do with how the hardware was integrated into the motherboard. It is far from unusual for bugs to be introduced at this level. If yours match and are the same revision, you probably have the same hardware. If there is any discrepancy, file your own bug. For webcams, fingerprint readers, and other things that use the USB interface, check the ID listed by lsusb If it seems you have the same hardware, use the Me Too feature and read on.

Double check exactly what the original reporter is experiencing. Read the full version and any responses they've already given. The title is not enough. If you're not seeing the same behavior, assume it's a different bug.

If it turns out to be one bug that affects multiple pieces of hardware we can always mark them as a duplicate later. That's not a problem. That's part of triaging.

But if it turns out that there are 15 different issues being reported in one bug, that is a problem. If we have 2 people saying something fixes it, and one saying it makes it worse, and a few others say they don't have that exact symptom but rather something somewhat different and the fix didn't work for them…that makes the bug very convoluted. We then try to read through the bug and see what's going on, and it's full of conflicting information. How are we supposed to debug then? We have no solid answers.

Something I see in sound bugs a lot is that one person will file a "No Sound" bug or a "Crackly sounds" bug. Everyone with that symptom jumps on that bug, but they don't belong there. There are multiple possible root causes, and many of them are hitting different ones. But they present themselves the same to the user. What we, as triagers, want to see is that these bugs are filed independently. If, after some debugging, we find that a few have the same root cause, we can mark them as duplicates easily. Finding the 1 root cause to 5 separate issues masquerading as one, though? That's not possible, because really there are 5 root causes and thus 5 bugs. Continuing to pretend they are all one bug just clutters the bug report, making it hard to read and hard to understand.

And that is why I say, "'Tis Better to Dup Than to Convolute."

Washington, DC - Intrepid Installfest - TONIGHT

2008-11-14T14:01:00.004-05:00

As usual, we're having an installfest for th new Ubuntu release. Also as usual, it's being hosted by GW ACM with many of the helpers coming from the DC Ubuntu LoCo Team.

What: Installfest for Ubuntu 8.10
Why: In case you need/want help
Who: Anybody interested in trying Linux
Where: George Washington University (Foggy Bottom metro)
CS Dept Conference Room
Phillips Hall, 7th Floor
22 & H NW
When: 6pm, Fri 14 Nov

Help Avoid Regressions

2008-11-04T13:27:00.004-05:00

If you saw Planet Ubuntu today, you saw Jonathan Ernst's post about feature regressions. I was discussing this with Jordan Mantha last week. I think too much time is lost during sync, and with nobody being willing to test until beta or RC by which point it's too late to fix much. He seemed to agree. I think a year-long release cycle would be nice, but he says Ubuntu's testers are a major chunk of GNOME's testers. Hrm, that's tough then, because we don't want to cut out the number of people testing each of GNOME's releases.

Well, anyway, we got to talking about testing and more effective testing. Writing automated test scripts is something that comes up a lot, but it never happens. And anyway, we don't even have specs written up for what those automated tests would do. So we need to start small. We need a set of specs, a list of what minimum functionality there needs to be in at least all of the default desktop software. And we need to have directions for using that functionality by hand. Then, during development, we can all run through little 5-minute tests each week and ensure a minimum of functionality. The more often we test, the quicker we catch regressions.

To this end, I've created a page on the wiki for Application Testing. I made lists of applications that need to be tested. We need test cases. If you've got 15, 20 minutes, why not pick an application out of the list, create its page (there's a template available!), and fill in a few test cases? Right now, Seahorse is the only one with test cases. Or if you get there and more pages have been started, take a read through and fill in any missing details or add a few more test cases. Each test case takes about 10 minutes to write for simple tasks.

I want to have a lot of these test cases ready by UDS, but I can't do it myself. Anyone with a reasonable grasp of English (so anyone that can read this) can help write these. You don't need to be a developer. You don't need to know how to triage. You just need to know what the application can do and what buttons you need to click to do it.

Go Vote!

2008-11-04T13:20:00.002-05:00

This is a little friendly reminder to go exercise your right to vote. Remember: it's your civic duty.

Oh, and Californians, please vote NO on Proposition 8. Proposition 8 would legalize discrimination against quite a lot of people. You may think you don't know anyone that's gay, lesbian, or bisexual, but are you really sure? For all you know, a vote for Prop 8 could be a vote to legalize discrimination against your best friend's sister.

Intrepid Update FAQ

2008-10-29T23:53:00.012-04:00

Last time, I did a FAQ for Hardy upgrades. I may not be running Intrepid on hardware, but I've been reading a lot of bugs and have an Intrepid VM. So, here are some of the things you might need to know.

When will it be released?
- While it is 30 Oct in at least one timezone
How should I download it?
- Torrents! They take the load off of Canonical's servers
How can I upgrade?
- First, make sure you have all your updates. Then if you want to upgrade from the command line, run sudo do-release-upgrade. If you want to use the GUI, gksu "update-manager -c"
Where's OpenOffice.org 3?
- Its release date slipped too far, and after FF3 in Hardy, they decided maybe they ought not to ship unfinished major software again. But, if you want it, you can add the OpenOffice.org Scribblers PPA.
If I want to have the encrypted ~/Private directory I heard about, what do I need to do?
- This option is only available when installing using the Alternate CD. It's not on the Live CD. If you're upgrading or use the Live CD to install, there are instructions for setting it up.
How's Flash?
- Flash 10 has issues with Qt. It only works on some sites (Bug #262693). For everyone else, the combination of Flash 10 and the configuration files that Intrepid sets up should work fine. You can remove libflashsupport now (since it's known to cause instability). If for some reason you don't have sound with Flash in Ubuntu, make sure you have libasound2-plugins installed. Log out and back in, and it should work.
Why isn't my Atheros card working?
- there are a few drivers available. One requires a new version of the wireless stack, so including it by default would break everything else. That one works on some hardware. The default one included works on other hardware. Neither works on all of them, though, so that's fun. If yours doesn't work (hint: it seems netbooks with Atheros chips are very likely to be affected), you need to install linux-backports-modules-intrepid
How's 802.11n?
- If you're using an Intel 4965, you need to install linux-backports-modules-intrepid. You'll get kernel panics if you don't. Once you've got that, it should work. Though there has been one report that kernel panics still occur, just much less frequently.
What happened with Broadcom?
- Canonical contracted a closed-source driver from Broadcom for the few Broadcom wireless cards that don't work with b43 and required ndiswrapper. They should be able to work now, after enabling the driver in Jockey.
Any bugs Nvidia and ATI users need to be aware of?
- You probably can't suspend.
How's tablet support?
- Ugh. You can make them work, but it'll take work. See, there were big changes to make it so that HAL handles all input. The only trouble is, we're kind of right in the middle of it. When HAL's done being made all super awesome, it'll be…well, super awesome. Work's being done on using HAL for hotplugging input devices. So, my understanding is that evdev handles things by default for HAL. Then you need a .fdi file to tell HAL exactly what to do with that device. Unfortunately, the wacom driver really fails here. It needs to be initialized over and over for all the different functionality. HAL can't do that yet. In the meantime, you can still setup your Wacom in xorg.conf just like you used to. It'll just act like a stylus by default.(source)
Why is my Places menu launching applications instead of opening Nautilus?
- Right click a folder, go to Properties -> Open With, and change it back to Nautilus. There's a bug where if a folder is opened in an application, it automatically associates folders with that application on your system.
What's the biggest UI change?
- The logout button has been subsumed by the fast-user-switch-applet (FUSA). At first, it'll show your name and the power icon. When you login to Pidgin or Empathy, it'll show your current status. I recommend changing Pidgin's "Show system tray icon:" setting to "only on new messages" to avoid having the "Available" icon showing up double. You can change your Pidgin/Empathy status using the FUSA, switch users, or choose one of the other options that drops down to logout, reboot, shutdown, etc.
Why aren't we using Empathy like upstream GNOME?
- After some extensive usability testing, it was decided that both had issues, but Empathy had more issues with usability, so Pidgin has been kept for one more release. Assuming those usability issues are fixed up in the next few months, Empathy should be in Jaunty.
What's the coffee stain on the wallpaper?
- That's a silhouette of an ibex, a sort of mountain goat with big curvy horns.

You can also read the complete Intrepid Release Notes.

NOTE: Please install your updates immediately after installing Intrepid! A bug was found where Ubiquity installs the kernel with 666 permissions, meaning anybody on the system can mess with the installed kernel. There is an update ready-and-waiting to fix this.

Happy Tux-o-ween!

2008-10-27T23:26:00.005-04:00

My friend Nick (AKA Spec) made himself a Linux pumpkin this Halloween, and he asked me to post the pictures here so you all could see it. It's cute!

Looking at the next one, you'll see that it's not actually carved all the way through. He just made it really thin so it glows nicely instead of having one bright point of light.

Why do people hate Ubuntu's fonts?

2008-10-22T14:05:00.008-04:00

I always see people complaining about Ubuntu's fonts and font-rendering. I don't get it. Could someone please tell me exactly what is wrong?

Ubuntu has some pre-set font settings: Monochrome, Best Shapes, Best Contrast, and Subpixel Smoothing. These are equivalent to certain settings found when the Details button is clicked. They are as follows:

Monochrome → No smoothing, Full hinting
Best Shapes → Greyscale smoothing, Medium hinting
Best Contrast → Greyscale smoothing, Full hinting
Subpixel Smoothing (LCD) → Subpixel smoothing, Full hinting

I decided it was time to do a comparison of the renderings. I often see people suggesting turning on Subpixel Smoothing for LCDs, but I never do this. I use the Best Contrast setting, which looks like this:

Compare to the Subpixel Smoothing setting:

I always thought the Subpixel Smoothing setting was blurry. It seemed like the verticals weren't truly vertical and the diagonals were getting lost a bit. But now, looking at it, it looks like there's actually better contrast on the Subpixel Smoothing setting. At least, the text looks darker. And yes, the diagonal on the "w" is less "jagged" as I've heard people call it, and maybe it's because of days I spent making cartoon dollz, but I kind of like seeing pixels. Though now that I've moved away from my beloved 800x600 resolution, I don't think I can accurately count pixels anymore. Maybe not seeing the pixels is what makes the subpixel setting seem less sharp.

Best Contrast is joined by Best Shapes in using grayscale smoothing. Here's Best Shapes:

And here are the other two grayscale-smoothing settings. The first is with no hinting. The second is with slight hinting.

The Subpixel Smoothing option, as mentioned before defaults to Full hinting. In order, here are no hinting, slight hinting, and medium hinting:

And, finally, here is the Monochrome setting. It's very pixelated, but try changing it to "no hinting," and it's even worse.

Here's the side-by-side comparison:

(Click image to view full-size)

A Couple of Links

2008-10-18T01:56:00.002-04:00

I was just reading through ZaReason's news page, and I saw a link to Linux is Making Me Fat and Lazy by Carla Shroder, a woman I know from LinuxChix. I found it rather amusing. The other thing I saw that stood out was What Dell Can Learn From ZaReason. I think the writer makes a good point, because having to wait months after a release to get the newest Ubuntu from Dell is rather annoying. Maybe they don't even start testing until after release? ZaReason tests unstable to watch out for regressions, though just in case they missed it, I did email them about Bug 276990, which would affect the laptop I bought from them. I'm hoping they let other customers who bought a laptop with the same wireless card know about that bug before Intrepid releases if it's still there at release time. So you don't have to go look, it's that the Intel 4965's new driver (iwlagn) causes kernel panics. Yuck. Though, I do really love that I have an Ubuntu key on my laptop. I was teasing the guys at the Ubuntu table at OLF about the fact that the System76 laptops they had out had Windows keys, though that bug has been fixed apparently.

Don't Get Cracked on Hostile WiFi

2008-10-11T20:03:00.004-04:00

That was the title of my talk today at Ohio Linux Fest. I told everybody I'd put my slides up here, so:

I think there should also be a video appearing on the OLF website some time soon. I'm sorry, I know I was speaking a bit fast. I pretty much always talk fast.

I am not impressed with OpenOffice Impress

2008-10-09T20:51:00.005-04:00

OpenOffice.org Impress makes LaTeX + Beamer look user-friendly. Now that I've gone through turning my OLF slides from boring black-on-white to prettier, I realize how much of a usability nightmare Impress is.

First I tried making a background image in Inkscape. Inkscape's nice, because it has a bunch of preset color palettes. I decided to use Tango colors. So I made a background image 1024x768 to be the right proportions. Saved the .svg and tried to set it as the background on my slides. Now, I've done this once before, so I knew it was convoluted and that rather than wasting my time trying to figure out how to do it again, I ought to just read the Help. Want to know how convoluted it is? Let me demonstrate...

Go to Format -> Area
Go to the Bitmaps tab
See this:

Guess which button you click? Add or Import? To save you the frustration, I'll just tell you: Import
Pick the file
Give it a name
Close that window
Go to Format -> Page
Click Background
Choose Bitmap
Choose the image you just imported

Why couldn't I just skip to Step 8 and browse for an image there? This becomes extra annoying when you start tweaking the background image and want to see how it fits. Every time you tweak, you have to delete the old one, import the new one, and then change it in the Page formatting again. There are too many steps involved, and none of the early ones are anything close to obvious! I gave up on the tweak, import, set, tweak, import, set, tweak, import, set thing after about 6 rounds. I decided to fake it with text box borders and fill and such.

So next I wanted to make my text and bullets be the right colors. I still wanted Tango colors. I even found the hex/HTML-style codes for the colors. So I go to the Styles thing, choose Outline 1, right click, and hit Modify. So far so good. I hit the Customize Tab on the window that opens, and there's no way at all visible to set a color other than their 30-or-so pre-defined ones. Bummer. After a bit of time reading Google, I learned that going to Tools -> Options, expanding OpenOffice.org, and going to Colors lets you define your own. Great! Oh, but you have to get out your calculator and convert all that hex to decimal. And they have to be added one at a time. And if you're not careful you'll overwrite one of their pre-defined ones. And if you hit Cancel it still commits the changes. This is the part where you give your screen the evil eye.

Screw that. Just open a terminal.

cd ~/.openoffice.org2/user/config/
sed -i 's/>/>\n/g' standard.soc
vim standard.soc

The sed line is to make it legible. Nobody at Sun has heard of newlines, it seems, so their XML is all one line. Oh, no wait, they use two lines. The first is to say that this is an XML file. It is now 110 lines long. I used vim, but you can use whatever text editor you want. Add in XML lines defining the colors you want using the nice simple hex format we're all used to using to define colors. Save it, start OpenOffice.org back up, and yay, you have all those colors you wanted. It took about 2 minutes. Adding one at a time and converting the hex to decimal, it probably would've taken 30 minutes.

Yay, now I have colors. I've got to be past the annoying part now, right? Nope, not that lucky. I wanted my bullets to all be Tango Sky Blue 2, so I pulled up the Style thing and told it that. As expected, all the bullets changed color to Tango Sky Blue 2. Oh, um, except the bullets on the slide that was in view when I used the Style tool. That one didn't change. Still have to do that manually.

I decided I didn't like the indenting on the bullets. I didn't want the first level to be indented at all, but I did want there to be some space between the bullet and the text. So I open up the Style thing again, go to Outline 1…and those options aren't there. Just to be sure, I checked what happens when I highlight a bulleted list and go to Format -> Bullets and Numbering. The options do exist. I just can't use them in bulk. So I went through every single slide setting the indenting and spacing on bullets. I had to highlight the bulleted lists manually too to do this because you see, Ctrl+A to Select All doesn't actually Select All. It opens up a file chooser instead.

I wanted to fake the effect I was trying to get in Inkscape, so I decided to make the title textboxes full width and set a border on them. I wanted it to have a one-shade-darker border, just like in Tango icons. The border, however, would expand past the edge of the slide in different amounts in each direction. No even borders for you!

Also, opening an .odp does not display nice user-editable XML, which I was under the impression is how ODF was supposed to be implemented. I was ready to give up quite a while back and just edit the file's XML directly. Well that isn't very possible, it seems.

I found one nice thing in OpenOffice.org Impress. There's a Color Bar in View -> Toolbars that adds a palette of all defined colors below your slide so you can select a textbox and click it to set the fill background.

Firefox 3 Hug Day Tomorrow!

2008-10-08T15:04:00.003-04:00

Firefox has a fair number of bugs, but before they can be fixed, they need to be triaged. How about going through the New bugs and confirming the ones you can reproduce? And for the confirmed ones, check that it's still reproducible. In both cases, add any necessary information you can. For the New bugs, ask for necessary information too.

The Mozilla Team has a Triagers' Handbook with all the information you need to help triage Firefox bugs. So go check out the Firefox 3 Hug Day bug list. If you've got some free time, why not help triage these bugs?

Intellectual Property & Some Politics

2008-10-02T03:07:00.007-04:00

Update: A reader named Jude just sent me an email showing that apparently the House passed PRO-IP by roll-call vote two days after the Senate unanimously passed it. About that transparency thing…yes they're public records, but what about telling everyone what's going on beforehand?

In my Information Policy class today, the topic was Intellectual Property with two lawyers, one of which is from the CDT. I found the statement that copyright supporters believe copyleft supporters are totally anti-copyright funny. Mostly because copyright is the only basis on which copyleft works. Just this summer, a US court upheld copyleft, creating the precedent that copyleft infringement and copyright infringement are the same thing. Afterward, we chatted about UMG v Lindor (a case where a woman who had never used a computer was sued for making-available on a filesharing network—she's now trying to question the $750/song rate the RIAA sues for), Elektra v Barker (settled, $750 total instead of per-song), and Atlantic v Anderson (RIAA loses, pays $107,951). I also showed him a slide show of "If the DMCA applied in real life. I think he was amused.

Part of the discussion there was about DRM which we know is defective by design. Don't you love how we can't legally & freely watch DVDs with Linux? Yeah, me too. So this led me to dent on Identi.ca the idea that maybe we could influence the market somehow. What if a very large number of people stopped buying movies on DRM'd DVDs (BluRay and HD-DVD included)? I was thinking 1,000,000 people pledge to not buy any DRM'd DVDs in 2009 and send a letter to the MPAA saying that the reason you weren't buying their stuff is because of DRM. If you just can't stand a lack of movies, well, first, you need to recognize that books are generally better than movies. Second, how about some indie films? Of course, friends were quick to point out that 1,000,000 people are not enough. If one assumes the average person buys 4 DVDs/yr, that's 4,000,000 DVDs, or about $80,000,000. With $16,000,000,000 in consumer sales last year (yes, 3 more 0's), that's a drop in the bucket. Getting more than 1,000,000 in on it seems like a bit far-stretched of a goal though. There's got to be some market dynamic that can force their hand though, hasn't there? The possibility that the MPAA would just whine more about how declining sales are proof of piracy and obviously means we need more DRM is also an issue. Oh, supporting Creative Commons was also mentioned. We need an alternative to MPAA DRM'd DVDs. The rise of DRM-free music sales (such as from Amazon or iTunes Plus) has led some DRM'd music services to shut down, for example Walmart's. I'm sure we have plenty of Creative Commons supporters

In case you hadn't heard, the US Senate unanimously passed a RIAA-backed PRO-IP Act. All the articles I've seen say that it's now going to the House (of course), and some say as soon as Friday or Saturday, but they don't give a Bill number for the House, which is a problem. Mentioning this to Jordan Mantha, he pointed out that Congress is hardly transparent because they make it too hard to get information. Having written Python scripts to parse government websites, I have to say, they are seriously lacking on the tech-savvy front. He says (and I agree) that Congress needs RSS feeds. He also said that probably the reason they don't have them is that then we'd know what they were really doing with their time. He's probably not too far off. The bill is available to download (PDF), but the scariest part is the part where they want an "IP Czar" in the Executive branch. They also want to double the fines, and there was something about seizing any equipment used or intended to be used for copyright infringement. One can assume that's for big piracy-for-profit situations, but when it comes to the letter of the law, bye-bye laptop if you illegally download a movie. They got rid of the part where the DoJ could bring civil suit. I don't know if the take-away-your-stuff part went with the DoJ stuff or not. I don't think it did. I think they just got rid of the DoJ stuff so that they wouldn't be tied up acting as lawyers for the RIAA when they have much more important things to do. Well, anyway, the point of mentioning that was to say that if you're a US voter, you might want to give your Congress Critter a message regarding this bill.

And now for a bit more serious politics. Feel free to tune out now. There's US economics coming up. K, that was your warning. Found some interesting charts regarding the US economy. The charts were based on information provided by the US Senate and were to be used in a presentation to the US Senate. If you'd like a better breakdown of it, try these charts. They let you see where George HW Bush, Clinton, and George W Bush each started and finished, broken down by year. The more interesting thing, in my opinion, is the effect 9/11 and the War of on Terror had on the economy. While 9/11 was a big shock to the economy, history would tell us that the war should have helped the economic situation. History had a different situation, though. With the Great Depression and World War II, we had an economy based on production, so the wartime economy meant increased production. In our current economy, where probably half of it is middle-men and we produce much much less than we import, it had the opposite effect. It just meant needing to buy more from overseas, and we were already buying quite a lot. I hope those in charge note the difference between war's effect on a productive economy and war's effect on a non-productive economy. Please, this is not meant to provoke debate regarding the US's current overseas involvement, just meant to demonstrate that the real issue with our economy is that we simply do not produce enough, and when we do, we don't do it sustainably. Using up all of our resources so that we need to buy from overseas again when we run out is not a long-term solution. We need efficient production. I would think that would be true of any economy though. It's simple common sense. C+I+G+NX is basic macro-economics. The "Net Exports" (the "NX") is pretty important. I'm pretty sure our NX is a negative number.

Again, I have to ask that you please not turn the comments into a debate about the war. This is about intellectual property and production (and hey, how about someone's intellect invent some property that can help make production more efficient?).

5-A-Day on Ubuntu UK

2008-09-26T00:59:00.005-04:00

The most recent episode of the Ubuntu UK Podcast has a segment on 5-A-Day beginning about halfway through. I'd like to highlight this part of the conversation:

Dave: "If 5-A-Day is manageable, why have in the last 7 days there been only 35 people who've actually submitted bugs to the 5-A-Day project?"

Alan: "How'd you measure that?"

Dave: "Ah, Daniel Holbach's 5-A-Day stat page."

Alan: "Well, I haven't done any today because I spent most of the day in the pub."

Dave: "What I'm getting at is, the Ubuntu community is vast, why in the last 7 days is there only 35 people working on it?"

Ciemon: "Because it's too hard."

Alan: "No, it's not. It's not."

Right, so, I agree with Alan. It's not hard. As they note in podcast, there are plenty of wiki pages to help you out. Come on, give it a try. Why not start on the newest bugs? If you see something without a package, well, you could find the right package and assign it. If you see a bug you recognize, confirm it. If you can add more information, do so. If you see missing information, the wiki's got plenty of information on what data needs to be added, and those default responses can come in handy. If you speak something other than English, why not translate a bug report into English? You can also improve the titles and descriptions of bugs. There's guaranteed to be something you can do.

Oh, and don't forget about Hug Days. On Hug Days, you get a hug for every bug you hug. Get together with a friend, and triage together. Today's is Update Manager. The Hug Day runs throughout the entire time that it's that Thursday in any timezone. The 5-A-Day application has support for adding tags, and every Hug Day has a tag. Oh, and Hug Days are every Thursday, so join in!

Tags can also be used for Bug Jams. Why not organize a Bug Jam with your LoCo team? Set up a custom tag for your Bug Jam. And even when you're not doing a Bug Jam, well, you can add a team to your 5-A-Day settings, and then in the stats page linked above you and your local team both get credit.

Come on, everybody. Let's try to get the "Top 50" lists for the week and the day to both actually contain 50 names!

Of course, there's no reason to stop at only 5 bugs a day…even if the .signature output thing only lists 5 ;)

--
My 5 today: #274605 (firefox-3.0), #274608 (xserver-xorg-video-intel), #274582 (ubuntu), #274624 (brasero), #274616 (usplash)
Do 5 a day - every day! https://wiki.ubuntu.com/5-A-Day

Swfdec 0.8: Open Source Flash

2008-09-24T21:22:00.006-04:00

Raise your hand if you've had issues with Flash on Linux. Er, let's try this again. Raise your hand if you haven't had issues with Flash on Linux. That's a bit easier to count, now isn't it?

Supposedly Flash is much much hairier if you use 64bit Linux, because Adobe only releases 32bit plugins. I decided that instead of dealing with nspluginwrapper and then needing libflashsupport to work around the issues with Flash+PulseAudio, I'd just try Swfdec. There's a 64bit version available. Yay! It turns out it's actually pretty good. The most important test is that it can do YouTube without a hitch. Oh yeah, bonus: It's like having FlashBlock installed because it turns all Flash items into a play button (the arrow) so no more annoying, loud, auto-playing things. Awesome.

However, I quickly found a problem with using it on 64bit Hardy: no sound, even with libflashsupport. The 64bit sound drivers use mmap while the 32bit don't, and the version in Hardy doesn't like that. The version in Intrepid (0.7.4) is perfectly happy, though. So, I compiled Intrepid's for Hardy. And then it was happy.

Now something better has happened. Stéphane Marguet has libswfdec-0.8-1 in his PPA. The cool thing about Swfdec 8 is that it doesn't require libflashsupport. They've worked out how to get sound, even on 64bit, without any helper apps. And yes, this works on Hardy's version of ALSA as well as Intrepid's. Oh, and yes, I can use Rhythmbox at the same time. Please remember, though, since it's from a PPA, do not report bugs in it to Launchpad. It's not actually supported in Ubuntu.

Swfdec isn't perfect. Sites done totally in Flash are sometimes a bit funny, and Google Street View doesn't work, but it's getting there. And hey, that annoying thing where on certain sites you can't reach the menus because they hide behind Adobe Flash's nasty always-on-top behaviour? Gone. Swfdec obeys z-index.

Try out the Intrepid themes in Hardy

2008-09-23T13:58:00.002-04:00

I just realized that a lot of you out there probably don't know about this. We've all heard about the planned visual refresh for Intrepid. Well, if you want to try out some of the themes that have been created, you can install them in Hardy and stay up to date with their improvements using kwwii's PPA. Just add these lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kwwii/ubuntu hardy main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/kwwii/ubuntu hardy main

Run sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install community-themes, and you're good. Intrepid's sound theme is also in that PPA, so if you don't want the login sounds to change, disable the PPA again after you get the themes installed.

I really like the Kin theme.

To upgrade or not to upgrade?

2008-09-22T17:10:00.004-04:00

I'm content with Hardy. It "Just Works." Someone convince me to try Intrepid!

Here's the situation. Every release, I've had a real incentive to upgrade in the form of better hardware support.

Dapper->Edgy: Xorg got AIGLX built-in. I could use Beryl. SD reader module included.
Edgy->Feisty: SD reader module loaded on boot.
Feisty->Gutsy: xserver-xorg-video-intel means no more 915resolution
Gutsy->Hardy: iwl3945 means no more restricted modules
Hardy->Intrepid: ???

Yes, there's eCryptFS and the generated Guest account. I think eCryptFS can be setup on Hardy too. Given the bugs I've been seeing regarding NetworkManager and suspend/resume, though, I'm not sure I want to touch its unstable form.

Yes, there is better hardware support available for my laptop now as compared to when I bought it in July. I fixed my sound suspend bug, and that's been SRU'd for Hardy and is in Intrepid. There are drivers for the webcam and fingerprint reader, but not in the mainline kernel, and not in Intrepid. I'd have to compile them myself anyway.

Any killer new features for Intrepid that I don't know about?

Today: Ubuntu Testing Day

2008-09-22T13:59:00.003-04:00

Today is Ubuntu Testing Day. The goal is to test out the new Intrepid Ibex alpha 6 ISO. Just pick one (or more):

ISO testing instructions
Feature testing
Hardware testing

Join #ubuntu-testing on irc.freenode.net if you need any help. And don't forget to file any bugs you find!

Advice Requested: Teaching Python to an 8-year-old child

2008-09-14T00:19:00.004-04:00

I want to teach my little 8-year-old cousin Python. Her dad says she's only just getting used to Windows. I'm giving her an old laptop running Edubuntu to practice on (so her environment is similar to mine), and I'll be teaching her through email correspondence since I go to school away from home. I figure Edubuntu will be good for two reasons. First, she'll have education games. Second, her mom's a teacher and might like it. Anyway, I need some recommendations.

It has been suggested that I try PyStart. Anyone have experience with it? How does it do on testing for correctness of code? Is it likely to be total overkill? I suspect the answer to that one is yes.

I normally recommend How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning With Python for learning Python as a first language, but the book was written for a class of high-schoolers. My feeling is that some of the math examples might be too advanced. On the other hand, maybe I could just give her different examples. The only book I've seen suggested for young kids is Snake Wrangling for Kids. Has anyone used this to teach an elementary-schooler Python? How'd it go? Any other suggestions?

Finally, development environment. I'm a vim user. I like the command line. I'm also not crazy. I'm not spending time teaching an 8-year-old vim before she can do any programming. The only Python IDE I've used is Idle, which isn't much more than Gedit with a run button. I'm looking for suggestions on easy-to-use (but hopefully still featureful) Python IDE. It's an older laptop, so it'd also be best if it's something smaller than, say, Eclipse.

Thanks for any input, guys!

Its name is... (Planet Ubuntu meme)

2008-09-11T23:30:00.003-04:00

I've mentioned it before, but hey I'll follow along with the current Planet meme (it has jumped from Planet Debian to Planet Ubuntu), which is to give the naming scheme of your computers. So, my naming scheme, like his, is for female names. Specifically, my computers are female computer scientists. I have:

Ada, after Lady Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, commonly referred to as Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer
Grace, after Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, most famous for removing a moth from the Mark II computer, secondarily for handing out "picoseconds" and "nanoseconds," but most importantly for inventing the compiler
Betty, after both Betty Jean Jennings and Betty (Snyder) Holberton, both of whom programmed the first digital computer, ENIAC

Reminder: Sept 11 == Hug Day!

2008-09-09T19:56:00.003-04:00

Brian Murray sent out the next Hug Day announcement today. The target this time is confirmed bugs that aren't assigned to a package. The list of 50 bugs being attacked is on the wiki. Even if you've never triaged before, don't worry, the wiki includes instructions for what to do for the Hug Day. Oh, and don't forget the part where you get a hug for every bug you work on! Get together with friends and have a Hug Day bug triaging party.

And hey, this is a chance to really boost your 5-A-Day. Don't forget to add the hugday-20080911 tag!

Bug work doesn't have to be confined to Hug Days, of course. Have you seen the pie chart on Launchpad's Ubuntu Bug page? Let's get cracking on shrinking those New and Incomplete sections.

Trendnet: "We support Linux...not really"

2008-09-08T01:17:00.007-04:00

Even when the box claims Linux compatibility, beware.

Seriously, they need to be more specific. When it says Linux is supported, they mean strictly that the hardware supports Linux. The software to configure the hardware does not. Tech support does not. And the hardware defaults to a static IP address that very likely is not accessible with your default route…even though it supports DHCP.

My apartment, at this moment, contains 6 Linux laptops, 1 MacBook Pro (roommate's), and 1 Linux desktop. The installation software doesn't even support OSX. There's actually a note in the booklet saying for Mac users that after it's configured they can go to whatever IP address they've assigned it. So, if you buy the hardware on the basis that it will work fine in your Windows'-free household, you are in for a wonderful surprise.

On the 2nd call to tech support I mentioned there was a Mac, which they do support. He still tried to convince me that a Windows box is absolutely necessary. Ergh. Finally, Daniel Chen asked the guy if it's possible to cut the router out of the picture and using a regular Cat5 (I don't have a crossover) talk to the print server to set it up. He said yes. Why didn't he just say that before? Anyway, to make a Trendnet TE100-P1U work do this:

Connect the TE100-P1U to the computer with an ethernet cable
Assign a 192.168.0.x (I used 192.168.0.100) IP to the wired interface sudo ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.100
Make sure you can ping 192.168.0.1
In your web browser go to 192.168.0.1
Click "Change IP Address" on the left
Either configure it for DHCP or for an IP that is accessible to your route.

For that last step, I told it to use DHCP. Once I saw it get a lease in my router's configuration page, I made it use Static DHCP. Static Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol…sounds funny, but it keeps the assigned IP address tied to that MAC address so that the lease doesn't expire and move your printer to some other IP address, causing you to have to reconfigure all your printer settings. So I recommend doing that.

Go System -> Administration -> Printing. Click on New Printer. Choose "LPD/LPR Host or Printer" and enter the IP address the print server is using. Leave Queue blank and go on. From there, just configure it like a normal USB printer.

Moral of the story: just because the box says the hardware supports Linux doesn't mean it is possible to install or configure the hardware using Linux or that the company is willing to help any further than advising you to change operating systems.

Ubiquity?

2008-09-05T01:27:00.002-04:00

Am I the only one that hears people talking about Mozilla's Ubiquity and thinks of Ubuntu's Ubiquity? Poll on the right.

Stephen Fry says "Happy Birthday" to GNU

2008-09-02T12:09:00.002-04:00

Check it out! Actor and writer Stephen Fry is explaining Free Software and GNU/Linux. He makes a nice little analogy in there too. I find it rather interesting the method they use to show the video. It's an open source Java applet that asks where to put temporary internet files (defaults to /tmp so you can just OK it) and then plays a video in I-don't-know-what format, but it works quite well using just OpenJDK.

Who's using Gwibber?

2008-09-02T11:22:00.004-04:00

I know a bunch of Ubuntu folks switched to Identi.ca, what with it being like an open-source Twitter. And a bunch of us are using Gwibber to send and receive updates. There's talk going on of some micro-blogging (with Identi.ca/Laconica's tags, that is) for Ubuntu and possibly UDS and such. But right now I'm wondering who's using Gwibber? I know I am. Jorge Castro is. Myrtti is. Who else?

If you haven't heard of it, I just wrote an article on it for MakeUseOf. I'm rather pleased to see the Windows users who are sad it's a Linux-only app, though. I mean, when some of the best FOSS out there (Firefox, OpenOffice.org, GIMP) is cross-platform, where's the incentive to switch to Linux? We need more of these really great but Linux-only apps to entice them over, right? And then we hear these silly excuses for not using Linux like "there are no applications for Linux" or "Linux apps all suck," which is certainly not true at all. Let's prove them wrong.

And if you want to get Gwibber some attention, it's up on Digg right now.

Microsoft, Enough With the Obvious Patents!

2008-09-01T02:32:00.003-04:00

A bit over a year ago, I blogged about Microsoft patenting sudo. They're at it again. Guess what they patented this time. According to ZDNet, Microsoft patented the Page Up and Page Down keys. Yeah, no kidding. I really like how they linked to a keyboard from 1981 where you can see the aforementioned keys on the numpad.

Keep One Application Together

2008-08-27T23:19:00.003-04:00

One feature of VirtueDesktops that I really liked on OS X was being able to constrain an application to a specific workspace. It turns out Compiz has been able to do this for, well, since Beryl and Compiz became Compiz Fusion. For organization, I like to keep my Pidgin windows all in one place. I'm likely to miss them if they popup behind my Firefox, after all. Usually this means I notice that I have an IM and then hunt around for the window to move it to the proper workspace. No more!

You need to have compizconfig-settings-manager installed. Open it up and go to the Window Management section. In there, enable the Place Windows plugin. Go to the Fixed Window Placement tab. See the "Windows with fixed viewport" part? Click the New button under there. On the popup, click the + button. The type of match should be Window Class. Now hit the Grab button and click on a window for that application. In this case, I chose Pidgin. Hit Add to confirm it. Now you're back to the first popup. Here's perhaps the trickiest part, figuring out which viewport. I'm using the Cube, so for the Y direction, all viewports are number 0. The first viewport I see when I load up is number 0 for the X direction. The cube face to the right of that is number 1. The next is number 2. Et cetera. Choose your settings, and close that popup. Now any new window for that application should automatically open in the proper viewport, yay!

If you're using the Desktop Wall, I believe you can assume 0,0 for the default viewport. The viewport below that should be X0 Y-1 (and above it would be X0 Y1), I think, but feel free to correct me in the comments if I'm wrong on that.

I just used Pidgin as an example for this. Another good use I see for this is making your windows auto-arrange on applications you have set to automatically start.

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