Tag Archives: Ubuntu

Spring Cleaning for 2013

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With Easter just around the corner and possibly spring coming shortly after–Canadians have to wait a bit longer for spring t0 properly arrive and winter to make her final exit–that it would make sense to update my blog.   Many things have changed in the past few weeks .  Like we have a new pope, Pope Francis, just in time for Easter.  (I’m not going to weigh in on my opinions of the decision of the Conclave, other than I have mixed feelings.  And each passing day does not ease my general feeling about unease.)  Some things have not changed.  Like most things in the world I guess.

With the slow coming of warmer weather, I have a good excuse for a bit of spring cleaning and growing myself.  In terms of spring cleaning, I have meant to really organize my activities and my surroundings.  Unfortunately since I had to make do without my laptop for a few weeks, that has not helped me get more things done.  Especially when it comes to dealing with my overflowing inbox.  Apologies for everyone expecting me to get back to them.  I’m getting there slowly.

I did get to play around with setting up Python on my hosting environment and with Clojure.  Clojure, while definitely useful still feels like an exercise in academics than industrial programming.  (Still one can write a full implementation of Snake/Nibbles in Clojure in under 100 lines of code?  Madness!)  Python on the other hand is too much fun to feel like work.  I considered using something like a static website generator like Nikola or benjen to port some of my websites.  But I think for kicks, I will go the route of using Flask and craft my own mini-site just because working with Python is a such a joy.

One unfortunately necessary bit of spring cleaning will be changing Linux distros again.  It seems that Canonical is doing a fair bit of wild experimentation nowadays.  Too wild and it smells like they are suffering from NIH (not invented here).  The idea to chuck out everyone’s hard work on replacing X with Wayland, with their own thing was just too much.  So it looks like I’m going back to openSUSE for good.  It is just a matter of when I get around to migrating all my systems over.  I have no real issue with Canonical doing what they want with their own distro Ubuntu.  I just don’t agree with the philosophy, and the needless experimentation, especially since I am quite happy with using a relatively standard KDE 4 desktop.

Hopefully once I finish all the spring cleaning I’ll get to finish up and show off some the projects I’ve been working on.

 

News – Google Chrome for Linux, Thunderbird 3.0 & Malware for Ubuntu

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Dorian is currently concentrating on writing and getting things ready for Christmas.  So in the meantime, here are some new stories to tide you over:

Tech News – Canonical Bringing Music to Ubuntu, LH Strikes Again & Affero GPL Can’t Fix the Cloud

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Canonical Launching a Music Store?

Rumours on the world wild web point to the possibility of Canonical building an iTunes-like music store.  Works for U thinks such a move would add another viable revenue stream for Canonical, even if it seems to stretch the resources of the firm.  If this music store comes to Ubuntu, I’m sure many users will enjoy using it.  And it will help Canonical start a community of artists, musicians and software firms to using Canonical and Ubuntu as a platform for selling content and applications.

The Linux Hater Tries Karmic Koala

No one knows who hides behind the LH mask.  Is he an enlightened but disgruntle Linux programmer?  Or is the king of all trolls?  Who cares!  Read up his (or her) review of the “fail” that is Ubuntu’s Karmic Koala.  You’ll get a kick out of it.

Kubuntu Needs Documentation Help

nixternal (Richard Johnson) calls for help to improve the sad state of the Kubuntu documentation.  If you are a tech writer and enjoy using Kubuntu, please help out.  UPDATE: You should know how to use DocBook to help.

Affero GPL Can’t Fix the Cloud

One of the great opportunities and threats for commercial open source is the emerging cloud computing landscape.  However Matthew Asslett (451 Group) points out the Affero GPL doesn’t negate the threat of no monetary contributions from cloud providers to commercial open source vendors.  Yes it doesn’t.  But the licenses were designed to get  source code contributions from developers.  Business models need to focus on selling value (some scarce resource based on real scarcity not an artificial one) to clients, and some clients will not see the value.  There will always be those that get away.  The Affero GPL does help “guide” most cloud providers contribute back.  If anything the GPL will give more freedom and opportunities for many more smaller players than a few large ones.  And that solves many more economic and social problems than anything else.

Review of Ontario Linux Fest 2009

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Two weekends ago I went to Ontario Linux Fest 2009, held here in chilly Toronto for the third year in a row. And for such a young conference, it was quite good.  In fact good enough, that longer review of the event is in order:

Morning Keynote – Changes to the GPL

The day started with me rushing out the door in the morning, to catch a morning bus.  I made a bit later, missing the first part of Bradley Kuhn‘s keynote.   I rushed in, grabbed my conference package, put on my name-tag and rushed to hear the second part of the keynote.  Brad discussed the changes between versions 2 and 3 of the GPL (GNU General Public License).  As someone who followed the licenses and uses the GPL in my current project (justCheckers), it was pretty interesting to hear about why behind the changes.  The original GPL2 was quite brief for a software license, but not quite as understandable as the GPL 3.  The GPL 3 helped simplify the license, made it international and got rid of some icky loopholes.  After the keynote, I did a quick swag run even buying a fleece from the Eclipse guys from Redhat.  (And no Nick, I wasn’t there just for the swag I just haven’t gotten around to contributing to Eclipse just yet.)  I then quickly popped quickly back in for the first track of sessions.

Session 1 – Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

Cheryl McKinnon from Nuxeo did a talk on ECM.  I can definitely relate to having to hunt down information in the mess of Office documents and e-mails at the office.  I can just imagine what happens at larger organizations that have less rigorous guidelines to handling documentation.  So I definitely see the need software that handles such data, especially in terms of productivity and maintaining documents for regulatory purposes.  I can’t understand why every organization doesn’t have at least a wiki.  Interesting note that the concepts I learned in a university course on information science, really applies here.  Managing the capture, collaboration, review, publish, archiving and search-ability of information is really a science on to itself.  No wonder open source vendors like Nuxeo, Alfresco and MindTouch that provide ECM solutions in a flexible and low-cost way are such a big hit for enterprises.  There also was a neat discussion on how Nuxeo can do both centralization (bring documents into itself) and management of meta-data (like the locations and “tags” related to scattered documentation).  Really neat.

Session 2 – Ubuntu Moblin & Netbook Remixes

Jorge Castro from Canonical of Ubuntu community fame presented the Ubuntu Moblin and Netbook Remixes.  As with any live demo, the demo technology co-operated with Jorge like any demoed technology or self-conscious prima donna.  Still the Ubuntu Moblin Remix looks gorgeous.  It sports a nice, simple, elegant and understandable user interface.  However this remix qualifies as a tech preview more than something to hit the mass consumer.  Still I think people will be impressed when they change over from Windows to something like Moblin.  It looks a far bit of effort was put into making refactoring the UIs to fit a smaller, wider screen.  The Netbook Remix looks great too, and if you are reading this and running Ubuntu 9.10… switch over to the Netbook UI, you’ll love it even on your main system.

Lunch Chat 1 – Free Software and Its Impact on the Future of the Software Industry

I skipped out on the last session of the morning to pester Brad Kuhn with a few questions.  It started with an innocent question about his opinion about certain companies planning on moving from the GPL to the Apache licenses.  Brad figured out that I had read one of Matt Asay’s blogs on the topic, and went on a mini-rant.  Apparently Matt is one of Brad’s “nemesis” (not that they don’t get along rather their views on software freedom are quite different).  Brad envisions a future where software stops being a “big box” industry of packaged software products to more of a lawyery/consultancy profession.  I have to agree with him on that, and I don’t mind such a future being a consultant by trade.  However I did point out the difficulty one runs into with consumer-level products or projects.  Basically how does one sufficiently fund a project like Inkscape?  One way would be to sell a proprietary product, which defeats the purpose of going open source.  Another way would be to offer a service.  The heart of the problem is how to finance a regular development and enhancements (like usability) on a regular basis… and still get someone to pay for it willingly.  It isn’t an easy problem to solve… A problem that I plan on working on in my semi-stealth project… But Brad tried to convince it wasn’t as big of a deal as I think it is.

Lunch Chat 2 – Decoupling User Interfaces from the Application Backends

Feeling now famished for lack of a breakfast, I went out with Scott from the GTALug for pizza.  Scott is into user interface design both on a hardware and software level.  We both agreed that user interfaces should be loosely coupled to their backends.  In enterprise web application design the concept of different views for different users and environments comes to mind.  Scott introduced me to the concept of a framework that allows for completely decoupling the user interface with the underlying application, called Metisse.  It allows for building UIs at runtime using a widget palette or toolkit… brilliant!  That would let developers concentrate on what they are good at: application development and design.  And HCI/usability/graphics designer concentrate on what they are good at: design kick-ass usable user interfaces.

Session 3 – Building Business Applications Using SugarCRM

Right after lunch, I went to a more practical session by John Mertic, a developer at SugarCRM.  The session was naturally about developing applications using SugarCRM.  It looks a very nice application, and CRMs apparently can solve a lot of problems centred around customers.  Even just using SugarCRM to manage a client’s organizational contacts would save a lot of my time at work.  However since I work in Java and not PHP, thats not really an option.  But it looks like a neat application, the latest version SugarCRM 5 being all built in PHP and using the YUI (used to use ExtJS).  There is a vibrant community forge and marketplace around the application.  Neat.  Also neat that John just published an Apress book called: The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM.  See a pattern, yet? 😉

Session 4 – World Domination, Documentation and Ponies

OK, I admit it as a writer masquerading as a software developer,  (Or is it the other way around?) I actually enjoy writing documentation.  Some would even say, I enjoy writing documentation too much.  So I jumped at the opportunity of hear Emma Jane Hogbin talk about world domination through good documentation.  Actually I was disappointed by the lack of talk on world domination.  But there was much talk of ponies… oh and documentation.  I swear I’ve never heard anyone comparing documentation to wearing high heels.  I guess the analogy of it being sexy and painful makes sense.  But then again I’ve never (or do I ever plan to) worn high heels, so I’ll trust the ladies on this one.  Still it was an awesome and enlightening talk.  I’ve never consider all the various audiences (devs, users, marketing) and types of documentation.  I must agree with Emma’s statement, that if you are doing a lot of work documenting how to use your program… maybe reconsidering how the UI is done is in order.  The concept of automating documentation and using an XML source is new to me.  But I will have to look into technologies like pywebdoc, Mallard and DocBook.  Emma went through the Capture, Organize, Translate, Output, Review and Revise cycle, using the Status.net documentation efforts.  (Emma’s project on writing open source documentation.)

Session 5 – The Look at Introducing FLOSS into Education

Karlie Robinson of On-Disk did a talk about her experiences with connecting the OLPC, Fedora and RIT together.

Afternoon Keynote – How Linux is Like Music

The conference wrapped up with Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier‘s afternoon keynote.  Zonker is an incredible speaker, and he also threw plush penguins at the crowd which instantly made the keynote awesome.  Alas I didn’t have any thing worthy to add to the conversation so I didn’t get another plush penguin. 🙁  But I’m getting ahead of myself…  Zonker talked about how we should move away from the tired analogy of choosing operating systems like cars.  Rather he suggested how choice of OSes and Linuxes should be compared to bands and musicians:

  • Fedora -> Frank Zappa
  • SuSE -> The Who
  • Ubuntu -> Duran Duran (Hurrah, I mean huh?!?)
  • Gentoo -> Write your own sungs in your own built studio (Damn right!  Sorry, ecstatic ex-Gentooer here.)

A bit zany, but with a nickname of Zonker… 😛 Ok, I’ll stop teasing.  But he did go into the problem of widespread Linux adoption: better self-marketing, pre-installed PCs (we are getting there slowly), market shift to the cloud and mobile (at least we have that one covered to a degree) and  the in-fighting that the F/OSS community seem to love (welcome to the new face of anarchy and things to come?).

The Pre-After Party

At this point most of the participants went out to either go home or wait out the time for the reception.  Having come alone, I felt like I’d love to mingle at the afterparty but I needed to do something while I waited.  Fortunately, the KDE 4 guys (Troy Unrau, Shawn Starr and Eugene Trounev) were quite welcoming and let me tag along with them.  Troy was pulled into the speaker’s dinner so I didn’t get to talk to him much.  But Shawn, Eugene and I chatted for a bit, grabbed a quick bite to eat at Burger King and came back to chill at the venue.  Shawn works on developing plasma, while Eugene makes graphics for KDE Games.  Actually if you count myself and Troy in, we each represent a different aspect of the KDE  project: Shawn – developers, Eugene – artists, Troy – marketing and myself – the humble user/wannabe contributer.

When Eugene found out about my semi-stealth project, he suggested I should join the KDE Games and look into the Gluon project.  I’m planning on getting involved, once I’ve hacked around with Qt, something I started on recently.

The After Party

The conference wrapped up with a reception sponsored by Google.  Actually I got a good amount of useful swag from Google, and the free booze was much appreciated.  At the reception I got to mingle with the presenters, organizers and participants of the conference.  I got to discuss the finer points of revision control systems (CVS, Subversion and Bazaar) with a Bazaar/Launchpad developer, Aaron Bentley from Canonical.  Also got to watch Brad Kuhn and Jorge Castro get into a heated but amicable debate about Mono, software patents and why Canonical should stop releasing and supporting proprietary software.  And I got to chill and talk about Apache Qpid (a reliable message queueing system, think something like IBM’s MQ) with Redhat’s Rajith Attapattu.

I left the reception really, really late.  And I got home around 2 in the morning, which just goes to show how awesome of a conference OLF2009 was.  After the conference I felt a lot smarter, enlightened and inspired to contribute back to the Linux and libre software community.  I’m almost sure I’ll be at OLF2010 whenever that comes around.

Links to what others had to say about OLF2009:

  • Troy Unrau [http://troy-at-kde.livejournal.com/23041.html]
  • Eugene Trounev [http://my.opera.com/it-s/blog/show.dml/4455292]

Why Open Source Projects Make Sense Career Wise

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Greetings Earthlings! (OK enough silliness for one day, back into the pocket you go Martian.) Once again I have to bring up the sort of lame excuse of being too busy to blog earlier. Well yes, it was lame too much work. Actually I killed my “1337” Gentoo box doing an update. So I basically installed the new Ubuntu 6.06, and I am in the process of setting things up. More on the new Ubuntu tomorrow.

Today’s rant is why open source projects make sense. At least from a university student’s point of view. Undergrad in CS to be exact. All other information from me will have to be extracted via torture, slyness or greasing of palm. 😉

Back to the topic, I am in the process of finding an internship position for the next 12-16 months. So far my own personal experience has mostly unsuccessful. The interesting part is that for the two interviews I have received, my interviewers were most interested in my open source projects. They glossed over my “work” experience, if you can call it that in my case. University courses were not even mentioned. Nope, the thing that stood out were the two projects I am currently actively involved in. For those in the unawares, I actually have 3 open source projects in the works. While initially I thought that working on these projects would be fun and simply educational, it turns out that they mean more than that.

There are three main reasons why I believe employers are interested. These being experience, portfolio and marketing. When you work on a project you have to not only have a grasp on the technology but also on the subtilties of team relationships, and organization. Any open source project will showcase your performance as a developer and/or project leader. The final product is interesting in itself. A look into your source code will reveal your work ethic, organization, knowledge, talent and creativity. Finally comes marketing, which applies mostly to the employer and sometimes to yourself. The words “open source” currently flow with the hype and buzzwords of the business world. By hiring an open source developer, the company gains a zen and almost messanic reputation of by part of what the business world sees as the future. Personally I think open source means plain old fashioned politeness and embraces the ethics of old (the “new” standard of “Western” ethics is quite dissettling). In some rare cases if the project is successful enough, the product becomes a brand onto itself. Any developer of said project also gains a certain amount of worth and can use this to his or her advantage when looking for work.

Well that is all great and everything but how can one gain these advantages. Simply put start a project for something that you need or want. Treat if it were a real life product to sell not just a “pet” project. This is how many open source companies themselves started out. Show your professionalism throughout the process. Try new things, and over time maybe that project will pay off in hard, cold cash.

Till tomorrow,
Dorian

Finally Peace?

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Hehe I hope so. The peace part I mean. Err… I’m getting ahead of myself…

Finished my second exam today, this one being for Programming Languages. Not pleasant, since there was a good degree of Scheme on it. I actually hoped for more of a theory exam but no… mostly Scheme, Prolog, a BNF, and implement pseudo-language question thrown in for flavour. I finished in the expected time, a good chunk of my answers felt weak, so not too happy. None of this means that I will fail the course. So far I have not failed a single assignment or the midterm. In fact I’m expecting a 55-65% mark overall. Nothing to balk at in general. Still I learned alot of what makes a programming language, a language. I learnt about 3-4 new languages: Scheme, Prolog, ML and C++. Overall a pretty good achievement.

On Monday I had my Operating Systems exams like I mentioned. One word says everything about the exam: cakewalk. I got every question, finished a 3hr exam in 1.5 hours, and nearly all my answers were as airtight as… well… think of the most airtight thing… and then take that to the exponent of 100. Oh yeah! I must confess that I am bit of an expert in operating systems, being overexposed to the topic by playing with Gentoo Linux, Minix and reading Andrew Tannenbaum’s Operating Systems books. Yes I read both of them. Anyways I am a bit of a freak in that sense. Come to think of it, many of my classmates consider me to be an expert in a lot of the theoretical-technical part of CS. Being a host for an oversized ego, I neither admit or deny the honour.

Life otherwise has been placed on hold. With one more exam on next Friday, I can finally get back to doing StudentABC work. Since Keith asked me… please, please go visit his site: StudentABC. Its an excellent resource for citations especially for websites. Works near flawlessly for MLA and APA. Heck, I helped do the research and test cases for it. In the near future we will have support for parenthetical citations too. Once I get my lazy butt over there to work on the test cases. And its a totally free service. (Probably should convince Keith to get PayPal though for donations. ;-))

The real progress has come in brainstorming for my novel, Beneath My Icy Cloak. I have come up with a real basic plot, a few characters, and have done most of the research about technology, etc. When I started on the project, I decided to cut out the fantastical “technology” most sci-fi has. I even scrapped all forms of FTL travel. Why? Cause its extremely unlikely to happen anytime soon (read as before the next millenia) and its probably not physically possible. I actually nearly got bogged down on selecting suitable starship drive technology. I finally chose a combination of solar/magnetic sails and nuclear propulsion drives for travel. After some tossing and turning, I decided to keep some warp tech. Yes it helps travel somewhat. But I made it that it is so unpredictable that its mostly used for… other uses. I guess I need a tiny bit of artistic license. Anyways, I have a location, a back story, and now all I need to do is to solidify my skeleton of the story. A select few friends will get the honour of helping me edit it. How long all this will take? I’m not sure. One thing is for sure, I will publish this one. I doubt it will make its way to your local Chapters-Indigo or what-not. But you never now.

Gotta run.

Putting the Edge Back into My Sword

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He ran softly down the tunnel, morningstar sword in hand. The passageway in the caves had begun to twist in a myriad of directions. He stopped to listen for the monster’s footsteps. A few days earlier while exploring the cave system, he had stumbled across an orc patrol. He then smote the first one that got in to this path. Apparently that one was the orchish commander’s lieutentant. Oops. Now there he was the great Adventurer… hunted like a rat by an entire orcish army.

You know those days that you feel like our Adventurer? Well it seems that this month has given me nothing but those kinds of days. Yeah those days. Sort of like perpetual Mondays. 😉

Course work and midterms backed up on me so much, that I had to drop my philosophy course. Did not really like anyways… but I sure hell could you the money. Also I must admit that I have fallen behind in Datasphere work. I was hoping to catch up on that this week, unfortunately I stumbled across my own orchish army. In my case, it was the departure of my laptop’s late chipset. Yup. My chipset of all things. My fan, and HDD are intact. But the machine’s performance has ground to a near P2 halt. Oh, and did I mention that I run modern software applications??? After a number of tests, and reinstalls of my new Linux distribution to no avail. I think I have to “acquire” a new modern system. Unfortunately I have about $100 in my account. So a purchase is out of the question, even off a self-constructed rig. Without the 3D graphics card. Right now I have borrowed my Dad’s laptop. Windows 2000 sucks, and getting the whole system to my liking is a pain in the… neck!

I finally left Gentoo after 1.5 years of continuous usage. I realized that I spend more time configuring my system and hacking then doing school work, house work or even hobbies. Also I don’t have the time or the patience of building a distribution. So hence, enter Ubuntu, or more specifically Kubuntu. The system looks nice, the installation is easy (for a non-RPM system), and is hacker-friendly. I am looking forward to using it, along with setting it up. I hear there a huge variety of packages. So we shall see… I still think Gentoo Linux is the best out of all them. The most flexible, configurable and the nicest package manager. I just don’t have time to do that anymore, besides my configurations often turn out disastrous. And the package release is too fast. But the community is the best I have seen anywhere on the web. Kudos to the Gentoo developers, maintainers, and community for making those 1.5 years the most colourful, exciting and informative years in my Linux experience. However I think I will be more use to you and the OSS community as whole, as a developer. Thanks guys!

I seem to have lost my edge in programming and computer science. I remember being the second best in high school. Some of that elitism continued into university with being a Linux fan, and project manager of my own pet open source projects. Nowadays looking at my mark, and me being in the lower part of the class marks, I feel rather mediocre. In fact if it were not the valiant and determined work on my partner and friend, Daniel D’Alimonte, I would be doing worse. I know that this third year, and that I am in the top elite of CS. However when I am surrounded by such brilliant and talented individuals, a half-talent enthausist looks rather like a drone. Sure from the perspective of a high school student I may seem like a demigod. But I feel puny in my current surroundings. My midterms place me where I am supposed to be. Sorta sucks to finally meet your limit.

Now for more of my unhappiness rant. Dude, I feel so sucky. I am terrible at educational pursuits, as seen above. I don’t excel in art, or any of the other humanities. Social interactions are almost non-existent. Heck even my friend (you seems most unlikely) Rudy as a girlfriend. And supposedly a hot, cute, and almost-“perfect” one at that. I even tried asking out Kat again recently, to go out and do something. She was unfortunately busy with moving. I am not a great worker, in a rule-filled environment I seem out of place, I carry my memory in my PDA (which curiously lost its own… a lot of its own), bad organizational skills, and I can say the say thing about almost anything. I feel most uninspired, and not compelled to work at anything… since I am sooo sucky.

Sigh… I wonder why I even try sometimes. Well I got bored yesterday… and since my crap-box was hogging my wireless card, I did not get ANY school work done. Instead I managed to compose a shorty ditty in Fruity Loops… I hope to use it in my game project for Visual Computing. It will be on my school website, Gluppy Intro.

Well I have to get going. I have a lot to do… OH AND PLEASE WRITE COMMENTS. Most of the time I feel very lonely, it would be nice to know that I am not alone all of the time.