Free Software Planet

More about S.C.O.U.R.G.E.: Heroes of lesser renown

S.C.O.U.R.G.E.: Heroes of lesser renown 0.17 (updated)

3D roguelike game

AstroMenace 046b (updated)

3D scrolling space shooter with great graphics

More about AstroMenace

More about Battle for Wesnoth

Battle for Wesnoth 1.2.1 (updated)

Fantasy Turn-Based Strategy Game

January 15, 2007 08:31 PM

Planet OpenOffice.org - Developer News

Michael Meeks: 2007-01-15: Monday

Up early, chewed mail, another 1/2 day off to prepare
a talk for Thursday. Call with Doug & Co. call with JP, call
with Guy - my amateur telephonist credentials are in the ascendant
clearly.

Ok, so as promised the shop.fluendo.com is now live with all our codecs!. You guys have no idea all the practical issues delaying this, the last that hit us today being the credit card system suddenly refusing payments in dollars so we had to switch the shop over to Euro.

Anyway the press release is out and hopefully we get some good coverage. This release should also be a response to Eric Raymonds request
for someone to save him from the lack of codecs.

As you will see if you go to the shop we support Windows Media codecs on Linux x86_32, Linux x86_64, Linux PPC, Solaris Intel and Solaris SPARC, just as we do with our MP3 plugin. Depending on interest other platforms could follow.

For Linux x86_32 and Linux x86_64 we also have MPEG2, AC3 and MPEG4 Part available. AAC is underway.

People will also notice that we rebate heavily if you buy the codecs in bundles, this is because we really prefer to stear people away from the single codecs purchases as they cost us as much as a bundle per transaction, which means more money to the bank and less to us :)

The codecs are distributed inside tarballs together with instructions. We realize this is not as painless an install as one could wish for. But doing packages for a million and one distro's was not a plausible solution either. That said we are working on a codec installer/updater which will automatically download and install any codec bought in the shop. It will also upgrade those codecs as updates becomes available. The idea is that a purchase of the codecs gives you a year of updates, after which you can buy an discounted update to continue getting updated codecs and bundles.

So I hope people like the shop and also for anyone reading this wanting a site license, we do offer that, but that will be handled outside the shop. The shop is targeted at people looking for 20 or less licenses.

January 15, 2007 08:05 PM

Planet Gentoo

Christel Dahlskjaer: The story goes on without you..

So, having said I'd be up at 7 with a ton of things to do.. I either forgot to set my alarm or I did infact turn it off in my sleep. It's 1pm, I've not been awake particulary long. Fuck. I ended up talking with Steve (lawyer) until 4-5am, picking his brains about law and.. well, not law.

My friend linked to this article that someone had linked at slashdot, I don't even begin to remember my password, not having logged in for about 5years, so commenting on it was somewhat pointless. However, it made me think about Gentoo and the way we treat our users at times.

Perhaps we need to not talk down to or tell our users that they are stupid. Stop being assholes. Because, chances are they're not stupid and noone needs a condescending prick talking down to them to start with? Sure, they may not have a computer degree or any certifications, they may not have the experience and knowledge you do.. but that doesn't necessarily make them morons. It just means you know stuff they don't, and they know stuff you don't.

Why shouldn't we talk down them? I'll side with K here.

1. No-one will like you, which in a different world would just make it easier to outsource you to Bangalore. If you have no interest in connecting with users, there's no reason to keep you within connecting distance.. right?

2. Your software will suffer, as everyone will be too afraid to tell you how to improve it.

At slashdot someone brought up the idea that the condescending nature of IT is partially to blame for the lack of women applying to IT schools. Maybe they are partially right too. Looking back, many of the people I've come across, those who seemed to know everything, turned out to know no more than I did. They just had plenty more confidence and no fear when it came to jumping head first into something new, be it something they knew anything about or not. Generally speaking, us women may be a bit easier to intimidate that way, perhaps not as confident as men. Mind, I don't think the way to change that is by telling the men in the IT industry to be more professional and treat us with respect.. I think it involves us refusing to take it and be told we don't know anything. Or would general awareness about how many asshole developers there are help?

DJ was a busy bee last night, and I think we can finally launch the FOSSCON site in a day or two! Admittedly very much behind schedule as the aim was early November..

Steve(B) is going to NYC towards the end of my US trip, I am sort of tempted to head up and spend a day or two with him. Shopping, touristing.. Also, I am realising that right now the theme of my life appear to be "Steve." Everyone is called Steve all of a sudden, lawyer boy is Steve, sit is a Steve, I'm spending a fair amount of time with my friend Steve(B).. And when I talk of Steve, without prefixing which, people must get the impression that this Steve is quite something and has a finger in many pies! Mmmpie. Perhaps I should make some lunch.

January 15, 2007 08:04 PM

BlenderNation

Review: Advanced Fluid Dynamics In Blender DVD

Recently, Jason “Groo” Van Gumster (Fweeb) announced on BA that he had been working with cmiVFX on a 3 hour training DVD for Blender entitled “Advanced Fluid Dynamics In Blender.” Thanks to cmiVFX,...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

January 15, 2007 08:00 PM

OpenBSD Journal

Maryland BUG - Call for Members

Mike Erdely wrote in to say:

A BSD User Group has just started in Maryland (MD BUG). If you're interested and located in the Maryland, Virginia, or DC areas, please join our mailing list or find us in IRC (#mdbug @ irc.freenode.net).

We'll be holding our first meeting on Wednesday, January 31 at 6:30 PM in Bethesda, MD. I will be giving a small presentation about binpatch, Gerardo Santanta's binary patching system for OpenBSD.

For more information, check out our website.

January 15, 2007 07:53 PM

Planet Debian

Enrico Zini: latex-beamer

Some latex-beamer tips

Using with source-highlight

source-highlight's latexcolor
output uses colors that are not available in latex-beamer. Normally one would
have to include them with \usepackage[usenames,dvipsnames]{color}, but under
latex-beamer it does not work.

One solution is to include the relevant colours from
/usr/share/texmf-tetex/tex/latex/graphics/dvipsnam.def:

%% For source-highlight's output % This unfortunately does not work %\usepackage[usenames,dvipsnames]{color} % Therefore, I will copy them from /usr/share/texmf-tetex/tex/latex/graphics/dvipsnam.def \DefineNamedColor{named}{Blue} {cmyk}{1,1,0,0} \DefineNamedColor{named}{BrickRed} {cmyk}{0,0.89,0.94,0.28} \DefineNamedColor{named}{Brown} {cmyk}{0,0.81,1,0.60} \DefineNamedColor{named}{ForestGreen} {cmyk}{0.91,0,0.88,0.12} \DefineNamedColor{named}{Purple} {cmyk}{0.45,0.86,0,0} \DefineNamedColor{named}{Red} {cmyk}{0,1,1,0} \DefineNamedColor{named}{Black} {cmyk}{0,0,0,1} \DefineNamedColor{named}{RoyalBlue} {cmyk}{1,0.50,0,0}

After this is done, including a source is just a matter of:

# In the shell $ source-highlight -f latexcolor filename.ext

# In the latex-beamer frame
\input{filename.ext.tex}

Proportional columns

In the latex-beamer documentation I have only seen columns with fixed sizes.
\textwidth luckily works:

\begin{frame} \frametitle{Correzione dei compiti} \framesubtitle{Il programmino da Fortran.}

\begin{columns}

\column{.5\textwidth}

{\tiny
\input{fortran/01-inizio.f77.tex}
}

\column{.5\textwidth}

{\tiny
\input{fortran/02-inizio.py.tex}
}

\end{columns}
\end{frame}

January 15, 2007 07:52 PM

Enrico Zini: suspend-on-asus-u5f

Suspend on ASUS U5F

I have suspend.

The acpi4asus developers now added support
for the U5F. I pulled their code and now I can control the screen brightness
writing numbers into /etc/acpi/asus/brn.

I also discovered that the problem I had on
suspend was that the laptop wakes up with
some weird brightness setting that causes the light not to turn on.

Writing to /etc/acpi/asus/brn I can now manage to turn it on again, and I
added trivial script that save /etc/acpi/asus/brn on suspend and restore it
on resume.

\o/

January 15, 2007 07:52 PM

Free Software Magazine -

An icy day

Hi, it's B and G, the little kid's in this house. We've had a lot of ice lately. The TV says we may even lose the electricity. Dad said he needed to write his blog early this weekend. But right now, he is walking around the living room and griping about writer's block. He looks kinda funny.

So we sneaked in here to say what we don't like and do like about the computer. The adults have said what they liked, now it is the kid's turn.

January 15, 2007 07:20 PM

Planet Ubuntu

Christer Edwards: the Ubuntu Linux Bible : CD-ROM Included

Joseph Price: UbuntuForums.org Weekly Update (no.4.1)

Couldn’t wait till Friday…

ubuntu-geek pointed out to all the staff a few minutes ago that we hit 2 million posts over the weekend… and nobody had noticed despite all the celebrations we had at 200,000 members.

Congrats to ubuntu-geek and everyone else who supports the forums!

January 15, 2007 07:12 PM

Planet GNOME

Mark McLoughlin: Virtual networking

Dan I have been discussing how to "fix virtual networking", not just Xen's networking but also getting something sane wrt. QEMU/KVM etc.

Anyone interested should read this writeup. To discuss, libvirt-list is probably the best place.

January 15, 2007 07:11 PM

Planet Mozilla

Mozilla Quality: Thunderbird 2 Beta 2 Test Day this Friday!

In preparation for the next Thunderbird 2 beta, we will be holding a Community Test Day this Friday, January 19. Details are here.

As always, suggestions are welcome as to subject matter for future test days. Last Friday, we held a Community Test Day that was focused on Litmus Test Case Writing. While we did not receive many new test cases, we would like to encourage the community to continue to contribute test cases (you can always write them in your spare time :)) or suggest ideas for new test cases. We did have one community member who suggested some new test cases that concern low disk space, and this is a good example of how you can help make the Litmus test tool even better! As always, thanks for your continued support of the project.

January 15, 2007 06:58 PM

The Web Standards Project

The Dutch Embrace Web Standards

According to Peter-Paul Koch the new Dutch accessibility laws are pretty sweeping and “go way beyond WCAG“. Better yet, they read like a veritable blueprint for modern standards based web development:

A few examples will show you where Dutch government accessibility is heading. As of 1 September last year, every website built for a government agency [...]

January 15, 2007 06:52 PM

Planet Debian

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Too hot to Handel

We went to see a performance of Too
hot too Handel [1], a Gospel/Blues/Jazz/Rock rendition of the Messiah, at
the Auditorium Theater on
Saturday.

Two choirs comprising 120 singers, a full jazz (big) band with drums,
electric and acoustic bass, electric organ, piano and about twenty brass
instruments as well as an equal number of strings in the symphonic section,
plus vocalists Rob Dixon (tenor), Victor Trent Cook (counter tenor) and
Alfreda Burke (soprena) made for a very full sound in this beautiful theater.

For apparent scheduling problems, the performance was moved from the
Christmas season (in which Haendel's original Messiah is rather popular) to
the Martin Luther King birthday weekend, which is appropriate enough. Even
though quite a few seats were empty, the musicians had little problem to get
the audience onto their feat with a fine performance, and a rousing
finale. Recommended.

[1] Not sure where the Umlaut went missing there. Oh well.

January 15, 2007 06:50 PM

Planet PHP

Jaws 0.7.0 - Amir Mohammad Saied

On behalf of the Jaws development team, I'm proud to announce another release of Jaws.

Jaws 0.7 (At my signal, unleash hell!) is a release with lot of Ajax and fancy stuff you will love, new gadgets and new code!
As usual it's provided through three tarballs:
Jaws Core: Include core and core gadgets (useful if you want to use Jaws as a framework).
Jaws Blog System: include same as jaws-core but also some gadgets like Banner, Blog, Chatbox, FileBrowser, etc..). Useful if you want to use Jaws as a blog system and a theme.
and Jaws Complete: include everything

For more information: official announce

January 15, 2007 06:31 PM

Planet Mozilla

Mike Beltzner: DESCriptive email, a lesson from mom

My mom (who reads this blog, so be nice!) works as a management, leadership, communication and team effectiveness consultant. Or something like that; I’m not sure what labels she likes to apply to her services. She’s been doing it a long time, and she’s really quite good at it. When I was in my last year of high school, she insisted I go do a Myers Briggs Type Indicator, and despite strong instincts towards youthful rebellion, I had to admit that not only was it eerily accurate, but it and her debriefing were both incredibly helpful to me in understanding how I could communicate better with my peers.

This is all by way of explaining why when I send my mom an email like:

Hey Mom and Dad,
Lately you guys have been sending me more and more forwarded emails,
usually with large photo attachments. I appreciate you wanting to share the
laughs, but it’s filling up my email a lot, and I’d rather you not send me them
anymore.
love,
mike

The answer I get back can sometimes look like this:

That was a pretty perfectly drafted DESC statement (used for giving feedback about a desired change in behaviour). If you were in one of my courses, I’d give you full marks!

This is, of course, a bit of a gambit on my mother’s side, almost begging for her son to come to her for some old fashioned lesson-learning. That’s OK, though, since it turns out that she has some really good lessons to teach. So I asked her what DESC meant, and, well … check it out:

DESC stands for Describe (the behaviour you would like changed, factually, without blame or accusation or attribution of motive); Explain (the impact of the behaviour on you or - if you’re the manager or spokesperson - on your your group); S stands for Suggest (the alternative behaviour you prefer; it can also stand for Specify, if you need to be tough, or Solicit, if you think the other person is willing to come up with constructive ideas ); C stands for Contract (if you do this,, I will…) or Consequences (N.B. - positive consequences accruing to the change in behaviour).

D: Lately you guys have been sending me more and more forwarded emails,
usually with large photo attachments.
E: it’s filling up my email a lot
S: and I’d rather you not send me them anymore.

C: now that I think of it, there was no C, but in this case, it really wasn’t
necessary. (DESC is an adaptable model.)

You also said “I appreciate you wanting to share the laughs..”, which is not, strictly speaking, part of the DESC - but like in Olympic skating, there are technical points and presentation points, and that phrase went a long way to establishing a positive tone and therefore getting a co-operative reply.

I’d love to say that I always write email like this, but my mother would probably be the first to tell you that usually my attempts to appear aloof and capable come across as being a bit of a jerk. So I’m actually really glad to have gotten this little introduction to writing in a DESC-riptive (my word, not hers!) style. Looking over previous posts in newsgroups and on mailing lists, I’m quite sure that I didn’t always follow the style, but I’ll try to in the future. It seems like an effective way of getting one’s point across efficiently and effectively without needlessly filling up inboxes across the land. And hey - I can still score points for style!

January 15, 2007 06:27 PM

Planet GNOME

Prashanth Mohan: A look back at the Kurukshetra OPC

The Kurukshetra OPC was finally conducted successfully last sunday (14th Jan, ‘07).

So, The official stats!

Total No of Registered Teams: 633
Total No of Active Teams: 547 (Teams who confirmed their accounts)

	No of Submits	No of Accepted Submits
Three Brothers	255	26
Names in a DataBase	224	31
Travelling Fisherman	83	9
Festive Change	291	55
Nikhil’s Cake	166	21
Father and Son	61	1

Now, The number of submits by language:

Language	No of Submits
C	207
C++	800
Java	32
Python	24
Perl	5
Ruby	12

The OPC was conducted by using a product that Ravi Shankar and myself designed — Hackzor. If any of you would like to use Hackzor in your college/organisation, please feel free to contact either of us in helping you deploy it. And of course any help in developing it further is most welcome. Hackzor is a Python application which uses the Django Web Framework.

Many thanks are due for Ravi Shankar, Rajiv Mathews, Anjan, Venkatanathan, etc for helping us make this OPC a huge success.

Questions in the OPC:

Technorati Tags: Kurukshetra, Hackzor, Anna University, CEG, OPC

January 15, 2007 06:22 PM

Planet XML

Edubuntu: Remarkably easy to set up and use

In the spirit of other bloggers in the XML space who have
recently talked about their personal experiences with technology
and their children and/or Linux, I thought I would mention my
experience over the weekend setting up a computer for my
daughter.

My daughter has just turned three and is starting to learn her
letters and numbers and how to spell a few words (e.g., her name).
I decided it was time to get her her own computer but being cheap I
didn't want to go so far as to actually buy one, especially not
when I have a veritable scrapyard of old PCs and parts at
home.

As it happens, we moved the Austin office of Innodata to new space
last week and as a side effect I got to take home an ancient
dual-proc PIII machine. So I decided yesterday, a cold rainy day,
to try to build an Edubuntu

machine. Edubuntu is a configuration of ubuntu Linux
specially designed for kids and classroom use. It comes with a
number of educational applications and games, including Tuxpaint,
which is perfect for Dada as she learns to use the mouse and
keyboard. There are some nice little
learn-to-use-the-keyboard-and-mouse games as well.

I also had an LCD display that I wasn't using (in our new house
there's really no need for a dedicated desktop and we don't really
need or want docking stations for our laptops so the display was
only being used as a console for the network firewall machine,
which I needed maybe twice a year).

The machine (which had been named "Doublebot" back when it was a
development support box) wouldn't come on so I pulled the power
supply out of my old game machine desktop [an AMD box I built some
years ago--it had gotten flaky but by that time I was in the
process of becoming a parent and long hours of gaming in a room by
myself were not really relevant to my now any more] and slapped it
into Doublebot, along with a wireless PCI card and the
not-quite-as-ancient video card from the old game machine. During
this time I was also downloading the bootable CD image for
Edubuntu. It did take me a while to figure out how to cable up the
various drives but I did eventually get all the jumpers set right
and the cables hooked up correctly. Finally the machine got to the
point where it was correctly recognizing the drives and trying to
boot from them (the hard drive in the machine didn't have a usable
operating system on it).

By the time I got the hardware going the CD image had downloaded
and I burned it to a disk. Popped the disk in the drive and it
booted right up. The network connection worked, the screen
resolution was correct, all the devices were recognized. It just
worked. Then I just selected the "install" option and it put itself
on the disk drive--I didn't have to do anything beyond select my
language and keyboard layout. I let it set up the disk partition
for me (I've spent so many hours over the last 10 years or so
configuring disk partitions, hours that I'll never get back). I ran
the software update, which updated everything to the latest
versions, added a few more packages that I wanted, and verified
that all the kid stuff worked.

I put the covers back on and set it up in the livingroom on Dada's
little table. Booted it up and showed her how to log in (since she
can spell her name she can log in herself, although she is still
getting used to seeing dots instead of letters when she puts in her
password). She easily spent three hours yesterday playing with
Tuxpaint. She got the basic mouse skills remarkably quickly, given
that she'd never really used a mouse before, although she still
needs help with selecting stuff (and she can't read the message
boxes that come up when she accidently clicks on things like "save"
or "exit"). She can also use Tuxpaint to type words, which she
likes to do.

I can't tell you how many times I've installed Linux or Windows
over the years and this was by far and away the easiest it's ever
been--I don't think it could have been any easier unless it had
just magically appeared on the hard drive without any physical
intervention from me. Of course I was using a very old computer
with fairly old components (the newest part was probably the
wireless PCI card and that was at least two years old), so it's no
surprise that there were no driver problems or anything, but just
the fit and finish was so much better than I've ever seen from a
Linux distribution before. I also liked the window environment (I
assume it's KDE but I really don't know what it is), partly because
it's very close to Windows, which means it looks and behaves like I
expect it to.

The only other thing I did was install secure shell so I could
connect to the machine remotely (using Cygwin and Cygwin X11 under
Windows) and that was as easy as could be using the Synaptics
package manager (of course, I did know what I was doing at that
point, having configured a few Linux boxes in my day).

I would like to see more games and applications for pre-literate
children, but I know that that's a lot to ask of the open source
community. But I would be willing to pay a fair price for
applications that run under Linux (just as I would for
Windows-based apps).

Coupled with the latest versions of Open Office, which seems to
finally be able to really handle MS Office stuff completely enough,
it might be time to take another look at going to Linux (something
I did some years ago but finally got beaten down, in particular by
the lack of a version of Arbortext Editor that would run on Linux,
back when Arbortext Editor was central to a lot of my work as an
integrator, as well as a change in the pricing for VMWare, which
enabled running Windows in a virtual machine).

Hmmm...

January 15, 2007 06:02 PM

Slashdot: Developers

State Trooper Fights For His Source Code

BarneyRabble writes to tell us that a Wisconsin State Trooper is fighting to maintain control of the source code for a program he wrote that helps officers write traffic tickets electronically. Praised by the state just 18 months ago, Trooper David Meredith is now suing the head of patrol claiming that the state is trying to illegally seize the source that he had developed on his own time. From the article: "Meredith, of Oconto Falls, defied an order from his bosses to relinquish the source code - the heart of the program - in October and instead deposited it with Dane County Circuit Judge David T. Flanagan, pending a ruling on who should control it. The case centers on how the software was developed. Department of Transportation attorney Mike Kernats said the State Patrol - a division of DOT - provided Meredith with a computer to write the software and gave him time off patrol duties so he could do the work. But Meredith said in court filings that he spent hundreds of hours off duty working on it, developing it almost entirely on his own time. He noted that he never signed a software licensing agreement."

January 15, 2007 05:35 PM

Planet KDE

Mauricio Piacentini (piacentini): IRC non-meeting

In the last kdegames IRC meeting we all decided to skip the January 1st monthly-meeting, for obvious reasons. Someone then suggested that we should schedule an informal gathering to the second Tuesday of January. But we forgot to remind everyone in a timely manner, so what follows is the log of our quasi-meeting, pretty much myself chatting with Josef :)

I am just posting it by request. Nothing

January 15, 2007 05:29 PM

Planet Ubuntu

Alberto Milone: I’ve been interviewed about Envy…

I’ve been interviewed about Envy, Ubuntu and other distros by luna6:

I hope you enjoy the read

LINK

January 15, 2007 05:13 PM

Planet GNOME

Curtis Hovey: Announcing the birth of my son Tristan

Firstly, let me apologize to everyone who has heard of the birth from others instead of Anne or myself. We have had a very hectic two weeks, and have had little time for anyone but our children.

Tristan Alexander Lawrence-Hovey was born on January 9, 2007 at 5:58 EST. He weighed 7lb 13.8oz in anachronistic measuring units. He measured 19.25in in length (also in old units). He inherited my hair, nose, ears, and toes. From Anne, he got his eyes and mouth. He appears to have a calm disposition like Caroline (another trait that must come from Anne). I added a gallery of photos from Tristan’s birth, and made a short slideshow of the birth (you can save any high-res photo or the QuickTime movie by choosing ‘Save As’ from your browser’s ‘File’ menu).

Tristan was taken to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit a few hours after birth because he was having difficulty breathing. Nothing conclusive was found to be the cause, and he was breathing fine a few hours later. The doctors decided to begin a seven-day course of antibiotics while they continued to test. He was moved to the half-way room two days later, where we were permitted to hold him. We visit him for most the day. Anne is nursing/feeding him as best she can given the awkwardness of the situation. I spend a lot of time moving Anne and the children to and from the hospital and schools. The hospital will release Tristan Tuesday evening, pending the completion of his medications and his hearing test. I prepared some photos from Tristans stay in the NICU and a QuickTime slideshow of the past week.

PS. My only disappointment was Anne rejected Euphrates for a middle name. I have some solace in the knowledge that his full name in iambic pentameter.

January 15, 2007 05:05 PM

ardour - the new digital audio workstation

Update on fundraising

Paul writes: “I’m trying to setup the Ardour Foundation as a 501c(3) non-profit but that takes a little bit of time. In the meantime, I’m experimenting with different ways to raise money to support myself+family until a proper foundation is set up. All donations are much appreciated. Please keep in mind that repeat donations will mean much more for the long term than larger amounts right now. I’ll keep you up to date as I figure stuff out.”

January 15, 2007 05:04 PM

Planet Gentoo

Markus Ullmann: New virtualization around... And GPL'ed

Okay, today there was a nice announcement on heise... "Open-source competitor takes on VMware and Co."

So we have an open-source virtualizer now? Yes we do The test on the page showed that it's only a bit slower compared to the other mentioned virtualizer, so I gave it a run and it worked okay from the first moment. Stats indicated that there were some binaries around but we don't like binaries if we can get the source, right?

I've put a masked live ebuild in the tree and in fact we're the first distro that has virtualbox in the official repository. So give it a run if you want to see the power of open source
There are good docs available on the homepage but if everything fails, you can stop by in #vbox on freenode (upstream irc channel)

January 15, 2007 04:50 PM

BlenderNation

CGChallenge XX Deadline

Today is the deadline of the CGChallenge CC contest.

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

January 15, 2007 04:46 PM

Planet OpenOffice.org - Developer News

IssueZilla: New issues: Mon Jan 15 16:43:00 UTC 2007

#i73481# - Drawing: 64bit: insert long into any but extract as sal_Int32

#i73483# - Drawing: AlphaChannel/Transparenz lost when saving graphic with new logical size via GraphicExporter
#i73471# - Presentation: Flash embedding does not work
#i73488# - Presentation: expand slideshow api to retrieve current slide show image
#i73480# - framework: 100% CPU Usage
#i73487# - framework: Euro Converter does not open any files

#i73486# - framework: SetImage command doesn't work for Image toolbar control
#i73485# - gsl: revisting ZWJ and ZWNJ, alternative filtering proposal
#i73476# - l10n: [VI] GUI Translation for 2.2
#i73472# - l10n: be-BY Belarusian translation update for 2.2
#i73475# - porting: OpenBSD porting: SRC680_m199: desktop/source/deployment/registry/package/dp_package.cxx r1.17 breaks builds with gcc3

#i73473# - sw: Blank spaces are inserted between the cursor and the character when Bangla (Bengali) numerals are typed in a Bangla sentence
#i73477# - sw: Export button position is not intuitive
#i73479# - sw: Grey out nonprinting characters
#i73484# - sw: Type in german translation for GID RID_SVXSTR_SINGLENUM_DESCRIPTION_7
#i73478# - sw: WW8: multiline input field justifies even single-line paragraphs

#i73482# - udk: idlc emits extra XInterface data
#i73474# - ui: Change UI for "Use system font for User Interface"

January 15, 2007 04:44 PM

Planet Debian

David Moreno Garza: Ulteo

I’ve been hired by the Ulteo project to work on packaging and releasing matters. I’m pretty excited

January 15, 2007 04:34 PM

Planet GNOME

Cody Russell: GTK is certified clean of adware/spyware!

Yes, I'm sure to everyone out there this is the great news you were
waiting on the edge of your seat for the past few years. GTK is
finally certified
free of adware/spyware by Softpedia!

Tim Janik received an email
from them, which he kindly posted
to gtk-devel-list for us all to enjoy.

Your product "GTK+ 2.10.7 Rev A" has been tested by the Softpedia labs
and found to be completely clean of adware/spyware components.

We are impressed with the quality of your product and encourage you to
keep this high standards in the future.
To assure our visitors that "GTK+ 2.10.7 Rev A" is clean, we have
granted it with the "100% FREE" Softpedia award. Moreover, to let your
users know about this certification, you may display this award on your
website, on software boxes or inside your product.

January 15, 2007 04:24 PM

Planet Apache

Sam Ruby: SVG Comments

Joe Gregorio has reenabled comments on his weblog. To my knowledge, he has the first weblog that accepts SVG in comments. Oh, and the parent post is priceless.

It is not often that I’m jealous... but one thing is certainly true, I rarely stay jealous for long. :-)

January 15, 2007 04:20 PM

Planet KDE

Timo Hoenig: Use Your Finger

Tired of typing passwords? Tired of using closed source products? If you caught yourself nodding twice in a row please read on.

Several laptop vendors (e.g. IBM/Lenovo, Toshiba) are using a fingerprint reader developed by STMicroelectronic/UPEK. Up to now there was some closed source solution in order to use the fingerprint reader with GNU/Linux and PAM. Last year Pavel came up with his hack called thinkfinger which — by now — has grown a little. I have taken over and created a small library (libthinkfinger) as well as suitable pluggable authentication module (PAM). That’s all you need to get rid of the binary crap which was previously unavoidable.

ThinkFinger: Just a swipe (YouTube)

Preliminary instructions should be straight forward. OpenSUSE users feel free to grab packages from here. I’ll push them to our build service as soon as possible.

Get ThinkFinger 0.2. You will need PAM >= 0.81. Expect regular code drops on SourceForge SVN. Discuss on thinkfinger-devel.

January 15, 2007 03:55 PM

Planet Ruby

Jamis Buck: Refactoring RJS

For today’s tip, I’m going to be cheap and just point you at someone else’s post. :) It’s a good post, though, and it fits right in with my recent posts on RJS, so I think it’s fair. Also, since I posted to The Rails Way this morning, I don’t think too much should be expected of me today, blog-wise!

So, the pointer: RJS Refactoring. Find yourself doing a lot of the same thing in your RJS code? This tip’s for you. (Thanks for writing that up, Gustav!)

January 15, 2007 03:54 PM

Planet RDF

If the Blogosphere is Kandor, who is Brainiac?

New York Times reporter David Carr has a funny and
insightful article, 24-Hour
Newspaper People, on blogs and traditional newspapers. Several
quotes stuck me. Carr writes about how tending to his blog competes
with his real work.

Sometimes I wonder whether I care to the point that I neglect
other things, like, oh, my job. Tweaking the blog is seductive in a
way that a print deadline never is. By the time I am done posting
entries, moderating comments and making links, my, has the time
flown. I probably should have made some phone calls about next
week’s column, but maybe I’ll write about, ah, blogging
instead.

Not that this would ever be a problem for me.

Carr has an interesting quote from Clay Shirky, one
which I’ve not been able to find on the Web or
Blogosphere.

“We are living through the largest expansion of expressive
capability in the history of the human race,” said Clay Shirky, an
adjunct professor in the graduate interactive telecommunications
program at New York University. “And it wouldn’t be a revolution if
there were no losers. The speed of conversation is a part of what
is good about it, but then some of the reflectiveness, the ability
for careful summation and expression, is lost.” Even as Mr. Shirky
is saying this, I peek at the comments section of my blog, and he
goes on, “There is an obsessive, dollhouse pleasure in
configuring and looking at it, a constant measure of social
capital.” [Emphasis added]

This seems so right. The pleasure of creating and
nurturing one’s own little world underlies much of what people do
with computers. An image that game to me was that of Kandor, Krypton’s capital
city which was miniaturized by the evil Brainiac but rescued and
lovingly kept by Superman under a bell jar in his arctic fortress.
Kandor was also used as the name for a knowledge representation and
reasoning system developed by Patel-Schneider and colleagues in the
mid 1980s. The name was chosen because Kandor was a lightweight
version of an earlier KR system,
Krypton. Both systems were precursors to description
logic, a family of representation formalisms that underlies the
Semantic Web language OWL.
Building a representation of some aspect of reality can deliver
that dollhouse pleasure and also lead to obsessing over it.

Finally, Carr delivers another metaphor — blogger as day trader:

There has always been a feedback loop in journalism — letters to
the editor, the phone and more recently e-mail messages. But a blog
provides feedback through a fire hose. The nice thing about putting
out a newspaper was that, at some point, the story was set and the
writer got to go home. Now I have become a day trader,
jacked in to my computer and trading by the second in my most
precious commodity: me. How do they like me now? What
about … now? Hmmmm … Now? [Emphasis added]

This works on many levels, but I get an immediate visual image
of the lonely blogger/trader at home spending 16 hours a day
staring into a computer, punctuated by bouts of frantic typing only
to fall exhausted into bed at 1:00am.

January 15, 2007 03:53 PM

OpenBSD Journal

GPRS / UMTS with OpenBSD

In what's not even the last of the OpenCON slides, Felix Kronlage
talks about

Redundancy or mobile deployment with 3G technology, explaining the current and future state of UMTS and GPRS networks, how they are accessed through OpenBSD, what devices are supported, and what the future will hold. This presentation includes lots of tips on creating and improving your connection, and even more information is available on fkr's web page.

Conclusion: OpenBSD + Soekris + GSM/GPRS = Internet on the Baltic Sea!

Planet GNOME

Wouter Bolsterlee: A bit older

Much like last year, I grew a bit older today…

Me celebrating my previous birthday

Me celebrating my previous birthday. Photo is from last year… no camera right here right now. My hair is much longer nowadays.

I’ve ‘celebrated’ my birthday at the university in an almost all-day meeting, spending the rest of my time writing UI design mockups and doing database design reviews. Yay…

January 15, 2007 03:44 PM

Planet Apache

Ugo Cei: Book Review: In Search of Stupidity

In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters, Second Edition (Paperback) by Merrill R. (Rick) Chapman.

This is the second edition of Merril R. Chapman’s best-seller In Search of Stupidity. To the first edition’s collection of episodes of strategic blunders, marketing disasters and outright hubris on part of various high-technology companies during the 80’s and the 90’s, the new edition adds a few notable episodes. Companies listed include: IBM, Digital Research, Apple, Microsoft, MicroPro, Ashton-Tate, Siebel, Borland, Intel, Motorola, Google, Novell, Netscape, and various dot-coms from the Internet bubble times.

Apart from being a fun and enjoyable read, In Search of Stupidity is also a valuable resource for high-tech entrepreneurs, marketers and geeks wanting to turn their technical prowess into a profit. There’s nothing like learning from the mistakes of others in order to avoid repeating them, and one of the merits of this book is that it does not limit itself to making fun of clueless companies, but extracts and digests from their tales a number of immediately useful advice.

So you can expect to learn how to avoid the same sort of positioning mistakes that doomed MicroPro, how not to inimicate the developer community that constitutes the lifeblood of your products, like Ashton-Tate constantly did, how to avoid damaging your relationships with the press, and many other useful tidbits. In this respect, the Stupid Analysis chapter at the end of the book is especially useful, in case you missed some of the more subtle lessons that were contained in the narrative presented in previous chapters.

In summary, this books is valuable both to entrepreneurs and managers, and to geeks who want to enter marketing, management or start their own company. Even if you are content with keeping a purely technical role, should you start recognizing the signs of stupidity on part of your company, you could at least be prepared to polish up your resume.

To be honest, it could be argued that some of the most egregious screw-ups described in the book were, at least in part, due to sheer bad luck, and that hindsight is always 20/20. Still I think that the stories told here teach some extremely valuable lessons. External circumstances alone cannot account for all that happened; it takes much stupidity and arrogance to turn unfavorable events into total disasters.

If you want to be picky, there is a couple of instances where the message of the book sounds a bit off. The first one can be found in the story of Google’s fight with CNET.com over the issue of privacy, and its supposed bowing to the censorship imposed by the Chinese government. You can argue how much you like that Google acted stupidly in these circumstances. Its behavior might have tarnished its ethical image—”Don’t be evil”, remember?. However, it doesn’t seem to have affected Google in any serious way; few people remember the episodes and Google is going as strong as ever. Compared to the other examples found in the book, this is a case of very mild stupidity, if at all, and it looks like Chapman seriously wanted to pick on Google but couldn’t find any real damning evidence.

The second point is in chapter 12, The Strange Case of Dr. Open and Mr. Proprietary, where the author traces the beginnings of the Free Software movement to the first hackers who started out by illegally copying Microsoft’s Altair BASIC. If one didn’t know better, one might start to think that Free Software pioneers were just a bunch of freeloaders, if not thieves. In the rest of the chapter, however, Chapman makes it abundantly clear that the only example of stupidity, in this case, can be found on the side of proprietary companies who failed to understand the Open Source/Free Software movement and its effect on the software industry.

To sum it up, In Search of Stupidity is a very good book, especially if you missed the first edition. Five stars are well deserved.

January 15, 2007 03:33 PM

Planet MySQL

OurSQL Episode 6: Falcon, part 2

In this episode, the second part in a two-part series about Falcon, the new storage engine provided by MySQL, we talk about what happens when commit, going over and explaining the serial log and indexes.
Direct play episode 6 at:
http://tinyurl.com/yympcn
Subscribe to the podcast by clicking:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=206806301
You can Direct download all the oursql podcasts at:
http://technocation.org/podcasts/oursql/
Links:
Falcon features:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/falcon/en/se-falcon-features.html
Falcon documentation
http://www.mysql.org/doc/refman/5.1/en/se-falcon.html
Special thanks to Arjen Lentz (http://arjen-lentz.livejournal.com/ ) and Mark Matthews (http://www.jroller.com/page/mmatthews ) of MySQL AB for their answers and explanations, and Jim Starkey and Technocation for their use of the audio from the July 2006 Boston User Group meeting with Jim Starkey.
Acknowledgements
http://www.technocation.org
http://music.podshow.com
http://www.russellwolff.com
http://www.smallfishadventures.com/Home.html ?The Thank you song? ? Smallfish
Feedback
If you have any feedback about this podcast, or want to suggest topics to cover in future podcasts, please email
podcast [at] technocation [dot] org
You can also:
Call the comment line at +1 617-674-2369
Or use Odeo to leave a voice mail through your computer:
http://odeo.com/sendmeamessage/Sheeri
Or use the Technocation forums:
http://tinyurl.com/sc6qw

January 15, 2007 03:27 PM

Planet Apache

Ben Hyde: Foreclosure Tracking

The RealtyTrac web site shows real estate foreclosure data for the US. It’s thought provoking to look at places your familiar with thru this somewhat specialized lens. What you want to do here is get to their maps quickly. To do that you:

enter a zipcode
select a house at random
on that house’s abbreviated listing page click on the interactive map button

Then browse around the neighborhood you’ve selected. When you want to look at another neighborhood, start over. Be sure to take a look at good and bad neighborhoods, places your friends and relatives live, and at places you’ve lived over the years. I really hadn’t appreciated how there some seemingly pleasant neighborhoods where it appears that one out of 20 homes are owned by the bank.

January 15, 2007 03:08 PM

Planet MySQL

MySQL Queues, part II ? groups of queues

I believe this is a huge optimization for a heavily implemented Web 2.0 idea.
This article makes simple work of groups of queues. An example of this would be “the most recent 10 people to view an article,” so each article has a queue of up to 10 items in it. This method eliminates the need for multiple SQL statements or using TRIGGERS to check to see if the queue is full.
I bow down to Baron Schwartz, aka Xarpb, for his article on how to implement a queue in SQL:
http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2007/01/11/how-to-implement-a-queue-in-sql/
I am very excited because this also works for groups of objects, and we’re about to implement something at work that needs this idea. The idea of “the most recent x things” or “the top x things” is huge, especially in social networking, and probably one of the most often sought after features.
The biggest issue is that in order to display, say, the most recent posts, a query has to find the time of all the posts and only get the most recent 10. This can be made easy by the logic that the 10 most recent posts are the last 10 rows in the table. Any logic is also added, as in “the last 10 rows in the table viewable and for this guest/login.”

What if you want to track the last 10 people to view the post? Aha, this gets trickier. Convention would say that when a person views a post, have an SQL transaction that adds the information (person x viewed post y at time z and anyo other info, such as browser type, IP, etc) and if there are more than 10 entries for that post, delete the oldest ones until you have 10 entries. This transaction could be done via the application code or via triggers in MySQL 5.0 and up.
However, both those methods use multiple SQL queries, and in the case that an article has been viewed fewer than 10 times, the queries are unnecessary. And given each article has a different popularity — some are viewed lots more than others — running multiple queries ends up being a waste of cycles for articles whose last 10 viewers change infrequently.
These commands were tested on MySQL 4.1.19-standard-log. I use REPLACE INTO because it’s shorter than SELECT…ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE, and yes, those aren’t
Let’s say you have a New Year’s Resolution to eat 5 servings of fruits and 5 servings of vegetables per day. The only thing that changes from Baron’s example is that we add a group field (called ‘kind’). The “fruit” field was changed to “edible” and will still contain the name of the edible.
As Baron does, I will use a MySQL-specific command. However, he used SELECT...ON DUPLICATE KEY and I will use REPLACE, as it is smaller in syntax.
use test;
CREATE TABLE q (
id int NOT NULL,
modulo int NOT NULL,
kind char(1) NOT NULL,
food varchar(10) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY(id,kind),
UNIQUE KEY(modulo,kind)
);
The basic statement is below — I’ve added AS clauses to make the variables more clear. The modulus is, in this case, 5, but in the article case above would be 10. The “kind” is either “f” or “v”, these are your groups of queues. In this case they stand for “fruits” and “vegetables” but they might be numbers referring to articles. The “food” stands for the type of food eaten, but in the article scenario would represent the username or user id of the customer viewing the article.
REPLACE INTO q (id, modulo, kind, food)
SELECT
(COALESCE(MAX(id), -1) + 1) AS id,
(COALESCE(MAX(id), -1) + 1) MOD 5 AS modulo,
'f' AS kind,
'apple' AS food
FROM q WHERE kind='f';

mysql> SELECT * FROM q order by kind,id;

id
modulo
kind
food

0
0
f
apple

As expected, 1 “fruit” row.
mysql> REPLACE INTO q(id, modulo, kind, food)
-> SELECT
-> (COALESCE(MAX(id), -1) + 1),
-> (COALESCE(MAX(id), -1) + 1) MOD 5,
-> 'f',
-> 'orange'
-> FROM q WHERE kind='f';
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
Records: 1 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0
mysql> SELECT * FROM q order by kind,id;

id
modulo
kind
food

0
0
f
apple

1
1
f
orange

As expected, 2 “fruit” rows.

mysql> REPLACE INTO q(id, modulo, kind, food)
-> SELECT
-> (COALESCE(MAX(id), -1) + 1),
-> (COALESCE(MAX(id), -1) + 1) MOD 5,
-> 'v',
-> 'okra'
-> FROM q WHERE kind='v';
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
Records: 1 Duplicates: 0 Warnings: 0

mysql> SELECT * FROM q order by kind,id;

id
modulo
kind
food

0
0
f
apple

1
1
f
orange

0
0
v
okra

As expected, 2 “fruit” rows and 1 “vegetable” row. Now, let’s quickly populate the fields so the “fruit” group reaches it’s maximum of 5.
REPLACE INTO q(id, modulo, kind, food)
SELECT
(COALESCE(MAX(id), -1) + 1),
(COALESCE(MAX(id), -1) + 1) MOD 5,
'v',
'squash'
FROM q WHERE kind='v';
REPLACE INTO q(id, modulo, kind, food)
SELECT
(COALESCE(MAX(id), -1) + 1),
(COALESCE(MAX(id), -1) + 1) MOD 5,
'f',
'peach'
FROM q WHERE kind='f';
REPLACE INTO q(id, modulo, kind, food)
SELECT
(COALESCE(MAX(id), -1) + 1),
(COALESCE(MAX(id), -1) + 1) MOD 5,
'f',
'cherries'
FROM q WHERE kind='f';
REPLACE INTO q(id, modulo, kind, food)
SELECT
(COALESCE(MAX(id), -1) + 1),
(COALESCE(MAX(id), -1) + 1) MOD 5,
'f',
'pear'
FROM q WHERE kind='f';
REPLACE INTO q(id, modulo, kind, food)
SELECT
(COALESCE(MAX(id), -1) + 1),
(COALESCE(MAX(id), -1) + 1) MOD 5,
'v',
'celery'
FROM q WHERE kind='v';
SELECT * FROM q order by kind,id;

id
modulo
kind
food

0
0
f
apple

1
1
f
orange

2
2
f
peach

3
3
f
cherries

4
4
f
pear

0
0
v
okra

1
1
v
squash

2
2
v
celery

We have 5 values in the “fruit” group and 3 values in the “veggie” group. Now let’s see what happens when another fruit is added:
REPLACE INTO q(id, modulo, kind, food)
SELECT
(COALESCE(MAX(id), -1) + 1),
(COALESCE(MAX(id), -1) + 1) MOD 5,
'f',
'banana'
FROM q WHERE kind='f';
Query OK, 2 rows affected (0.00 sec)
Records: 1 Duplicates: 1 Warnings: 0
Note that a duplicate has been found! This is because the modulo wrapped around. The id of “banana” is 5, and 5 modulo 5 = 0 - the same as 0 modulo 5, which was the modulo value previously taken by “apple”. So “apple” is pushed off the end of the queue.
SELECT * FROM q order by kind,id;

id
modulo
kind
food

1
1
f
orange

2
2
f
peach

3
3
f
cherries

4
4
f
pear

0
5
f
banana

0
0
v
okra

1
1
v
squash

2
2
v
celery

To find the current list of all fruits, with the most recent fruit first, run:
SELECT * FROM q WHERE kind='f' ORDER BY id DESC;

id
modulo
kind
food

1
1
f
orange

2
2
f
peach

3
3
f
cherries

4
4
f
pear

0
5
f
banana

Let’s get back to the example of page views, though. We probably care about when the pages were viewed, so let’s add a timestamp:
ALTER TABLE q ADD COLUMN fed TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP;
I ran the queries again, with some delays, so the timestamps wouldn’t all be the same.
SELECT * FROM q order by id,kind;

id
modulo
kind
food
fed

1
1
f
orange
2007-01-15 14:48:25

2
2
f
peach
2007-01-15 14:48:28

3
3
f
cherries
2007-01-15 14:48:28

4
4
f
pear
2007-01-15 14:48:31

5
0
f
banana
2007-01-15 14:48:34

1
1
v
squash
2007-01-15 14:48:28

2
2
v
celery
2007-01-15 14:48:31

3
3
v
beet
2007-01-15 14:48:31

4
4
v
spinach
2007-01-15 14:48:34

5
0
v
cucumber
2007-01-15 14:48:34

Or, what the query would be in a real system — find all fruits eaten and sort by time, most recent first:
SELECT food,fed FROM q WHERE kind=’f’ ORDER BY fed DESC;

banana
2007-01-15 14:48:34

pear
2007-01-15 14:48:31

peach
2007-01-15 14:48:28

cherries
2007-01-15 14:48:28

orange
2007-01-15 14:48:25

January 15, 2007 03:04 PM

Planet OpenOffice.org - Developer News

Gullfoss: A Matter Of Styles

In my last blog about the Writer project I talked about ideas to avoid the explicit usage of styles for some functions in Writer because understanding styles (especially page styles) shouldn't be a necessary precondition to use these functions. In some of the replies I received it was suggested to strengthen the use of styles and to use them even more. Fine, I don't see a contradiction here! We can think about new and better ways to use styles for more productive work – if we still make sure that all functions that not really need styles can be used without them.

Forcing users to use a certain tool (styles) will make them angry if they think they could reach their goals faster or easier using another one (direct formatting) that was deliberately removed. People don't like know-it-all programs – and deservedly so! There are several reasons why users might not want to use styles (besides the fact that they didn't understand what styles are at all) and we should respect this.

I think the main reason why users might not want to use styles is that they don't see the benefit of doing so. Styles indeed don't offer a benefit to users if they didn't understand the difference between the formatting of content and the usage of the formatting as a representation of the content's “role” in the text. This is a cognitive process, not a question of GUI design. If I wanted to make text bold just because I wanted it to look bold, why should I create additional overhead and give its formatting a name? On the other hand if I understand that I want to have the text bold because I want to emphasize its meaning using a style makes sense. It allows me to change the formatting easily in case my taste about how emphasizing something should be represented will change.

But even if users are able to see this benefit there is the barrier that they must plan and design styles before they can use them. Without that you can't use the second big benefit of styles, the beauty of consistent formatting. It's hard to clean up things afterwards if you started formatting your text at random. Here you had to create styles from existing formattings (“New style from selection”) and assign them, a very tedious procedure. It is comparable to code refactoring to clean up the mess you have left when you started hacking before thinking about the design. As a developer I know how much fun hacking can be. So I understand that even if people may know the value of a structured formatting approach they might use quick and direct formatting when they are in the heat of the moment. Now let's assume that they wanted to “refactor” their formattings into a consistent style set. Can we have a better tool to support this than the mentioned procedure?

Frank Meies has blogged about our recent changes regarding automatic styles . In short words the change was that starting with OOo2.2[*] assigning e.g. the „bold“ attribute to some text will create an automatic style (or use an existing one that fits). This automatic style contains the current formatting of the text, modified by the new “bold” attribute and is assigned to the corresponding text portion(s). It is not visible in the user interface and the text still appears to be directly formatted. But internally (in the code) it is stored very much like a “real” style. The most important difference between automatic and real styles is that the former can't be changed if it is used more than once. It has a “copy on write” semantics – otherwise it couldn't appear as direct formatting.

Automatic styles aren't new to Writer: Assigning numbering/bullets to a paragraph always created an automatic list style that appeared as if the numbering had a direct formatting. Now we have them for character and paragraph attributes also. Frank's blog was about the nice performance improvements we got by implementing these automatic styles. Now an idea suggests itself: why using “create new style from selection” if the formatting is already available as something that comes very close to a style, why not converting automatic styles into real styles on demand? That could be an easier way of “ refactoring” as we could convert more than one portion of formatted text at once if we wanted to do so.

This will not turn OOo Writer into an application that is completely built on styles and doesn't use direct formatting at all as Peter Sefton suggested in his blog as an alternative GUI for OOo. The good news for Peter is that everybody can create such a GUI already (if you leave tables out as we don't have styles for them). So if anybody wants to get a “styles only” GUI in Writer – go ahead and do it! You don't need development skills for this. Here's a short explanation how it basically works.

In OOo 2.0 we added the feature that styles can be assigned to keyboard shortcuts. The GUI for this is a little bit hidden, so let me point you to the place where you can find it. Open “Tools-Customize-Keyboard” and scroll the “Category” list box down to the end. Here you find the “Styles” category. Some of the styles have got shortcuts already, as e.g. “ CTRL-1” for “Heading 1” as you can see from the picture below (excuse my German keyboard in the screen shot ;-)):

Unfortunately we didn't manage to get the same functionality into the dialogs for customizing tool bars and menus. But this is only a deficiency of the dialog, not of the implementation of these GUI elements. As a workaround you can edit the configuration files of them manually and so assign styles to menu or tool bar items also. [**]

Let's see how the assignment above is reflected in the keyboard shortcut configuration file (you can find it in $(inst)/share/config/soffice.cfg/modules/swriter/accelerator/en-US):

<accel:item accel:code="KEY_1" accel:mod1="true" xlink:href=".uno:StyleApply?Style:string=Heading 1&FamilyName:string=ParagraphStyles"/>

The interesting part is the “href” that specifies the command being executed when the key is pressed. The same command can be inserted into a tool bar or a menu configuration file! The format of this command is easy to understand. By replacing the “FamilyName” or the “Style” argument you can assign any existing style.

Add-on extensions also can contain GUI configurations and so I created one that adds a “Styles” menu containing some selected styles. You can download it and install it into OOo (you will need at least OOo2.0.4) using our Extension Manager (that was named “Package Manager” in older versions than OOo2.1). You will see the “Styles” menu as soon as you open a Writer document after the installation of the extension. Selecting a style from the menu will apply it to the selected text.

The Add-on doesn't need any code written to work, it just uses the dispatching of “ .uno:StyleApply” commands. With some code the menu could also be built dynamically from all existing styles and so it could look different for every used document. It could also be placed anywhere in the menu bar, my “Styles” top level menu just is the simplest and fastest way.

Remarks:

[*] Frank wrote that the changes will be present in OOo2.1 but we missed the code freeze deadline of this release and so the automatic styles went into OOo2.2.

[**] A bug prevents that it works for tool bars currently but this bug will be fixed in OOo 2.2.

January 15, 2007 03:02 PM

Ajaxian

Weebly: Online Website Creation Tool using Ajax

David Rusenko told us about his product Weebly, a web site creation utility written with copious amounts of Ajax utilizing an easy to use drag and drop interface.

We’re trying to make a tool that’s easy enough for the majority of web users to use, and guides the user towards creating a complete compliant web site [...]

January 15, 2007 03:02 PM

CAcert NEWS Blog

new beta of the CAcert-Stamp Logo

We've released a beta product to display the CAcert logo and indicate if
the site has a valid certificate or not.

We are after testers to verify if the site stamp works in all
circumstances possible, (ie no false positives, and no false negatives),
and is efficiently displayed in a timely fashion.

Please see http://stamp.cacert.org for more details.

Bandwidth saved by RSScache.com

January 15, 2007 02:51 PM

Planet Ubuntu

Stephan Hermann: Joke or stupidity?

If you need a used Win XP License check this out: http://cgi.ebay.com/Windows-XP-Home-Edition-License-Key_W0QQitemZ150080733165QQihZ005QQcategoryZ41887

January 15, 2007 02:49 PM

LWN.net

Vista launch will boost desktop Linux (ZDNet Australia)

ZDNet Australia

suggests that Microsoft's launch of Windows Vista will give companies
a new reason to switch to Linux.
"The launch of Windows Vista has created a huge opportunity for Linux vendors to take a larger share of the corporate desktop market, according to the president of Linux Australia.
New features combined with a slightly different look and feel mean that migrating to Vista from an older version of Windows will cause disruption in the workplace.
On the first day of Linux.conf.au, the president of Linux Australia, Jonathon Oxer, told ZDNet Australia that instead of retraining staff on the new version of Windows, administrators could make the switch to Linux."

January 15, 2007 02:32 PM

Ajaxian

byteplug: Experimental Online JavaScript Editor

Andrea Giammarchi has been working on an online JavaScript editor and debugger.
The online editor combines a possible solution for byte family plugins, a global byteplug namespace object, and a portable Editor panel to test quickly JavaScript and/or html pages.

Features

realtime debug
It allows developers to write and test code quickly using document.write, alerts or everything else.
To view [...]

January 15, 2007 02:30 PM

Planet GNOME

Edd Dumbill: Conference roundup: XTech, ETech, OSCON

A brief update concerning the conferences with which I am involved.

XTech 2007, of which I'm chair, is progressing well. We've had a large number of submissions and the review process is proceeding apace. Speakers will be notified on February 2nd, and we hope to publish the schedule very soon after. Now's the time to think about joining us in Paris, May 15-18th.

The O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, aka ETech 2007, for which I'm a member of the program committee, is now open for registration. Be in San Diego this March to connect with the brightest cultivators of tomorrow's tech.

Also from O'Reilly, the 2007 Open Source Convention is now open for proposals. OSCON needs no introduction from me, I'm sure. I've been on the program committee for some years now, brooding over Linux, XML and other topics. Deadline for proposal submission is February 5th.

January 15, 2007 02:24 PM

Planet Debian

Eddy Petrișor: qemu and non-i386 arches

Junichi, the Debian vesion of qemu doesn't work for ppc.

January 15, 2007 02:22 PM

OpenGeoData

Ed Parsons interviews

Couple of Ed Parsons interviews which mention that mapping thingy: Nestoria blog and e-consultancy.com.

January 15, 2007 02:20 PM

Planet Ubuntu

Jonathan Riddell: Akademy Call for Papers; Vodafone 3G Datacard and Kubuntu; Gnome Calendar

The Akademy 2007 call for papers is out. If you are doing something cool that's KDE or cross desktop related, this is for you. Don't think your project isn't important enough to contribute, it is. Doing a talk is not hard, and it's very satisfying, let us know what you're up to.

As a christmas present to myself I got a Vodafone 3G data card. It's quite a stuggle getting this thing working. Infact it's quite a struggle to get it at all, first the card didn't arrive, then it didn't arrive again, then they didn't know anything about me, then my promotional code wasn't valid any more but on the fifth try it all went smoothly. Next there are no useful instructions about how to put the SIM chip in. It could go in any one of 4 ways but the instructions just say to match it to the contacts on the card for which I would need to take the card apart to find out where the contact are. The answer is the chip faces the top of the card with the cut-out-corner towards the nearest corner of the card. Unfortunately trying this with feisty Herd 2 linux just complains about IRQ's and gives up. So I was daft enough to try on Windows where the 65MB of installed software just complains about "a problem with the SIM" and gets no further. After trying various numbers I got through to someone who was happy to help and said I should have installed the software with the wifi disabled, but that didn't change anything. So I fired up a dapper live CD and after some experiments found a wvdial setup which made the light go blue and it all worked. Files at http://kubuntu.org/~jriddell/vodafone-3g-datacard/ You need to set up DNS manually, but it seems nice. At £7.50 a MB (Pay as you talk) I won't be browsing many web pages with this, but if I need to check e-mail from the train, it should be useful.

In return for dragging my girlfriend along to Croatia on the pretence of a holiday but actually to give a talk on Kubuntu she showed how much attention she was paying by buying me this wonderful Gnome Calendar as a present. Very tasteful.

January 15, 2007 02:06 PM

LWN.net

Fluendo announces Windows Media and MPEG codec support for Linux

Fluendo has announced the availability of new CODECs for Linux and Solaris.
"Users of GNU/Linux and Solaris operating systems have previously lacked
solutions which enabled them to license and use popular media formats
such as Windows Media, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 in accordance with the laws of
their country. Through Fluendo's agreements with Microsoft and MPEG LA
such a solution is now available.
By closely integrating with the GStreamer multimedia framework,
Fluendo's new plugins enable support for these widely used codecs in
popular GNU/Linux and Solaris applications such as Totem Video Player,
Rhythmbox music player, Banshee Music player, Elisa Media Center and the
Jokosher sound editor."

January 15, 2007 02:05 PM

BSD - The Dark Horse of Open Source, by Brendan Scott, OS Law (Groklaw)

Groklaw

presents a paper by Brendan Scott on the BSD license.
"Brendan Scott has been studying the BSD license, particularly in the context of Australian law, and he has come up with some startling questions. Is the BSD license as permissive as we've thought? The paper is principally for lawyers to consider, but it's certainly of interest to everyone, and note his disclaimer:
Nothing in this paper is legal advice or a statement of the law. This paper is an exposition of an (untested) argument as to the effect of the BSD license."

January 15, 2007 01:55 PM

Planet Apache

Danny Angus: labels and post by email

I just applied labels to all my posts, thinking that I could use them to select what is syndicated on planetapache, then I realised that posts from emails won't get any label, so I'll have to log-in and apply labels if I want that to work.blogger, please can we have default labels for email/mobile posts?

January 15, 2007 01:55 PM

Planet Debian

Brett Parker: Random Interesting Things of the Day

iPhone news

So, looking around at what's happening in the media we seem to be getting a fair few non-overly impressive insights in to the iPhone (not least of all the fact that Apple haven't secured the name, and that Linksys have had the iPhone name for a while now - see http://www.linksys.com/iphone/ for the real iPhone, the one that does exist, the one that's already in the market place...)

So, back to Apple, people (being people, and therefore incredibably fallable ;) have created iPhone themes for current mobiles, and they're being hunted down by Apple's lawyers, that can't be good publicity, surely? I thought imitation was the sincerest form of flattery... tut, bad evil corporate giant! According to Matthew Lynn on Bloomberg's opinion pages, """To its many fans, Apple is more of a religious cult than a company. An iToaster that downloads music while toasting bread would probably get the same kind of worldwide attention.""", which seems about true to me - the rest of the article is worth reading, gives more insite in to why he thinks it will fail, and is quite an interesting article.

Health

There's a story in the Guardian about Low cholesterol levels linked with higher risk of Parkinson's disease - so we'll continue the Monday trip to the Cafe then, and have us a nice lunch of bacon and eggs, in the name of health, obviously.

From NewScientist, we get the news that being bilingual delays the onset of dementia, so maybe it's time I got round to learning a language that isn't English... I wonder if knowing a reasonable number of programming languages and their syntax works... Someone should do a study in to that.

Random Tech

And just for more fun, lets just have a bunch of interesting links Miniature jet engines could power cellphones, Silicon 'Lego bricks' used to build 3D chips, Gravity gets a quantum boost.

And that's that...

So, we'll end that there, tonight is, as with every Monday, the pub quiz over in the Hop Poles in Brighton. Should be very silly, and fun.

January 15, 2007 01:52 PM

LWN.net

Monday Security Updates

Fedora Core 5 fixes
w3m (format string vulnerability).

Fedora Core 6 fixes
w3m (format string vulnerability) and

avahi (denial of service).

SUSE fixes
opera (remote code execution).

Ubuntu fixes
libgtop2 (buffer overflow),

krb5 (arbitrary code execution) and
ksirc (denial of service).

January 15, 2007 01:48 PM

Ajaxian

ShackPrices: Rails based Ajax real estate site

ShackPrices is a Seattle-area real estate Ajax application written using Rails by Galen Ward and team.
If you do real estate, you need to mashup to Google Maps, but this goes beyond that. It is highly interactive, with lots of live filters and tools, and the back button seems to be handled really well.

January 15, 2007 01:23 PM

Planet Classpath

Mario Torre: First shots with my Nikon D40!

Hey, I know that I‘m not an expert and this photos may look too simple, but I‘m so happy about them I have to post!!!!

Simple but nice, isn‘t it? (I know, the leaf is dead, but this was only a...Read More

January 15, 2007 01:13 PM

Planet Ubuntu

Melissa Draper: A few words about LCA so far

Well, it ROCKS, of course!

That is all.

…

Nah. Just kidding — There are a few more things I could say:

It’s really great to be surrounded by all the cool kids. Meeting people who you’ve only known online is always fun. Meeting people who you’ve heard so much about, but never spo… typed a word to also rocks.
Catching up. There’s quite a few people here who I met at UDS-MTV a two months ago. Hi Leslie, Jono, Scott, Ryan, Robert, Rich!
We scouted the Regent Hotel for Thursday night’s Ubuntu-Au unofficial casual late dinner. Sridhar, Karl, Andreas and Myself went there for dinner tonight. It was a two-birds-with-one-stone deal, since we got to have a peek and have some nightly sustainment at the same time. The meals are cheap and came quick. I am still alive. Both Sridhar and Karl were also alive when they left after this evening’s bag packing session. Considering this, I am going to conclude that the meals are safe for geek consumption.
For those who have been asking about the menu & costs for the afformentioned dinner…
Click the following thumbnail to see a menu, with prices. The place is cheap, and the food definately passes.
We got the Ubuntu/Ubuntu-Au bags packed, YAY! Those who have been putting up with me the past few weeks would know I’ve been a bit anxious about getting both the componants for the bags and the componants into the bags. I can happily tell you now, that there are almost 300 bags sitting with me here in this room — fully packed. They’re basically what the previous post is, with one extra slip with useful newbie help and information links. Huge thanks to Paul, Karl and Sridhar. You guys rock.

Now, it’s about to strike midnight, and I am somewhat sleep deprived, so that really is all for now. I’ve likely forgotten to mention something.

Oh that’s right. If by some chance you’re reading this, it meas the wireless here at Shalom has stayed with me long enough for this much markup to squeeze through. Huzzah!

… I swear, it’s attached to the goddamned fucking “Publish” button…

January 15, 2007 01:08 PM

Planet GNOME

Kristian Rietveld: wooops

(Apparently the planets don't support lj-cuts and everybody is being bored with a too long blog entry. Sorry! Fixed the formatting too).

January 15, 2007 01:02 PM

unofficial planet python

James Tauber: Metrics in Two or More Dimensions

In the previous Poincaré Project post about coordinate systems and metrics, we introduced the notion of a metric that tells us how quickly a coordinate changes on a one-dimensional manifold. Let's now extend that to two (or more) dimensions.

Imagine that you're at a particular point on a two-dimensional manifold. If you head off in a particular direction from that point at a particular rate, your coordinates will change. The metric tells you, from a given point, the rate of change of each of your coordinates given travel in a particular direction at a particular rate.

Or to make it more concrete, imagine you're in a boat on the ocean and you start to travel due east at ten knots. The metric will tell you the rate of change of longitude.

Note three things:

the metric is different at different locations. In our ocean example, the metric will be different at different latitudes.
the "travel in a particular direction at a particular rate" is a kind of vector.
the metric, at a particular point, is a linear function of that vector. If you head off twice as fast, the coordinates will change twice as fast, and so on.

To better understand what kind of mathematical object this metric is, we'll need to better understand the notion of a vector.

January 15, 2007 01:01 PM

FreeBSD Project News

FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE is Now Available

January 15, 2007 12:57 PM

LWN.net

DeLi Linux: A light Linux distribution, done right (Linux.com)

Linux.com
reviews DeLi Linux.
"Perhaps one of the best Linux distributions tailored for older hardware is DeLi Linux. It's simple, and performs well enough to run on hardware as old as a 486.
In fact, DeLi Linux runs on anything better than a 386 with at least 4MB of memory, though if you have only 4MB, don't expect stellar performance. Things get decent at 8MB, 16MB is smooth, and 32MB or more is perfect. I tested DeLi Linux on several machines, ranging from a 66MHz 486 DX2 with 8MB of RAM up to a a Dell Pentium III system with 256MB of RAM. The 486 system struggled to open anything, taking several minutes if things got too complex, such as when I was running a window manager, the X server, and AbiWord. However, DeLi Linux surprised me by turning the old 486 into an usable system, provided I had patience to spare. What's more, the Pentium III was extremely responsive, being even faster than my main AMD64 system running Fedora Core 6."

January 15, 2007 12:56 PM

Planet HCI

Positive Technology Journal: The University of Washington Neural Systems Lab have created a humanoid robot you can control with your thoughts.

Via Mind Hacks

Researchers at the University of Washington Neural Systems Lab have created a humanoid robot you can control with your thoughts via a EEG-based non-invasive brain-computer interface.

Link to Neural Systems Lab robot info page

January 15, 2007 12:52 PM

Planet GNOME

Kristian Rietveld: GtkTreeView column resizing

The infamous column resizing bug, #316087, has a good amount of duplicates. While it might look like a programming bug which needs to be fixed, there is actually much more involved: what you see happening is actually "correct", but it looks really strange. I've been looking at some other toolkits to see whether they support a likewise expand flag and how they solve this issue. More details under the cut, since it's a pretty lengthy piece.The columns in GtkTreeView support live resizing, in fact non-live resizing isn't even supported. In general this works very well. However, GtkTreeViewColumn also has an "expand" property. All extra horizontal space left after allocating size to the columns is equally divided between all columns with the expand flag set to true. This is really useful in cases where you want to give the most important column in your view the extra space, when it is not the last (rightmost) column (by default this rightmost column gets the extra space). For example: if you are writing a media player, you would probably set the expand flag on the column holding the track name / title.What's the big deal here? Create a tree view with two expandable columns, make all columns resizable, look what happens when resizing.Let me elaborate. Suppose we have the following columns:

[column0][expandable1 ][column2][expandable3 ][column4]
If you try to resize the column "expandable1" (using the handle between "expandable1" and "column2") you will notice that as soon as you press the mouse button the column separator will jump to the right. What's actually happening here? Well, the column is set to use-resized-width mode, and the resized-width has just been set to the actual width of the column PLUS the extra size from expand (that's where the mouse cursor was when you pressed the button). Of course, since the column is still expandable, it receives extra space on top of the resized-width.What happens if you try to resize column2? Column2 grows, while both expandable1 and expandable3 shrink. Because column2 is growing, there is less extra space to divide between expandable1 and expandable3. It looks really weird, but the behavior is 100% correct.A possible bug fix which came to mind: as soon as a user resizes a column, turn expand off on all columns, and for all columns set the width to their requested width plus the extra space allocated to them. This should actually work if you apply the patch from comment #26 in #316087.Automatically turning off the expand flags is not the nicest solution of course. After a suggestion from Nickolay, I started to look how other toolkits handle this. I've only had a quick look at some toolkits; if there are errors in my quick analysis or if there's a toolkit with a really nice resizing mode missing out, please let me know.From a quick look I figured that Windows does not support live resizing, so it falls out of the scope of this discussion.Java's Swing has a pretty thought out approach to resizing (I've looked at JTable here). The actual resizing happens in the doLayout() method. If the table itself resizes, the change of width will be distributed to all columns in the table. If one of the columns changes width, JTable will do resizing according to the resize mode set by the programmer:

resize-off: column widths won't be adjusted, a horizontal scroll bar is used when the sum of the column widths is bigger than the width allocated to the table.
resize-next: use the column after the resizing column to absorb the change in width. With this mode the column separator between adjacent columns can be changed without affected the other columns.
resize-subsequent: use all columns after the resizing column to absorb the changes.
resize-last-column: adjusts the size of the last column only.
resize-all-columns: with this mode all columns are adjusted, also the one which is being resized. It does look a little awkward.

The minimum and maximum column widths are respected if they are set. You can find some nice graphics which might make everything more clear here: http://java.sun.com/products/jlf/ed1/dg/higp.htm#999756. JTable does not seem to have an expand flag for columns.Cocoa's NSTableView has likewise resizing modes (although a little different here and there) since Mac OS X 10.4. It does not support an expand flag on columns.ETree/ETable does not support an expand flag like GtkTreeView does. Instead you set an expansion value and columns all get a share of the extra space based on their expansion value. Interesting is that it seems that only columns marked as resizable are allocated extra space. When live resizing, only columns to the right of the column being resized actually change width. So all in all it looks pretty similar to the (default) "resize subsequent" mode in JTable, however in ETable only resizable columns are modified.QListView in Qt3 has a resize mode property too, however it only supports none, all or the last column (deciding which column will be resized to fit the list view). Qt4 does not seem to have support for this; when the layout is updated columns are sizes based on a per-column size hint. Both do not support an expand flag.Being able to set a resize mode like in JTable in GTK+ might be nice, but the only thing it can solve is nicely resizing columns without increasing the width of the list view (ie. avoiding a horizontal scroll bar). Introducing this won't help our expand flag problems, since also with a resize mode resizing will look weird. (Unless somebody comes up with a brilliant special resize mode with takes expandable columns into account).Another interesting observation in the bug report by John Bryant says that the expand flag is actually only really used to get nice sizes for the column "on start up". After that the expandable flag is of course still active, but the changes most probably aren't that huge.In summary, after writing this piece, I actually think that disabling the expand flags after the first column resize by the user is a fair way to solve this problem. We should keep in memory that adding resizes modes might be nice in the future.Suggestions, comments are of course welcome. If nobody has better ideas I will probably end up committing something like the patch in comment 26 mentioned above.

January 15, 2007 12:52 PM

Planet OpenOffice.org - Developer News

Gullfoss: Is Subversion OOo's next revision control system?

A few weeks ago, I jumped on to investigate into different revision control systems. In general, there are two different approaches for revision control: The distributed systems and the centralized ones. But what are the differences? What are the current problems with CVS one is confronted with when dealing with OOo code? What fits best into the OOo development process?

The main difference between distributed and centralized solutions is the way they host the underlying code repository. Where the distributed one enables users to easily host their own repository on their own machine or within their own infrastructure and therefor supports some kind of disconnected development, the centralized one needs a online connection to the central repository for every kind of interaction (commits, checkout, ...). From that point of view, a distributed revision control systems seems to fit great into the OOo development processes, especially as developers and contributors are spread all over the world.

But this is not the only aspect. When taking a look to the current hurdles dealing with OOo code, one would find out, that the processes (especially the Child Workspace Process) relays heavily on creation of branches and on tagging. And branching and tagging of huge source trees is a nightmare with CVS (which is the current centralized solution of OOo). It takes ages to create a branch to work on and ages to execute updates, checkouts, commits. Are these problems solved by usage of a distributed system? Maybe. But its for sure, that these problems will be solved with a actual implementation of a centralized revision control system: Subversion.

What else when thinking about a successor of CVS?

On OOo, we have implemented a lot of useful processes and tools around Collab.net's infrastructure ( CEE). Some of these are the Environment Information System, the Child Workspace Tools and more. All this depends more or less on the revision control system, migrating it from CVS to Subversion is a straight froward task, easy to do and with a acceptable investment of time and resources. Revision history import for CVS repositories is fully support by Subversion, which means, migration of old code lines is an easy task and one don't need to deal with two revision control systems, one for old code lines, one for new ones. Subversion will be seamless integrated into the updated Versions of Collab.net's CEE. Taking all this into account, I clearly vote for subversion as the next OOo revision control system.

Havoc Penningten also blogt about the question of source control a few weeks ago and an other famous project just migrated to Subversion: Gnome

Who I am: My Name is Nils Fuhrmann, I'm working on StarOffice/OpenOffice for more then 11 years, started as Release Engineer. I was involved into the technical tasks when open sourcing the Office code and helped kicking of the localization project as the co-lead. Nowadays, I manage the operations department within Suns StarOffice organization. My team includes RE, Tools, Program Management, QA, Lab-IT. Most of you will find members of this great team continuously on OOo.

January 15, 2007 12:50 PM

Planet HCI

Positive Technology Journal: The Center for Neurotechnology Studies

From Brain-waves

The Potomac Institute for Policy Studies has announced the launch of The Center for Neurotechnology Studies (CNS) which intends on providing neutral, in-depth analysis of matters at the intersection of neuroscience and technology, neurotechnology. and public policy...

Read the full post

January 15, 2007 12:47 PM

Planet KDE

Kurt Pfeifle (pipitas): Bugzilla Cleanup ; KDE Printing Tips+Tricks ; KDEPrint in KDE4

It looks like one of the recurrent problems of people using KDEPrint's more advanced features is with "number-up" printing, combined with "print duplex when I have a simplex printer" (yes, you can turn the stack of paper round and feed it a second time through the printer; hope and pray it doesn't munch it). This then piles up like here:

Bug #82123 : Printing odd/even pages with multiple pages per sheet gets silly results (DUPLICATE)
Bug #107936 : [KDE4] multiple pages on one sheet not in right order NEW
Bug #92962 : Option for number-up-layout=???? (page ordering on multiple pages) missing in kprinter (DUPLICATE)
Bug #97669 : multipage reverse printouts in wrong order (DUPLICATE)
Bug #103666 : [KDE4] facilitate margin adjustment for double-sided printing (DUPLICATE)
Bug #108484 : printing multiple pages per sheet with reverse option selected (DUPLICATE)

What bug reporters had not realized: KDEPrint can do most of what they want already. (It's just not easy to find, and maybe not easy to setup. But really easy to use once setup.)

So, time to ruminate some of the stuff that has been written, shown, talked about, tutored and showcased elsewhere and oftentimes. And yet it still is very little known. (This blog won't change it, I'm sure. But maybe a few dozen people will learn a bit, and keep it in mind.).

First case: reporter of bug #82123 wants to layout 2 pages per sheet, and then to print only the odd sheets of the result. He selects everything in the main print dialog and then finds the result his printer spits out "silly". Because he gets "1+3", "5+7", "9+11" etc. (1st pic):

But he wanted "1+2", "5+6", "9+10", see? (2nd pic)

Why does he want this? In his bug report he doesn't explicitly tell, and one has to guess: he wants a 2-up layed-out double-sided printout, but on a simplex printer. OK, fair enough.

While my 14 year old son would just use the "Range" feature of KDEPrint and type in "1,2,5,6,9,10,..." to select whichever pages he wants on each print run (before bothering to fill in a lenghty bugzilla entry calling the encountered behavior silly), here we seem to have someone who likes the power of automation, but failed to set it up.

In KDEPrint, we don't do anything on our own to the printfile that we receive. We let CUPS do the work, it knows better. What KDEPrint does, is provide a GUI frontend to all the rich CUPS functions, collecting the user input and translate it into the commandline parameters for CUPS. CUPS then can manipulate the jobfile before it passes it on to the printer. So KDEPrint is dependent on how well CUPS works, and in which order it chooses to apply the different options to a jobfile.

It happens so, that CUPS always applies the page selection first, before doing the number-up layout thing. So it is expected behavior if you select "odd pages only" and "2 pages on one sheet" to get "1+3", "5+7", "9+11". We can't change that... but!

But we can ask some external utilities to come to help us.

The main dialog of KDEPrint isn't made for people who want to print duplex on simplex-only printers, and want at the same time their 2-up page selections behaving like they order. For those, we integrated a troup of helper tools. But they have no place on the main print dialog. They are called "pre-filters". You can find them on the "Filters" tab after you click on "Properties" in the main dialog. We can run a helper to select "odd" pages, and another one to make a "2-up" layout, and we can stack them in any order we want.

So, fact is, KDEPrint can serve this man, and serve him well. Here's how, step by step:

* Don't set anything in the main print dialog! Leave "All" pages, and "All"
pageset, don't select any number-up there.
* In the "Properties" part of the print dialog set up a chain of "pre-
filters".
* That is: locate the "Filters" tab
* On the Filters tab enable two filters (in that order!): as the first, use
the "Multiple Pages per Sheet" filter; as the second, the "Page
Selection/Ordering" filter
* Make sure the two pre-filters are set up correctly: multiple pages set to
"2", the page set to "odd".
* I hope you can discover by your own how to set these things (hint: there is
an icon with a wrench, and its tooltip says "Configure filter").
* After you've printed the front pages of the sheet, now repeat the same
prodedure with the back pages. (You may want to use one of the "Reverse"
switches for reverse order of printout in order to avoid the manual sorting
of your during first pass printed sheets).

Sounds complicated? Yes it is. But the job wanted to be done isn't sooo simple either. Look at the supposed "bug report". The reporter couldn't give a simple description of the task, so how can the solution be simple? (Sometimes it works out like this, but not here...)

But wait, I'm not ready yet.

Does the man need to set up this complicated thing every time he wants to treat his cheapie printer with the "2-up, duplex-printout" trick? No. KDEPrint and CUPS have a solution for him: He can save this setup as a "printer instance", and give it a "speakting" name. I'd call it "make-my-printout-like-bug82123-reporter-wants-it". Eye-wink Once he's done that, no more printjob setup! No more thinking about the details. Just select the printer instance in the drop-down menu; all options, prefilters etc. will be set right already (apart from "number of copies" maybe). Just click "Print" and be done.

Here are 4 more hot tips+tricks for your printing pleasures:

use kpdf for print previewing (run "kaddprinterwizard --kdeconfig", click "Preview"). It can do a few tricks that kghostview can't. Like, remember the size of its window. Let you search for strings in the preview (if fonts are embeded). It renders sometimes pages (if they contain big bitmaps) much faster than kghostview. (It starts a bit slower, because it secretly runs "ps2pdf" to convert the previewed PostScript to PDF first.)
create printer instances even for the "Special Printers". Want regularly PDFs layed out as a booklet so you can print them at work on the office printer in one go? Create a a printer instance with "psbook"/"Pamphlet Printing" as a prefilter, and make it an instance of your "Print to File (PDF)".
WhatsThis is your friend when you use the KDE print dialog.
Uhmm... I forgot the fourth one now.

Finally, let me quote a response that I left in the comments section of this bug entry:

I invite you to create a detailed and concrete proposal how to implement
this. No, I don't mean to write the C++/Qt code (you probably can't code,
like I myself can't; if you can, please offer your help). I mean create
some gimp-ed mockups, some drawings, some rough visual representations of
how it should look like in your opinion. Do some "paper prototyping". But
take into account the *overall needs* of KDEPrint which must cater for a
lot of different apps: KDE's own ones *as* *well* *as* *external*
*applications*.

How should the overall layout of the printing dialog be looking: Where to
place which buttons? Where to position other widgets? How does the
workflow for the user look like? What is differnt if she whats to preview
first? What is different if she prints from a browser? From a KOffice
application? From kpdf? What if he has access to 20 different printers
(big office)? What is different for home users from corporate users? What
is different for big TCP-connected laserprinters from small color inkjets
connected via USB? Don't forget installation/setup tasks, don't forget job
control wishes, don't forget security...

I'm sure that for a good design and layout of the dialogs we will also find
people who'll write the code to implement it. I'm not sure you'll even sit
down for an hour and think about it...

And this:

For KDE 4.x we'll have to see. People with skills and time and love to look
after this "boring" printing stuff are rare -- and they are also rare inside
KDE. So it is not ruled out that we have lots of nice discussions and many
pretty feature requests and nasty bug reports, but not much will change for
printing when shiny new KDE 4.0 is out.

I think this is a fair statement about our current status for KDE4/KDEPrint development.

KDEPrint rocks, and kprinter rocks. Yes, they can be improved in a lot of spots, and overall. And we have some great ideas too. But someone with enough time needs to do the work. So likely, when KDE4 comes out KDEPrint will still rock. But the competition will have come closer. And it will also have many un-implemented wishlist items, and will not have had a complete usability overhaul.

January 15, 2007 12:37 PM

CAcert NEWS Blog

Eye spy with my little eye…

Every where I look lately I see a post about the EV (extended verification) certificates, the articles against are more or less pointing out what others and myself have posted in the past, or a watered down version.
All the articles for EV certificates keep pushing the same line how it will prevent phishing, but this [...]

Bandwidth saved by RSScache.com

January 15, 2007 12:37 PM

drupal.org - Community plumbing

Drupal 5 is out!

It's been a long cycle, but Drupal 5 is finally here. See the official announcement. Thanks everyone for your bug reports, patches, documentation and testing. We couldn't do it without you.

Comments are disabled on the announcement, so feel free to post your cheers, comments and response here. If you encounter any problems, submit them through the issue tracker.

Digg the announcement using the widget up left, and snack on some Drupal cookies.

January 15, 2007 12:33 PM

Planet Apache

Danny Angus: USB Turntable

I didn't make it up ... buy it here

January 15, 2007 12:32 PM

Planet RDF

Attributes and Relations

I've a feeling there's some serendipity lurking around this
stuff, so I'll turn it over to PlanetRDF's eyeballs, assuming it'll
behaviour better than that goddarned no-good LazyWeb
varmint.

Thread on the Hutter
Prize list
Discussion of Relational Similarity Subsuming Attribute
Similarity, begins with a link to a post
from Peter Turney, crosses over into a variety of territories: AI
philosophical, linguistic & logical, compression etc.

January 15, 2007 12:26 PM

unofficial planet python

Pycon: Last day of early-bird registration

Today is the last day to register for PyCon 2007 at early-bird rates; register for the conference now.Don't forget to reserve your hotel room, too; to obtain the conference rate, you must register by February 1st.The introductory Django tutorial, to be held in the morning, is now full.

January 15, 2007 12:25 PM

drupal.org - Community plumbing

Drupal 5.0 released

After 8 months of development we are ready to release Drupal 5.0 to the world. Today is also Drupal's 6th birthday, so the timing could not be more perfect. Drupal 4.0 was released in 2002 and finally we feel confident to increase the major version number from 4 to 5.

Drupal powers sites across the web, ranging from the personal weblog of Tim Berners-Lee, podcast sites like TWIT.tv, community driven sites like SpreadFireFox.com, artist communities like Terminus 1525 to large media sites like TheOnion.com, MTV and even sites for NASA.

There have been over 492 contributors to the Drupal 5.0 release submitting 1173 patches, which is 150 more people than our previous record with Drupal 4.7. These new contributions are seen in the major usability improvements, a new Drupal core theme, a web-based installer, and expansion of the Drupal development framework that will afford themers and contributing developers even greater flexibility and power.

Download

http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/drupal/files/projects/drupal-5.0.tar.gz

January 15, 2007 12:23 PM

Planet GStreamer

Zeeshan Ali: 15 Jan 2007

Dependence sucks

Just forgot to mention a source of frustration in my last
blog. It's been at least 8 months that I first emailed jdub [at] perkypants [dot] org (Jeff Waugh) to request
the syndication of my blog on planet gnome but i
didn't
received any response. At GUADEC I mentioned that to him
and he told me to keep reminding him about it and since
then i have been doing that but never i got any reponse. I
tried two of his emails that i know of but no response
ever. I really hate this attitute of ignoring people but
seems people enjoy doing that when they are incharge.
Anyone know a way I can get his attention other than
sending him emails?

January 15, 2007 12:17 PM

symfony project weblog

Do you want to move to Paris?

The activity of Sensio, Fabien Potencier's company, has already been benefiting from the success of symfony. Today, Sensio is expanding, and we would like to offer the opportunity to join us to the symfony early adopters.

Whether you currently live in the US or in Poland, if you know symfony well enough, we're interested. The positions are in Paris, France, and we are willing to do the necessary paperwork and look for accommodation for you. The job description is a mix between web development and project management. Prerequisites for working at Sensio's are simple:

You must be an experienced PHP developer (you should know what OOP, MVC, ORM, and unit testing mean and how to apply them)
You must be able to manage a small web project (you should know a bit about XP programming, trac, svn, and scheduling)
You must be able to handle the relationship with a client (not necessarily with a tie, but at least with a smile)
You must have already developed an application with symfony (askeet doesn't count - you must have made the askeet tutorial anyway)
You must be willing to move to Paris, France (who wouldn't?)
You must be available full time and soon enough (this is a real job)

French is not compulsory, since our teams speak English and the projects we work on come from all over the world. Salary is attractive, working conditions are nice, the team is fantastic, projects are fun. Plus, this is a unique opportunity to work in Paris.

If you're interested, send a email to Fabien at fabien.potencier [at] symfony-project [dot] com

. Interesting profiles will be contacted by phone during the week.

January 15, 2007 12:13 PM

Planet Debian

Miriam Ruiz: Playing with usplash

I’ve been experimenting with usplash for some weeks, and it seems quite powerful. I decided to try with the latest version of the program (0.4), from Ubuntu’s repositories, which doesn’t seem to be backwards-compatible with the one that is currently in Debian (that is, 0.3e). The main idea of a theme in usplash seems to be embedding all the needed information into a shared object, including the images and the fonts, and coding the themes in plain C. This, which might seem terribly scary for non-coders, gives a lot of freedom for creating new effects in a certain theme, which is something I want to experiment.

The low-level graphical fuctions use bogl (Ben’s Own Graphics Library) and svgalib for showing, and the rest of the code is built above them. Even though I like the overall design of the project, it doesn’t really suits my needs for what I want to try. I need to implement more low-level functions for certain effects, and I’m also considering doing some changes to optimize memory used. Right now I’m doing the graphical effects in a pixmap and, right at the end, dumping that pixmap onto the real screen, which makes me adapt what I want to the canonical code of usplash, but I guess at some point I might need to make deeper changes in the code, and I might need to change the insides of usplash.
I don’t know if something useful can come out of this, or if the results will be only aesthetic, but I’ll put my code available somewhere as soon as it is ready for inspection, so I can get some comments on it. As always, ideas are welcome.

January 15, 2007 12:05 PM

unofficial planet python

Mark Rees: Need to find time for LCA 2007

Linux conf 2007 is on this week and I have paid to attend. The only problem will be finding time to go, otherwise it will be the most expensive t-shirt I have ever purchased. The urge to attend LCA was induced while attending OSDC 2006 and meeting a number of interesting people who are speaking at LCA. So hopefully will be able to attend:

Digital Preservation - The National Archives of Australia

January 15, 2007 11:47 AM

LWN.net

Release 2.0.8 of Linux-HA is available

Version 2.0.8 of Linux-HA, aka heartbeat and OpenHA, a cluster management
system, is out.
"There are many significant features and numerous mostly-minor
bug fixes in this release."
New features include support for split-site geographic configurations,
improvements to the CRM placement algorithms, support for IBM xSeries
STONITH devices and several new resource agents.

January 15, 2007 11:45 AM

Planet GNOME

Sven Herzberg: A new free Virtual Machine

Today Innotek released its virtualization product VirtualBox as free software. Unfortunately it comes only with a QT interface, but maybe that changes…

January 15, 2007 11:32 AM

Planet RDF

QOTD : output connections

We very easily make the mistake of seeing "legacy" formats as
data sources for scraping, nothing more. In fact they are
text-based interfaces to a wealthy of existing, stable, user
tested, applications which are perfectly capable of consuming "RDF"
data, when reformatted appropriately.

Dan Brickley

If anyone knows of any tools for expressing RDF data in
other formats, please add a link to ConverterFromRdf

Planet Debian

Erich Schubert: Smoking kills

Nothing new, but fun:

Sometimes, smoking can be a very bad idea.

Darwin award
2006.

January 15, 2007 11:17 AM

Planet KDE

Marco Gulino (RockMan): KMobileTools - Current development status

Since many of you already noticed the lack of subversion updates, and also of the homepage too, i guess i should write it here too.
Yes, development is currently suspended (again).
I've some university exams until 15/02/2007, so probably there will be no more updates until then.
I must anyway tell you i'm quite disappointed. After all these years, kmobiletools still is a one-man project. It's shameful in my point of view that if someone is busy, for study, work, real life, or (why not) a girlfriend, the entire project freezes.
Even if i'm studying, i'm still here to encourage and give some references to a brave developer, so there's no point in totally stopping development. Also some time ago i received some mobile phones kindly donated (look here), so there's also this resource available.

It's open source: no secret development, no private servers.. everything is on the public kde svn, so why not keeping an eye on it?
So this is the point: i'll be back soon, but in the meantime, try thinking on helping this project too.

January 15, 2007 10:54 AM

Open Source Flash

admin:new_project

If you want your open source Flash project to be hosted on OSFlash, please add your details to this list. Hosted projects receive a Subversion (SVN) repository, mailing list, and their own namespace on the wiki. This page will be periodically revi...

January 15, 2007 10:45 AM

Planet Debian

Julien Danjou: Kicking out Web spammers with DNSBL

Every project has its story. Every war has its winner, and its casualties. They were 20 millions men, fighting for their freedom.

And you'll never know their story.

Because during last week, I was looking why my Web server was so heavily loaded. And I discovered that my blog was attacked by spammers trying to post comments. They were stopped by a great plug-in named spamplemousse, which use spam keywords and DNSBL to drop spam comments.
However, this plug-in is written in PHP, like the rest of my blog, so it loads Apache and MySQL in a way that is no more acceptable: the page have still to be rendered for this !@#$ spammers.

Consequently, I decided to write a Apache 2.x module which will just drop a 403 Forbidden error page in the spammers' head using DNSBL servers. Here it is, and it is called mod_defensible.

I'm using it since 3 days now, and I got some pretty interesting result and less load on my Web server, so c'est tout bon[1].

Notes

[1] It's all good

January 15, 2007 10:33 AM

Planet GNOME

Michiel Sikkes: Multimedia school project for teaching kids about art

So my projectgroup at the Haagse Hogeschool is finishing the project we have been working on for the last eight weeks. The goal was to find a fun and educational way to teach kids the subjectivity of art. More specifically, that people around the world have different opinions about art due to their place in the world (culture, environment, wealth, etc.). After having a learning concept we had to design and program a working prototype.

We haven’t met the goals requirement’s that well but we’ve managed a bit. After all we’re still learning to work together, doing creative thinking and getting familiar with the tools to use.

This project was made with some random sounds of the web, Adobe/Macromedia Director and Photoshop. Here are some screenshots:

creative thinking, design, haagse hogeschool, prototype, Uncategorized

January 15, 2007 10:00 AM

Lucas Rocha: Selection bits

I'd love to see this mockup (by tigert) implemented in GtkIconView. It would be a great improvement for Nautilus, EOG and all other GtkIconView users. See bug #382544. Actually, the current selection visual feedback (selection border on label and "darkened" icon) of GtkIconView is not good at all. So, it would be more than an improvement. It would definitely be a bug fix.

January 15, 2007 09:59 AM

Planet Debian

Martin F. Krafft: Status of my book

The wait for Debian sarge was long and painful for me, because I was trying
hard to synchronise the publication of my Debian book with it, and much to my own surprise, the book
was done before sarge was ready, and I had to wait. In the end, the tome
left the presses only a little more than 24 hours after our release managers
announced Debian 3.1 in July 2005, bundled with the second release of the
official DVD, 3.1r0a. Since
then, the volume has been reviewed numerous times and praised by many readers. I was especially honoured to find the
title in the top ten list of most favourably reviewed books

by one of my most respected reviewers, Richard Bejtlich.

We are now approaching the release of Debian etch, version number 4.0, and
a lot of stuff has been added or changed in Debian. I have received more than 150 emails
since the etch freeze announcement,
asking about an updated edition for etch, and while I am most gratious for
all the feedback (and can't deny a certain amount of pride), I have to
disappoint my readers, at least for now. I have not had the time to update my
text, and thus cannot synchronise a new edition with the release of etch.

There are a number of reasons: first, shortly after the publication of the
original edition, I suffered from several physical problems, which in the end
all pointed to severe muscle deformations in my back from years of wrong
posture sitting at the desk. Now, one and a half years after the first
symptoms appeared, I've been
through numerous therapies and even though the net result is positive, I am
not over the problems yet. Thus, I still try to minimise the time spent on
a computer, and getting a second edition of the book out would achieve quite
the opposite.

Second, I am busy with my Ph.D. research, so I cannot work on
the book much. It has been suggested to me to allocate minimal resources to an
update, getting the text ready for etch and postponing new content to
another edition. However, I would feel uncomfortable doing that. On the one
hand, I'd much rather see my work be relicenced under a Creative Commons licence. So long as that is not possible, I'd
rather not make people spend money without getting much in return.

My book's to-do list is growing and there are many new topics which I would
like to cover in the next edition (for instance: fonts, xen, more packaging
topics, including modules, kernel patches, pbuilder, and packaging with
version control systems). Thus, with the release of a new edition, I want to
provide not only an updated version, but also one with enough content to give
a fair return for people's money. I have always thought that
updated-but-no-new-content editions are ripping the customers off, so I don't
want to go into that direction.

I am thus currently looking at the relase of the second edition together with
Debian lenny, the Debian release following etch. I am looking forward to
much more feedback between now and then.

NP: Solar Project / Force Majeure

January 15, 2007 09:59 AM

Planet KDE

Anne-Marie Mahfouf (annma): X && SVG

Until now I had a problem with my X setting and my laptop was slow in rendering pictures. I thought it was due to some libs and did not go deeper in the matter. Ervin, whom I met last wednesday at Toulouse LUG, told me it was my X conf. I have a NVidia GeForce 7400 and I used the nv XOrg driver. So I settled to fix it. I had to install nvidia drivers from NVidia in order to fix this and that took me several days last week. Somehow in my usual user I ended with a blue screen! With the help of Mandriva IRC people I got it all working again.I could demonstrate Nexuiz to my son. I did not manage to get compiz work but I don't have the time to tweak it. Yesterday (we should have gone out but Léah had a nasty stomach bug) I implemented SVG rendering in KHangMan (before I thought SVG rendering in Qt4 was slow while it was my machine...). The great thing about Free Software is that you have sources from other people to dig in. As I am not a "real" programmer (i.e. one who learnt it properly) I really need to "study" other people code. It's easy to see the difference between a self-taught person (me) and a "professional". Just look in KHangMan sources and KGeography sources for example. That does not mean KHangMan code is crap, it just does not flow like KGeography's does, it's not so intuitive. That also does not mean I feel I can't code. It's just that I have some areas to improve to master OO programming.Implementing direct SVG support in Qt4 is a matter of very few lines of code, less than with pixmaps. I toyed with the idea to enter the Qt Centre Programming Contest in order to raise my knowledge but I probably won't have the time. It seems quite demanding. My idea was to implement a KEduca replacement in Qt as it's a very needed application. People kept telling me so in Auch and it also came on an edu-related mailing list. Having it cross-platforms would be great although it could be ported to KDE later. But I don't want to pursue too many goals and reach none!

January 15, 2007 09:49 AM

Monologue

Edd Dumbill: Conference roundup: XTech, ETech, OSCON

A brief update concerning the conferences with which I am involved.

January 15, 2007 09:24 AM

Open Source Flash

events - created because of topic on osflash mailinglist 15-01-2007

A google calendar has been started to list as many upcoming Flash events (conferences, festivals, etc) as possible. Here are the links: XML : http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/phbsb0vqsqee4kfi89dl2ega1c%40group.... i...

January 15, 2007 09:10 AM

Planet Apache

Danny Angus: .. and finally ... how I got it all together (or why is it all so hard?)

The previous post was made from my phone, including picture. Cool huh?It was way not as easy as it should've been :-(Step one, send a mail to go [at] blogger [dot] com from my gmail account and claim my blog.Step two, send a mail from my phone to go@blogger look for an smtp server to use, o2 or gmail? o2 doesn't seem to work. what connection to use? try several pre-programmed ones, settleon the one that actually finds the smtp server. error "TLS/SSL can't recognize certificate" Solution, install root certificates in phone. What! This isgetting a bit too far from the path of straighforwardness we shouldexpect in the 21st century, surely? Anyway, root certs duly found andcable attached. Cable can;t be used because the certs are just copiedinto the removable memory. Good job I have a blue tooth dongle,bluetooth them across. It works. Try gmail. OMGWTF it works, I receivea mail and send a mail. New problem though, too much crap comes into my gmail account Iwant to use a quiet account from my phone. So I try setting up mailfor killerbees.co.uk with my google apps which I set up the other day.It gave me a whole "cyber presence" in minutes (well an hour or so)which is great because I no longer bother to host my own domain and Iwas wondering why I bothered to pay for it, anyway back to the story,the thing I hadn't done was to create MX records for killerbees.co.ukpointing at gmail's servers, so I tried that last night and...easyspace wouldn't accept the gmail mx hostname, I know about thetrailing dot but that didn't work either so I raised a trouble ticket.Woke up this morning to find that they'd done it by hand for me.Thanks. Now I just have to mail to go@blogger and claim it for my blog.Thats what this post is.

Summary, repect to:

blogger - for go [at] blogger [dot] comgoogle - for gmail smtp & google appssony ericsson - for the k750i having support for TLS in smtp & SSL in POP

Name and shamesony ericsson - for not pre-installing root certs02 for not setting their customers up with all this automatically.

January 15, 2007 09:07 AM

Planet HCI

Bloug: Intranets and personalization

James Roberson is running a brief survey on the use of personalization on intranets. (Being an Aussie, he spells it funny—"personalisation"—but don't hold that against him.) It takes about one minute to complete; please help him out and take the survey by January 31: Personalisation is seen as a desirable enhancement for intranets, and a major selling point for portals, but the key question is: to what extent do staff actually make use of these features? While there is some level of anecdotal information on the actual adoption of personalisation, there are no hard figures. This 60-second survey, consisting of 8 questions, looks at the adoption of user-driven "personalisation" on intranets and portals. (Please do fill this out even if you don't currently have personalisation implemented.) The full results of this survey will be shared publicly, and the aim is to quickly gather valuable figures that can be used by...

January 15, 2007 08:52 AM

Planet GNOME

Johannes Schmid: Anjuta 2.1.0 is out!

The Anjuta team is proud to annouce Anjuta 2.1.0, the first beta release of the anjuta 2.x series. This release is also the first that is sticking to the x.1.x = unstable convention as many people have been confused by this before. Read the full release note and get if from our website.

January 15, 2007 08:42 AM

Planet SELinux

Russell Coker: LCA talk

This afternoon I gave a talk at the Debian mini-conf of LCA on security improvements that are needed in Debian, the notes are online here.The talk didn't go quite as well as I had desired, I ended up covering most of the material in about half the allotted time and I could tell that the talk was too technical for many audience members (perhaps 1/4 of the audience lost interest). But the people who were interested asked good questions (and used the remainder of the time). Some of the people who are involved in serious Debian coding were interested (and I'll file a bug report based on information from one of them after making this post).I believe that I was quite successful in my main aim of giving Debian developers ideas for improving the security of Debian. My second aim of educating the users about options that are available now (with some inconvenience) and will be available shortly in a more convenient form was partially successful.The main content of my talk was based on the lightning talk I gave for OSDC, but was more detailed.After my talk I spoke to Crispin Cowan from Novell about some of these issues. He agrees with me about the need for more capabilities which I take as a very positive sign.

January 15, 2007 08:36 AM

Russell Coker: top 10 girl geeks

We have a list of 10 (famous) girl geeks from CNET and one from someone else.The CNET list has Ada Byron, Grace Hopper, Mary Shelly, and Marie Curie. Mary Shelly isn't someone who I'd have listed, but it does seem appropriate now I think about it. Marie Curie is one of the top geeks of all time (killing yourself through science experiments has to score bonus geek points). I hope that there are better alternatives to items 4, 7, 9, and 10 on the Cnet list.The list from someone else has 9 women I've never heard of. If we are going to ignore historical figures (as done in the second list) but want to actually list famous women then the list seems to be short. If we were to make a list of women who are known globally (which would mean excluding women who are locally famous in Australia, or in Debian for example). The only really famous female geek that I can think of is Pamela from Groklaw.The process of listing the top female geeks might have been started as an attempt to give a positive list of the contributions made by women. Unfortunately it seems to highlight the fact that women are lacking from leadership positions. There seem to be no current women who are in positions comparable to Linus, Alan, RMS, ESR, Andrew Tanenbaum, or Rusty (note that I produced a list of 6 famous male geeks with little thought or effort).Kirrily has written an interesting article on potential ways of changing this.

January 15, 2007 08:36 AM

Planet Apache

Yoav Shapira: Ben on "Value of the Irrational"

Ben just posted a great blog entry, "Value of the Irrational." I don't have his level of experience in the matter, not by a long shot, but I completely agree from what I've seen in my personal experience, and I wanted to elaborate on one point.He says that "...this problem was to see if you could extract from Joe, via observation, interviews, what ever, a codification of his knowledge... This turns out to be much harder than it looks."My problem is that many management / B-school types tend to assume 100% complete, accurate knowledge extraction from any given expert is possible a-priori. They just allocate some time for it, typically far too little (a few days at most), and expect the resulting document or the person doing the extraction to know everything the original expert knew. Not gonna happen.So how do we properly manage management's expectations in this situation? Do we just tell the CEO that Joe (the expert) has been here for 10 years, and it will likely take that long to extract all his / her information? Do we settle for a summary? How abridged a summary?My starting point would be that person to person knowledge transfer is better than person to document. At least when Joe teaches the new guy, Bill let's say, his knowledge, Bill can ask questions and we can have two-way feedback, soliciting more salient and also more subconscious processes from Joe. This takes longer and ends up covering probably less total rules than if Joe were to sit down and brain dump for an equivalent amount of time, but it covers those rules better and with more contextual integrity.

January 15, 2007 08:32 AM

Planet PHP

PRADO 3.1 alpha released - Knut Urdalen

Qiang has just released the alpha version of Prado 3.1. While 3.0 was a major rewrite of the Prado PHP Framework. 3.1 is focused on adding new functionality to the framework. I think the coolest feature is the AJAX enabled web controls (called active controls) which enables you to easily write AJAX-based user interfaces but still be abstracted from all the details behind the scene. Wei has written a nice tutorial on an building an AJAX chat application that you can try out here. Prado 3.1 also includes three layers of database access (including PDO-based data access, active record and SqlMap) in addition to two new web service wrappers (SOAP and JSON).

January 15, 2007 08:14 AM

Planet OpenClipArt

Inkscape: SCALE Inkscape BOF

John Taber and other Los Angeles area inkscapers will be giving demos of the new Inkscape at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) 2007, located at the Los Angeles Airport Westin, on Feb 10-11.

January 15, 2007 08:05 AM

Planet XML

del.icio.us bookmarks for 2007-01-14

"Hip
Hip Hurray, Igbo Language Now Compulsory in Igbo Schools! [Odo
Akaji, Biafra Nigeria World]": "Igbo governors [decided at
their Aug 1, 2006] conference to make the Igbo Language compulsory
from primary to Junior Secondary level in [all] educational
institutions in ala Igbo." Cool. "Ndi g'ede ihe gat'ụtọ" (People
who'll write delightful things) (from uche)
"Free Font
Manifesto": Advocacy and resource page for high-quality free
fonts. "...provides information and airs ideas about the concept of
free fonts. Its annotated appearance reflects my conversations with
type designers about the danger and necessity of free fonts."
(from uche)

January 15, 2007 08:00 AM

BlenderNation

Retopology Tool tutorial and video

There are a number of exciting features in our upcoming release. One of which is the remake topology tool. See this video tutorial by kattkieru ( Charles Wardlaw) that shows the basic function of...

[read the full article on blendernation.com]

January 15, 2007 07:56 AM

Planet Debian

Lucas Nussbaum: ruby & native threading

Stefano Zacchiroli said:

To balance this, according to my first read of Ruby’s threading capability, it’s my impression that not only at most one thread can execute Ruby code at a time (limitation shared by OCaml, due to the non-distributed nature of mark and sweep garbage collectors), but also a thread blocked on a syscall will block all other threads to run.

Dumb Ruby threads (but I still hope I’m wrong …)

This is not totally true:

Yes, Ruby threads are user-level: you won’t get speedup from dual-cores or dual-processors system. In python, this presentation claims (slide 39) that python threads are mapped to native threads, but that a giant lock always prevents the execution of more than one thread at a time (so library writers don’t have to write thread-safe code).
The ruby interpreter tries very hard to map blocking syscalls to their non-blocking counterparts (for example, all I/Os are passed to a select() call). This gets really dirty when you mix I/O and other syscalls. For example, see the strace output the following Ruby code:
require ‘thread’
th1 = Thread::new do
pid = fork { sleep 2 }
Process::waitpid(pid)
puts “Finished.”
end
th2 = Thread::new do

f = STDIN.read
puts “Finished2.”
end
th1.join

select(1, [0], [], [], {0, 349}) = 0 (Timeout)
gettimeofday({1168847486, 478832}, NULL) = 0
select(1, [0], [], [], {0, 0}) = 0 (Timeout)
waitpid(25249, 0xbf926810, WNOHANG) = 0
select(1, [0], [], [], {0, 0}) = 0 (Timeout)
gettimeofday({1168847486, 479013}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1168847486, 479053}, NULL) = 0
select(1, [0], [], [], {0, 59959}) = 0 (Timeout)
gettimeofday({1168847486, 538971}, NULL) = 0
select(1, [0], [], [], {0, 41}) = 0 (Timeout)
gettimeofday({1168847486, 543017}, NULL) = 0
select(1, [0], [], [], {0, 0}) = 0 (Timeout)
waitpid(25249, 0xbf926810, WNOHANG) = 0
select(1, [0], [], [], {0, 0}) = 0 (Timeout)
gettimeofday({1168847486, 543200}, NULL) = 0
gettimeofday({1168847486, 543240}, NULL) = 0
select(1, [0], [], [], {0, 59959}) = 0 (Timeout)
gettimeofday({1168847486, 602842}, NULL) = 0
select(1, [0], [], [], {0, 357}) = 0 (Timeout)
gettimeofday({1168847486, 606842}, NULL) = 0
select(1, [0], [], [], {0, 0}) = 0 (Timeout)

January 15, 2007 07:55 AM

Planet JDK

A. Sundararajan: Scripting SVG with JSR-223

SVG - Scalable Vector Graphics is a modular language for describing two-dimensional vector and mixed vector/raster graphics in XML. Batik is a Java-based toolkit for applications that want to use images in the SVG format for display, generation or manipulation. Batik supports script tag of SVG. The script tag can be used to implement interactivity, animation and so on. Batik uses Mozilla Rhino based JavaScript ...

January 15, 2007 07:49 AM

Planet Debian

Ingo Juergensmann: Debian, the release and m68k

Ok, Etch was scheduled for release in December. We have now mid of January and Etch is still not released, but just frozen.

In October there was a large thread about m68k not a release arch for etch; status in testing, futureplans? (both on debian-68k as well as on debian-project).

M68k is performing quite well after the gcc issues were finally solved (thanks to Roman Zippel for his great work!) and I'm wondering, if m68k could be a release arch *now*?
M68k is >98%, whereas there are problems with the alpha arch apparently, which drops below 97%. And arm had some problems as well...

January 15, 2007 07:40 AM

Open Source Flash

pixlib - add Oddly Community

pixlib is an AS 2.0 framework developed by Francis Bourre. It’s designed to support event handling, logging, data preloading, managing sound and video, making transitions, data holders and data structures, patterns implementations ... downl...

January 15, 2007 07:35 AM

pixlib:fdt_template:ioc - created

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><templates><template autoinsert="true" context="com.pf.fdt.ui.editor.template.actionscript" deleted="false" description="extends AbstractCommand - pixIOC" enabled="true" name="cmdioc">import com...

January 15, 2007 07:32 AM

Planet Ubuntu

Stephan Hermann: VMWare-Server and Ubuntu Edgy and/or Feisty

Dear Lazyweb,

I have to run a vmware instance of my company windows xp install to read company emails via Exchange.

On Ubuntu Dapper I can install vmware-server without any hassle, but installing it on edgy or feisty, I stucked.

I'd install the linux kernel headers, which are installed to /usr/src/linux-headers-`uname -r` but somhow the vmware-server install script doesn't recognize these kernel headers.

Now, how do I tell vmware-server that I have my correct linux kernel headers installed, and that he should compile its modules.

If you have any clue, please tell me how.

KThxBye,

\sh

January 15, 2007 06:54 AM

Planet Mozilla

Robert Sayre: Stuff from my bug list

We pass most of the DOM Core Level 1 suite, except for some DTD-related things.
We pass a fair amount of the WHATWG HTML5 tests. Lots of the failures relate to reparenting comments and style elements. Some of them are trickier, though.
I wrote a JSON parser for J2ME. It’s happy as long as you feed it ASCII–it passes a pretty exhaustive test suite. Need to add a bit of UTF decoding. It turns out J2ME phones don’t ship with any character set guaranteed other than ISO-8859-1. In particular, not many ship with UTF-16 or UTF-32, which JSON requires support for (the wisdom of sending either to a mobile phone is left as an exercise for the reader). There’s a superfluous state transition table in there as well.
I wrote a bunch of code to allow getElementsByClassName to accept a JS array as an argument. Turns out we’re going to drop that bit, so my patch will fall about 75% in size.

January 15, 2007 06:42 AM

Planet HCI

Bokardo - Social Web Design: The iPhone or Marriage: which is the ultimate lock-in?

I wonder if Cory Doctorow believes in marriage.
Or, if like his latest Boing Boing piece: iPhone - the roach motel business model, he disagrees with it on the basis that it is the ultimate “lock-in”.
Since the iPhone was released last week, this issue has come up again and again. Since I’m a Mac user, [...]

January 15, 2007 06:13 AM

Planet Debian

Evan Prodromou: 24 Nivôse CCXV

Last minute note: I mentioned some discussions about advertisement on Wikipedia; I sadly missed a conversation in which Jason Calcanis pointed out that Wikipedia leaves $100M on the table, and the response from Jimmy Wales who has his own take on advertising and Wikipedia. Interesting discussion.

tags: wikipedia advertisement jason calcanis jimmy wales

January 15, 2007 06:04 AM

Planet MySQL

Two principles of successful open source businesses

I had dinner with Fabrizio, a good friend and CEO of Funambol, the leading mobile open source company. He was in Salt Lake to ski and was kind enough to call me so that we could hang out.

Fabrizio said some things about open source that rang true with me, which I had not considered before. I'll list two principles he mentioned, and will discuss each in turn:Don't upsell your community, and

Sell open source to those who don't like/trust open source.At first glance, Fabrizio's principles fly in the face of most open source businesses out there. But when you scratch the surface of his thinking you see that it actually undergirds the most successful open source businesses. Let me explain.

Fabrizio's first principle - "Don't upsell your community" - basically means that there are multiple markets for open source, and the developers who download your product will not be an important source of revenues. They yield many other benefits - product extensions, product feedback, bug fixes, etc. - but don't expect them to fund your development.

You can see companies making mistakes in this regard all the time. They set up models that are designed to goad "free-riding" developers (or, "the community") to pay. Hence, the now ubiquitous "Community" vs. "Professional" or "Enterprise" versions of products, with the hope that Community users will become Professional or Enterprise buyers.

They won't. Give it up.

This is not to say that product segmentation is wrong, but it means that we need to be clear about how and why we segment an open source project.

In Fabrizio's case, he recognized that consumers aren't going to pay him money, and the enterprise market might not be fertile ground yet either. So he's focused on mobile operators, and finding a great market there (especially in developing geographies). He gets a huge amount of value from his user/development community (fast approaching 1 million downloads), and doesn't confuse his goals with the operators with those of his user community.

This has meant two things for Funambol: They don't write code that enterprises may want. They write code that their mobile operators will want, and let the community extend Funambol to meet enterprise-y needs (like Exchange connectors - operators and consumers don't care about Exchange, so why should Funambol spend its development dollars there?).

Funambol's licensing is designed to maximize code reuse and utility for its developers (i.e., GPL), while not harming the mobile operators (who simply want to buy their way out an open source license, anyway).This brings me to Fabrizio's second principle - "Sell open source to those who don't like/trust open source." These are my words, not Fabrizio's, but they're my best rendering of what we discussed. Fabrizio keeps finding that the customers willing to pay the most money tend to be those that appreciate the benefits of open source, but don't want open source, itself. In his mobile world, this means that they like the fact that the code is effectively in permanent escrow with a massive user base and so it doesn't have to bet on Funambol, per se, but rather on its community. They also don't have to fret about being locked into their vendor.

So, they like the benefits of open source. But their lawyers don't want to be bothered with thinking through the implications of possibly (though this possibility is remote) having to share their code, or figuring out support, etc. So, they buy a commercial license to Fabrizio's code to get the benefits of open source without the so-called risks of open source. They want commercial open source. They want a company behind the community, but they definitely want the community, too.

I think Fabrizio has it right. In my content management/collaboration world, my primary customers are enterprises. They want open source, but they don't want to lose the commercial relationship with a vendor. Enter Alfresco.

But they also don't want a lopsided entity that is mostly commercial, and very little community, open source. I personally feel that the GPL (and other free software licenses) is the best way to ensure maximum community input while retaining the ability to give enterprises a way out. It won't always be like this - I assume in a few years enterprises won't be so keen to buy their way out of the obligations of open source (because they'll recognize that the obligations lead to greater and greater benefits), but while the world is as it is...it's a great model.

Look at what MySQL has done with its Enterprise offering, coupled with their Network. MySQL took nothing away from its community, but added to what companies wanted (better support, more QA, etc.). Its development/user community gets the freedom of GPL (v2) so that they don't really have to care that there is a company behind the project. Enterprise customers, for their parts, get the commercial license so that they don't really have to care that there is a community behind the product.

Everyone wins.

This is as close to "The Right Model" as we currently have in open source, in my opinion. It's community-maximizing without being overly reliant on support dollars. (If your business depends on selling support exclusively, you're going to find that you may successfully pull in five-figure deals, but you'll always strain and struggle to get the six- or seven-figure deals. Those require something beyond vanilla support - not proprietary software, but rather "proprietary" service (meaning the code is free, the services around it are not).

Thoughts?

January 15, 2007 05:38 AM

Monologue

Maurits Rijk: Kids and permanent markers?

I’m not happy at all. My 3 yo daughter has scribbled on my tft screen with a permanent cd/dvd marker. Hopefully when I’m back from work I can remove it. I know quite a few people read my blog, so if there are any useful tips to remove the ink from my screen, I would [...]

January 15, 2007 05:20 AM

Planet Ubuntu

Andrew Bennetts: Linux.conf.au 2007, day 1.

Linux.conf.au is huge this year. Much much larger than last time it was in
Sydney. As usual, many of the highlights so far have been meeting and talking
to people, rather than the talks.

I've spent most of today at the GNOME miniconf, but I think tomorrow the Gaming
miniconf is looking surprisingly interesting...

January 15, 2007 05:08 AM

Planet GNOME

Martin Sevior: AbiWord-2.5.0 complex script testers please?

As noted by Marc "uwog" Maurer and hub AbiWord-2.5.0 was released today. Like every free software project, we really appreciate testing and feedback from our users. However for the 2.5.0 release cycle we have a special plea to speakers of Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, Indic, Thai and other complex script languages. One of the really big efforts in the 2.5.0 cycle is to move to a new pango-based text renderer for Linux. This is primarily the work of Tomas Frydrych,, ex-biblical scholar, now OpenedHand developer. With this we can in principle fully support all the languages supported by pango. However none of us core Abi-Hackers has much knowledge of these languages so we really need help from native speakers to provide feedback and to let us know what doesn't work.Your help is much appreciated.

January 15, 2007 04:56 AM

Planet Ubuntu

Andrew Bennetts: Em dash

I see far too much writing on the web using “--” instead of “—”. Most
software out there now copes quite happily with UTF-8, so there's no technical
reason not to use the “EM DASH” glyph. Actually, I lie, it's less convenient
because most keyboards don't have a “—” key, but do have a “-” key. In vim, you
can use the “-M” digraph, and in GNOME I find the Character Palette
panel applet nearly as handy. Or in HTML-land just use
“—” if you prefer.

So, this is a public service announcement: use a real em dash, not the ugly
double hyphen. Thank you.

Unicode: it's not just for non-English speakers, it's for punctuation pedants
too!

January 15, 2007 04:52 AM

Planet OpenOffice.org - Developer News

IssueZilla: New issues: Mon Jan 15 04:43:01 UTC 2007

#i73467# - Database access: broken resource placeholder in conn_shared_res.src/STR_CANNOT_CONVERT_STRING
#i73465# - bibliographic: Enhancement of the insert bibliography entry dialog
#i73463# - bibliographic: When a field is empty it apears in the bibliography entry.
#i73470# - l10n: IT: Incorrect translations for "icon" ("simbolo", "barra dei simboli")
#i73469# - l10n: Slovak GSI for 2.2

#i73468# - porting: OpenOffice++
#i73462# - sw: Stylename of Frames isn't sustained when saving document
#i73466# - sw: Tables with a SUM formula doesn't get exported properly
#i73464# - sw: it isn't possible to insert a footnote inside a textframe
#i73460# - www: Can't use an undefined value as an ARRAY reference at IzCrmBridge.pm line 412

#i73461# - www: Wiki "authenticated" timeout is too short.

January 15, 2007 04:43 AM

::Planet PostgreSQL::

David Fetter: PostgreSQL Weekly News - January 14 2007

PostgreSQL Weekly News - January 14 2007

Security updates 8.2.1, 8.1.6, 8.0.10, 7.4.15 and 7.3.17 are out
including packages for Debian, Fedora, Fink, FreeBSD, Red Hat and
Ubuntu. Upgrade ASAP.

PostgreSQL Product News

Another PostgreSQL Diff Tool 1.0.0_beta13 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/apgdiff/

pfm 1.4.3 released.

http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pfm/

mysql2pgsql-1.0.2 released.
http://gborg.postgresql.org/project/mysql2psql/projdisplay.php

PostgreSQL SDBC Driver 0.7.3 was released:
http://dba.openoffice.org/drivers/postgresql/

Navicat PostgreSQL 7.2.10 for Windows released.
http://pgsql.navicat.com/

Slony-I 1.2.6 is out.
http://slony.info/

audittrail2-beta1 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/audittrail2/

PGCluster 1.5.0rc13 and 1.7.0rc2 released.
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgcluster/

PostgreSQL Local

The German PostgreSQL Usergroup ( http://www.pgug.de ) is creating
three new flyers in english and german. The topics will be 1) an
abstract about PG, 2) PG and replication, 3) PG compared to others.
Iv you have material to add or want to participate, please contact
info at pgug dot de.

Please submit your PGCon 2007 proposals. PGCon is taking place in

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The deadline for submissions is January 19th.
http://www.pgcon.org/2007/submissions.php

There will be a PostgreSQL booth at FOSDEM on February 24 and 25 in
Brussels, Belgium. Many of the usual suspects from the EU PostgreSQL
communities will be there. Contact de [at] postgresql [dot] org to participate.
http://www.fosdem.org/2007/

Pavel Stehule will be teaching a course on stored procedures in
PostgreSQL. This will be on January 11, 2007 in Prague, and conducted

in Czech.
http://www.root.cz/zpravicky/skoleni-o-ulozenych-procedurach-v-postgresql/

The Italian PostgreSQL community will be holding a PostgreSQL day this
summer. Bookmark the link below to participate.
http://www.pgday.it

Gavin Sherry is running a PostgreSQL miniconf at Linux.Conf.Au in
Sydney on Tuesday the 16th of January 2007.
http://lca2007.linux.org.au/Miniconfs/PostgreSQL If you would like to

attending, email gavin AT alcove . com . au

PostgreSQL in the News

Planet PostgreSQL: http://www.planetpostgresql.org/

General Bits, Archives and occasional new articles:
http://www.varlena.com/GeneralBits/

PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter,

Devrim GUNDUZ and Robert Treat

To get your submission into the upcoming issue, get it to
david [at] fetter [dot] org by Sunday at 3:00pm Pacific Time.

Continue reading "PostgreSQL Weekly News - January 14 2007"

January 15, 2007 04:31 AM

Planet PHP

I wish I was as cool as DJB - Brian Moon

I should throw up a fanboy alert right here. You have been warned. =)

I was reading a heated discussion about security (no link, MARC is read only right now) on the PHP internals list this past week. In the middle of it, Zeev Suraski writes: “No remotely accessible software has a perfect track record, perhaps other than qmail.” For those that don’t know, qmail is the second most used MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) on the internet. It was written by Dan J. Bernstein (DJB). DJB, as I like to refer to him around the office, is a professor at University of Illinois at Chicago. You can read all about him at his web site.

The basis for Zeev’s comments is DJB’s qmail security guarantee. As Dan writes, he was fed up with security holes in sendmail. So, he decided to do something about them. He just avoided the whole app and wrote his own. Besides being rock solid, the application takes a very intuitive (to me) approach to internet mail. DJB believes in separating jobs into separate daemons that run with separate users and permissions. One daemon accepts incoming mail and puts it in a queue. Another reads that queue and then decides if it is an internal or external delivery. I then hands that to an local or remote daemon responsible for those jobs. Everything has its job. Nice and neat.

DJB did not stop there. He also wrote (IMO) the best darn DNS server ever in djbdns. Like qmail, it has a security guarantee. It uses the same logical design as qmail. Honestly, DNS propagation is a bit of mystery to me. Bind zone files confused the hell out of me. But, djbdns is easy as pie to use.

I have been lucky enough to use qmail for my entire career. The first host I ever signed up with used qmail and it was all I ever wanted to use. When our current systems administrator, a life long sendmail and bind user, came to work for us, I showed him qmail and djbdns. It took a little while, but now he will never go back. Even with the occasional annoyance, its better than the alternative to him.

You do have to adjust to the DJB style. His applications don’t have the normal configure, make, make install setup. He is a FreeBSD user. At times there are errors on non FreeBSD systems that are in his opinion flaws of those systems and not qmail. He is usually right. At the least, you can’t say he is wrong. djbdns for example does propagate data between hosts “automatically” like bind does. You have to rsync the data somehow yourself. That is a turn off at first for some. Then they realize how much more control that will give them.
He is very diligent when it comes to sticking strictly to whatever RFC exist for each daemon he writes. One guy I know complains that qmail is the only MTA that requires the \r\n at the end of emails. qmail will reject them straight away. As you soon discover, there is a huge community of “patches” to make qmail do all sorts of things. There is a patch for that “feature” as well.

For more on qmail, see qmail.org, a collection of patches, documents and add-ons. The most popular of those documents is likely Life with qmail. It is sort of a noobs guide to qmail.

For more on djbdns, see DJB’s page about it.

January 15, 2007 04:25 AM

Free Software Magazine -

What kind of articles would you prefer to see in Free Software Magazine?

Desktop oriented HOWTO-like tutorials36% (9 votes)System administration articles16% (4 votes)Opinion pieces on free software and politics28% (7 votes)Comparative articles and reviews (hardware and software)12% (3 votes)Other (please write a comment!)8% (2 votes)Total votes: 25

January 15, 2007 04:21 AM

Planet XML

[Dare Obasanjo:DRM] How DRM Saved Us All From DRM

Close to the end of the third episode of The Matrix, Agent
Smith, after "defeating" Neo, suddenly realizes that "this isn't
how it ends." to then realize that what he has actually done is
defeated himself. Okay, so there's obviously...

January 15, 2007 04:15 AM

Planet GNOME

Hubert Figuiere: Abi ports

So AbiWord 2.5.0 is out, heavy last minute hacking. Since the Linux version does not really need my help, being in good hands (don't worry I still have a couple of ideas under the hood), I spent some time setting the Mac build straight an square. The good news is that it finally compiles (maybe after 2.5.0 release, I don't remember if I had to commit more stuff), the bad is that it fails running, or at least running in something useful. I have to figure out what is going on.

One of the thing I had to spend some time is what I will call abiports: it is a ports system to provide the ever growing list of dependencies. As of today, AbiWord 2.5.0 depends on glib, wv, libgsf, libpng[1], popt[2] and enchant. The idea is to compile them with limited dependencies to embed them in the application bundle.

And for those who are wondering why I waste time on the Mac build instead of working on Free Software platforms, it is because somebody has to do it, for the sake of the project...

Notes

[1] yes this library is not part of MacOS X

[2] about to be ditched

January 15, 2007 03:16 AM

Planet Apache

Sanjiva Weerawarana: IBM's Don Ferguson now in MSFT

Yes, you read that right: IBM Fellow to Microsoft Fellow. From being IBM Software Group's Chief Archiect to working with Ray Ozzie and team in Microsoft. Wow. WOW.

Don is the guy who made it possible for me to do everything I did in
IBM. To say he's a great guy and a technically brilliant person is an
understatement. This is a huge loss for IBM and a huge gain for

Microsoft. I'm sure Don will enjoy, no love, the challenges of being in an entirely different new world and will have major impact on Microsoft!

Good luck Don!

January 15, 2007 03:05 AM

Planet MySQL

Projection support in libmygis 0.7

I’ve just recently released a new version of libmygis, a library for dealing with various GIS formats. Its main purpose is importing ESRI Shapefile data into MySQL’s GIS, but it is useful for much more.
There are many new small features in libmygis 0.7, but the biggest new feature is projection support (and automatic re-projection) via the PROJ.4 cartographic library. With support for projections and the ability to read Shapefile PRJ files, libmygis is getting much closer to having full support for the Shapefile format. This means you can easily import Shapefiles in any projection into MySQL and deal with it in pure lat/lon, which is what you’ll need in order to interface with outside tools such as Google Maps API.

January 15, 2007 03:03 AM

Planet HCI

Digital Web: What's New: Happy Birthday to jQuery

jQuery, the little JavaScript library with a big voice, celebrates its first birthday with some sweeping changes in its 1.1 release. According to creator John Resig's release notes, the CSS selectors are now 10-20 times faster than before, and large chunks of the API have been simplified.

The jQuery website has also undergone a realign, and the documentation wiki has been tidied, reorganized, and given a new home. There's also apparently a jQuery book in the works - not bad going for just one year!

January 15, 2007 02:48 AM

Kernel Planet

Dave Jones: .au adventures, pt1

Made it to Sydney ok.Remembered what a disaster zone heathrow is on my first connecting flight.I had three hours between landing and my next connection, and still only just made it in time. Queuing for three hours. Tons of fun.Flight to Singapore mostly uneventful. Slept a bit thanks to the wonders of Melatonin supplements. Got off in Singapore, and wandered around the terminal to kill some time whilst they refueled. Not much to see or do, but not a big deal given I had less than an hour to kill. Flight from Singapore to Sydney a lot longer than I had anticipated. I knew it was far, but I hadn't realised just _how_ far.Met at the airport and shuttled off to a hotel where a comedy of disasters occured. The ultimate one being almost electrocuted by a hair dryer the following morning. Made my way to the student accomodation I had booked into for the remainder of the week, bumped into various peoples throughout the day, beer was consumed, and life was good again.After numerous beers, we decided to call it a night and three of us headed back to the campus where we were staying, when things took a turn for the worst.Whilst we were staring at a giant map/info board (we may as well have put up a flag saying "We don't belong here") we were set upon by a gang of about a dozen teenagers. First they started asking for smokes, and then it progressed to money and then money with menaces. After realising we weren't going to give them anything it got a bit physical. It wasn't the ideal way to begin the week, but it could have been a lot worse. None of the little shits seemed particularly 'hard', but in a group of a dozen, it was somewhat.. well.For the benefit of those reading this through planet LCA: I had thought the campus would be one of the safest places, look out for yourselves if you're out at night alone, or in small groups.Oh, and my right butt cheek is still numb from the 37 hours of travelling. I'm getting increasingly concerned.

January 15, 2007 02:47 AM

Monologue

Jeroen Frijters: AWT/Swing a Little Bit Less Unsupported

I don't want to raise expectations too much because there's still an incredible amount
of work to be done, but thanks to great work done by Volker Berlin a lot of progress
has been made on the AWT/Swing front. For example, here's a screenshot of the JDK
SwingSet2 demo running on the current ikvm version from cvs:

Not everything works and some of the missing functionality will be quite difficult
to implement on top of .NET 1.1 or 2.0 (it may be easier with WPF, but I really don't
know). There are also a couple of GNU Classpath bugs, but overall it's quite impressive
how well this demo works.

January 15, 2007 02:46 AM

unofficial planet python

Simon Willison's Weblog: CSS library for Python

CSS library for Python (via). “A Python package to parse and build CSS Cascading Style Sheets. Partly implements the DOM Level 2 Style Stylesheets and CSS interfaces.”

January 15, 2007 02:32 AM

Planet Debian

Joey Hess: debootstrap's 6th anniversary

Sometime this month, debootstrap turns six years old. I was thinking about
this last night as I tweaked a new xen instance that the
hosting provider had installed Debian on using
debootstrap, while in the other window using a debootstraped system to
investigate a weird apt premissions problem.
All very standard, and between this kind of thing, installing Debian with
d-i, and building packages with pbuilder, a lot of us would be lost without
debootstrap now.

The story of exactly how it came about is interesting, though it's blurred
by time in my memory. Maybe AJ will correct me, but I think it went
something like this:

Aeons ago, every Debian system was bootstrapped using a root
filesystem tarball, which was built using the basedisks.sh script in
the boot-floppies source. That ugly thing hardcoded a bootstrap sequence
that managed to work most of the time, and had a lot of code to work
around issues in various packages in bae. IIRC it needed a local mirror,
and lots of babysitting to keep it working.
When I suggested that boot-floppies be rewritten, and modularised,
I'm fairly sure that I pointed to basedisks.sh as one thing that would
make a useful standlone module, but I can't find proof of that.
In late 2000, AJ
posted to a
thread about
one of the first d-i demo systems with something he was calling "base-deb",
that is a recognisable prototype of debootstrap. It downloaded debs from
a mirror and built a chroot on the fly.
After some
back and forth
over the next couple weeks regarding how it would work with d-i, AJ
released the first version of debootstrap on January 30th.
It's sorta hard to believe now, but there was a lot of push-back on the
idea of bootstrapping Debian on the fly, rather than using the old tarball.
Much of it was inertia; some of it was legitimate concerns about whether it
would work robustly. IIRC these concerns kept coming up right through the
release of woody in 2002, the first version of Debian to install using
debootstrap. In fact, woody still included a basedebs.tar, although it
was built using debootstrap.
While various rough edges were filed off over the years, there were no
really big changes after that to debootstrap until 2005 then debootstrap
finally got smart enough to resolve dependencies, rather than using the
hardcoded lists of what packages to install in what order, that it had
inherited from the boot-floppies.

Debootstrap is one of my favorite examples of a tool that ends up being
much more general purpose than was first envisioned (at least by me; AJ may
have known all along). The collection of stuff that has grown up around it
and the way it's changed how both Debian developers and users work is
pretty impressive.

January 15, 2007 02:23 AM

unofficial planet python

Simon Wittber: Unity3D Evaluated. Wow.

Unity3D is a game authoring application for OS X, which can deploy standalone binaries to OS X, Windows, and a Web Player Plugin. No Linux build yet, unfortunately.I decided to investigate Unity3D because I read that it supports Python for scripting game objects. I've found this to be untrue. It supports Boo, which is not really Python, however it looks a lot like Python in most cases. Unity3D also uses Javascript, which is what I chose to use when running through the tutorials.I decided to persevere and complete a few tutorials. I'm glad I did, as I am absolutely blown away by the power of Unity. It really is an amazingly productive, and flexible tool. It combines a generic 3D engine (with support for shaders, different lighting models etc) and a generic physics engine with a very intuitive GUI which ties all the game objects together using drag and drop scripting, which can be coded in Javascript, Boo or C#.If you run OS X, and you want to write games, I recommend trying out the Unity3D demo, and running through a few tutorials. It won't take you long to realize that simplicity and ease-of-use has not been achieved at the expense of flexibility and power. You'll having a working game demo in a few hours, with animated particle effects, colliding objects and whatnot. If you don't run OS X, and you want to write games... it is worth shelling our for a new machine, just so you can run Unity3D. Yes, it is that good.

January 15, 2007 02:15 AM

Simon Wittber: Got Mac. Evaluating Unity3D.

The reality of web development, is that one code base must work on several platforms, Mac/Safari being one of them. I picked up an intel iMac last Friday, so that I can test my web code in Safari and Firefox in an OS X environment.The iMac is a very tidy unit. I'd consider buying one even if I used it to just run Windows or Linux.Of course, I couldn't wait to get my hands on a trial version of Unity 3D, and see if it's all its cracked up to be. I haven't had much time to play with it yet, though I have run through the first tutorial. It's well laid out, and easy to pick up, and produces good results. That's all I can really say at the moment. Hopefully I can get some more time in before the trial runs out, and post some nice screenshots!

January 15, 2007 02:13 AM

Brandon Corfman: Asteroid Smash released!

You can find it on my Software page.Let me just say py2exe is incredibly underdocumented. But here are helpful links if you see "Zlib not available" or "Runtime error: default font not found" when packaging your own game.

January 15, 2007 02:01 AM

Planet MySQL

OurSQL Episode 5: Falcon, Part 1

Finally, episode 5 is here. In this episode, the first part in a two-part series about Falcon, the new storage engine provided by MySQL, we talk about what happens when you query a Falcon table, going over and explaining MVCC and the record cache. Next episode will go over the serial logs and indexes.
Direct play episode 5 at:
http://tinyurl.com/y68ewn
Subscribe to the podcast by clicking:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=206806301
You can Direct download all the oursql podcasts at:
http://technocation.org/podcasts/oursql/
Jim Starkey is a great speaker, and very funny to listen to ? at one point he refers to a performance hit as a ?performance surprise?. He’s also a piece of history ? listen for his take on MVCC, which he invented.
Links:
Falcon features:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/falcon/en/se-falcon-features.html
Falcon documentation
http://www.mysql.org/doc/refman/5.1/en/se-falcon.html
Special thanks to Arjen Lentz (http://arjen-lentz.livejournal.com/) and Mark Matthews (http://www.jroller.com/page/mmatthews ) of MySQL AB for their answers and explanations, and Jim Starkey and Technocation for their use of the audio from the July 2006 Boston User Group meeting with Jim Starkey.

January 15, 2007 01:48 AM

Planet Debian

Ben Hutchings: Mould: not just a flavour of cheese

BoingBoing linked to a previous story about Quorn being allergenic, which I've not heard claimed before. Supposedly about 5% of people have unpleasant reactions to it, which I find a bit hard to believe. I'm curious, though, so I shall make the most of my remaining days of paid account with a not particularly scientific poll:

View Poll: Mould: not just a flavour of cheese

January 15, 2007 01:29 AM

Planet Ubuntu

Jono Bacon: Mmmm…update

The man, the legend, Chris Procter has written up another Jokosher report on the Jokosher Forums. Chris is writing regular reports to fill you folks in on the specifics of whats going on with the project.

Speaking of which, for you LCA bods - I am speaking about Jokosher tomorrow (Tue 15th Jan) at the GNOME miniconf - its the first slot. Be there for a shot of GNOME multi-tracking goodness.

Incidentally, LCA is pretty cool. Well organised, good bunch of attendees and speakers, and nice weather. Still a bit jet lagged, but getting there.

January 15, 2007 01:23 AM

::Planet PostgreSQL::

Magnus Hagander: search.postgresql.org statistics

Now that the new GIN/tsearch2 based search engine has been running on search.postrgresql.org it's time for a bit of statistics of the searches being performed. The following statistics are pulled from the most recent 99,733 searches performed. Note that these statistics are taken pre-lexing, so searches for different variants of the same word count as different words.

A total of 32,810 unique search terms were submitted, meaning that each search term was used on an average only 3 times.

4930 of the searches resulted in stepping pas the first page of results, meaning that 95% of all searchers only looked at the first page of results.

17 searches stepped all the way to the 50th page (the maximum number of pages shown). My guess is that all of these were people testing and not actually looking for the hits there.

The 25 most common search terms, and the number of searches for them, were:
foobar 3873 search 1796 alter table 732 create table 588 jdbc 517 select 508

update 507
insert 475
copy 463
pg_dump 458
odbc 386
sequence 381
vacuum 368
date 361
cast 350

case 349
replication 330
grant 320
psql 318
join 296
create user 275
between 266
tsearch2 264
timestamp 260

cluster 250

The first two are certainly very interesting, with foobar representing almost 4% of the searches. You may wonder why this is, and it has a very logical explanation - that's the nagios system that monitors the servers functionality...

The second one is explained by that being what you get if you hit "search" on the frontpage without typing anything in the search box first.

The good news is that system load has remained vastly below what it was with the old search engine. Most of the time, you can't see anything on the server at all, and the load avg is 0.02/0.01/0.00 right now (my stats processing being what brought it so far up). Continue reading "search.postgresql.org statistics"

Read principles 6-15 at Tomski.com.

Planet HCI

Reaction!: The BBC's 15 web principles

Tomski has published the BBC's fifteen web principles (originally developed as part of the BBC 2.0 project). Here are the first five:

Build web products that meet audience needs: anticipate needs not yet fully articulated by audiences, then meet them with products that set new standards.
The very best websites do one thing really, really well: do less, but execute perfectly.
Do not attempt to do everything yourselves: link to other high-quality sites instead. Your users will thank you. Use other people's content and tools to enhance your site, and vice versa.
Fall forward, fast: make many small bets, iterate wildly, back successes, kill failures, fast.
Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don't restrict your creativity to your own site.

Reaction!: Ctrl Print Screen

Another reminder of why usability is important in the workplace...

- Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est

Reaction!: Pope Benedict XVI on user experience

"We are dealing with human beings, and human beings always need something more than technically proper care. They need humanity. They need heartfelt concern."

[via Adaptive Path]

January 15, 2007 12:59 AM

KDE Dot News

KDE Commit-Digest for 14th January 2007

Happypenguin

Babaliba (new)

Video-adventure with fast movements and frenetic action.

More about Babaliba

D2X-XL 1.9.8 (updated)

Descent 2 OpenGL port

More about D2X-XL

More about Blob Wars : Blob and Conquer

Blob Wars : Blob and Conquer 0.8-2 (updated)

Somewhat violent 3D action game

More about Super Mario Clone FX

Super Mario Clone FX 0.99.4 (updated)

A jump-and-run game in the style of Super Mario World

January 15, 2007 12:08 AM

Planet GNOME

Thomas Thurman: These are the words that the voice was repeating

On Thursday night we released the tax filing program. I say "we", and though I was around for the final tagging, gong-beating, and general rejoicing, I still had to go home at the ordinary time. Otherwise, SEPTA would have stranded me. Many of my comrades left to paint the town red, and several brave souls stayed behind to tweak the deployment. They stayed until the small hours, and ordered in beer and pizza, as any reasonable person would.On Friday an email went around saying there would be a meeting for all staff at 3:45, and attendance was not optional, which is pretty strong language for where I work. The rumour went around that the CEO was unhappy because he had found the beer bottles in the recycling. Sure enough, 3:45 came, and the boss stood up and said, "I know you've all been working really hard to release this program, and you've all done a fine job, and I know releases are always stressful, but I want to remind you that it is never appropriate to introduce alcohol into an office environment...", and all the managers appeared behind him pouring champagne for us all. Such is my workplace.I know many of you are waiting for a link to the program. It's all working fine, but it's not publicly released yet: the UI of the public version still needs some polishing. I promise to post the link on Thursday, or possibly Wednesday, as am I am itching to do. Meanwhile, here's some news coverage from Florida, and from Ohio, and from Pennsylvania.The person whom someone whom someone knew knew who knew how to fix washing machines did not turn up at the appointed time. Therefore, we spent $50 in quarters on washing and drying our clothes at a laundrette. Tomorrow, we shall go and buy a new washing machine. Ho hum.Someone mentioned teaching languages to kids this afternoon, and it made me think about how to teach Rio. I think it's important that she learns other languages early on, and I suppose there are two possible approaches, which are complementary: either we can have a rule that (as much as possible) all conversation is in such-and-such a language at particular times, or we can have more formal lessons. I can probably manage to do either of those to some basic level in French or Welsh, but not anything else. For the second, dyddgu (penblwydd hapus, btw) has sent us some Welsh language textbooks, and I'm expecting to be able to use those when Rio's got beyond dw i'n hoffi coffi level. Do any of you have ideas or experiences you could share?

Planet KDE

Benjamin Meyer (icefox): Home For Christmas

For christmas I flew back to Boston to be with relatives. Having lived in America my entire life up until recently it was an interesting experience and I was surprised by the differences in American culture that I noticed upon returning.

After not owning a car the last year and a half I was amusing at how often people would drive when they could walk. My favorite experience the past few weeks was when I went out to lunch with some friends. We pulled out into the road, which was the main road for the town and the traffic on the road was almost bumper to bumper, stop light to stop light. Five minutes later about a mile up the road we pulled into the restaurant. It was like in Office space where the guy with the cane is walking faster then the cars. The best part was that the car I rode in was a hybrid and during the middle of lunch we briefly talked about the price of gas at the pump.

Jen and I walked around town, but still it was surprising how often we had to convince people that we really could walk a mile to the store and didn't need a ride. Someone once told me that the streets of Europe are not as handicap accessible as in America, but at least in Arlington that wasn't true at all. Lots of sidewalks don't go down to the road on corners, trees have uprooted chunks all over the place, many side streets simply didn't have sidewalks, and some side roads had no sidewalks and barriers on both side (so you couldn't even walk in the dirt) highly discouraging anyone from walking that way. One day it was sixty degrees or so outside and we were happy to see other adults outside until we realized that every single one was in some sort of workout clothes and running or "quick" walking. As far as I can tell walking in America is only for exercising, not for actually getting somewhere.

Although I knew that there was less adds on TV back home in Norway I was surprised just how many there actually where. Every few minutes, another set started for your enjoyment. I watched the evening news a few times and was annoyed at just how poor the news is here. The things that they report that are not important or the lack of actual news in a five minute span was amazing.

Part of the fun of visiting was eating all of the food I missed, I wonder if Norwegians who live in the America miss brown cheese? Every other day we went to a different old favorite restaurant with friends. The food was fine, but I think in my head I had been looking forward to it for so long that they couldn't match up to my expectations. One in particular I was looking forward to was Mountain Dew. I it different tasting over in Europe, but of course by the time I came back here it doesn't taste as good as I remember.

What would going to the US be without visiting a mall and the local megastores. Apple stores sure seem to be doing well and I couldn't help but noticing every time I was in one there were more girls then guys in them. As some of you know I enjoy transformers so it was fun going to the toy stores where after such a long time they were all new to me and I couldn't help but pick up one or two. Similar to the malls we went to the local grocery store. The amount of variety and over abundance of "stuff" at places like super stop in shop is amusing. Having become accustom to shopping in stores who's total size was only the size of the produce section at stop and shop I really had to question if getting to choose between two hundred tooth brushes had any benefits.

During this whole time the closest I got to programming was getting a new MacBook. I have to say I am very happy with it. The speed jump from my old 667Mhz powerbook is amazing and I can actually do real work on it (rather then sshing somewhere else). I like the built in iSight and set it up to take a picture every time it wakes up from sleep after a set amount of time which has presented me with a range of amusing photos, such as the one on the left. Touching on some of the software I must give credit where credit is due, iMovie/iDVD is slick, really slick. I video taped Christmas and with just two hours work pulled it off the camera, did basic editing, titles, transitions, and slapped it on a DVD with photos also taken during the video taping.

One task I got done while here was closing my savings account with Bank Of America and opening one with ING direct. Besides having a horrible website, Bank of America's savings accounts have a dirt floor low interest rate at .5% last I checked verses ING's 4.5%. If you are interested in opening an ING direct account send me and ben+ingrefurral [at] meyerhome [dot] net (e-mail) and I can send you a referral e-mail which will give you $25 just for opening the account. A nice easy way to get a better return on your savings and a little bonus.

January 15, 2007 12:05 AM

Software patent news

MyESM: IBM Sets Record for Most U.S. Patents Earned in One Year

January 15, 2007 12:00 AM

Slashdot: Alan Cox Files Patent For DRM

January 15, 2007 12:00 AM

January 14, 2007

Planet GNOME

Ronald Bultje: Movie

I went to see the immensely poopular movie Pan's Labyrinth (imdb) this weekend. This Spanish-spoken, half-war / half-fairytale movie, nominee for a Golden Globe, is without doubt going to be one of the most popular of the year.

The movie plays at the end of World War 2 in Franco's Spain, at a site where resistance and military are fighting out their fight. Ofelia, daughter of the flirt-of-the-day of the military's captain, is caught up halfway between on the one hand this world of very explicitely and realistically pictured misery and violence, and on the other hand the world from her fairytale books. Wonderful scenery, convincing play and just a very nice story, not at all suited for kids.

January 14, 2007 11:54 PM

unofficial planet python

Spyced: Why SQLAlchemy impresses me

One of the reasons ORM tools have a spotted reputation is that it's really, really easy to write a dumb ORM that works fine for simple queries but performs like molasses once you start throwing real data at it.

Let me give an example of a situation where, to my knowledge, only SQLAlchemy of the Python (or Ruby) ORMs is really able to handle things elegantly, without gross hacks like "piggy backing."

Often you'll see a one-to-many relationship where you're not always interested in all of the -many side. For instance, you might have a users table, each associated with many orders. In SA you'd first define the Table objects, then create a mapper that's responsible for doing The Right Thing when you write "user.orders."

(I'm skipping connecting to the database for the sake of brevity, but that's pretty simple. I'm also avoiding specifying columns for the Tables by assuming they're in the database already and telling SA to autoload them. Besides keeping this code shorter, that's the way I prefer to work in real projects.)

users = Table('users', metadata, autoload=True)
orders = Table('orders', metadata, autoload=True)

class User(object): pass
class Order(object): pass

mapper(User, users,
properties={
'orders':relation(mapper(Order, orders), order_by=orders.c.id),
})

That "properties" dict says that you want your User class to provide an "orders" attribute, mapped to the orders table. If you are using a sane database, SQLAlchemy will automatically use the foreign keys it finds in the relation; you don't need to explicitly specify that it needs to join on "orders.user_id = user.id."

We can thus write

for user in session.query(User).select():
print user.orders

So far this is nothing special: most ORMs can do this much. Most can also specify whether to do eager loading for the orders -- where all the data is pulled out via joins in the first select() -- or lazy loading, where orders are loaded via a separate query each time the attribute is accessed. Either of these can be "the right way" for performance, depending on the use case.

The tricky part is, what if I want to generate a list of all users and the most recent order for each? The naive way is to write

class User:
@property
def max_order(self):
return self.orders[-1]

for user in session.query(User).select():
print user, user.max_order

This works, but it requires loading all the orders when we are really only interested in one. If we have a lot of orders, this can be painful.

One solution in SA is to create a new relation that knows how to load just the most recent order. Our new mapper will look like this:

mapper(User, users,
properties={
'orders':relation(mapper(Order, orders), order_by=orders.c.id),
'max_order':relation(mapper(Order, max_orders, non_primary=True), uselist=False, viewonly=True),
})

("non_primary" means the second mapper does not define persistence for Orders; you can only have one primary mapper at a time. "viewonly" means you can't assign to this relation directly.)

Now we have to define "max_orders." To do this, we'll leverage SQLAlchemy's ability to map not just Tables, but any Selectable:

max_orders_by_user = select([func.max(orders.c.order_id).label('order_id')],
group_by=[orders.c.user_id]).alias('max_orders_by_user')
max_orders = orders.select(orders.c.order_id==max_orders_by_user.c.order_id).alias('max_orders')

"max_orders_by_user" is a subselect whose rows are the max order_id for each user_id. Then we use that to define max_orders as the entire order row joined to that subselect on user_id.

We could define this as eager-by-default in the mapper, but in this scenario we only want it eager on a per-query basis. That looks like this:

q = session.query(User).options(eagerload('max_order'))
for user in q.select():
print user, user.max_order

For fun, here's the sql generated:

SELECT users.user_name AS users_user_name, users.user_id AS users_user_id,
anon_760c.order_id AS anon_760c_order_id, anon_760c.user_id AS anon_760c_user_id,
anon_760c.description AS anon_760c_description,
anon_760c.isopen AS anon_760c_isopen
FROM users LEFT OUTER JOIN (
SELECT orders.order_id AS order_id, orders.user_id AS user_id,
orders.description AS description, orders.isopen AS isopen
FROM orders, (
SELECT max(orders.order_id) AS order_id
FROM orders GROUP BY orders.user_id) AS max_orders_by_user
WHERE orders.order_id = max_orders_by_user.order_id) AS anon_760c
ON users.user_id = anon_760c.user_id
ORDER BY users.oid, anon_760c.oid

In SQLAlchemy, easy things are easy; hard things take some effort up-front, but once you have your relations defined, it's almost magical how it pulls complex queries together for you.

.................

I'm giving a tutorial on Advanced Databases with SQLAlchemy at PyCon in February. Feel free to let me know if there is anything you'd like me to cover specifically.

January 14, 2007 11:39 PM

Rene Dudfield: I Am A Drum Machine

Here's a song I made the other night - I thought some of you might find it funny.http://rene.f0o.com/~rene/stuff/I-am-a-drum-machine.mp3If you just want to play it in your browser, there is a flash based player here with it:http://www.pretendpaper.com Written by a Melbourne web developer. Available for your projects - php, mysql, e commerce, javascript, CMS, css, flash, actionscript, python, games, postgresql, xml.

January 14, 2007 11:38 PM

Planet Apache

Gianugo Rabellino: The Sunday post: layers, layers, layers…

Lasagne are to many Italians the ultimate comfort food, bringing distant memories of grandmas layering together thin hand-made pasta, slowly cooked meat ragout, white sauce and cheese to come up with a work of art both horribly hot and incredibly good.

As many Italian dishes, there is nothing hard in making lasagne, apart from some dedication and a lot of patience: a proper meat sauce needs no less than 4-5 hours on the stove, and that’s only part of the story as home-made pasta and white sauce will take their toll as well. The good news is the reward you get for the effort: apart from being great food in itself, lasagne are extremely flexible for a dinner with friends, as you can get everything ready in advance and whack it in the oven while having a chat over some whine. Unlike almost every pasta, if you’re so lucky to have any leftovers, you can freeze and reheat them in the busy days and, finally, if you like optimization like I do, when you cook the meat sauce you can make hefty quantities of it and store it for some good “pasta bolognaise” (by the way, you might want to know that no Italian will ever name what we call “pasta al ragù” as “bolognaise”: personally, I would run away from any Italian restaurant using that horrible term, but then again I’d run away from every Italian restaurant abroad so you might not want to quote me on that).

On to the recipe: the key in making good lasagne is the meat sauce, which is really not difficult to make once get to grips with the time it will take for the sauce to slowly simmer. As it might get as long as six hours, don’t choose a busy day to cook this kind of stuff; on the other hand, know that the hard work will be done in 30-45 minutes, and all you need for the remaining five hours or so is a casual eye to avoid burning, while your house fills up with flavours and you’re reading a book or surfing the Net. Get everything ready first: if you want to cook a lot of sauce, good for two or three meals, grab 600g of minced beef (assuming you trust your butcher, that is, or mince it yourself as I do), 100g of pancetta or lard in very small cubes and no less than 1.5kg of ripe tomatoes.

Start with tomatoes first: since it’s winter, and we don’t get nice small and sweet tomatoes, some work is in order to get rid of some acidity. Get a pan with boiling water and a bowl with cold/iced water, cut a cross over the tomatoes, and poach them in the boiling water for no more than a minute. Throw them in the cold water and watch the skin fall apart. Peel the tomatoes, cut them in four and throw the seeds away. Sprinkle some salt on the clean tomato quarters and put them in a drainer for twenty minutes. You will be amazed to see how much water the tomatoes will lose: know that this passage is paramount for a proper tomato sauce, unless we’re talking about fresh small cherry tomatoes coming straight from the garden.

While the tomatoes are draining, put a pan on the fire and prepare some soffritto (you can read here how to cook it, use a large onion, a carrot, a stalk of celery and a touch of garlic), unless you happen to have some frozen stuff which will shave some time from your cooking day: once it’s ready, take it away, roughly clean the pan, pour no less than three spoonfuls of olive oil on high heat and throw the minced meat/pancetta in. Let everything toast and brown, add the soffritto back with a couple of glasses of white wine which will need to fully evaporate (unless you use the de-alcoholyizing trick we’ve been trough before) and finally let the drained tomatoes join the pan, together with a nice cup of beef stock. Let everything get to the boiling point, then lower the fire to the minimum possible heat and grab that book as it’s now time to wait. Don’t - ever - put a lid on. Stop by the pan every twenty minutes or so for a good stir and, after a couple of hours, add a good glass of milk as the perfect finishing touch to your meat sauce, which will be ready as soon as every single drop of water will be evaporated. Don’t rush, take your time, and the reward will be excellent.

A couple of hours before the meat sauce is ready, it’s time to think about pasta: make a dough with 400g of white flour, four eggs and a good pinch of salt, then use the rolling pin or a pasta machine to end up with thin, large, squares which if at all possible should be the size as the pan they’ll be ending up in a short while (this pasta shape is what we call lasagne, by the way). Let the pasta sit for a while, and bring some salted water to boil. While you wait for the water to heat, get on with the white sauce, using 60g of butter and a good spoonful of white flour to make some roux, then add roughly a liter of milk and keep on stirring until it thickens (don’t let it boil!), seasoning with some salt and pepper to taste. Grate a good quantity of parmesan cheese (no less than four-five handfuls) and get ready for the assembly phase.

Get a bowl with cold water and bring it near the stove. Add a drizzle of oil to the boiling water, and poach no more than two lasagne at the same time, or they will horribly stick together no matter the oil. Let them cook for a little more than a minute, then throw the lasagne in the cold water bowl to stop them from overcooking. Grab an oven pan and make a first lasagne layer on the bottom. Add a spoonful of meat sauce, a spoonful of white sauce and a good sprinkle of grated parmesan, then move on to the next layer repeating the poach/cool/arrange/season drill until you run out of pan space or lasagne. Finish your pan with the two sauces and a very generous handful of parmesan which will melt and form a great crust. Some 30 minutes before you want to eat, turn the oven on to 180°C and whack everything in. Finish with some grill and warn your friends before heating, as the lasagne will be as hot as a lava, but also as good as food can be.

January 14, 2007 11:21 PM

Planet GStreamer

Zeeshan Ali: 14 Jan 2007

The vision of GOD:

People often don't get the very point of my new
project, so
I thought I should further explain a little more of what I
intend to achieve. It is actually all about distributed
multimedia pipelines. E.g Lets suppose I don't have a
gstreamer plugin on my N800 device that provides any mp3
decoder element (although it's not true at all) and i want
to play some mp3 files but I have several mp3 decoder
elements provided by different plugins on my mac. How would
i use those elements from my N800? Thats where GOD kicks in.
In my application, I use GOD to create the mp3 decoder
element for me on my mac mini, while I create the
gnomevfssrc (or whichever source element is appropriate for
that particular scenario) and the sound sink on my N800,
connect them, but them in the same pipeline and play the
pipeline and tada! I am playing mp3 on my device without
having an mp3 decoder on it. This is just the simplest
example I could think of but there can be as many practical
implications/use-cases of the project as the extent of your
imagination.

Those who are familiar with Gstreamer API must have
questions and doubts on how this all will be achieved. For
them, I'll provide some pointers: D-Bus,
Gabriel, Gstreamer magic (GDP,
network
clocks etc) and lots of hard thinking and some work. :)

After some communication with both D-Bus devels and
the
socat devel, there is a patch for socat for the support of
abstract unix sockets which will be included in the next
socat release. For Gabriel,
this would
mean the ability to connect to a normal dbus session bus.
Which would also mean the removal of the server-side stuff,
which further simplifies the project and simplicity is
always a good thing.

Someone has entered life:

I now have a new girl-friend, Anna-Maija
Karjalainen. She studies History at
the University of Helsinki and is a high-school classmate
of a very good friend of mine also named Anna. Since there
is a big name-space pollution of the name Anna in Finland,
everyone keeps calling her Ansku so I also prefer to call
her by this nick of hers. It's been more than a week that
we started actually dating and now we spend as much time
together as we can. Eeh! it's hard to write about her when
she is sitting next to me reading everything and laughing
at each sentence so i won't write more. :)

January 14, 2007 11:17 PM

Planet MySQL

lca rocks

lca2007 already totally rocks.
did the speaker thing this morning, which was awesome (and i won’t spoil the surprise)
mysql miniconf today, should rock.

January 14, 2007 11:09 PM

Planet OpenOffice.org - Developer News

Michael Meeks: 2007-01-14: Sunday

Up lateish, off to NCC, spoke, back for lunch.
Bed, tired. Up, lunch, watched 'Madeline' on DVD - rather a
heart-warming movie. The Brightys dropped in in the evening,
beans on Toast for dinner, bed.

January 14, 2007 11:00 PM

Ajaxian

JavaScript Scripting Essentials

Dan Webb asks what are your JavaScript essentials? Those bits and pieces you can’t live without that get copy/pasted from project to project. His pragmatic list includes the $ function, getElementsByClassName, Dean’s event handling, the JS 1.6 array methods, and the DOMContentLoaded event. His full script that he guarantees he _won’t_ support is [...]

January 14, 2007 10:47 PM

Planet KDE

Zack Rusin (zrusin): More boolean ops

I've spent most of the day just playing around with different degenerate cases of boolean operations. I've recorded a short movie showing some live path merging - the one case that should be interesting to application developer is combining two simple rounded rectangles to produce a frame with, what one can easily imagine to be, a highlighted selection on the left. Note that in this case two simple rectangles are enough to produce animation of the selection rectangle on the left going up and down between the "imagined" items :)

And also I forgot a very important thing, which is that Gunnar and Eskil hooked me up with a very cool QtJambi mug. They're doing an amazing job (working on QtJambi, not giving out cups). And here's the mug (and the last I checked, the thing holding it, was me).

January 14, 2007 10:46 PM

Cornelius Schumacher: History

Face of Cornelius Schumacher

I was doing a bit of historical work today. While moving the content of the old KOrganizer home page to the Kontact web site I came across all kinds of interesting stuff of the past which I had completely forgotten. When I told Adriaan about the news entry on the KOrganizer web page from almost seven years ago that reported about me becoming KOrganizer maintainer, he quickly put on his SVN statistics guru hat and digged up some interesting numbers. Boy are we a bunch of oldtimers.

It's also interesting to have a look at the history of the Osnabrueck meeting:

2003: This somehow was the birth of the KDE PIM community. Kontact still was named Kaplan and we decided at the meeting to move KMail to kdepim. We discussed merging the "Kroupware" branch into the main branch which was the first version of the Kolab client.

2004: We came up with the brilliant idea to have a separate release of kdepim shortly after KDE 3.2. That was the plan. The result was that we just were ready with kdepim in time for KDE 3.3. The 2004 meeting also saw the first appearance of icecream, an exciting new tool for distributed compiling.

2005: This meeting was the first which saw roadmap planning for KDE 4. We also came up with some fantastic design documents for a new KitchenSync interface.

2006: The birth of Akonadi. Lots of time was spend on discussing its design and the implications for KDE PIM. We also created the famous Akonadi architecture diagram.

2007: Akonadi becomes reality. There is serious hacking going on and it's becoming clearer and clearer where it will lead to. Newest ideas include integration of Strigi and Nepomuk-KDE. We are also talking about a KDE PIM Enterprise branch, which is supposed to be the base for those who need a really stable branch for enterprise use, for example the Kolab people. Half of us are almost Osnabrueck locals now.

One of the most exciting things about these past five years is that there has been a really strong community all the time. We feel and act as a team and have come an amazingly long way. Another nice aspect of the meetings is that we always had a number of fresh people there. So in spite of some of us being old farts KDE PIM meetings are continuing to be a stimulating experience. The air is still burning of ideas and productivity.

January 14, 2007 10:45 PM

Planet Debian

Uwe Hermann: Upgraded my website to Drupal 5

I have upgraded my website/blog/podcast/photoblog/linkblog/whatever to Drupal 5.0-rc1 today (I'll skip 5.0-rc2 for now and wait for the final release of 5.0 for the next upgrade).

The upgrade went quite nice, even though I had to upgrade several modules and port quite a bunch of custom hacks I had on my old (Drupal 4.6) site. I first upgraded to 4.7, then to 5.0 (as is the recommended procedure) on a test-site, and after figuring out how to fix or work-around all the issues that appeared, I upgraded the live site.

I password-protected the site during the upgrade, that's why it wasn't available for a while today (and caused some problems on Planet Debian it seems, sorry for that!).

New features you might enjoy:

Every blog post, podcast entry, and photo/image has an AJAX-enabled voting/rating box now, thanks to the nice jRating module. Feel free to rate any content over here, I'm eager to know what you think.
The Service links module provides those tiny images in each post, which allow you to submit the post to del.icio.us, Digg, etc. etc. with a single click.
I now use the great new standard Drupal-Theme Garland with a custom color map. I really like it.
Tons of small changes here and there, removing custom hacks which are now obsoleted with the new Drupal release, shuffling some menus around etc. etc.

If you notice any bugs or problems with the site, please uwe [at] hermann-uwe [dot] de (let me know).

January 14, 2007 10:44 PM

Planet Lisp

Troels Henriksen: McCLIM 0.9.4 "Orthodox New Year" released

Today, version 0.9.4 of McCLIM was released. McCLIM is a free and
increasingly-complete implementation of
the Common Lisp
Interface Manager 2.0 specification. Version 0.9.4 has some
nifty new features that make McCLIM nicer to use - for one, the old
editor substrate, Goatee, has been replaced with a new one based on
Climacs code - Drei. In general, Drei has a lot of nifty
features that Goatee lacks, such as syntax-highlighting and an
official way of defining new commands. When using the CLIM Listener,
you now get proper syntax-highlighting and symbol-completion,
bringing it closer to being a usable tool. Drei has some problems,
though, some of which it has inherited from Climacs. For one, it has
quite slow redisplay. Secondly, it's quite complex and offers far
more nooks and crannies for bugs to hide in. Thirdly, it attempts to
do some things (such as literal Lisp objects in the buffer and
variable-width fonts) that prevent us from handling some things
easily. If you hit a bug in Drei that totally prevents your favorite
CLIM application from working, there is a not-so-secret internal
variable, clim-internals::*use-goatee* that you can set to
true in order to disable Drei and use the old editor substrate
instead.

One of the main points of Drei was to provide the ability to define
editing commands that apply in every text-editing context across
CLIM applications, and I think it's become as easy as
possible. Here's an example (adapted from the under-development
McCLIM User's Manual).

A common text editing task is to repeat the word at point, but for
some reason, Drei does not come with a command to do this, so we
need to write our own. Fortunately, Drei is extensible software, and
to that end, a DREI-USER package is provided that is
intended for user customizations. We're going to create a standard
CLIM command named
com-repeat-word in the command table editing-table. The
implementation consists of cloning the current point, move it a word
backward, and insert into the buffer the sequence delimited by point and
our moved mark. Our command takes no arguments.

(define-command (com-repeat-word :name t
:command-table editing-table)
()
(let ((mark (clone-mark *current-point*)))
(backward-word mark *current-syntax* 1)
(insert-sequence mark (region-to-sequence mark *current-point*))))

*current-point* and *current-syntax* are two
of a number of special variables that provide access to editor state
during command invocation.

This command facilitates the single repeat of a word, but that's
it. This is not very useful - instead, we would like a command that
could repeat a word an arbitrary (user-supplied) number of
times. The primary way for a CLIM command to ask for user-supplied
values is to use command arguments. We define a new command that
takes an integer argument specifying the number of times to repeat
the word at point.

(define-command (com-repeat-word :name t
:command-table editing-table)
((count 'integer :prompt "Number of repeats"))
(let ((mark (clone-mark *current-point*)))
(backward-word mark *current-syntax* 1)
(let ((word (region-to-sequence mark *current-point*)))
(dotimes (i count)
(insert-sequence mark word)))))

Great - our command is now pretty full-featured. But with an editing
operation as common as this, we really want it to be quickly
accessible via some intuitive keystroke. We
choose M-C-r. Also, it'd be nice if, instead of
interactively querying us for commands, the command would just use
the value of the numeric argument as the number of times to
repeat. There's currently no way to do this with a named command
(SE. when you run the command with M-x), but it's quite
easy to do in a keybinding. We use the set-key function
from ESA:

(set-key `(com-repeat-word ,*numeric-argument-marker*)
'editing-table
'((#\r :control :meta)))

Now, pressing M-C-r will result in
the com-repeat-word command being run with the first
argument substituted for the value of the numeric argument. Since
the numeric argument will be 1 if nothing else has been specified by
the user, we are guaranteed that the first argument is always an
integer, and we are guaranteed that the count argument
will have a sensible default, even if the user does not explicitly
provide a numeric argument.

There are many other improvements, the most majors ones probably the
improvements to Gtkairo, but since I do not work on Gtkairo, so I do
not feel qualified to talk much about them (but you
can look at some
screenshots). There is also still much work to be done. I don't
have a TODO-list, as that suggests some kind of discipline, but I do
have a NICE-TO-DO list:

Make Drei redisplay less slow and structure the output records
so variable-width fonts and variable-width lines can be implemented
sanely and efficiently. Perhaps by improving the performance of
McCLIM incremental redisplay?
I suspect that it should be possible to call presentation
generic functions for objects that have defined a method
on presentation-type-specifier-p that returns T. Current
McCLIM has some internal function try to find the metaclass for a
candidate object, and error out if it can't find it.
Presentation histories still do not behave exactly as people
might expect, as they do not actually store the textual
input. Perhaps they should? Views would have to be handled
somehow.
Gadget
views (picture)!
Maybe revise the names of the Drei special variables. Why not
just *buffer* instead of *current-buffer*?
And *current-window* should probably
be *editor*, since it's not really a window when the
command is running for an input-editor.
Implement an output-record based minibuffer for the input-editor
so we can have M-x extended commands.
Fix the layout managing of certain composite classes. Many of
them just ignore the max-width and max-height
attributes of they child panes, leading to visual distortion or just
having your space requirements plain ignored, which can be very
frustrating.

If you have never tried McCLIM before, now's a good opportunity to
try it out. This release points out two significant things - that
McCLIM doesn't have to be ugly (see Gtkairo), and that non-Emacs
text editors don't have to be weak. I'm probably biased, but seeing
the glimpses of Drei's potential has made me far more certain that
the whole "put Emacs in everything" idea (as opposed to "put
everything in Emacs") is going to work out fine.

January 14, 2007 10:44 PM

Planet HCI

Column Two: Speaking at the IA Summit

The initial program has been published for the IA Summit in Las Vegas (22-26 March 2007), and I'm pleased to say that I'll be speaking not once but three times at this conference: Full day workshop: Intranets as a Business...

January 14, 2007 10:36 PM

Planet Lisp

Andreas Fuchs: McCLIM 0.9.4 "Orthodox New Year" released!

We released McCLIM 0.9.4 today. You may be wondering what’s so cool about it this time, so here’s a short list:

A new input editor and editing substrate called DREI (covered here before),
several great improvements to gtkairo (see lisp porn here), and
many cool new features and bug fixes, including a few clim 2.2 functions.

(Of course, there are probably lots of new bugs in there, too. Please let us know about them at mcclim-devel at common-lisp.net!)

(And of course, the release announcement has the obligatory editing-under-stress error. You will get the following reward for finding it:
)

January 14, 2007 10:35 PM

Planet Apache

David N. Welton: Stuff To Do updates

After two weeks of being operational, Stuff To Do has been a big success at work, because it lets people keep track of what they're doing with a minimum of hassle. Truth be told, I've never been that wild about "productivity" software, but I'm pretty happy with the system I've created. I really have attempted to make something that stays out of your way as much as possible. That has involved making some choices - for instance, instead of buttons to start or stop time tracking for a given task, Stuff To Do [aside: it would be much faster to write 'STD', but I think that might not be such a good idea in terms of marketing] uses some javascript to see if you've moused over (or blurred, or typed, or done anything, basically) to the window where it lives in the last 15 minutes. This will certainly reduce the accuracy a little bit, and if you get 'in the zone' and don't hit the browser for a while, it won't count your time, but all things considered, this is better than having to hit a stupid button every time you do anything, because you will invariably forget to hit the button, and leave it going overnight, and then have to go back and manually edit everything, and.... yuck. I also have some ideas about how to further improve the javascript in order to make it even easier to track whether you're active or not (with your consent, of course!).

In any case, I've fixed up a number of small bugs, and added a few new features:

You can now only drag tasks with their title so that you can cut and past text from the 'notes' section.
The notes now use 'markdown' so that you can mark them up some.

Some other things I'm considering for the near future:

Enable sending tasks via email with one or two clicks - this would make it so you could add a default email address (of a bug tracking system, for instance) and automatically submit the stuff you're working on.
"Warp" a task to the top of the list of things to do via a link for each task. You can currently move a task around by clicking, holding, and them moving the mouse scroller, but that's kind of cumbersome.

In the process, I also happened upon Active Merchant, which is some cool code by the fine folks at jadedpixel.com, which was quite handy for integrating Paypal. Being somewhat of a perfectionist, I found a few things that I wanted to do just slightly differently, and sent in a patch.

January 14, 2007 10:32 PM

Planet Debian

David Welton: Stuff To Do updates

In any case, I've fixed up a number of small bugs, and added a few new features:

You can now only drag tasks with their title so that you can cut and past text from the 'notes' section.
The notes now use 'markdown' so that you can mark them up some.

Some other things I'm considering for the near future:

Enable sending tasks via email with one or two clicks - this would make it so you could add a default email address (of a bug tracking system, for instance) and automatically submit the stuff you're working on.
"Warp" a task to the top of the list of things to do via a link for each task. You can currently move a task around by clicking, holding, and them moving the mouse scroller, but that's kind of cumbersome.

January 14, 2007 10:32 PM

Planet GNOME

Marc Maurer: AbiWord 2.5.0 done

[ release notes ] | [ download ]

January 14, 2007 10:26 PM

Planet Apache

Jeremy Quinn: New Blog domain

I just took up on the offer by my blog host, Blogger.com, to switch to their new service.One of the new features is the ability to serve the blog from your own domain, so I have switched my blog's address to blog.fiveone.org.I hope this does not mean that you get multiple copies of old posts or anything nasty like that ......

January 14, 2007 10:21 PM

Planet Debian

Jonathan McDowell: Hello 2007

Apparently it's a new year. I spent the first week of it in San
Francisco, on honeymoon. I spent Christmas with my parents in NI. After
ending up driving there (and getting the Holyhead/Dublin ferry) because
I was flying home during the period when fog was affecting UK airports.
FlyBE cancelled my flight from Norwich on the
Thursday, but in their usual fashion it took them several hours after it
was due to take off to do so. I hate that. They knew it was unlikely to
take off when I was checking in, they cancelled all other flights around
it but they kept the Dublin flight until the last minute. I think this
is because it had the most people on it and they wanted to try to avoid
having to refund people, but it would have been much easier for those of
us supposed to be travelling on it if they'd just accepted their losses
earlier.

Not a lot happening so far this year aside from the trip to the US. I'm
without car (Katherine brings it back tomorrow - we flew from Belfast to
Heathrow to get the flight to San Francisco so the car got left at my
parents'). I might have bought a 32" HD LCD TV, but more on that if
it actually arrives. James Puderer sent me a patch for supporting the
Dream Cheeky USB missile launcher as well
as the M&S one already in usblauncher. Get version 0.0.3
here if
you have one of these.

A belated Happy New Year, folks.

January 14, 2007 10:18 PM

Planet SuSE

Roger Whittaker: Recent photos

Some recent photos are here.

January 14, 2007 10:05 PM

Planet HCI

This Is Broken: Free customer parking

Giudo Loches submits a picture taken in Salem, Oregon: We saw these two signs together in downtown Salem - Entering FREE Customer Parking District on top of No Parking. I couldn't tell if I was able to park on that...

January 14, 2007 10:03 PM

Kernel Planet

Dave Miller: In Sydney.. for LCA2007.

If you are not here, you are square, it's that simple.

Even Andrew Morton, whom originally did not plan to attend,
caught a last minute flight so he's here too.

It's 80 degrees (fahrenheight), sunny, with
a light breeze. In short, wonderful weather.

We arrived Saturday morning, around 7:30am (an hour late)
so many on our flight missed their connections. Scored an
upgrade to business class and was able to sleep 10 out of
the 14 hours of the LAX-SYD leg. The food was excellent, and
since there were many empty seats in the business class cabin
the FAs were in a great mood and gave great service.

There is nothing like the warm nuts they give you in business and
first class on United, absolutely nothing.

First things first, bought bus passes, took the 373 downtown to
the Circular Quay to eat a meat pie. Went to the top of Sydney's
AMP tower for nice views and some shopping in the malls.

After a brief sushi second-lunch, we headed over to the Sydney
art museum to see some of my favorite Picasso works which they
have on display.

After a bus ride back to the lodge and a brief afternoon nap,
we headed out to Coogee Beach for food at A Fish Called Coogee.
Tasty seafood and, above all, chips. Just about any fast food
or greasy meal is offered with "chips" in AU. Many menus look
like "X and chips, Y and chips, Z and chips" etc etc

After having a VB at the pub, it was back for some much needed
sleep.

Sunday began with breakfast back at Coogee at The Bohemian Cafe
where you can get crepe style pancakes with ice cream on top.
They were as good as I remembered them from 5+ years ago, during
my previous visit to Sydney.

Next, back downtown and take the ferry to Toronga Zoo. After
getting off the ferry, you take a gondola to the top of the hill
the zoo is on. Then you visit the zoo by basically going side
to side downhill till you're back at the ferry dropoff on the shore.
For a zoo, the food offerings at the main food court were really
good. I had ravioli in red sauce that was warm and yummy.

Ferry back to downtown, then off to Darling Harbor for drinks at
the cafe and some paddle boat fun. The boats were hard to control
and it was a bit warm, but it was nice.

Off to china town and some Korean food, along with the usual coffee
and shopping. We found the main Korean district and surveyed
the various grocery stores, so that we know where to get the basic
necessities of life such as kim chee.

The shops were closing down, as it was Sunday, so we made our way
back towards the Opera Bar (near the opera house) where we were
to meet up with the UNSW Slarken Society for drinkies at 7PM.
I saw a lot of folks I haven't see in years. Off to bed around
11pm.

Registered to the conference Monday morning, checked out the virtualization
talks in the morning whilst Horms and Alex went for a bike ride.
Just had some lunch and am ready for more talks.

Great stuff so far, and looking forward to more of the same.

January 14, 2007 09:56 PM

Planet GNOME

Dom Lachowicz: 14 Jan 2007

Fin

AbiWord
2.5.0 should be out in a few hours, and it has quite
a few major improvements over the 2.4 series. The
ChangeLog doesn't do it justice. Certainly it's the best
non-stable series release of AbiWord ever.

A major impetus was getting a repackaged version of AbiWord
onto the OLPC XO machines
before their code freeze this Monday. We've poured our
hearts and souls into Abi and rededicated
ourselves in the process. I hope that we've put our best
foot forward (or at least haven't screwed up too badly) and
hope that we've played a small part in helping educate
underprivileged children around the world.

I'd like to sincerely thank Uwog, Sum1, TF, Martin, Hub,
Rob, RP, the Gnumeric team for their help with GOffice and
LibGSF, and everyone else that helped make this release rock
so hard. You're all real heroes.

Planet Apache

Apache Jakarta news: Velocity TLP move

Velocity has moved to a TLP at its new address,
http://velocity.apache.org.

Velocity is an Java templating engine.

Apache Jakarta news: Commons Betwixt 0.8 Released

The Commons community is pleased to announce the availability of
Commons Betwixt 0.8.

Commons Betwixt is a customizable, flexible, dynamic, reflective bean-centric object-xml mapper.

0.8 is a feature release.
Improvements have been made to suppression strategies.
Enhancements have been made to mapping formats.
Mixed collections are now handled more completely.
For full details see the release notes
and release documentation.

It is
available
in binary and source distributions.

Apache Jakarta news: Commons VFS 1.0 Released

The Commons community would like to announce the availability of
Commons VFS
1.0. Commons-VFS 1.0 is the first release.

Commons VFS provides a single API for accessing various different file systems. It presents a uniform view of the files from various different sources, such as the files on local disk, on an HTTP server, or inside a Zip archive.
For example, you can use filenames like "tar:gz:http://anyhost/dir/mytar.tar.gz!/mytar.tar!/path/in/tar/README.txt" to access a compressed tar file located on a web server.

Commons VFS is available in either binary or source form from the
Commons VFS downloads page.

Apache Jakarta news: Commons SCXML 0.6 Released

Commons SCXML 0.6 has been released. Commons SCXML provides a Java State Chart XML
engine. Anything that can be represented as a UML state chart -- business process
flows, view navigation bits, interaction or dialog management, and many more -- can
leverage the Commons SCXML library. Commons SCXML 0.6 contains a few new
features and a small number of bug fixes. Full details can be found in the release
notes:
http://www.apache.org/dist/jakarta/commons/scxml/RELEASE-NOTES.txt

Commons SCXML is available in either binary or source form from the downloads page at:
http://jakarta.apache.org/site/downloads/downloads_commons-scxml.cgi

For more information on Commons SCXML, visit the project home page:
http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/scxml/

Apache Jakarta news: HttpComponents HttpCore 4.0-alpha3 Released

HttpComponents HttpCore
4.0-alpha3 has been released. HttpCore provides a set of low level components, which
can be used to build custom client and server side HTTP services.
ALPHA3 release features a number of enhancements and refinements to the base
HttpCore API and adds an optional set of API extensions based on NIO.
HttpCore NIO extensions can be used to build asynchronous HTTP services based on
non-blocking I/O model capable of handling a great number of simultaneous
connections with just a few I/O threads. Please check it out and let the HttpComponents
team know what you think.

More information can be found at the
HttpComponents project site.

Downloads can be found
here

Apache Jakarta news: Commons Digester 1.8 Released

The Jakarta Commons community would like to announce the availability of
Commons Digester
1.8. Commons Digester lets users configure an XML to Java object mapping module.

Digester 1.8 contains a few new features and a small number of bug
fixes. Full details can be found in the
release notes.

Digester is available in either binary or source form from
Digester downloads
page.

Apache Jakarta news: Commons Discovery 0.4 Released

The Commons community would like to announce the availability of
Commons Discovery
0.4. Discovery provides facilities for discovering implementations for
pluggable interfaces.

Version 0.4 is a long overdue release (0.3 failed at the last hurdle
to actually be released). Discovery is not an actively developed component, so
this release is chiefly to mark a stable point that the users of discovery
can depend on.
Full details of this can be found in the

Release Notes.
Discovery is available in either binary or source form from the

Discovery downloads page.

Apache Jakarta news: Commons DbUtils 1.1 Released

The Commons community would like to announce the availability of
Commons DbUtils
1.1. DbUtils 1.1 is a bugfix release resolving most of the issues raised over
the last couple of years. Full details of this can be found in the

Release Notes.
DbUtils is available in either binary or source form from the

DbUtils downloads page.

Apache Jakarta news: Commons Validator 1.3.1 Released

The Commons Validator team is pleased to announce the availability of
Commons Validator
1.3.1. Validator 1.3.1 is a maintenance release fixing a number of bugs, full
details of which can be found in the

Release Notes.
Validator is available in either binary or source form from the

Validator downloads page.

Apache Jakarta news: Jakarta Commons HttpClient 3.1-beta1 Released

HttpClient 3.1-beta1 has been released. This version finalizes the RFC 2965
cookie management API and adds a number of improvements to the HTTP
connection management classes.

Downloads:

Download - http://jakarta.apache.org/site/downloads/downloads_commons-httpclient.cgi

Release notes - http://www.apache.org/dist/jakarta/commons/httpclient/RELEASE-NOTES.txt

For more information on Commons HttpClient, please see the HttpClient web site.

January 14, 2007 09:05 PM

OpenGeoData

JOSM goes Applet

Hi,
Practically nobody knowed it, but JOSM had a possibility built in to be launched as an applet. This was implemented many month ago. Now I finally got myseld into fixing the last problems (including a bit of server hacking) and made a demonstration setup.
You can either use the standard login or create your own [...]

unofficial planet python

Python411: PyCon 2007 Earlybird Preview

I just registered for PyCon 2007 in Dallas February 23-25 and here is a preview of the talks I most want to attend.

January 14, 2007 09:02 PM

Planet Debian

Gustavo Franco: How to "embed" Thunderbird into Firefox?

Dear lazyweb,Is there a way (through add-ons/extensions?) to "embed" Thunderbird as a tab into Firefox? I'm out of ideas on what to search more about the subject into common search engines and addons.m.o. Btw, is it a "yes, but when you launch both over xulrunner" thing?Feedback is appreciated, thanks in advance!

January 14, 2007 09:01 PM

unofficial planet python

Making It Stick (Patrick Logan): Killing the Buddha

I am getting nostalgic for programming in the supermini era. We *really* had "no rules" then. I was writing "CAD tools" for designing electronics. We had a home-grown programming language called "MPL" (by another group in Boston, most likely just "some guy", for some reason the name John Barstow sounds familiar). I recall it officially stood for "Macro Programming Language" because it was a Modula/Pascal-like pre-compiler for PL/1. (Data General's flavor of PL/1 was its systems programming language. There was no "C" compiler for DG for a number of years yet.)

Our unofficial name for MPL was "Mud PuddLe". In fact we had no other name for it. I take that back, now I am recalling a more offical name was "MaPLe". I think only the CAD tools group called it Mud Puddle. Now I think either Harry Newell or I invented the name Mud Puddle, but I could be way wrong on that.

Our graphics/UI system (I don't think we had the term "framework" then) was called "Reddog". This was a 2D, retained graphics system and it was also home grown (by a DG group in Austin, again just "some guys", I think Kerry Kimbrough was one. There were just a few women programmers that I knew of at DG. My manager's wife was in the OS group. Three(?) women were in the CAD tools group.) The Macintosh would come out a year or so later. I had seen the Lisa at school, and did some programming on Lisp machines. At that time DG had no official "window system" and no document for "user interface guidelines".

(I thought it was cool later when I got my Mac512k, the Manx C compiler, and the "phone book" edition of the Mac API guide. I think that was the first time you didn't need a $10,000 Lisa to program a Mac128k.)

We stored our "domain" data in files. The schematic editor for example just used the Reddog graphics file itself to store all its electronics data. Heck, it was a tree and had lookups. Otherwise we'd just have to write our own indexing, etc.

Not too long after I got to DG another group there told us about this thing they developed, a "relational database". (Apparently Oracle was a fairly new vendor of these things for the VAX or something but none of us in CAD tools knew about them.) We looked at how to use it for electronics data. There was no such thing as a "DBA" to tell us what we could or could not do. SQL seemed pretty cool, these "queries" for getting data out of the database.

The bottom line is we had an operating system and a compiler. There were no rules.

"If you meet the buddha on the road, kill him."

January 14, 2007 08:59 PM

Happypenguin

Fly Hard 0.3 (new)

Thrust clone - with explosions!

More about Fly Hard

Galcon 1.1.1 (updated)

hectic arcade real-time planet conquest

More about Galcon

Vendetta 1.7.14 (updated)

Massively Multiplayer space game

More about Vendetta

Cultivation 7 (updated)

A unique game that explores conflict and cooperation in a gardening community.

More about Cultivation